NEWT INC.

By JOHN F. DICKERSON WASHINGTON

In imparting his vision of America, Newt Gingrich has a way of dropping names. Say, Hewlett-Packard and Health South Inc. during his series of videotaped college lectures; Johnson & Johnson and other pharmaceutical giants in letters to the White House and the Food and Drug Administration. By coincidence or design, many of the name-dropped have deposited timely contributions to organizations linked to Gingrich. Disclosures about the favors and donations provoked growing scrutiny last week of the Progress and Freedom Foundation, a Gingrich think tank that seems to churn as much cash as ideas. Declared Ellen Miller, executive director of the Center for Responsive Politics, ``It's just another way in which Newt Gingrich's coat has many pockets.''

Or a way he buttonholes his way to political profit. In the last Congress Gingrich introduced three bills to suspend duties on drug ingredients imported by Solvay Pharmaceuticals, a subsidiary of a large Belgian company based in his Georgia district. In January 1994 Solvay contributed $30,000 to the foundation. In mid-1994, Gingrich pressed the FDA to speed the approval of a drug manufactured by Solvay. Last September Gingrich lobbied the White House and the FDA on behalf of Direct Access Diagnostics, a Johnson & Johnson subsidiary that was seeking approval for a home test kit to detect the AIDS virus. Soon after, Direct Access contributed an estimated $30,000 to the foundation.

News of Gingrich's efforts on behalf of the two companies added to a growing ethical controversy. The House ethics committee is already looking into donations to GOPAC, the Gingrich-led political-action committee that received money from corporations like Hewlett-Packard. The committee is also probing his lucrative contract to write two books for media mogul Rupert Murdoch.

In the case of the drug companies, there is no linkage between the favors Gingrich did for them and the money they gave the foundation, says Jeffrey Eisenach, founder and president of the foundation. Indeed, Gingrich had been railing against the inefficiencies at the FDA long before he asked the foundation to provide him with a plan for revamping the agency and before it even started collecting donations. There is also no evidence that Gingrich knew of these donations or that the foundation promised influence when seeking financial support.

That does not exempt him from charges of hypocrisy. ``Newt Gingrich complained about the corrupt system when he was in the minority,'' says Fred Wertheimer of Common Cause, who six years ago gave crucial support to Gingrich's effort to oust Speaker Jim Wright for ethics violations. ``Now he's running that corrupt system, and it's politics as usual.''

Eisenach describes himself as Gingrich's ``intellectual sidekick,'' but he insists the foundation is wholly independent of Gingrich as well as organizations like GOPAC. That defense is less than satisfying to critics. Before founding Progress and Freedom, Eisenach was executive director of GOPAC. His think tank, furthermore, is steward to ``Renewing American Civilization,'' the 20-hour college course that Gingrich teaches. Eisenach, however, denies that he remains beholden to partisan zealots at GOPAC. ``The clique that feeds at the trough of Republican politics is not my crowd,'' he told . ``I survived at GOPAC by telling them I'd leave them alone if they'd leave me alone.''

To defuse criticism of the foundation, Eisenach has released a list of donors. Apart from Johnson & Johnson, Health South and Solvay, it includes such pharmaceutical companies as Searle, Glaxo, Genzyme and Burroughs Wellcome, as well as AT&T, Turner Broadcasting and Lockheed. All are under federal regulation or have contracts with the government--and are thus barred from contributing directly to political campaigns. The foundation has not indicated the amounts each corporation has contributed. The foundation, which is tax exempt, officially nonpartisan and not subject to federal election laws, can receive unlimited amounts of money from donors and is not bound to disclose the names of its supporters. Nevertheless, it admits it has received a total of $1.7 million since 1993.

Eisenach, 36, does not disavow spiritual ties to the Gingrich crusade. He considers himself the curator of Gingrich's ideas. He agrees with the Speaker that no idea has played a more central role in American civilization than progress. It was a combination of patriotism and technological innovation that was instilled in Eisenach as a child. In the first grade, he and his classmates in Mrs. Bumstead's class in Dayton, Ohio, would regularly hear B- 52s flying overhead, heading back to nearby Wright-Patterson Air Base. Each time, the kids' response was the same. ``We would stop whatever we were doing in class and clap.''

Eisenach and Gingrich met in 1988 while Eisenach was studying drug-abuse policy at the conservative Heritage Foundation. ``We found out that for 10 years we had been thinking about many of the same things,'' says Eisenach. Nowadays, he talks with Gingrich two or three times a week. One irresistible topic for them must be the growing scrutiny of their relationship.