Tout Newt - Newt Gingrich's suggested reading list for Republican legislators

National Review, March 20, 1995 by Richard Brookhiser

NEWT GINGRICH'S reading list for Republican congressmen is already having an effect. A mover and shaker, one of the Golden Horde that has descended on the capital, told me she had begun Democracy in America. "I'm on page 73," she said gallantly. "Small print!"

What do Newt's books tell us about his mind? We need the help because the mind in question is fertile, quirky, and opaque. I first interviewed Gingrich during the 1984 campaign; custom has not staled his infinite variety. "Learning is hard," he told me then. "The more we tell poor people there is an easy way the more we trap them. . . . The voters of Bavaria Atlanta. . . . Our goal in life is to make Bangladesh resemble Dallas. . . . What is our positive alternative? In the Hegelian sense, what is our antithesis?" In the normal sense, what is his thesis? Newt's books give us a clue.

The list obviously breaks down into Founders and Contemporaries, but there is further division of labor within the sections. The Declaration explains why we are a country; The Federalist describes how to make the count work. Tocqueville is an intelligent foreigner, asking fifty years later how we were doing, and how we were likely to do. The Washington biography tells how the United States actually came to be, through the agency of a hero.

The first thing to notice about the Founders' division is that the country Tocqueville visited was already different from the one Jefferson et al. had made. The Founders thought government had some responsibility for moral education. Washington wanted a national university in the as yet unbuilt capital, where future leaders could attend the debates in Congress and study republican virtue. (He assumed there would be a connection.) By the time Tocqueville made his visit, Americans were strongly moralistic, but their morals percolated up from their religions and their private lives, with little encouragement from the state. Maybe they had learned something. Maybe they had lost something too.

But the most striking thing about Gingrich's first team is the inclusion o Flexner. Verbalists and theorists have a way of assuming that ideas are self-enacting. We think them, therefore they are. But political ideas require statesmen to make them real, and great statesmen must be great men. The Indispensable Man - a one-volume version of Flexner's four-volume biography - understands Washington's greatness moderately well. In one respect, Flexner is the best biographer Washington has ever had, for he brings to the most visual of Presidents the eye of an art historian. Flexner's most serious flaw, however, is a consistent underrating of Washington's interest in ideas. Having just argued that great men are superior to great ideas, I must seem to be contradicting myself. But part of a great man's greatness is his understanding of ideas. A would-be great man without confident access to them ends up like Boris Yeltsin, sliding into a morass of improvisation and bad advice.

It's the modern stuff on Gingrich's list, however - the computer nerds, the business wonks, and the futurists - that has gotten the most attention, and that strikes many people, not all of them liberals, as problematic. The subject of the last four books is the modern organization, whether a single company or a civilization. The authors attack the theme with very different degrees of success.

The best book of the lot is Mary Boone's. She asked 16 executives, from organizations ranging from the Senate to Tootsie Roll Industries, how computers have affected them and their work, and presents their experience with a minimum of hype. Her executives say that e-mail is more flexible than the telephone, and more communicative than letters or memos. Print snobs should realize that e-mail competes not with Jane Austen, but with the typical business memo. Miss Boone's sources also testify that a well designed computer system can act as an extra set of fingertips on the piano keys of information. Miss Boone thinks all this has implications for the structure of businesses - less middle management, flatter organizations that are coached rather than directed from on high - but her conclusions flow believably from her reporting.

Morris Shechtman and Peter Drucker are two management consultants, who frequently disagree. Mr. Drucker believes that if a jerk can do a job, lock him do it, while Mr. Shechtman insists that everyone in an organization should share a common ethos. Drucker, like Mary Boone, favors flatter organizations; Shechtman believes that pyramidal hierarchies are required to give needed guidance. There is an authoritarian streak to Shechtman, only partly concealed by a layer of psychological talk, which is one reason why I prefer Drucker. The other is that Drucker writes better. Shechtman, however, makes the point that the goals of people and of groups must flow from their missions, which arise from their values. This is a necessary antidote to the vertiginous sense one gets that Drucker could as easily advise John Gotti as Mother Teresa.