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

National Review, March 20, 1995 by Richard Brookhiser

The lacuna of The Indispensable Man is pertinent here. Although Washington had only the equivalent of a grade-school education, he read all his life, and most of what he read was first rate. He kept up with the political literature of North America for over thirty years, when it was of the highest order. When he needed elaboration he turned to George Mason, Madison, Hamilton. He did not read the prophecies of Condorcet, or Nostradamus.

Why do the critical faculties that guide Gingrich in judging men who lived before 1840 desert him when he comes to the Tofflers? One reason is curiosity. Considering Gingrich's love of dinosaurs, make that boyish curiosity. Boyish curiosity is a good thing; it precedes all inquiry. Washington, D.C., the most timid and status-conscious of cities, starves for lack of it. Tip O'Neill never read the Tofflers, not because he was too wise, but because he was too busy robbing civilians.

Another reason is Gingrich's rise through the ranks since 1978, and the Republicans he had to supplant and outflank. Before Ronald Reagan and Jack Kemp, the congressional GOP was a party of inertia and self-defeat. I remember once hearing former Minority Leader Bob Michel reminisce about his first political experience: passing out sunflower buttons for Alf Landon. No wonder he expects to get kicked in the head, I thought. In the long years of fretting as the minority of the minority, Gingrich had to sustain himself with the hope that he was the wave of the future - and there were the Tofflers, to tell him that it was so.

Curiosity and hope explain Newt Gingrich's strange weakness for trendology, but they do not excuse it. Statesmanship is hard. The more we tell politicians there is an easy way, the more we trap them. If the Speaker wants to fulfill the mission he has set himself, he and his followers will have to bring the second half of their reading list up to the level of the first.