WRITING ETHICS: CHURCHILL AND GINGRICH

It is said that those who do know history are doomed to repeat it. It might also be said that lawmakers who don't know history are doomed to enact bad legislation.

So it is with the latest proposal to limit the royalties members of Congress may receive from books they publish.

Congressmen intent upon preventing Newt Gingrich from making money on his recent book are rushing to pass a law that would stop him from doing so. They might benefit from pausing and thinking back to the example set by the politician considered by many to be the greatest statesman of this century:

Winston Churchill.

In addition to being a member of Parliament for many decades, and the British prime minister who probably deserves more credit than any other human being for defeating Adolph Hitler and the Nazis, Churchill was also a Nobel Prize-winning historian.

That's right. A politician once wrote so well that he wont the Nobel Prize for Literature. (Note to Newt: I've read your book. Don't get your hopes up.)

Churchill was a published author of four books before being elected to Parliament at the age of 25. A fifth came out 12 days after his election. During an active life in politics, the great workaholic found time to write a history of World War I, a history of World War II, an autobiography and other ambitious works.

Churchill's primary source of income was his writing, not his salary as a public servant. During a two-year period including 1922 in earned today's equivalent of $200,000 from his writing. His masterpiece, "The World Crisis," a six-volume, 3,261-page history of the first world war, sold 80,551 copies, earning him $285,996. In one month in 1929, his writing income -- including the advance for his Duke of Marlborough biography, plus payment for three magazine articles he'd written, plus the monthly royalties from his war history -- was the equivalent of two and one-half years earnings of the prime minister. Churchill enjoyed life on such a high scale that, unknown to most of his contemporaries, he was always just a book contract ahead of his creditors.

Had Parliament been silly enough to pass a law forcing Churchill to choose between politics and writing, he might well have left Parliament long before World War II. Or, he might have decided not to write his books, in which case he would be deprived today of some of the best history ever written.

Personally, I rather like the idea of sending to Congress people of sufficient brainpower to write books worth reading. Politicians like Winston Churchill, Bill Bradley, John F. Kennedy, Theodore Roosevelt, Alexander Hamilton and James Madison come to mind.

If they are truly the best and brightest leaders of our country, I want to read what they have to say.

If their books are pitiful, let them die on the vine at the bookstores. But don't take away one of the biggest incentives to write them.

In this day of big money politics and 30-second informercials, it seems our great political leaders of the past are gradually being replaced by talking heads with big bankrolls who can sound intelligent for one sound bite.

Passing a law that would take away the financial incentive for congressmen to write books could drive some of the smarter ones from office and discourage others from taking the time necessary to produce a book worth reading.

Such a law should increase the likelihood that we would live in a world where our Winston Churchills are in occupations other than politics.

To paraphrase a great man: That would not be Congress's finest hour.

Or to paraphrase him again: Never in the field of literature would so much damage done to so many by so few.

Morley Swingle is the prosecuting attorney of Cape Girardeau County.