From memoirs to romance, more US senators write books

WASHINGTON, June 14: Forget about campaign managers, strategists and fund-raisers. What a U.S. senator needs nowadays is a good literary agent.

About 30 of the 100 currently serving U.S. senators have authored books at some point in their careers, and the number is growing.

It isn't just the 2008 presidential hopefuls churning out autobiographies. Senators are publishing treatises on terrorism, paeans to populism, odes to the Earth and, in one case, the heartbreaking story of a son's suicide.

Senators have long had literary aspirations, but in the 19th and most of the 20th centuries, they waited to retire before penning memoirs, associate Senate historian Don Ritchie said.

One of the senators to break the mould and publish early in his career was former President John Kennedy, author of ''Profiles in Courage.'' ''It launched his national reputation,'' Ritchie said.

Since then, senators have tackled genres ranging from politics to murder mysteries. Robert Byrd, a West Virginia Democrat, turned out a massive four-volume history of the Senate itself.

Some lawmakers may write books, in part, because it's one of the few permissible ways to earn outside income. But some senators say they enjoy writing or have something that they can't say within a standard campaign speech.

ROMANCE, FAMILY TRAGEDY

A few months ago California Democrat Barbara Boxer fulfilled a long-time wish to write fiction by publishing a steamy political romance called ''A Time to Run''.

Gordon Smith, an Oregon Republican, recently published a slim volume called ''Remembering Garrett: One Family's Battle with a Child's Depression,'' the poignant story of his son's suicide and the family's emergence as mental health advocates.

Connecticut Democrat Chris Dodd and family members are in the early stages of compiling a book based on letters their father, the late Thomas Dodd, wrote home to his wife Grace while he was prosecuting Nazis at Nuremberg. The elder Dodd wrote 10 or 15 pages a day -- a mix of love letters and thoughtful discourses of the war crimes tribunal's legal and moral challenges that the senator believes resonate in today's fight against terrorism.

Missouri Republican Christopher ''Kit'' Bond's southeast Asian travels stirred his concern about potential terrorism threats incubating in the jungles, and the need for the United States to engage before it's too late.

''I made speeches on the floor. But my wife pointed out that no one notices floor speeches. She said I should write a book,'' said Bond, who is collaborating with a Pulitzer-prize winning journalist who knows the region.

Barack Obama's first book, ''Dreams from My Father: A Story of Race and Inheritance,'' was a best-seller while he ran for the Senate. The Illinois Democrat is now working on another volume tentatively titled ''Audacity of Hope.'' Its premise is that Americans have more in common than their polarising politics suggest.

''Writing a book is an opportunity to talk in stories rather than in 10-point plans or sound bites,'' Obama said. ''It allows me to have a dialogue with readers that's more complex, with more ambiguities and nuances and shades to it.'' Massachusetts Democrat Edward Kennedy just published two books, a liberal cri de coeur called ''America Back on Track'' and a playful children's volume called ''My Senator and Me: A Dog's Eye View of Washington, DC.'' The book was ''coauthored'' by Splash, the senator's beloved Portuguese water dog.

AN EYE ON 2008

Massachusetts' other senator, John Kerry, who may seek the Democratic presidential nomination again in 2008, is working on a book about the environment with his wife, Teresa Heinz Kerry, an aide said. Al Gore, of course, wrote ''Earth in the Balance'' back when he was a Tennessee senator with presidential ambitions -- but he has now moved on to ice-cap melting movies.

North Dakota Democrat Byron Dorgan's ''Take This Job and Ship It: How Corporate Greed and Brain-Dead Politics Are Selling Out America,'' should reach book stores in a few weeks.

Media-savvy Chuck Schumer of New York said he had been approached in the past about writing a book but now has a message to share with fellow Democrats.

''My book is about ideas. It's not five little legislative proposals,'' Schumer said of the forthcoming ''The 50 Percent Solution: Winning Back the Middle Class One Family at a Time.''

Reuters