The Agenda: Inside the Clinton White House. - book reviews

National Review, August 1, 1994 by Frank Gannon

By Bob Woodward (Simon & Schuster, 352 pp., $24)

A LOOK at the New York Times best-seller list shows two books with "Inside the White House" in their titles. These are, of course, very different books, as different as the two White Houses they take you "Inside."

Imagine this headline in the Washington Post: "Clinton Replaces Entire White House Staff with the Cast of Les Miserables!" To judge by Bob Woodward, Bill Clinton might want to think about it.

Mr. Woodward is, of course, our modern-day Invisible Man. This fellow has the ability to completely shut off whatever it is in one's body that causes it to reflect light on the visible spectrum. A few years ago (in Veil: The Secret Wars of the CIA, 1981-1987) he slipped past a bunch of FBI agents posted outside William Casey's hospital room. Then he reappeared, went over to Casey, who was not far from death, and asked him a whole bunch of questions. Casey momentarily perked up and answered these questions.

As my son would say, Cha. And Snoop Doggy Dogg's next CD will be My Gershwin.

This time out, Bob Woodward does not strain our credulity quite as hard, and does manage to create a fairly credible picture of President Clinton at work. It's not a pretty picture. Mr. Clinton has a tendency to vacinate, although as with Hamlet, his hesitancy to act in a forceful, direct manner is a result of thinking too much. Here's where Hillary Clinton comes in. Mr. Woodward looks inside her and tells us what she's thinking: "The burden of carrying out the Administration policies was too much on her husband, she felt. . . . Too many senior people in the Administration and on the staff were stopping short of full preparation. The President invited this slacking off in some ways . . . lots of them would just take problems to him in midstream, knowing he would have thought about it and would have ideas and questions they might have considered." Here are more of the First Lady's thoughts about her husband (another interior monologue unearthed by the extraordinary Mr. Woodward! : "Bill was such a complex person. Nobody had described the whole man. People kept trying to chop him into little pieces. It couldn't be done, she knew. . . . Yes, Bill confused people, she thought. His style created dissonance."

At least, when things are going bad, Mr. Clinton can always scream at poor George Stephanopoulos. As Mr. Woodward tells us: "[Mr. Stephanopoulos] sometimes thought his primary function was to get yelled at first thing in the morning, to bear the brunt of Clinton's anger, to take the punches." We learn that Mr. Clintons staff has little names for the boss's tirades: "purple fits," "earthquakes." Mr. Stephanopoulos, a veteran of many verbal assaults, calls them "the wave," a name that accurately describes the phenomenon as Mr. Woodward presents it: Mr. Clinton tries to do too much, he doesn't delegate well, he gets bad news, he yells at Mr. Stephanopoulos.

By the time I got to the end of The Agenda, I felt that I had spent a lot of time with a lot of people who are seriously conflicted and confused. Things are so chaotic in the Clinton White House that it is rather remarkable they get anything done at all. (Indeed, a better title for the book would have been Mr. Stephanopoulos's term, The Wave.) This quality of chaos seems to create a mood where everybody who works in the Clinton White House can't wait to spill his guts to Bob Woodward.

The recently published Haldeman Diaries is, meanwhile, what historians call a primary source. The late H. R. "Bob" Haldeman was a man committed to organizing the Nixon White House, and his diaries are a testament to how hard he worked at his job.

Unfortunately (I think), his diaries reveal a man who sees himself as an extension of the will of Richard Nixon. Haldeman's portrayal of Nixon is very candid. We see Nixon vindictively going after whomever he perceived as enemies. At one time or another, Nixon used the IRS, the press, the TV networks, and the office of the Presidency itself to punish that familiar cast of enemies: the Kennedy family, intellectuals, liberals, bureaucrats, etc. Much has been made of the President's alleged anti-semitism. However, in the Haldeman Diaries we see that the man Haldeman calls "the P" is, in times of stress, virtually anti-everybody-who-is-not-named-Richard-Milhous-Nixon. Calling Richard Nixon anti-Semitic is like calling Jonathan Swift anti-English. Maybe the accusation is true, but why stop there?

However, we also see Nixon as a very hard-working President who was, for a time, enamored of the theories of White House physician Walter Tkach, who felt that it was possible to eliminate sleeping completely and work 24 hours a day. It might have been Haldeman's similar attitude toward work that formed the very strong bond between him and the President. For whatever reason, Haldeman certainly had more power than any chief of staff before or since. Nixon called Haldeman his "lord high executioner." Haldeman repaid Nixon's faith in him with an absolutely unwavering loyalty.