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

Washington Monthly, July-August, 1994 by James Fallows

Before complaining about this book let me acknowledge its virtues. They start with the virtuous way in which Bob Woodward has conducted his career. At any point in the last two decades, Woodward could easily have decided that he was tired of working so hard. He could have turned into a bigfoot pundit and dined out for the rest of his life on the afterglow from All the President's Men, The Brethren, or Veil. Instead he has kept at it, with his dogged interviewing and cross-checking of sources. There certainly are worse role models in today's news business.

The subject of the book is worthy, too. For at least a dozen years, since the early Reagan era, journalists have nodded and agreed that the federal budget is a really important subject, which someone should take seriously--preferably somebody else. Campaign coverage, the cherished White House beat, foreign postings, and talk-show opinionating were all more glamorous. Near the end of the Bush administration, Woodward apparently decided that he would try to delve into and explain the story of economic policy in the way he'd explored the obviously sexy secrets of the Supreme Court and the C.I.A.

Woodward has been thorough and careful; as of this writing, a week after the book's appearance, none of its subjects has challenged any of his major factual claims. To any Washington reporter it is amazing that Woodward has gotten so many insiders to speak freely so early in a president's term. This is easy late in an administration, when the people with inside knowledge start worrying about their next career berth. Woodward seems to have sped up the cycle through his own "Deep Throat" reputation for stony secrecy about his sources and by working with so many sources that much of the information can't be traced to a single leaker. Experienced newspaper readers can usually pick out the origin of catty blind quotes by asking who is hurt and who is helped by each revelation. Only in a few cases do Woodward's stories bear this sort of obvious fingerprint. Mostly, he seems to have found the original memo or tracked down all the participants in a meeting so that he can combine and compare their accounts.

The few stories with fingerprints fall into the "Al Haig was troubled... " genre. Haig, who was White House chief of staff during Richard Nixon's second term, seemed a probable major source for Woodward and Carl Bernstein's Watergate books, since in so many cases he was portrayed as being conscience-struck and troubled by the criminality emerging around him. In The Agenda we have David Gergen often seeming troubled about signs of partisanship and disorganization in the Clinton White House. More surprising, since Gergen is hardly a longtime Clinton loyalist, we occasionally see George Stephanopoulos in "troubled" mode, sighing about the president's imperfections. The overall portrait of Stephanopoulos, however, emphasizes his competence and his diehard loyalty.

Woodward suggests that Hillary Clinton has more influence over her husband than any other one person, although like everyone else so far he has been thwarted in trying to find out exactly how she exercises power, and to what end. He mildly mocks Al Gore, whom he shows scurrying to have the seat right next to Clinton at every meeting or event. But the book provides impressive evidence of Gore's playing legislative hardball to help enact the administration's plans and fighting consistently for his environmental principles. Woodward also shows Gore making sophisticated economic arguments--for example, pointing out that previous tight-money campaigns by the Federal Reserve board, designed to choke off inflation, had occasionally backfired and increased the inflation rate. The people who come out the worst in the book are the White House chief of staff, Mack McLarty, who is portrayed as being weak and completely out of his depth; Paul Begala, the campaign strategist, who badmouths many of his associates when they aren't listening (but Woodward is); and David Boren, the senator from Oklahoma, one of several vacillating legislators who nearly killed Clinton's budget plan in 1993. One quiet hero, to my mind, is Robert Rubin, who is portrayed as running the National Economic Council in a fair and effective way.

As for its portrayal of the president himself, the book will probably reinforce the view each reader already holds. Those who hate everything about Clinton will find new evidence that he is slippery and untrustworthy. After all, he ran on the promise of a middle class tax cut, and the book suggests that he knew he could never carry that promise out. His assistants are always squabbling, and he seems willing to give up anything to get one of his bills through Congress. Readers like me, who start out more sympathetic to Clinton, will find many illustrations of his intelligence, his resilience, his energy, his deftness at every political operation from backroom arm-twisting to speechmaking on TV, and his determination to make the most of his years in office.