Time Present, Time Past

0 Comments | Insight on the News, Feb 19, 1996 | by Colin Walters

In 1990, Sen. Bill Bradley, a New Jersey Democrat, came close to losing his Senate seat to Republican Christine Todd Whitman, now the state's governor. A friend remarked at the time how glad he was that Bradley won, but how the alternative would have made a good story for his newspaper.

"What do you mean, a good stork.?" asked the two-term senator and former New York Knicks basketball star.

"Oh, you know," his editor friend said." 'Golden Boy Falls on Face.'"

Bradley, of Presbyterian stock and rarely one to go easy on himself, was obliged to conclude that he had displayed a want of candor and responsiveness to constituents in tough economic times and that he had let himself be "intimidated by the state's roiling political atmosphere." "Rather than face painful issues, he made TV ads harking back to the basketball career he had tried to downplay in his political life.

The aftermath of the campaign entailed an agonizing reappraisal. Eventually Bradley emerged from the experience feeling a new freedom - prompted by conscience rather than political pragmatism - to follow his gut instincts and speak out on issues that most concern him: the deficit, jobs, race and minority rights, environmental needs and economic growth, civility.... The result is Time Present, Time Past (Knopf, 442 pp), its title from a poem by T.S. Eliot.

Bradley is not the only Democrat deciding to call it quits at the expiration of the 104th Congress this coming December. But he could be the most interesting of the lot. His book certainly would not be half as interesting to read if it did not offer a treasure hunt for answers to the decision by the still comparatively youthful senator first to abandon his presidential ambitions and then leave the Senate too.