Behind the Scenes.

Behind the Scense

Behind the Scense, by Michael K. Deaver, with Mickey Herskowitz (Morrow, 272 pp., $19.95)

Micheal Deaver's book, though also written with someone, hands a little more loosely from the spine. There is gold to be mined here, but, as General Haig would stay, let me caveat you on that: it costs a lot of sifting through somewhat dismal psychic terrain.

Larry Speakers doesn't have anything quite to match that, not even his fatal two paragraphs about putting words in the presidential mouth that brought about his resignation from Merrill Lynch. But his book is not uninteresting. We learn that Shultz treats underlings badly. Weiberger was "always putting his foot in is mouth." Jeane Kirkpatrick was "cantankerous, ideological, and difficult to work with." Tip O'Neil is a liar. Jack Kemp "drove the President and the rest of us up a wall." Al D'Amato is an incessant "motormouth." Olive North never once met with the President alone. In the wake of the Soviet shootdown of KAL 007, Strom Thurmond urged the President to return a numerically commensurate 269 KGB agents to the Soviet Union "dead or alive, either way."