Between Washington and Jerusalem: a reporter's notebook.

Between Washington and Jerusalem: A Reporter's Notebook.

Between Washington and Jerusalem: A Reporter's Notebook. Wolf Blitzer. Oxford University Press, $15.95. Wolf Blitzer may have the best job in daily journalism. As Washington correspondent for the Jerusalem Post, the covers the endlessly fascinating and frustrating saga of American Mideast policy and the U.S.-Israeli relationship. He writes for a great newspaper and a readership that follows his every word. His dispatches are lucid and generally accurate, an illustration of how a good journalist performs his task of writing "the first rough draft of history.'

Unfortunately, Blitzer's second draft of history, Between Washington and Jerusalem, is a disappointment. Blitzer mentions that in preparing the book, he reviewed "literally thousands of articles' he had written on the subject during the past dozen years. Reading the book, you can almost see the marks of scissors and paste.

Blitzer's basic problem in this book is a familiar one for daily journalists: too many facts, too little perspective--too much of the raw material of history and too little of the refined product. A reader senses in the book a caution, a wariness about offending sources. For example, there is a lengthy discussion of the role of the Israeli ambassador in Washington, drawing on Blitzer's relationships with the last four: Evron, Dinitz, Arens, and Rosenne. But Blitzer shies away from making strong judgments about the relative merits of the group. Is the current ambassador, Meir Rosenne, the weakest Israeli envoy in recent years, as some diplomatic observers contend? You won't find that delicate issue discussed in Blitzer's book.

Blitzer is also wary about making strong judgments about American officials. The book closes, for example, with an odd anecdote about President Reagan telling reporters that he supports both Israeli security and defensive weapons for the Arabs. Remarks Blitzer: "There seems little doubt that Reagan actually believes what he says.' Now what is that supposed to mean? The reader assumes that Blitzer regards Reagan's view as mistaken or naive or ill-informed. Or something! But he never says what he means.

Journalists shouldn't write memoirs unless they are prepared to offend people. They shouldn't pretend to stand back and tell the full story about events they have covered until they have the emotional distance and the intellectual perspective to do so usefully. Blitzer coyly calls his book "A Reporter's Notebook.' Perhaps that means he has another book in him--a book that will be worth waiting for--in which the raw material of the notebook will be organized more thoughtfully.