For the Record: From Wall Street to Washington.

For the the Record

From Wall Street to Washington, by Donald T. Regan (Harcourt Brace, 416 pp., $21.95)

The former Secretary of the Treasusry and White House Chief of Staff is a different case. In the spring of 1985, just after Donald T. Regan has assumed his new position in the West Wing, one of his assistants. Tom Dawson, was invited to lunch by a group of reporters. His host was David Hoffman, a reporter for the Washington Post. After the plesantries, Hoffman got down to business and told Dawson that the ought to get smart and start leaking. In return, he and the other new staffers would be guaranteed good press. He told Dawson that was why fomer White House Chief of Staff James Baker had gotten such favorable treatment.

Dawson reported the incident to his boss -- who was bot about to be intimidated. He dug in his heels and reinforced his absolute rule: no more leaks. He had been trained on Wall Street, where loose talk could land you in jail (at least theoretically). The second term would be run on the merits of substances, not press agentry.

When, two years later, Regan found himself in trouble during the IranContra affair, he looked around and found he had no media parachute. When Dawson called Lou Cannon of the Post to camplain about an allegedly inaccurate story involving the Tower Commission report, Cannon shrugged: "Maybe if you guys had played ball with us, things like this wouldn't have happened."

Now we have Regan's White House memoir, we have cover the Time looks a lot like the National Enquirer: EXCLUSIVE -- ASTROLOGY IN THE WHITE HOUSE. It makes Deaver's memoir look like the soul of discretion.

Never having been a fan of Don Regan's -- mainly because he always came across as such as ass in my daily Post -- I was more than prepared to hate his book. I was surprised. I found it considered, thoughful, honest, and, by gum, gracefully written, thanks to his collaborator, the novelist Charles McCarry, whom Regan graciously acknowledges. Much as I hate to disagree with all those fine, independent thinkers howling for Regan's window's peak, his book is getting the bum's rush. The evil that White House memoirists commit ends up on the covers of magazines. The good is oft interred in their books.

Regan had two motives here. The first was revenge against Nancy Reagan, whose meddling in her husband's affairs he clearly resented. Regan is, for better or worse, a man's man. Women raise the children, men take care of business. Once Deaver left it, was almost written -- in the stars? -- that she almost Regan were going to clash.

Regan's second motive is plain. He felt wronged, and apparently with some justification. He wa cited by the Tower Commission as bearing "primary responsibilities for the choas tha descended upon the White House" in the wake of the Iran-Contra revelations, a charge you will no doubt be surprised to hear he disputes. He says in the book's foreword that he could not have explained what happened without referring to the now famous "friend" of the First Lady.

Once Iran-Contra broke, it was essential that the President go public and state his case. Regan says he tried, desperately, to get him to do just that. Instead, the President was strangely silent, retreating to the Rose Garden. But now the reason for this Rose Garden strategy turns out to be that woman in San Francisco with her charts. Jupiter was out of whack or whatever and it just wasn't a good time for press conference (they tried one; it didn't work out) or public appearances. Mrs. Reagan was adamant.

It was Don Regan who fought to prevent certain quarters from firing Bill Casey on his deathbed; he who rather touchingly lied to the old warrior, squeezing his hand and telling him that once he was recovered, the President wanted him back at his right hand, in Ed Messe's old job.

As a young president of Merrill Lynch, he strove to reform Wall Street, which in those days was, as he writes, "a cartel masquerading as a capitalist competitive system." As Secretary of the Treasury he held out against raising taxes when all the President's men were urging him to. Regan appears never to have forgotten his roots. He seems genuinely to sympathize with the working and middle classes. Thus he pushed for and, incredibly, got the most drastic reform of the tax code in the century, at a time when the idea was dismissed as unthinkable by all the wise men who lunch daily at the Metropolitan Club.

Finally, what about his portrait of Ronald Reagan?

It's unfortunate that the President has been thrown out the window with all the astrological bathwater, because a closer reading -- or any reading, for that matter -- of Regan's book presents a different picture entirely. The portrait of the President here is emphatically not that of a dotty old gramps wandering around the corridors of power in his PJs. On the contrary, he is a man with a grasp of basic economic issues, who does his homework nightly, who is tough as nails with Gorbachevy, and who is supreme in his understanding of the American people.

Here too are the now famialiar paradoxes: a President who, upon reading of a destitute family in the paper, takes out his checkbook, but whom Regan could never get to thank the little people redoubtable switchboard operators; who dislikes confrontations so much that at times he appears to give up something of his manhood.

Well, so that? We have no right to expect perfection in President, and anyway we are sure as hell not going to get it. In an afterword in which Regan warns against a creeping, or already entrenched , tendency in the Presidency to design policy primarily for theatrical effect, Regan likens his near-namesake to Franklin Delano