O'Neill enlightens, Greenspan obscures: Fed chief's role in 'The Price of Loyalty' remains an enigma.

UP until about three weeks ago, the Bush administration had done an outstanding ob of hiding what goes on inside the White House. Its media strategy--pretending the media doesn't exist--had been consistent and effective.

But then we learned that Bush's former Treasury secretary, on a whim, had handed all of his private papers and unhappy memories to a journalist he barely knew. The journalist used those materials to elicit what clearly was some behind-the-scenes help from the chairman of the Federal Reserve, the former head of the Environmental Protection Agency and a phalanx of staffers at the National Security Council. And just like that, the previously discreet Bush administration is an open book.

Bush, too. For the first time since he took office, the president has been described doing his job by the people who worked with him closely. "The Price of Loyalty," by Ron Suskind about Paul O'Neill's two bizarre years as Bush's Treasury secretary, dwells on the president's incuriosity, but the Bush trait exposed by the book is not incuriosity. It's insecurity.

Social pre-emption 

George W. Bush is the guy who, when he sees you on the street, and before you can quite register his presence, hollers out your nickname, or some witty quip at your expense. The president's social manner, like his foreign policy, is pre-emptive.

From a distance, this can come across as social confidence. Upon closer inspection, it looks like something else: a man terrified of complicated social interaction. After all, what would happen if you spoke first? He might lose control of the conversation. He might have to think up a response.

"The Price of Loyalty" is laced with the president's terror of his own mind. One example: In his two years of weekly private policy meetings with the president, all O'Neill ever got- after being greeted as "Pablo" or "Big-O" --was a blank stare. "I wondered from the first, if the president didn't know the questions to ask, or did he know and just not want to know the answers?" O'Neill says.

The reaction to "The Price of Loyalty" has been almost as interesting as the book itself. There has been a dishonest attempt on the part of Bush supporters to discredit the source. The Wall Street Journal, for example, trashed O'Neill in a lead editorial for "impugning colleagues and betraying confidences to sell a book," as if he had some commercial motive for cooperating with Suskind.

The White House itself didn't know which way to jump, having, in its response to sunlight, the reflexes of a vampire. On Jan. 9, when the publisher leaked O'Neill's mystifying line to "60 Minutes" that Bush acted "like a blind man in a room full of deaf people," White House spokesman Scott McClellan said, "You're asking me to do book reviews and I don't do book reviews."

On second thought

The next day, the publisher leaked O'Neill's contention that Bush wanted to go to war with Iraq from his first day in office and that there was, so far as O'Neill could see, never any evidence that Saddam Hussein possessed weapons of mass destruction. Lo and behold, the same Scott McClellan took up book reviewing. "The world according to Mr. O'Neill," McClellan said, "is about trying to justify his own opinion rather than looking at the reality."

The following day, when the "60 Minutes" interview aired and the press began to attend to the story about Dick Cheney's cynical indifference to huge budget deficits, White House spokesman Ken Lisaius repeated it word for word. But then ABC News dug out an unidentified official from National Security Council meetings who corroborated O'Neill's account that Bush had been looking to wage war in Iraq well before Sept. 11, 2001. Oops! Since then the Bush spokespeople have retreated to their original chant: As a State Department spokesman asked about O'Neill's book on Jan. 12 put it, "As we so frequently say, we don't do book reviews."

Well, I do. And I don't think O'Neill's motives are all that nefarious. I think he actually means it when he says, seemingly absurdly, that he might still vote for Bush. O'Neill has his vices. He's vain. He tells too many stories in which he is the hero. He has a knack for thinking he's right and the world's wrong when the world, in fact, has a point. But these vices are small beside his virtues, and one of these is his preference for sunlight to shadow.

Largely, but not solely, for this reason, official Washington treated O'Neill as a crackpot. To me he always seemed more like the sane man in an insane world. But whatever you think about his approach to political life, he never lied about it. In his interview for the Treasury job, he told Bush and Cheney exactly who he was, and how he intended to operate: openly. Clearly, they didn't believe him. (Do they believe him now?

Most curious character

The character in this drama with interesting motives isn't O'Neill but his more shadowy friend, Alan Greenspan. It's evident that Greenspan helped with the book; his fingerprints are all over the thing.

Why would the Fed chairman grant an interview, even off the record, to a journalist he knew to be armed and dangerous to the Bush White House? Surely, not out of a sense of loyalty to his old friend Paul O'Neill. If Greenspan had that gene, he wouldn't have lasted as long as he has. Even more surely, not out of ignorance that he was helping to explode a political bomb. Greenspan doesn't get out of bed before examining the political consequences.

The only good explanation is that he knew exactly what Patti O'Neill's book would say-that the fiscal irresponsibility of the Bush administration had been almost criminal and that the manner in which Bush made decisions was deeply disturbing--and he was pleased to have it said.

Given, of course, that Greenspan was never explicitly attached to the thing.

A week after the first sensational tidbits from "The Price of Loyalty" appeared, Greenspan was asked about the book's contention that he considered Bush's plan for tax cuts irresponsible without triggers to scale them back if budget surpluses evaporated. "It's been rare over the many years of our friendship that Paul and I have different recollections of events, but in this case we do," Greenspan said through a spokesman.

As O'Neill pointed out to me, "If you read what Alan said, he didn't actually deny it." And it's true. If you read as plain English Greenspan's carefully crafted public response, it sounds like a denial. But when you see it for what it is, Greenspan-speak, it reads as almost a ringing endorsement.

We all know that Paul O'Neill just sent his old friend Dick Cheney a nasty message. It's interesting to think that Alan Greenspan cosigned it, even if he did so in disappearing ink.

Michael Lewis, whose books include "MoneyBall" and "Liar's Poker," is a columnist for Bloomberg News.