Spin Cycle: Inside the Clinton Propaganda Machine.

First, the caveats. I covered the White House full time from 1993 to 1996 and I'm friendly with many of the people in this book, including the author. My wife, who used to work for the Clintons, gets a couple of mentions in here. And I get a pat on the back for a scandal scooplet -- getting the White House to reveal that it had long known about Dick Morris' second mistress, the one with whom he had a child. So mine isn't, in the traditional book-review sense, an objective view.

That said, this is a solid read buttressed by a terrific amount of reporting. Kurtz has delved deeply into White House-press relations in the Clinton era. And while the title of the book focuses on the administration side of the equation, Kurtz scrutinizes both sides of the podium. There's the White House, obsessed with controlling the story and containing the damage from the latest scandal. And then there's the press corps -- afraid always of getting scooped on the latest scandal. As is true of almost any issue that one explores in depth, it's a complicated story. There are no villains and no saints.

Take Mike McCurry. He's got qualities that make him an ideal press secretary. He's well informed; he fights for the press within the administration. It was McCurry who lobbied for reporters to spend more time with Clinton in small, off-the-record sessions -- something that Clinton had resisted and continues somewhat inexplicably to believe, despite his considerable charms, is a waste of his time. (Having been in some of those, I think they're good for all sides) Still, even a straight shooter like McCurry can wander into the gray zone. At one briefing, he fails to mention what he knows to be true -- that he had personally coached Texas oilman Truman Arnold on how to respond to press inquiries about whether Arnold had been personally solicited by the president. It's not quite a he, but it's pretty close. It seems like a small matter but it's a telling instance of the administration's larger difficulties with the truth. Just look at the Al Gore imbroglio. First, the veep only remembered making a few fundraising calls. Oops. Then it turned out to be 46 calls. First they were just for the DNC. Shucks. Then it turned out to be for the Clinton-Gore re-election campaign as well -- an important legal distinction. On the Buddhist temple affair, only under duress did Gore aides come up with the slippery phrase that it was a "finance-related event" -- which, as my colleague Walter Shapiro jokes, is like calling a stick-up a wallet-and-watch related event. It's true, as the White House argues, that the truth is not something you can easily release to the press. The papers aren't always easy to find, the memories of individual actors sometimes conflict. And yet, the administration still has a propensity to be a little too cute.

For all the White House woes, the press, I think, actually comes off looking worse here. It lurches constantly from scandal to scandal, treating each new revelation as if it's earth shattering. And yet the cumulative effect of the FBI files, Johnny Chung, the coffees, Charlie Trie, the Webb Hubbell affair, Larry Lawrence's Arlington burial, the Gore fundraising calls, and so on is slightly ludicrous. The press never sorts out what's important from what's merely new No wonder the public has tuned out the scandal and is willing to give Clinton a pass -- at least for now -- on the Monica Lewinsky matter. When everything is a scandal, nothing is.

What's especially disheartening is the abject cynicism of the press. Each new Clinton initiative -- meat inspection, child care, even reaching a balanced budget -- is viewed through a political prism of who won and who lost. It's not that the press should treat Clinton's proposals with reflexive acceptance. But the idea of exploring whether a program would actually work or not is beyond the ken of the White House press corps. Interestingly, as Kurtz points out, the American people know better. Mark Penn, the president's elusive pollster, found that huge majorities of the American public knew about his proposals for meat inspection, controlling tobacco, and other issues. Even if the press treated each new announcement with knee-jerk disdain, Clinton was engaged in "a second conversation" with the public. Is that a triumph of propaganda? Cynics might say so. I tend to think it's the people making a judgment about the quality of their lives and the quality of their leaders' policies.

Matthew Cooper, a contributing editor of The Washington Monthly, is a national correspondent for Newsweek.