THE BARBER OF CAVIL.

The Truth of Power
Intellectual Affairs
in the Clinton White House
Benjamin R. Barber
W.W. Norton, $24.95, 256 pp.

Benjamin Barber's book has two objectives. One is to offer reflections on the age-old relationship between truth and power. The other is to provide a breezy, opinionated, and gossipy account of Barber's meetings with Bill Clinton. The latter project succeeds much better than the former.

Although Barber is by profession a political philosopher (Strong Democracy: Participatory Politics in a New Age, University of California Press, 1990), he has little that is original to say about the eternal questions posed by Plato and Machiavelli, let alone the more contemporary versions of Bourne, Orwell, Milosz, and Havel. "Intellectuals rarely have the truth," Barber notes, "while the president rarely has much power." Expressed at that level of generality, there is something to what he says. But in most concrete situations, including the ones in which Barber himself was involved, intellectuals have a distance from events that often gives them more access to truth than politicians. Moreover, as we can now see in the case of George W. Bush, presidents have considerably more power to shape what passes for the truth than do people who teach at universities.

Nothing much has changed since Plato went to Syracuse intent on instructing its tyrants. Intellectuals have things to say that politicians do not want to hear. If intellectuals want to get their word across, they have the choice of exemplary witness at the cost of isolation from power or flattery and duplicity at the cost of lack of integrity. Barber, by his own account, leaned in the latter direction. Clearly loving the attention the president lavished on him, Barber rarely if ever paused to tell Clinton that the policies he was pursuing were dangerous or self-destructive.

The fact that we know the extent to which Barber fled in the direction of intellectual cowardice helps explain why his book works better as diary than as theory. For a man who describes himself as self-important, Barber is pleasingly self-deprecating. Invited to a meeting with Clinton and other intellectuals at Camp David in 1995, Barber admits to squandering his opportunity to say something intelligent to the president in the receiving line. He also admits that he tried to grab a seat at the center of the conference table so that the president and first lady would have to look directly his way. Barber knows when he speaks too long and comes across as openly didactic. He is also willing to enter into the bad graces of a possible future president by noting how ill suited Vice President Al Gore was for intellectual give-and-take.

So honest is Barber about the gaffes he made that one wonders why he continued to make them. Readers may have forgotten, as I did, that Barber's name was once floated as a possible chairman for the National Endowment of the Humanities. One reason not to remember Barber's possible nomination is that anyone with a grain of understanding of how Washington works would have quickly concluded that Barber's chances of getting it were nil. Having been burned in the brouhaha over Lani Guinier, Clinton was not going to pick someone with a long list of publications for a sensitive job. Even if he were so inclined, Barber, from New Jersey, had none of the clout with influential senators that the eventual nominee, Mississippi's William Ferris, had. Given so many examples from Barber's own hand of his long-windedness, one can only imagine the reaction of Clinton aides as they thought about how he would testify before Congress. But Barber hungered after the job and, knowing better, took it badly when he was passed over. He even penned a letter of regret in which he somehow blended the future of democracy, the future of the NEH, and the future of Ben Barber. He caps off his description of the whole business by noting that the length and tone of his letter were reason enough why he never should have been considered for the job in the first place.

Just as Ben Barber comes off as human in The Truth of Power, so does Clinton. Barber is not one of those liberals who dropped Clinton after he signed welfare reform and brought on Dick Morris to triangulate. Nor is he one of those centrists who, disgusted with Clinton's personal behavior, retreated to private life. Barber likes Clinton as a person, so much so that he reminds the reader far too often of the "affair" he thinks he is having with the president, even to the point of comparing himself, sans sex, to Monica Lewinsky. He writes persuasively about how Clinton's mind works, not as an intellectual in the learned sense of the term, but as a brilliant synthesizer who can express the essential points of any argument that engages his attention. Barber believes, against the grain of conventional wisdom, that Clinton "is a man whose democratic career is long from over." And, displaying the rhetorical overkill to which he so frequently admits, Barber daydreams of Clinton "that he will become the first 'President of the World.'" It is as if Clinton's personal and political self-destruction pales in comparison to the fact that he read and could cogently summarize Barber's Jihad v. McWorld (Ballantine, 1996).

It can be said with some certainty that Ben Barber has thought a lot more about Clinton than Clinton ever thought about Barber. Clearly, the professor saw something resembling himself in the president. "He has the narcissist's gift of making conversation about him feel like conversation about you," Barber writes, an insight gained from Barber's own tendency to see his minor political setbacks and defeats as losses for the cause of democracy. Put Barber and Clinton in the same room--I, too, was in that room at Camp David--and it is not clear who would go on at greater length. My memory is not as good as Barber's; I wasn't taking notes. But I have the distinct recollection of Barber unable to stop talking and Clinton patiently listening.

Barber recounts many such meetings, including one in the summer of 1998 in which a number of intellectuals were once more invited to Washington to talk to Clinton, only this time it was Hillary. This was a meeting that I decided not to attend, and the reason was not because I knew that if I accepted Sid Blumenthal's invitation, I would have to listen to Ben Barber instead of enjoying another day in Wellfleet with my children. Barber writes that at this meeting, Hillary "was, in some oblique manner, well, taking over." Since that was indeed clear from the invitation, the whole business raised a serious question for me. By that summer, the bloom was off the Clintons. Like Barber, I am not sure how to speak truth to power, but one option, when power begins to corrupt, is not to speak at all. With a president nakedly lying and a first lady clearly trying to find an outlet for her ambitions, it did not seem, at least to me, the appropriate time to attend a seminar in the White House.

The Truth of Power ends on a note of regret. "I wish the small band of intellectuals whose special provenance ideas were supposed to be, the handful to whom I was privileged to belong, who from time to time had a hearing in the White House--I wish we had made more of our chance." And I wish Barber had made more of his chance, in writing a memoir of these exciting years, to say how such encounters could have been done differently.

Alan Wolfe's most recent book is Moral Freedom (Norton).