The Agenda: Inside the Clinton White House.

Before complaining about this book let me acknowledge its virtues. They start with the virtuous way in which Bob Woodward has conducted his career. At any point in the last two decades, Woodward could easily have decided that he was tired of working so hard. He could have turned into a bigfoot pundit and dined out for the rest of his life on the afterglow from All the President's Men, The Brethren, or Veil. Instead he has kept at it, with his dogged interviewing and cross-checking of sources. There certainly are worse role models in today's news business.

The subject of the book is worthy, too. For at least a dozen years, since the early Reagan era, journalists have nodded and agreed that the federal budget is a really important subject, which someone should take seriously--preferably somebody else. Campaign coverage, the cherished White House beat, foreign postings, and talk-show opinionating were all more glamorous. Near the end of the Bush administration, Woodward apparently decided that he would try to delve into and explain the story of economic policy in the way he'd explored the obviously sexy secrets of the Supreme Court and the C.I.A.

Woodward has been thorough and careful; as of this writing, a week after the book's appearance, none of its subjects has challenged any of his major factual claims. To any Washington reporter it is amazing that Woodward has gotten so many insiders to speak freely so early in a president's term. This is easy late in an administration, when the people with inside knowledge start worrying about their next career berth. Woodward seems to have sped up the cycle through his own "Deep Throat" reputation for stony secrecy about his sources and by working with so many sources that much of the information can't be traced to a single leaker. Experienced newspaper readers can usually pick out the origin of catty blind quotes by asking who is hurt and who is helped by each revelation. Only in a few cases do Woodward's stories bear this sort of obvious fingerprint. Mostly, he seems to have found the original memo or tracked down all the participants in a meeting so that he can combine and compare their accounts.

The few stories with fingerprints fall into the "Al Haig was troubled... " genre. Haig, who was White House chief of staff during Richard Nixon's second term, seemed a probable major source for Woodward and Carl Bernstein's Watergate books, since in so many cases he was portrayed as being conscience-struck and troubled by the criminality emerging around him. In The Agenda we have David Gergen often seeming troubled about signs of partisanship and disorganization in the Clinton White House. More surprising, since Gergen is hardly a longtime Clinton loyalist, we occasionally see George Stephanopoulos in "troubled" mode, sighing about the president's imperfections. The overall portrait of Stephanopoulos, however, emphasizes his competence and his diehard loyalty.

Woodward suggests that Hillary Clinton has more influence over her husband than any other one person, although like everyone else so far he has been thwarted in trying to find out exactly how she exercises power, and to what end. He mildly mocks Al Gore, whom he shows scurrying to have the seat right next to Clinton at every meeting or event. But the book provides impressive evidence of Gore's playing legislative hardball to help enact the administration's plans and fighting consistently for his environmental principles. Woodward also shows Gore making sophisticated economic arguments--for example, pointing out that previous tight-money campaigns by the Federal Reserve board, designed to choke off inflation, had occasionally backfired and increased the inflation rate. The people who come out the worst in the book are the White House chief of staff, Mack McLarty, who is portrayed as being weak and completely out of his depth; Paul Begala, the campaign strategist, who badmouths many of his associates when they aren't listening (but Woodward is); and David Boren, the senator from Oklahoma, one of several vacillating legislators who nearly killed Clinton's budget plan in 1993. One quiet hero, to my mind, is Robert Rubin, who is portrayed as running the National Economic Council in a fair and effective way.

As for its portrayal of the president himself, the book will probably reinforce the view each reader already holds. Those who hate everything about Clinton will find new evidence that he is slippery and untrustworthy. After all, he ran on the promise of a middle class tax cut, and the book suggests that he knew he could never carry that promise out. His assistants are always squabbling, and he seems willing to give up anything to get one of his bills through Congress. Readers like me, who start out more sympathetic to Clinton, will find many illustrations of his intelligence, his resilience, his energy, his deftness at every political operation from backroom arm-twisting to speechmaking on TV, and his determination to make the most of his years in office.

The Agenda's most damaging revelation about the president is its emphasis on Bill Clinton's temper tantrums toward his aides. When right-wingers attack Clinton for his womanizing or military history, the answer is: In 1992, voters knew or suspected the worst on these fronts, and they elected him anyway. The voters didn't know about his bitter outbursts. "I want him dead, dead," Clinton raged ("in blind fury," according to Woodward) about a staffer who had screwed up a campaign stop in 1992. "I want him killed, I want him horsewhipped."

Clinton's closet aides, especially Stephanopolous, have apparently learned that these tempests pass without permanent effect. When Clinton finally tracked down the aide who he had wanted "dead, dead," he merely said, "I hope he gets a real talking to." But one can easily see how those who do not know Clinton well could be shaken by his rage and discouraged from speaking up when dissent is called for.

What's the problem with this book? Two trademarks of Woodward's journalism become liabilities in The Agenda.

One is his tone of omniscient narrative. Woodward asks us to trust him that the material is right. He provides not a single footnote, attribution, source, or any other bit of bolstering for his version of the truth. (Because he's heard complaints like this before, Woodward says he will turn over all his notes for the book to the Yale library, where they will be open for inspection in 40 years. Harry Truman lived to be 88. If Bill Clinton does the same, he will have a chance to see the notes himself.) Woodward presents a seamless account, looking into the actions and thoughts of multiple characters, just as if he were a panoramic novelist--all the while asking us to trust that every bit of it is true.

Generally I do trust Woodward. He's earned that through his track record, and most of what he says in this book rings true. But most is not all. By insisting on writing the entire book as if he did know every detail--including thoughts, emotions, motives--Woodward inevitably gets into situations in which he is writing things he cannot know.

The book opens with a scene of Bill and Hillary Clinton in their bedroom, in Little Rock, discussing in 1991 whether he should make the run. "I think you have to do it," Hillary begins, and Woodward takes us through a dozen lines of verbatim dialogue. They emphasize the message of change that Clinton wants to bring to the country, and Hillary's apprehension about the personal price they will have to pay.

Now, there are only two people in the world (we hope) who could have heard this conversation. Bob Woodward is not one of them. What he knows, at best, is what either Bill or Hillary Clinton told him about their discussion that day. It is conceivable that one or the other of them accurately remembered all the back-and-forth of their conversation. Perhaps one of them immediately jotted it down in a diary, aware that it might be a historic moment. But precisely because it was a historic moment--part of this political couple's explanation of why they wanted to run--Woodward can never know whether it actually happened that way, or whether this was a prettied-up recollection from two parties with a shared interest in improving the story.

The bedroom episode itself is of little importance, and if Woodward had merely said, "Months later Bill Clinton recalled that he had told his wife, 'Gee, Hillary...'" he would have been within the limits of what he actually knew. Yet Woodward allows almost no distinctions in levels of truth in this book. He asks us to take it all as if it were hard, established fact.

Much of the narrative presumably is hard fact. The most reliable episodes are those based on memos Woodward is quoting or meetings involving many participants. People do take notes at meetings, especially in the White House. When a lot of people are present, errors or biases in their recollections tend to cancel out. The least reliable moments in the book, which occur on nearly every page, come when Woodward tells us what some figure "thought" or "felt" or "feared."

Woodward does not know what these people thought or felt. He knows what they told him or some other person, after the fact, about their beliefs or emotions at the crucial moment. That is not the same thing. yet he refuses to make any concession to the limits of after-the-fact journalistic knowledge. "The worst of [the economic officials], Begala felt, was Leon Panetta." "Carville felt like sliding under the table after Clinton's remark." "After the initial humiliation, Stephanopoulos felt liberated in his new job." And on and on. This assertion of inner knowledge is, of course, not unique to Woodward. Historians and biographers use it; magazine and newspaper writers may employ it in profiles of one or two characters. What is unusual in Woodward's work is his application of it to a large cast of characters--and his utter refusal to indicate how he knows anything he is presenting as truth. He would strengthen the authority of the material that he undoubtedly does know if he allowed shadings in his voice-of-God tone. It would involve the slightest of changes--"the worst of them, Begala later said he felt"--yet would represent an enormous cumulative increase in trustworthiness.

Woodward's other distinctive trait is his pose of rigid fair-mindedness. he does not judge; he reports and describes. In publicizing this book Woodward has been at pains to say that he is neither a political scientist, nor a historian, nor an economist. He does not presume to assess the wisdom of the Clinton economic program or the effectiveness of the Clinton White House compared to its predecessors. He just wants to tell us what he saw and heard.

That's fine, to a degree. I believe Woodward to be a genuinely fair-minded man. (I was surprised to hear him say, in a radio interview, that he had voted for Clinton in 1992. Somehow I had not pictured him doing anything so partisan as casting a vote.) But Woodward's refusal to assess, judge, or take sides finally leads him to take sides in an involuntary and destructive way.

The narrative center of the book is the struggle to pass the administration's 1993 economic plan. The separate struggles it recounts take place on wildly different levels. Some of them involve pure housekeeping or turf matters. Did the Clinton congressional liaison office return phone calls on time? Did some White House underling contact a congressman without telling the congressional liaison office? Woodward chronicles numerous glitches of this sort, without indicating whether they're more or less prevalent than in any other era. (Based on my experience in the Carter administration, the Clinton team seems to work more smoothly, but perhaps that doesn't sound like a compliment.)

Some of the struggles involve classic legislative maneuvering. Can the Republicans hold together enough votes for a filibuster? What will it take for Clinton to peel off a few Republicans? Other struggles are among cabinet departments for shares of the fixed budgetary pie. Some are about the slogans and packaging that should be used to sell both Clinton the president and his economic plan. And yet other struggles, the ones that are ultimately most important, involve basic questions of economic policy.

Struggles in this last category are the ones that require explanation and assessment. During the Reagan administration, they turned on the "Do deficits matter?" question. (Reagan, of course, initially argued that cutting taxes would eliminate deficits--and when it didn't, he argued that raising taxes would be more harmful than tolerating the huge deficits.) At the start of the Clinton administration, they involved conflicting views of the most urgent economic goal. Was it more vital to get the deficit down as soon as possible (which meant restraining spending and raising taxes)? Or was it more important to increase "investment" and rev up the economy, to put people back to work?

Disagreements of this sort are on a completely different plane from arguments about missed phone calls, slow appointments, or wounded vanities. Yet Woodward, in his reluctance to "take sides," presents all disagreements and "confusions" in the Clinton administration as if they constituted one big mass of indistinguishable disorder. In his omniscient tone, he presents every sides' complaints--and since he's not willing to assess or dismiss any of them, they all have equal emphasis and add up to a tableau of White House "disarray." When Clinton neglects the Congress, one group of advisors worries that the president is too naive and detached to succeed in Washington--and Woodward reports their fears. When Clinton wheels and deals with the Congress, another group of advisors worries that he's selling out just like other politicians, and Woodward reports their fears, too.

Any fear will do. Woodward shows us George Mitchell, the Senate majority leader, complaining about a plan to freeze cost-of-living adjustments for Social Security. "This is wrong," Woodward quotes Mitchell as saying, and then paraphrases Mitchell's objection: "The typical Social Security recipient was an elderly woman with little or no other income, who just barely survived, he reminded them." Since he's just reporting, not taking sides, Woodward feels no obligation to point out that Mitchell's claim is preposterous. ($55 billion a year in Social Security benefits go to households with more than $50,000 in income.) Nevertheless, Clinton's attempt to curb the COLA--a sensible fiscal step if means tested to take it away only from the affluent--is presented as completely disposed of by Mitchell's objection.

A view of history emerges from this kind of "fairness." It crops up in a brief passage early in the book. As Clinton began appointing his economic staff, Woodward says, he "wanted someone who knew Wall Street and the bond market close to him in the White House." Woodward explains:

One of the criticisms of Jimmy Carter had been his woeful lack of understanding and appreciation of the bond market. Carter had allowed interest rates to skyrocket, probably one of the mistakes that doomed his presidency.

The problem for Carter, of course, was not that he failed to "understand" or "appreciate" the bond market any more than Winston Churchill's problem was that he failed to "understand" or "appreciate" what was happening at Dunkirk. In each case an entire nation was subject to huge and destructive forces. In Carter's case it was the worldwide surge of inflation throughout the 1970s, which was initiated by a series of oil-price shocks and whose return Alan Greenspan fears even now. Carter "allowed" interest rates to skyrocket as Churchill "allowed" troops to retreat from Dunkirk--it was the best each of them could manage at the moment. The interest rate policy wasn't even Carter's doing. It was engineered by Paul Volcker, whose name does not appear in this book, when he took over the Federal Reserve Board in 1979.

In this kind of "fair" journalism, a mistake is a mistake is a mistake--bouts of temper, arguments over legislative strategy, historic shifts in economic fundamentals. This kind of fairness is actually foreshortening, reducing three dimensions to two. It distorts and limits the story that Woodward invested so much time trying to tell. Maybe we wouldn't like a more openly judgmental, less deadpan Woodward if he appeared. But for his next book I'm willing to take that risk.