The Agenda

...When Clinton asked Gore one day 'What can I do?' Gore's exasperation boiled over and the vice president said, 'You can get with the goddamn program!'" Clinton responded weakly, "Okay...

...Marjorie Margolies-Mezvinsky for her crucial vote for the tax bill...

...and the fiery, populist-leaning political advisers (James Carville, Paul Begala, Stan Greenberg, and Mandy Grunwald) who favor big-spending programs, heavy taxes on "the rich," and direct appeals to the electorate...

...Yet after eighteen months of research on his first book about a Democratic president (he chose to write about the Supreme Court during the Carter years), Woodward seems as disturbed and disillusioned and depressed as apparently everyone else around the president...

...Though she is tougher and more decisive than her husband, her effectiveness seems undercut by a juvenile sense of self-righteousness andan us-against-them mentality that warps her judgment...

...When Clinton was unable to decide whether to abandon his proposal for a BTU energy tax, Bentsen unilaterally announced on a Sunday talk show that it was being dropped...

...And Clinton apparently takes others on the emotional roller-coaster with him...

...This may be so because Clinton simply may not have a firm sense of right and wrong—a moral compass, if you will...

...0 ne gets the impression that this portrait of Clinton has not come easily or comfortably to Woodward, who writes with the utmost delicacy, even skittishness, about these personal shortcomings...

...T he real conflict is not among the advisers, but within Clinton, who is shown to be so racked with self-doubt and in the grip of "psychological anguish" as to be virtually paralyzed when it's time to lead...

...so long as they are wearing the white hats, normal ethics don't apply...

...Martin Lancaster, a North Carolina Democrat, for his vote on the economic plan, Hillary promised that her health care plan wouldn't single out tobacco for more taxes...

...Pushed to the wall by Rose on why he would be reluctant to vote for Clinton again, Woodward cited "the promises not yet realized...

...In one emblematic scene, James Carville takes a piece of paper, draws a square, and taps it with his pen...

...The person who most often rushes to fill the void, however, is Hillary...

...T his is not to imply that Clinton himself is impassive...

...This book, make no mistake about it, does a good deal of damage in the here and now...

...One quote has stayed with me more than any other: Speaking in the wake of the Gennifer Flowers allegations, George Stephanopoulos says, "A normal person would have dropped out of the race...

...Woodward is playing on a field all by himself...

...Though she originally sought appointment as the domestic policy adviser, she has come to function in the less formal but powerful role of de facto chief of staff, according to Woodward...

...According to George Stephanopoulos, "with any single audience or person, Clinton was generally consistent and had mastered his rap...

...Like his sources (he seems to have spent no time with the Republican opposition) the author voted for Clinton and had high hopes for this presidency, he said in a recent interview with PBS's Charlie Rose...

...0 stensibly, Woodward tells the story of a war for the Clinton economic program between two factions: the bloodless deficit-cutters culled from Wall Street and Congress (Lloyd Bentsen, Robert Rubin, Leon Panetta, Alice Rivlin, and Fed Chairman Alan Greenspan) who wish to pursue an "inside" strategy, not unlike that of the Bush administration, keyed to the financial markets and the congressional leadership...

...As Woodward tells it, Clinton, suffering from "near terminal ambivalence" over the substance of his program, gets rolled by the intimidating Washington graybeards, Bentsen and Greenspan, who believe that deficit reduction and higher taxes will spur economic recovery by reassuring the bond market...

...He also gets teary-eyed at odd moments, such as when asking Rep...

...The "news" here is that despite an innate intelligence, an undeniable charm, and an incomparable energy level, Clinton is ill-equipped to be president...

...In an astonishing scene seven months into the administration, Woodward reports that Clinton actually asks his advisers "where [are] the American people in terms of basic values...

...But he could articulate a totally different,even contradictory rap to the next audience with genuine sincerity...

...She speaks often of the need to have "villains and heroes" in explaining their policies and at one point tells the staff, "I believe in evil and I think there are evil people in the world...

...Though Woodward looks long and hard, ultimately he doesn't find much character to study, only a jumble of unpredictable feelings and impulses...

...CI...

...His sole preoccupation appears to be how to "crawl through to re-election," as Clinton himself is said to have aptly phrased it...

...Woodward quotes Sen...

...Of course, no other reporter could get away with offering the blanket protections that are apparently necessary to gain this sort of access...

...The reader is obliged to intuit too much, and may end up, as I did, wishing the author had sweated a bit more over the project...

...In lobbying Rep...

...there are lots of questions about whether he can manage the presiden66 The American Spectator August 1994 cy...

...Veil, by contrast, a study of the intelligence community during the Reagan years, struck a better balance between reportDavid Brock is the author of The Real Anita Hill (Free Press), recently issued in paperback, and an investigative writer for The American Spectator...

...Indeed, perhaps Clinton should have spent more time with Woodward, who seems to have functioned for his sources not as a reporter but as a therapist...

...The only scandal here is that members of the president's inner circle were willing to confide in Woodward their inner-most fears and frustrations and disappointments regarding Clinton's personal failings so early in his presidency...

...Clinton followed Lord Bentsen...

...At least the Reagan folk had the sense to publish their kiss-and-tell memoirs when any damage could be confined to the historical record...

...Without Hillary Clinton, he would be the most popular law professor at Arkansas Law School," Paul Begala is quoted as saying...

...In keeping with his signature style, Woodward never uses such blunt language and generally shies away from judgments of any sort...

...there are questions that are not dealt with in this book...

...In any event, precisely how the two groups fought out their differences, cursed each other, and finally came together to pass the "recovery" plan last summer, is, for my money, far less illuminating than the fact that all of the players seem to agree in their rather grim assessment of Clinton...

...The damning quotes keep piling up: A memo from pollster Stan Greenberg begins, "One of the central problems we face is the perception that there's no coherence or principle or purpose to the president's actions...

...The portrait of Clinton that emerges is of an undisciplined, indecisive, emotionally fragile man-child who shouldn't be trusted with the keys to the family car on a Saturday night, let alone the nuclear codes...

...One can't imagine any recent president so rudderless...

...Indeed, one can almost hear Clinton whining that no other sitting president has had to contend with Bob Woodward as a fly on the wall for his first 500 days...

...When it did (the only other tax was on big businesses that didn't join the proposed pools of insurance buyers), Lancaster called Hillary to charge double-cross...

...the author appears blithely unaware that long-interest rates are back to where they were at the beginning of the administration, that the tax hike will bring in less than the anticipated revenue, and that future deficit projections remain high due to uncontrolled domestic spending...

...Hillary doesn't quite say who these evil people are, but one can infer that she means those who don't agree with her...

...and how "might he reach into that system of beliefs...

...As in his previous work, what really matters is the indisputable fact that his unconventional techniques continue to pay off for the reader...

...What does he stand for...

...At the end of the book, Woodward delivers one of the few conclusions that he permits himself, suggesting that Clinton's eerie lack of commitment to anything other than his political career has made it "almost impossible to craft such a message," and that Clinton seems unable to "find the high ground or establish his moral authority...

...According to Woodward, "The conversation was on the phone, and Lancaster wondered whether she made her assertion with a straight face...

...Mack McLarty is depicted here as a cipher...

...The American Spectator August 1994 65 point...

...Mandy Grunwald goes into "a tailspin of depression" when Clinton backs out of a fight, and even the unflappable David Gergen is quoted as saying "I'm so depressed I can barely speak" after one inconclusive meeting with both Clintons...

...Exactly...

...Bob Kerrey, who is floated here as a potential primary opponent in '96, as saying that Clinton's "problem is not just economic but moral...

...But everyone has his role to play, and whatever the book's analytical and literary shortcomings, Woodward has once again done yeoman work in securing the kind of access to the highest levels in government that no other reporter can match...

...There is no way to judge whether quoted dialogue—not to mention attributed thoughts and feelings—has come from a first-hand source or is merely hearsay...

...BOOK REVIEWS T he most telling revelations in Bob Woodward's The Agenda: Inside the Clinton White House produced no headlines, because they are not the kind that readers have come to expect from the reporter of Watergate fame...

...on the contrary, he blows his top almost daily, in venting sessions nicknamed "the wave" that alarmed some of the grown men around him...

...It turns out that it's not the economy, stupid, after all...

...He is indefatigable, yet in the service of no fixed views or beliefs...

...Whether or not this is smart politics or economics Woodward doesn't say (Clinton himself, however, calls his plan a "turkey" at one THE AGENDA: INSIDE THE CLINTON WHITE HOUSE Bob Woodward Simon & Schuster/336 pages/$24 reviewed by DAVID BROCK ing and explaining, and the prose had some bite...

...Vice President Gore, Woodward reports, "saw that Clinton was too shaky and tentative in his public, let alone his private, pronouncements...

...Where is the hallowed ground...

...Hillary shares with Bill an ability to lawyer the truth...

...Nor do we know exactly which material in the book has been corroborated by more than one source, a journalistic rule of thumb...

...And so, as did Veil and The Commanders, Woodward's book on the Persian Gulf war councils of the Bush administration, The Agenda was conceived as a book about process but shades into a character study along the way...

...Where does [Clinton] stand...

...I mean, what's this presidency about...

...This does not inspire confidence or respect (or, on the evidence of this book, loyalty...

...For my taste, he takes this neutrality principle too far in this book, to the point that the narrative limps forward not on an argument, an idea, or even a clever structure but on an endless (and often redundant) catalogue of meetings and memos...

...He hadn't felt a need to consult with anyone, even the president, so he had gone ahead on his own," Woodward writes...

...Indeed, though they are admittedly beyond the purview of his inquiry, Woodward concludes with a scene of Bill and Hillary ruminating about the raft of scandals from the Arkansas days that have come back to haunt them in recent months, stories that seem only to have confirmed what Woodward's reporting about their White House days reveals...

...What happened to the tax-cutting, welfare-reforming "New Democrat" of the '92 campaign is anybody's guess, though there are hints in Stephanopoulos's confession that Clinton's promises "didn't add up" and Rivlin's declaration that the campaign "fundamentally misrepresented" the problems posed by the deficit...

...Hillary Clinton, George Stephanopoulos, Al Gore, and David Gergen appear as more or less honest brokers, with the former two tilting more toward the politicos and the latter two toward the insiders...

...Hillary had not been specific [in her promise], and she believed that people often heard what they wanted to hear...

...It is also clear that Woodward does his homework, takes great care to get the story right, and has rarely been successfully challenged on factual grounds...