Locked in the Cabinet
Reich, Robert B.
The Super Small-Sized Robert Reich Locked in the Cabinet Robert B. Reich Knopf / 339 pages / $25 REVIEWED BY Philip Terzian One evening I opened the door at my newspaper's offices, to step...
...Most striking of all are the Secretary's words when angered or surprised: His fondness for references to bodily functions, or parts of the anatomy not usually seen, must rank high in the annals of Washington memoirs...
...Like all nasty kids," he writes of Newt Gingrich, "inside is an insecure little fellow who desperately wants attention...
...Poor Federico Pena calls Reich, of all people, "to ask me how I discover what's going on at the White House...
...One Republican congressman is a "fleshy-faced former real-estate broker from New Jersey...
...Who added "secretly," Reich or his editor...
...There is even some bargain basement psychoanalysis...
...Added to this is an adolescent sneer: Sen...
...In short, Reich was just the man to serve President Clinton, if Clinton had been elected in, say, 1976...
...Our Lady of Working Americans...
...and as Reich will observe, his state of mind His view of corporate America sounds like Sinead O'Connor...
...Well, it is not difficult to see it from Reich's point of view...
...But that was then...
...His sojourn in Washington is a saga of betrayal, of past hopes foundering on modern realities...
...Like the Bourbons, liberal Democrats learn nothing and forget nothing...
...I might as well have farted 'The Star-Spangled Banner.'" Madam Perkins, I expect, would not have been amused, and sent the little fellow packing home to Boston...
...I say this as one who opened this book with different expectations...
...I worry that his leadership may fail," he writes of Clinton during the 1992 campaign...
...Then, too, there is the vision thing...
...Like most people, I suppose, I was momentarily startled by the Secretary's size...
...but I recovered quickly enough...
...There are scenes beyond counting where Reich reminds Clinton of their shared aspirations, and Clinton, with evident sincerity, is abashed...
...Now, having read his memoir, I am startled once again by Robert Reich's smallness...
...Wish I could have been with them this weekend instead of sitting here with these bores...
...But the picture is entirely characteristic of Mr...
...Newt Gingrich is "tubby...
...The Super Small-Sized Robert Reich Locked in the Cabinet Robert B. Reich Knopf / 339 pages / $25 REVIEWED BY Philip Terzian One evening I opened the door at my newspaper's offices, to step outside, and pulled in Secretary of Labor Robert Reich...
...His notion of the role of government in national life has not been fashionable in Washington since May 1964, when Lyndon Johnson first pronounced the phrase "Great Society" in public...
...Yet it is Reich's sour nature that smothers each and perception of the world was molded in the sixties...
...Right now, he wants to hear it from me...
...Only Robert Reich would tell Bill Clinton that he might wish to be "chair" of the Council of Economic Advisers...
...and Mrs...
...Dan Coats is "a snake slowly coiling around its victim...
...he asks...
...Reich was kept at arm's length from the White House, shunted aside to a secPHILIP TFRZIAN writes a column from Washington for the Providence Journal...
...Add "power" to "money," and Clinton's first term comes vividly to life...
...How's Alma...
...Great," replies his fellow member of the cabinet...
...The rest of the table is still...
...Still, another little fellow is inadvertently amusing...
...It is not especially persuasive...
...He'll become unfocused and too eager to please...
...A few days before the 1994 elections: "Disaster looms, but you wouldn't know ii nom here...
...Scarcely a page goes by when he doesn't express relief that he's not on the White House staff—all those pizzas and late hours—or subject to one of the president's famous tantrums...
...Some who had read it before me were full of praise for Reich's self-deprecating stories, his sense of the absurd, above all his caustic anecdotes about President Clinton...
...So for all of the talk about love for his family, Hillary's charm, his sons' soccer games, labor's proud history, his wife's stalwart nature, and the joys of administering OSHA regulations, Reich is a deeply embittered ex-secretary...
...And if these are diaries, incidentally, they are the most heavily edited, carefully updated, and self-servingly rewritten journals since Mary Chesnut's...
...His disappointment about not working at the business end of Pennsylvania Avenue must have been profound...
...One of Reich's sons, as he's tucked into bed, gazes into the eyes of the new Secretary of Labor: "You're really going to help people, aren't you, Dad...
...Kirkland grabs his hand...
...His attitude toward the military, and national defense, is virtually indistinguishable from that of the people who drafted George McGovern's platform...
...A business lobbyist is "slick...
...He rescues Frances Perkins's portrait from a closet—"God knows how long the Republicans had locked her away" —andhangs her in his office...
...And while Europeans drone about the balance of payments, Ron Brown scrawls a note and passes it to Reich: "How are Clare and the kids...
...Saint Frances of the Labor Department...
...like an aging frathouse president...
...The self-deprecation, I regret to report, is dished up with a healthy dose of self-importance...
...Of the ill-fated Roger Altman: "He'll surely replace Lloyd [Bentsen] at Treasury when Lloyd is ready to leave...
...But how long will this last...
...Reich's hindsight is remarkable, and entries often end with ominous, and painfully obvious, portents...
...The American Spectator June 1997 75 page...
...Lynn Martin is "thin and angular, with spiky red hair" and Richard Darman "has narrowly set eyes and a wide chin, which makes his face resemble a pear...
...I know because I was one of them...
...Clarence Thomas "scowls in the back row" at Yale...
...Dick Morris, of course, soon turns up...
...Another from Oklahoma is a "high-school debater nerd, with his black-rimmed glasses and bread-dough face...
...Autobiographers who dwell on their obscurity are usually saying, not least to themselves, how significant they are...
...And who else is he secretly talking with...
...Then, a few weeks later, Reich worries that Clinton will "seek advice from anyone he wants to hear it from...
...How would Brown have known...
...Macroeconomics is important," says President Clinton, "but micro is critical...
...All of these elements are present, of course, although the caustic nature of the anecdotes is blunted, and Reich settles scores with his various antagonists—Lloyd Bentsen, Lane Kirkland, Leon Panetta—in ham-fisted fashion...
...and-rank department, and shipped home to Boston at the end of four years...
...I have committed a faux pas," he ruefully recounts, and "withdraw my arm and carefully put down my spoon...
...He came to the capital as the senior Friend of Bill—they met on the ship transporting them to Oxford —and expected to do all the wonderful things that he and the Clintons had always talked about...
...She looks lovely," he exclaims, "hair pulled back in a neat bun, modest black dress, pearl necklace, her hands folded primly before her...
...Clinton, and Reich spares few details...
...Shortly thereafter, dining at the table of the dreaded Lane Kirkland, he mistakes some mint jelly for a platter of sauce, and Mrs...
...He had just walked up on the other side of the door, and was about to turn the knob, when he flew into my arms...
...As many have observed, the Clintons are rather like Tom and Daisy Buchanan, careless people who "smashed up things and creatures and then retreated back into their money or their vast carelessness, or whatever it was that kept them together, and let other people clean up the mess they had made...
...Gingrich rants and whines and "grins uncontrollably...
...Crab meat sticks to Lane Kirkland's chin...
...The Secretary was not famous in Washington for his good looks, but dwells on the physical deficiencies of his adversaries...
Vol. 30 • June 1997 • No. 6
