Mr. Smith's Washington

...Cap Weinberger is the first person in history to overdraw a blank check, " quipped Robert Dole of the overreaching and uncompromising Secretary of Defense...

...Gary Hart is a surprise, a conscientious Senator with, of all things, a penchant for telling jokes on himself...

...He is an activist for activism's sake, calling for movement in any direction, toward any goal...

...Congress has been dominant at other times in our nation's past, 1840-1860 for example, and 1865-1901...

...After a while, knowledgeable observers, including the inquiring Congressmen, learned that the country's top spy was bringing his own lie detector with him whenever he went to Capitol Hill to testify...

...Anonymous aides and bureaucrats create policies affecting millions...

...To an unprecedented degree, says Smith, influence has come to depend on intangibles like imagery and access...

...Thus, in 1986,97.7 per cent of all Congressmen seeking reelection were victorious...

...From being a figure of Republican ridicule at the start of the decade, O'Neill grew to become "Mr...

...Nonpartisans may wonder why Smith's emphasis is on the House...

...cities were completely vulnerable to Soviet missiles...

...In the 1950s, the seniority system was a target of liberals because so much of their favorite legislation used to get bottled up in committees ruled over by living fossils in the House of Representatives...

...Ronald Reagan, " Deaver insisted, "does not go out and talk about nuclear weapons...

...It is simply not a particularly good one that goes on and on for 793 pages...

...Following the 1980 election, when the Republicans captured not only the White House but the Senate as well, the Democratic Party was in total disarray—rudderless, leaderless, divided...

...What is more, as Thomas Byrne Edsall has pointed out in The New Politics of Inequality, the enormous lead the Republicans have over the Democrats in fund-raising significantly warps our one-man-one-vote system and should be a cause of major concern...

...Smith has been a New York Times journalist for a quarter of a century, with assignments in Vietnam, Cairo, Paris and Moscow...

...Three years passed before the President astounded the scientific community, the European allies and most of his closest advisers by making his private pipe dream public policy...

...Besides, he never explains why he is so eager to change things...

...Lobbyists and pressure groups swarm over Washington to cajole, threaten and make law...

...In this final period of the 20th century, we Americans have a more fluid system of power than ever before in our history," and the result is periodic paralysis...

...For two hours tensions mounted, as did mutual suspicions, until it was clear nothing remained to be said...

...There is, after all, more than one way to get a political message across...

...Itisacity that bulges with wits...

...He remolded the Speakership for the television age and stood toe to toe with the President...

...And there is genuine dramain the description of Tip O'Neill's personal transformation...

...It was, says Smith, a "personal epiphany," and the more Reagan endeavored to think about the situation, the more determined he became to push for the development of a protective system...

...The problem is an author with too much ambition...

...He sounds like a man who wants to build a superhighway from Salt Lick, Kentucky, to Lost Cabin, Wyoming...

...Since power is so often interlaced with comedy, some of Smith's best anecdotes have a memorable wackiness...

...On a more serious level, Smith's account of how the Star Wars initiative was hatched reveals why Reagan committed himself to the fantasy of a leak-proof shield against nuclear attack...

...Greatness, or at least national responsibility as the voice of opposition, was thrust on the Speaker, a jowly, publicity-shy, old-fashioned wheeler-dealer whose parochial outlook was summed up by his famous mot that all politics are local...

...There is no reason to have much confidence in someone who tells us that "permanent power is now harder to grasp and exercise than it ever has been in our history," if his perspective is restricted primarily to the last 25 years and his text deals almost entirely with the Reagan era...

...Usually, complaints about inertia come from individuals or groups with particular programs to push, who believe that the will of the majority is being thwarted by entrenched minorities...

...In the summer of 1979, during a tour of the North American Defense Command in Colorado, the future President learned for the first time that under the discomfiting quid pro quo known as Mutually Assured Destruction, U.S...

...Some of the finest pages of The Power Game provide intimate portraits of people we are accustomed to seeing in 30-second TV news bites...

...At the time he announced his retirement in 1986, opinion polls showed him garnering the same approval ratings as the wildly popular Chief Executive...

...Smith slings his history around a little too freely for comfort...

...Admittedly, these were not inspiring periods, but the question is whether the present political lassitude is unprecedented, a cause for extreme reform, and the answer must be that Smith has failed to make his case...

...Not so fast...

...The Senate, identified as a "swing element," also favors incumbents, and the Republican hold on the Presidency is at least as unbalanced as the composition of the House...

...Having made what he thought was a major concession on his budget, Reagan balked when the Democrats demanded more: "You can get me to crap a pineapple," he exploded, "but you can't get me to crap a cactus...

...Taking the last five Presidential elections together, Republicans have captured 77 per cent of all Electoral College votes...

...Smith calls for measures, including Constitutional amendments, to break through the crippling stalemate...

...Few people know more about what takes place behind the capital's closed doors than this insider's insider, and he has filled The Power Game with the kind of amusing and appalling tales that inevitably accumulate during a career of politics-watching...

...Smith is right to raise questions about the edge of the ins, wrong to point his finger at the Democratic-controlled House of Representatives...

...Inman had an unconscious habit of pulling on his socks if his boss gave a misleading answer before a Congressional committee...

...O'Neill rose to the occasion...

...Lassitude may not be such a bad condition if the alternatives are mandated balanced budgets, prayer in the schools, an anti-abortion amendment, runaway military spending, and all the other preferred causes of the presiding Administration...

...must have had a good reason for providing an extremely influential and well-placed journalist with a temporary home and allowing its staff "to share so much time and knowledge to educate me...

...The President wanted cuts in social programs...

...It was a stalemate of Irish Buddhas, broken only after James A. Baker suggested that everyone should get up at the same time...

...He has also served as a deputy national editor, a Washington bureau chief, and a chief Washington correspondent, observing as six Presidents have tried to grapple with the world's toughest job...

...Most writers would probably be satisfied to have compiled these episodes of a human comedy played for the highest stakes...

...Robert C. McFarlane emerges as an insecure bureaucrat who idolized Henry Kissinger and felt over his head as National Security Adviser...

...Since 1974, he argues, when a Congressional revolt overturned the old seniority system and asserted the Legislature's prerogatives against the White House, decision-making has spread through every nook and cranny of the capital...

...This is not to insinuate that Smith shaped his ideas to fit the desires of his sponsor...

...Smith's Washington is a raucous, contentious, very human place where the leading players spend a good deal of time cursing and screaming at each other amid the marble and the monuments...

...Had he limited himself to recounting his most pungent and incisive stories, he would have produced an engaging memoir...

...He was even ready to announce the idea during the 1980 campaign until Michael Deaver, worried about apossible warmonger image, put his foot down...

...Smith, however, thinks his stories add up to something more, a thesis about the nature of power in Washington and the state of governance in America...

...He is no hack...

...The Speaker of the House was looking for tax increases and reductions in defense spending...

...He tells of Vice Admiral Bobby Inman, a public servant widely respected for his integrity, who was deputy to the devious and less-than-truthful William J. Casey at the CIA...

...Democrat" of the 1980s—the embodiment of his party's ideals...

...Yet in the silence and the gloom Reagan and O'Neill both stayed seated, afraid that the first to rise would be accused by the other of backing away from the discussion...

...It is only to suggest that the...

...Smith maintains that the greatest problem lies with the Democrats in the House, who use the advantages of incumbency—lavish campaign funds, easier access to television—to diminish the possibility of electoral challenge...

...Junior Congressmen now lead important subcommittees...

...No less zany is a meeting Smith describes between Ronald Reagan and Tip O'Neill in 1982 to try to reconcile differences over the budget...

...Smith, though, does not appear to have an agenda, and concedes that the present torpor is probably an accurate reflection of the public's mood...

...The Senate filibuster was rightly trimmed after Southerners abused its power to stymie popular civil rights laws...

...Or perhaps there is method in this madness...

...But the urge to be more than a mere spectator on the sidelines has led him into theorizing and prescribing beyond his means...

...Their eyebrows may rise a little higher if they notice that The Po wer Game was written while he spent a year with a conservative Republican think tank, the American Enterprise Institute...