The Agonies of Public Servitude

...You've got a big handicap," they warned him before he went to the Hill for his ordeal...

...Who's down...

...and eagerly takes up the cudgels for them...

...How this came about is ultimately the story of the turnaround in policies that the Clintonites engaged in as they reached for re-election...

...and not this incumbent's alone ??” that are sure to foster cynicism in the public's perception of the office...

...Who's up...

...After preparations that could be matched only by those for a military invasion, and with camera crews to record the event, the Secretary triumphantly did the deed and held an appropriate news conference to crow to the world about it...

...As Locked in the Cabinet becomes widely read, we are bound to hear alternative versions of the episodes it describes from many of the characters who figure in them...

...Nor," Kirkland avers, "did I engage in the tour of the cultural horizon (Kant, Goethe, the Hapsburg Empire, etc...

...Reich has by implication made a case against Clinton, but he offers no remedy for the Presidency...

...Shortly afterward as Reich and his party were returning to Washington, Bridgestone announced that it could not comply with the court order and that it was therefore closing the plant immediately, throwing its 1,200 employees out of work...

...If Bill Clinton utters the same lament, he will doubtless have his longtime pal Bob Reich much in mind...

...He did as he was told...

...Having decided to fine the firm heavily, Reich also made up his mind to go to Oklahoma to serve the court papers himself...

...It's not...

...We learn how uninspiring a new Cabinet officer can be to the secretaries and bureaucrats who were in the department long before he arrived and who will be there long after his departure...

...Politicians, journalists, bureaucrats, lawyers, lobbyists...

...He became increasingly sour...

...That's where the campaign money comes from now...

...At every turn Reich found insurmountable hurdles in persuading his peers that investing in new enterprises was the key to erasing "the anger and cynicism that clouds our country...

...will find it hard to believe that after exhausting days at his public duties Reich could sit down and make diary entries so keen and rich that each of them stands as a teacher's homily to be remembered and pondered accordingly...

...Much is made of the alleged hollowness of Clinton's soul...

...They have a polish and pithiness most of us do not encounter when we speak to politicians...

...As a confirmed liberal, Reich is immensely sympathetic to the idea of a pluralistic society that recognizes the claims of competing groups, be they ethnic, racial, or class-based...

...Woe betide the credulous subordinate who aims to deliver on them, especially from a Cabinet position...

...Nor did he receive much encouragement from the President, who was busy moving toward the Center and leaving behind the noble expectations of change that he had once stirred in the nation's electorate...

...His rebuke to Reich came in a letter of several thousand words published recently in the weekly Jewish newspaper, the Forward...

...The only siren song Clinton heard clearly, it appears, was that of his pollsters...

...Who's in...

...It takes up with especial force Reich's version of a dinner he attended in Kirkland's home...

...I would have regarded it as wildly inappropriate, if not a little nutty, on such an occasion...

...He had a distant and uninterested air when Reich appealed to him directly...

...Kirkland was irate at Reich's claim that (at another dinner gathering) he spoke disparagingly of "Harvard professors" ??”a cohort that once included Reich...

...Who's out...

...Your whole life you've been trying to show people how smart you are...

...Nor does he take a larger view and confront the abiding conflict between the modern method of becoming President and the modern task of governing...

...Already Lane Kirkland has had his say...

...I wouldn't have known how to fake that kind of scholarly erudition, even if I wanted to...

...Peter...

...No one cares about ideas or values or even their families...

...While the dignity and gravitas of the Presidency are compromised by these books, there is grist here for all who love the Republic and are anxious about its prospects...

...If Reich has offered a response to Kirkland, it has not been made public at this writing...

...The advice he got was to be as obsequious as possible before his interrogators and to bear in mind that they hold the keys to the kingdom...

...It's a one-company town, Bob...

...Yet almost immediately upon beginning his tenure as Secretary of Labor, Reich recognized that he had been demoted to "outsider" status, that his ideas and goals would be dismissed or ignored by the administration...

...From the start Reich had a nagging concern about his old friends the Clintons...

...Robert Reich, a friend of both Bill and Hillary and a credentialized "insider" when the new President took office, was eager and ready to be a major player in the Clinton Administration...

...So there is no prescriptive element here, no answer, just a colorful tapestry of complaint and sulk...

...Unburdened by an "'as told to" coauthor, he sets a high standard of writing that puts him in the first rank of tell-all Presidential intimates...

...She was on to a truth that her beleaguered husband would soon learn in spades (or rather relearn, for the Reichs had previously done time in the Capital...

...In the 1980s we gave up on the little guys...

...Caught between the liberal imperative for public investment to retrain middle- and poverty-class workers, and the business world's zeal to balance the budget in the shortest time possible, the President opted to go with the budget-balancers, led by Bentsen (and later his successor at Treasury, Robert E. Rubin) and Fed chairman Alan P. Greenspan...

...Reich has an acid pen, and he is by turns witty, churlish, and plain vulgar...

...As the then president of the AFL-CIO he plays a major role in the former Labor Secretary's reminiscences...

...He has been informed by his devoted wife Clare that she does not want to go to Washington...

...We started drinking from the same trough as the Republicans...

...He was going to do his best to make a safer and better world by focusing on the need to find jobs and to retrain people for the global economy...

...Everyone works for the same company in some way or other...

...I never comprehended the exact relation between their ideals and their ambitions," he writes...

...derided by Presidents who campaign against Washington with its allegedly bloated government, ignored by members of Congress complaining constantly about the size of the civil service...

...the only passion he felt was his consuming lust to have another term...

...These and a host of other memorable quotations are central to the uncommon enjoyment this memoir produces...

...Like many others of his ilk, he fails to identify the candidate who can avoid the bargaining and compromising that getting elected and reelected require, and can instead speak only pearly truth for the commonweal...

...And page after page holds the rapt attention of the reader...

...So what is going on here...

...Some readers, like this one...

...that you describe...

...Many of Reich's stories about the agonies of public service are so splendid, though, that they could not have been invented...

...The Japanese-owned plant had egregiously failed to protect its workers from crippling and sometimes deadly accidents arising from the operation of some of its powerful machines...

...His White House "handlers" prepared him as if he were about to appear before St...

...Tearfully she explains why: "It's always the same thing...

...I suppose that's why I didn't choose politics formyself It seemed too hard to keep ideals and ambitions in the proper perspective...

...Reich, discouraged but not unnerved, kept a diary of the goingson, and here it is: a tell-all account that surely ranks high among the growing subcategory of books about the Presidency...

...Yet the former Labor Secretary is sympathetic to the plight of these career people...

...It looks so easy...

...Reich's adventure in the Clinton camp began long ago, at Oxford...

...Reich's distaste for the process of governing began with his Senate confirmation hearings...

...unless Kirkland, who was after all the host, is not to be believed about the list of those he and his wife had invited, Reich's account is so full of error about who was present as to render it more fiction than fact...

...Yet the configuration of American politics is such these days that hollowness of soul may soon be a prerequisite for occupying the White House...

...An especially telling one, revolving around Reich's visit to the Bridgestone tire factory in Oklahoma City, is the stuff of tragedy as well as comic-opera...

...The specificity of detail in this book adds up not only to an absorbing accounting of failed service in the Cabinet but also to a powerful indictment of the Clinton Presidency...

...If Locked in the Cabinet has a central theme, it is that Presidential campaign promises are made cynically and fecklessly...

...And all that really counts is your rank in the company...

...He also discovers how politically impotent the Democratic Party is when it comes to accomplishing liberal objectives...

...Reich's political education proceeded apace...

...This memoir picks up his winding path to the Cabinet in June 1992, when Reich, recovering from a hip replacement, knows he will be offered a place in the next Administration if Clinton wins...

...That's not what you should do [when you testify...

...But he got no cooperation from Treasury Secretary Lloyd M. Bentsen Jr., who treated him as if he were an adolescent troublemaker to be scorned when he could not be ignored...

...Power, power, power...

...Each entry is a complete episode, often with a cogent punchline (though how much of this book was written contemporaneously we are never told...

...Congressman Martin Sabo, the chairman of the House Budget Committee puts it to him in a nutshell: "We're owned by them...

...W]e didn't realize we were giving them power over us...

...You try to show [those Senators] how smart you are, you're in trouble...

...Reich's ability to evoke this type of comment day after day, and to remember the words as if he had a tape recorder in his hand, is so notable as to arouse suspicion that much whittling and sandpapering has been done on the notes he kept...

...The President seemed to have no convictions of his own...

...There is throughout the book a tone of blighted hope that should trouble every American...

...Business...

...The Presidents: A Reference Histoiy There is no memoir by a public figure quite like this one...

...And now we have both branches of government, and they have even more power...

...Long ago, President Warren G.Harding complained that it was not his enemies but his friends who kept him awake at night...

...Still, he felt "like a child learning how to ride a bike...

...Honored to be serving the President of the United States, Reich was also sincerely imbued with the conviction that the nation he hoped to see his sons grow up in must not be "a two-tiered society," peopled only by the very rich and the very poor...