FORMER VICE PRESIDENT Al Gore recently told an audience that"the [Bush] administration did not hesitate to heighten and distort public fear of terrorism after September 11th, to create a political case for attacking Iraq." With this in mind, I would to like draw your attention to a Project brief entitled, The Clinton Administration's Public Case Against Saddam Hussein. Some highlights:

* The New York Times reported that at the November 14 [1997] meeting the"White House decided to prepare the country for war." According to the Times,"[t]he decision was made to begin a public campaign through interviews on the Sunday morning television news programs to inform the American people of the dangers of biological warfare." During this time, the Washington Post reported that President Clinton specifically directed Cohen"to raise the profile of the biological and chemical threat."

* On November 16, Cohen made a widely reported appearance on ABC's This Week in which he placed a five-pound bag of sugar on the table and stated that that amount of anthrax"would destroy at least half the population" of Washington, D.C."

* In an article ("America the Vulnerable; A disaster is just waiting to happen if Iraq unleashes its poison and germs," November 24, 1997), Time wrote that"officials in Washington are deeply worried about what some of them call 'strategic crime.' By that they mean the merging of the output from a government's arsenals, like Saddam's biological weapons, with a group of semi-independent terrorists, like radical Islamist groups, who might slip such bioweapons into the U.S. and use them."

* In Sacramento, November 15, Clinton painted a bleak future if nations did not cooperate against"organized forces of destruction," telling the audience that only a small amount of"nuclear cake put in a bomb would do ten times as much damage as the Oklahoma City bomb did." Effectively dealing with proliferation and not letting weapons"fall into the wrong hands" is"fundamentally what is stake in the stand off we're having in Iraq today."

* He [President Clinton] asked Americans to not to view the current crisis as a"replay" of the Gulf War in 1991. Instead,"think about it in terms of the innocent Japanese people that died in the subway when the sarin gas was released [by the religious cult Aum Shinrikyo in 1995]; and how important it is for every responsible government in the world to do everything that can possibly be done not to let big stores of chemical or biological weapons fall into the wrong hands, not to let irresponsible people develop the capacity to put them in warheads on missiles or put them in briefcases that could be exploded in small rooms. And I say this not to frighten you."

* Cohen began his November 25, 1997 briefing on the Pentagon report by showing a picture of a Kurdish mother and her child who had been gassed by Saddam's army. A bit later, standing besides the gruesome image, he described death on a mass scale."One drop [of VX nerve agent] on your finger will produce death in a matter of just a few moments. Now the UN believes that Saddam may have produced as much as 200 tons of VX, and this would, of course, be theoretically enough to kill every man, woman and child on the face of the earth." He then sketched an image of a massive chemical attack on an American city. Recalling Saddam's use of poison gas and the sarin attack in Tokyo, Cohen warned that"we face a clear and present danger today" and reminded people that the"terrorist who bombed the World Trade Center in New York had in mind the destruction and deaths of some 250,000 people that they were determined to kill...."

The good news for Bill Clinton is that his book,"My Life," sold about 100,000 copies at Barnes & Noble stores the first day it was on sale, a record for the chain. The bad news for Bill Clinton is that the book sold about 100,000 copies at Barnes & Noble stores, a record for the chain. The book may make Clinton rich. It will not rehabilitate him.

The pity of it is that Clinton went for the bucks. That's understandable, since he never had much money and left office with a mountain of legal and other debts. But ever since Jerry Ford pioneered the franchising of the presidency -- there was virtually nothing he would not do for the right fee -- huge riches have awaited any former occupant of the White House. Solvency would have come to Clinton, if it has not already, even without his $10 million book advance. Clinton took the money -- and the obligation that came with it: write the sort of book that could be promoted on"Oprah." Clinton more or less did that.

The early reviews have been eviscerating, particularly the one in the New York Times. Its chief reviewer, Michiko Kakutani, somehow managed to read 957 pages in what must have been about a day and pronounced the book a mess --"sloppy, self-indulgent and often eye-crossingly dull." Other reviews have reached similar conclusions (although some feel otherwise), but suffice it to say that it is not being universally hailed as a triumph -- a book as brilliant as its author.

My own hurried perusal of the tome leads me to support Kakutani. Although in his acknowledgment Clinton thanks his editor, Robert Gottlieb, for teaching him about"hard cuts," it sometimes seems that nothing has been cut. We get, for instance, an appreciation of the Grand Canyon in late afternoon:"It was amazing the way the rocks, compressed into distinct layers over millions of years, changed colors as the canyon darkened from the bottom up." Nice, but can we move on?

To a large extent, Ulysses S. Grant's presidency was rehabilitated by his memoirs, written as the Civil War general was dying of cancer. Richard Nixon, virtually banished from Washington, wrote book after book from his exurban Elba in New Jersey. Watergate haunted him, as it should have, but slowly we came to realize that he possessed a first-class mind, keenly analytical, occasionally wise. No one could say that Nixon did not have gravitas.

Clinton, too, has a first-class mind -- I have observed him long enough to tell you that -- but this book, and especially the attendant publicity, obscures it. The people who lined up long before dawn to buy a copy were not drooling to find out about health care or the budget. Instead they were seeking a piece of Clinton -- like a souvenir or an autograph. He has emerged as the uber-celebrity of our times, beloved for his good looks, his charm and, paradoxically, the sex scandal that almost doomed his presidency....

One of the many problems with the American left, and indeed of the American left, has been its image and self-image as something rather too solemn, mirthless, herbivorous, dull, monochrome, righteous, and boring. How many times, in my old days at The Nation magazine, did I hear wistful and semienvious ruminations? Where was the radical Firing Line show? Who will be our Rush Limbaugh? I used privately to hope that the emphasis, if the comrades ever got around to it, would be on the first of those and not the second. But the meetings themselves were so mind-numbing and lugubrious that I thought the danger of success on either front was infinitely slight.

Nonetheless, it seems that an answer to this long-felt need is finally beginning to emerge. I exempt Al Franken's unintentionally funny Air America network, to which I gave a couple of interviews in its early days. There, one could hear the reassuring noise of collapsing scenery and tripped-over wires and be reminded once again that correct politics and smooth media presentation are not even distant cousins. With Michael Moore's Fahrenheit 9/11, however, an entirely new note has been struck. Here we glimpse a possible fusion between the turgid routines of MoveOn.org and the filmic standards, if not exactly the filmic skills, of Sergei Eisenstein or Leni Riefenstahl.

To describe this film as dishonest and demagogic would almost be to promote those terms to the level of respectability. To describe this film as a piece of crap would be to run the risk of a discourse that would never again rise above the excremental. To describe it as an exercise in facile crowd-pleasing would be too obvious. Fahrenheit 9/11 is a sinister exercise in moral frivolity, crudely disguised as an exercise in seriousness. It is also a spectacle of abject political cowardice masking itself as a demonstration of"dissenting" bravery.

In late 2002, almost a year after the al-Qaida assault on American society, I had an onstage debate with Michael Moore at the Telluride Film Festival. In the course of this exchange, he stated his view that Osama Bin Laden should be considered innocent until proven guilty. This was, he said, the American way. The intervention in Afghanistan, he maintained, had been at least to that extent unjustified. Something—I cannot guess what, since we knew as much then as we do now—has since apparently persuaded Moore that Osama Bin Laden is as guilty as hell. Indeed, Osama is suddenly so guilty and so all-powerful that any other discussion of any other topic is a dangerous"distraction" from the fight against him. I believe that I understand the convenience of this late conversion.

Fahrenheit 9/11 makes the following points about Bin Laden and about Afghanistan, and makes them in this order:

1) The Bin Laden family (if not exactly Osama himself) had a close if convoluted business relationship with the Bush family, through the Carlyle Group.

2) Saudi capital in general is a very large element of foreign investment in the United States.

3) The Unocal company in Texas had been willing to discuss a gas pipeline across Afghanistan with the Taliban, as had other vested interests.

4) The Bush administration sent far too few ground troops to Afghanistan and thus allowed far too many Taliban and al-Qaida members to escape.

5) The Afghan government, in supporting the coalition in Iraq, was purely risible in that its non-army was purely American.

6) The American lives lost in Afghanistan have been wasted. (This I divine from the fact that this supposedly"antiwar" film is dedicated ruefully to all those killed there, as well as in Iraq.)

It must be evident to anyone, despite the rapid-fire way in which Moore's direction eases the audience hastily past the contradictions, that these discrepant scatter shots do not cohere at any point. Either the Saudis run U.S. policy (through family ties or overwhelming economic interest), or they do not. As allies and patrons of the Taliban regime, they either opposed Bush's removal of it, or they did not. (They opposed the removal, all right: They wouldn't even let Tony Blair land his own plane on their soil at the time of the operation.) Either we sent too many troops, or were wrong to send any at all—the latter was Moore's view as late as 2002—or we sent too few. If we were going to make sure no Taliban or al-Qaida forces survived or escaped, we would have had to be more ruthless than I suspect that Mr. Moore is really recommending....

EVEN AS THE LAST OF THE TRIBUTES to Ronald Reagan straggle out, there's an elementary fact about his presidency that anyone who didn't live through it might not have picked up from the coverage. It's the fact that, after years and years of frightening drift, suddenly you could tell that someone in Washington was steering the ship.

It felt that way from the moment of Reagan's inauguration. No sooner had the new president uttered the oath of office, than at long last the American hostages in Tehran were set free. Literally, at midday on Inauguration Day, the 52 Americans held prisoner for 444 days by a regime that daily reviled the United States as the Great Satan were let go. And this was no dumb luck. Informed accounts of the Algiers negotiations for the hostages' release confirm that fear of what Reagan might do--combined with a continuing desire to humiliate Carter--governed the Iranians' timing.

Nor was this a one-time success. The same firmness and clarity that caused candidate Reagan, and president-elect Reagan, to call the hostage-takers" criminals and kidnappers" would cause President Reagan a few months later to fire 12,000 air traffic controllers who launched an illegal strike. Four hours into the PATCO strike, he gave them 48 hours to return to work. In explaining his action, the president read on the air the brief oath each controller had taken in assuming his job, an oath in which he promised not to strike. When the 48-hour deadline passed, Reagan did exactly what he had said. And he never backed down.

Thus, within seven months of coming to Washington, Reagan had bracingly taken command. Ordinary people started to feel that effective action wasn't beyond the president after all.

TO APPRECIATE THIS, you have to realize how inured Americans had become to national turmoil and disaster. And that's not just a reference to the Carter years--uneasy as they were, and culminating as they did in the Soviet Union's invasion of Afghanistan on Christmas Eve 1979 (one month after the seizure of the U.S. Embassy in Tehran) and, on the home front, in inflation over 13 percent. No, the Carter years were more or less in line with what had come before.

The early 1970s were dominated by the Watergate scandal leading to the resignation of a president, and the bitter American defeat in Vietnam, with its 57,000 American dead and legions of refugees. For that matter, what came before that was the ur-troubled-decade, the 1960s, with its annual race riots (the"long hot summers" whose death toll totaled about 300), the assassinations of John Kennedy, Martin Luther King Jr., and Robert Kennedy, and the convulsions of the war protests and the counterculture....

IN THE FALL of 1981, Ronald Reagan placed a phone call from the Oval Office to a lawyer named Jesse Eschbach. Reagan had decided to nominate Eschbach to the federal bench and was calling to ask him to serve. Would he serve! Of course! Judge Eschbach later wrote Reagan to express"my deep appreciation for your kindness and consideration in calling me. It was an experience our family will never forget."

Jesse Eschbach was one of the 382 judges Ronald Reagan appointed. That was (and remains) a record number for one president. With his choices, Reagan filled almost half of the sitting federal judiciary.

Reagan made similar calls to most of his nominees. That was a Reagan innovation. The phone calls indicated how much Reagan cared about judicial selection. So did the process he instituted for vetting nominees. Reagan was the first president to bring serious candidates for the bench to Washington for extensive interviewing. More than 1,000 prospects made the trip.

Reagan had the same interest in judicial selection as his Democratic hero, Franklin D. Roosevelt, did. Presidents who served between them often saw judgeships in terms of patronage--of political favors to be dispensed. But both Roosevelt and Reagan understood judicial selection as an opportunity to influence the path of the law.

Both men felt that way because both had complaints about where the law had been going. Both contended for judges who would exercise restraint. In Reagan's case, he objected to the tendency of courts to declare rights not found in the text or history of the Constitution. To Reagan, the 1973 case of Roe v. Wade, which declared the abortion right, was the most notorious example of what a court shouldn't do.

Reagan thus initiated through his judicial selection an important argument about the proper role of the courts. The issue has dominated the politics of judicial selection ever since, with the two parties now firmly on opposite sides. The nominees fought over have included ones designated not only for the Supreme Court but also for the lower courts.

Reagan managed to get most of his nominees confirmed when Republicans held the Senate, as was the case through 1986. But when Democrats regained control in 1987, his batting average declined.

That Congress established the importance to judicial selection of divided government. George H.W. Bush faced a Democratic Senate, and Bill Clinton, for six of his eight years, a Republican Senate. Both presidents would have seen more nominees confirmed had their parties been in the majority....

A BOOK launched last week covers a period of Australian history when parents weren't concerned about their children eating junk food.

Instead, many worried, and desperately, that they might not eat at all.

Today Peter Garrett, Bob Brown and John Howard are seen as extremists by their more hysterical enemies.

During the period of this book there were real extremists: Marxists plotting revolution and fascists looking for a general to help do the same.

And forget about 1000 troops overseas. Back then there were 800 times more abroad in trouble spots much worse than Baghdad.

The book makes clear what a blessed, secure and opulent life we now lead, no matter how we fret over petrol prices, childhood reading skills, or even international terrorism.

It is called The Biographical Dictionary of the Australian Senate: Vol 2 1929-1962 (Melbourne University Publishing, edited by Ann Millar).

It has 104 characters: the people who retired from the Senate, were voted out or, in the cases of 21, died in office in that 33 year period.

Volume One revealed what a bunch of wonderful scoundrels and gifted prophets helped create our nation.

In this second instalment, the life stories of the 103 men and one woman who completed service in the Senate between 1929 and 1962 illustrate the effect global cataclysms had on Australians.

They served between the end of the Roaring '20s and the start of the Swinging '60s. More accurately, they served from the Great Depression, through World War II and into a prosperity blighted by a nuclear fuelled Cold War.

"In those three decades the country suffered a life-threatening illness followed by a near-death experience and a slow recuperation haunted by constant fear of a relapse," wrote Clerk of the Senate Harry Evans in an introduction.

Among the senators were one who fought in the Boer war, World War I and World War II. Another was a savage opponent of conscription whose three sons volunteered during World War I. Only one returned.

Labor's Senate Leader and, more important, its most gifted in-house historian, John Faulkner, has highlighted Agnes Robertson Robertson, a formidable woman who did much despite having to spend her adult life explaining that her married name was the same as her middle given name.

Widowed at 30 in 1912 with three small children, she taught school until 1943 and was busy with church and community matters.

Socially and politically conservative, she nevertheless fought actively for equal rights for women.

In 1949 she became the first Liberal woman elected to the Senate from Western Australia. She was 65.

Faulkner took up her story in an address at the book's launching:"In 1955 the Liberals dropped her from their ticket because they considered her too old.

"She promptly transferred her allegiance to the Country Party, who did not consider her too old to get first place on their ticket.

"After all, they had the precedent of South Australian Labor Senator Frederick Ward -- first elected in 1947 at the age of 75."

Unable to resist a contemporary dig, Faulkner ended this section by saying:"No one should tell Peter Costello about Agnes Robertson's parliamentary career."

He also pointed out that one senator served just 10 days before dying in office, while George Foster Pearce made it through 37 years....

In his upcoming memoir, former President Bill Clinton tells the story of his life and his presidency. If you ask Columbia Journalism School professor Evan Cornog, however, Clinton is not the first president to spin a yarn, and he certainly will not be the last. According to Cornog, storytelling has always been a president's most important task. In his new book due out in August,"The Power and the Story: How the Crafted Presidential Narrative Has Determined Success from George Washington to George W. Bush" (Penguin Press, $24.95), he argues that even"from the earliest days of the American republic ... those seeking the nation's highest office have had to tell persuasive stories - about the nation, about its problems and, most of all, about themselves."

Before the days of blockbuster publishing deals, presidential narratives made their way into the world through newspaper articles, stump speeches and word-of-mouth anecdotes. Then as now, a good story could make the difference in a tight election, even if it wasn't created by the president himself. For example, in 1840, a Baltimore newspaper made a crack about William Henry Harrison's being happier in a log cabin than the White House."Harrison's people didn't come up with that log cabin," Cornog said in an interview by phone last week,"but they ran with it since it gave Harrison the opportunity to appear as the honest husband of the country." Voters soon forgot Harrison was actually the scion of Virginia aristocracy.

To Cornog, this kind of massaging of the truth is not a bad thing, especially since voters tend to know when they are being misled. In the 1992 campaign, George H.W. Bush donned flannel shirts and gobbled down pork rinds in an attempt to portray himself as a regular guy."And then in a debate with Bill Clinton a voter asked him how the recession had affected him," Cornog said,"and Bush was unable to convince her that he had suffered at all. Bill Clinton then took the question and conveyed an amazing empathy for regular people, and he won the election."

The key to a compelling presidential narrative is not only an element of truth but some resonance with the public at large."Look at John F. Kennedy and his story," Cornog said, referring to Kennedy's wartime experience."Being able to lead your men off a shattered PT boat to an island and to rescue said a lot about his capacity for leadership and endurance. And people were attracted to that." A quarter century later, Ronald Reagan displayed a more jocular kind of heroism when he quipped to surgeons about to remove an assassin's bullet:"I hope you guys are Republicans.""That said something about his courage," Cornog said,"about his humor, about his lack of self-importance."

As a former actor, Reagan had a distinct advantage in getting his story out to the public. Thanks to 24-hour news coverage, Cornog argued,"presidents have become storytellers themselves. They are enacting the stories live." And for Cornog's dollar, no modern American president was more skilled at doing this than Clinton."People were talking last week about Reagan as the great communicator; Clinton was even more so. The way he dealt with people one on one and on stage gave them the sense that they were connecting with him - that he cared how people lived their lives."

Clinton is from the South and has the obvious advantage of coming from a culture of storytellers, but Cornog argues there is no formula to shaping a compelling narrative. After all, people's needs change. Take, for instance George W. Bush's narrative of being a straight shooter. As Cornog said,"One of Bush's temperamental qualities is that he is a very stubborn person, a determined person. That simple determination seemed exactly what the nation needed after 9/11." In recent months Cornog has watched this narrative turn on Bush."When faced with a more complex and ongoing problem, such as Iraq, that stubbornness can seem like obtuseness."

Cornog looks forward to Clinton's memoir because not only is the former president a good storyteller, but the focus of his narrative will probably shift."I may be wrong about this, but one of the great lessons of Monica [Lewinsky] is that ultimately the press and the Republicans were more interested in her than voters. Sure, people want to know the naughty bits. But I think I am not alone in being more interested to see how he deals with his role in the embassy bombings, the Sudan, the presence of al-Qaida...."

"Even God realized he couldn't change the past. That's why he created historians." -- Anonymous

Michael Beschloss is a serious historian. He says no accurate assessment of Ronald Reagan's presidency can be made for another 30 years.

Beschloss' point is well taken. There will be a decade or so of hagiography -- we are already seeing it -- where Reagan is depicted as the winner of the Cold War, the force behind 18 years of economic prosperity and the champion of human freedom.

This rosy look will be followed by the" counter-revolution" where revisionist historians completely debunk the earlier assessments, painting Reagan as a bumbler, an intellectual lightweight, a warmonger, the instigator of class warfare, a racist, sexist and worse.

The debunking will be followed by an amalgam where everything blends together, resulting in an above-average president who had some notable accomplishments and made some serious mistakes. Put him in the second row of"near great" presidents.

I'm not a serious historian; I think Ronald Reagan was the most important president of the second half of the 20th century and arguably the most important person. I don't care whether this point is well taken or not.

I side with those who believe Reagan's economic policies -- but much more importantly his ability to communicate to an America mired in"malaise" that"America's best days are ahead of her" -- helped spur the sense of optimism that is always the foundation of risk-taking, entrepreneurialism and job creation.

From 1982, when Reagan supported Federal Reserve Chairman Paul Volcker's successful attempt to squeeze inflation out of the economy, to 1988, when Reagan left office, economic growth was an astonishing 4.7 percent a year, while unemployment fell from nearly 11 percent to 5.3 percent.

I credit Reagan with bringing down the"Evil Empire," resulting in a bloodless revolution in Eastern Europe -- and within the Soviet Union -- that freed a half-dozen countries and hundreds of millions of people from that empire's grip. For proof, just look at the admission of high-ranking Soviet officers that this was so....

Frank Rich, in the NYT (June 20, 2004):

...Experts kept saying how "surprised" everyone was about "the outpouring" for Reagan, but saying didn't make it so. The dirty little secret of the week: the outpouring didn't live up to its hype. "There was this kind of extraordinary outpouring not by the public but by reporters who should know better," as Morley Safer told Larry King after it was over.

A total of some 200,000 Americans passed by the coffin in California and Washington. The crowds watching the funeral procession in Washington numbered in the "tens of thousands," reported The Washington Post. By comparison, three million Americans greeted the cross-country journey of Warren Harding's funeral train from San Francisco to Washington when he died in office in the steamy August of 1923, according to Mark Sullivan's history, "Our Times." It took 3,500 soldiers to direct the crowd in his hometown of Marion, Ohio, alone. The grief for Harding was so pronounced in New York, a city that hardly knew him, that The Times reported how theaters canceled their shows to hold impromptu memorial gatherings for those citizens unable to jam into the packed services held in Trinity Church at Wall Street and Temple Emanu-El uptown and most houses of worship in between. Next to that, the Reagan outpouring, much of it carried out by bubbly TV-camera-seeking citizens in halter tops and shorts, was grief lite.

Harding's huge turnout didn't alter his hapless historical fate, but at least it was a genuine event. When every tragic news story, from Columbine to the Columbia shuttle to JonBenet Ramsey and Chandra Levy, is supersized in our national theater of TV, all of them are downsized. Incessant hyperbole becomes as numbing as Muzak. No matter how many TV recyclings, the close-ups of Nancy Reagan's three trips to her husband's coffin may never trump the single long shot of John John saluting his father. No matter how many pundits proclaim Reagan a great president, a realistic assessment remains on hold — especially since, as The Los Angeles Times reported, 90 percent of the 55 million pages of his papers is still off-limits to scholars at the presidential library where he was entombed. (A 2001 George W. Bush executive order could restrict access to every modern president's historical record indefinitely.)

When that entombment finally arrived, national mourning was giving way to national boredom. Except at Fox News Channel, ratings did not spike on either network or cable. "It was not a massively watched event," one CNN producer said to The Times's Bill Carter. "It was a largely watched event." Translation: Is it too late to grab a piece of the new J. Lo nuptials? Eventually, even Fox was elbowing Reagan into the wings for its O. J. retrospectives. On the Friday morning of Reagan's National Cathedral funeral, Matt Lauer tried to hold the "Today" show audience by promising a medley of mediathon standards: "A lot of news coming out of Washington, Katie, but there's other news to talk about as well, including major developments in the Kobe Bryant, Martha Stewart and Scott Peterson cases."

Only three days later, Bill Clinton, the star of the longest-running news miniseries of them all, "Impeachment of the President," was back in the White House, as a preview of coming attractions for the televised book tour he kicks off tonight on "60 Minutes." Even President Bush was glad to see him. Once people line up to buy the book, there will be no shortage of talking heads remarking on "the surprise outpouring" for the man they declared dead just a few years ago. At least Ronald Reagan, who understood nothing if not the cruel and fickle vagaries of show business, might find it funny. You can almost hear him saying, "There you go again."