Ann Gerhart, in the Wash Post (June 26, 2004):

Curses! The days of calumny and bellicosity remain a cherished tradition in the United States Senate.

By historical standards, Vice President Cheney's grunted command this week on the floor of the Senate for Patrick Leahy (D-Vt.) to contort himself into an impossible sexual position was most economical. And, he told Fox News yesterday, "I felt better after I said it." (He's a man of few words, and "sorry" isn't one of them.)

History reveals senators have discovered many ingenious ways to express Cheney's sentiment without resorting to short, pungent Anglo-Saxonisms. Most have involved florid paragraphs of rebuke. But pistols and blood have been drawn. Canes have been used.

Way back, Thomas Jefferson knew it would come to this. In his classic Manual of Parliamentary Practice, Jefferson, then vice president of the fledgling republic, warned: "No one is to disturb another in his speech by hissing, coughing, spitting, speaking or whispering to another; nor to stand up or interrupt him" and so on. From its beginning, the United States Senate was so preoccupied with decorum that 10 of its first 20 rules detailed proper behavior.

But for the longest time, senators resisted adopting Rule 19 -- "No Senator in debate shall, directly or indirectly, by any form of words impute to another Senator or to other Senators any conduct or motive unworthy or unbecoming a Senator," certainly a subjective and imprecise standard.

That changed after 1902, when jockeying between the distinguished gentlemen from South Carolina resulted in their censure. The junior senator, John McLaurin, proclaimed the senior senator, Ben Tillman, guilty of "a willful, malicious and deliberate lie." Tillman promptly responded with a square punch in the jaw. The ensuing Senate-floor brawl looked like a modern bench-clearing fracas in major league baseball.

Nearly 50 years before, a Massachusetts senator had been beaten unconscious, three days after he took to the floor to denounce two Democratic senators he believed to be pro-slavery. Illinois's Stephen Douglas, Charles Sumner had said, was a "noise-some, squat and nameless animal." He then accused South Carolina's Andrew Butler of taking "a mistress . . . who, though ugly to others, is always lovely to him; though polluted in the sight of the world, is chaste in his sight. I mean," he added, "the harlot, Slavery." That brought House member Preston Brooks in to defend Butler, striking Sumner about the head so furiously with a cane that the senator was carried bloody and unconscious from the chamber.

Cheney's remark this week -- he serves as president of the Senate -- arrived with such explosiveness because anger in the Senate is always to be deeply masked.

"Part of the much vaunted civility is -- how shall I say this? -- that gentlemen speak to gentlemen in terms that are gentlemanly," says Senate historian Richard Baker. "That there should be no barriers to understanding and communication that might happen with profane language."

One of Baker's personal favorite examples of this verbal legerdemain dates to 1925. Sen. Richard Ernst (R-Ky.) went after Sen. James Couzens (R-Mich.) with this: "I wish to know if there be any way under the rules of the Senate whereby I can, without breaking those rules, and without offending senators about me, call a member a willful, malicious, wicked liar? Is there any way of doing that?" Ernst was forced to take his seat, which he could do smugly, point well made.

And this from the legendary Huey Long of Louisiana, referring to Sen. Pat Harrison (D-Miss.) in 1934: "We all have our way of working. One is just as honest as the other. One is, catch your friend in trouble, stab him in the back and drink his blood. The other is, stand by your friend and try to heal his wounds." Down went Long, forced to sit for "imputing the motive of Harrison drinking the blood of his friend."

In "Dark Horse," his book about President Garfield, Washington lawyer Ken Ackerman writes that one "can search the Congressional Record and Globe through two hundred years of debate and never see a member of Congress insult a colleague so directly, brutally and articulately, on the record, in public, looking directly at him across the room" as Maine Republican James Blaine did in the 1880s to New York Republican Roscoe Conkling, his longtime nemesis. The eruption was caused by something utterly trivial. It still rings.

"As for the gentleman's cruel sarcasm," Blaine said, an eye to the galleries, waving dismissively at his opponent, "I hope he will not be too severe. The contempt of that large-minded gentleman is so wilting; his haughty disdain, his grandiloquent swell, his majestic, supereminent, overpowering, turkeygobbler strut has been so crushing to myself and all members of this House that I know it was an act of the greatest temerity for me to venture upon a controversy with him."

He was just warming up. Seizing on a newspaper story that had compared Conkling to a deceased great statesman, Blaine used it for ridicule. "The gentleman [Conkling] took it seriously, and it has given his strut additional pomposity. The resemblance is great. It is striking. Hyperion to a satyr, Thersites to Hercules, mud to marble, dunghill to diamond, a singed cat to a Bengal tiger, a whining puppy to a roaring lion. Shade of the mighty [Henry Winder] Davis? Forgive the almost profanation of that jocose satire!"

Ah, those days are no more. In the politics of the past few decades, senators excoriate each other with some pith....

David Brock has written a new book called The Republican Noise Machine: How It Corrupts Our Democracy. In it, he purports to expose the vast right-wing media conspiracy, a menace Brock claims to know first-hand as someone who was once a cog in its malignant machine. First-hand knowledge is an important claim for Brock because, as a famous self-confessed prevaricator, he is aware that he stands on shaky ground as he attempts to extend the successful career he has made out of his confession of malfeasance and the political reversal it announced. A similar dilemma haunts the postpartum lives of other reborn prevaricators like Stephen Glass and Jayson Blair. Brock’s advantage over them in finding a readership willing to believe his stories again is that he is selling a message his new political allies are eager to hear.

I do not intend to examine the thesis of Brock’s book, which I admit I find preposterous – that unscrupulous, partisan conservatives have invaded arenas previously governed by impeccable standards of fairness and objectivity, and thereby corrupted American journalism and politics in the process. Only the ideologically blinded will be persuaded by special pleadings like this. As a conservative writer and publisher, I have the dubious privilege of appearing as one of the culprits in Brock’s profile of what he claims is a vast right wing media conspiracy. In a dozen pages of The Republican Noise Machine, Brock offers readers an account of my career as a cabalist of the Right and polluter of the nation’s journalistic airwaves. What I propose instead is to use Brock’s account of my attitudes and deeds as an occasion to assess his reliability as a reporter of facts (rather than as an interpreter of their significance). In other words, I will use this opportunity to examine the reliability of Brock in providing the evidentiary basis he offers his readers to make a judgment about my work or anyone else’s.

I am an exceptionally promising subject for such an exercise because I have published a lengthy autobiography and left a clearly defined trail in many books and articles readily available on the web (at www.frontpagemag.com and www.Salon.com). Therefore a comparison of Brock’s version to this published record offers a unique and fairly precise way for readers to gauge his accuracy as a journalist and his reliability as a guide to the evidence, quite apart from any political conclusions he draws from it. In sum, if David Brock wanted to get the bare facts of what I have done and what I have said correct by checking the sources, he could easily have done so. He would not have to undertake the arduous task of tracking them down or conducting interviews with people who knew me, or with myself. Nor would readers have to weigh the veracity of his account of such interviews where only he and his subject were present, which is often the most problematic aspect of assessing the fairness and accuracy of a writer’s work. In order to measure Brock’s regard for the evidence, I will attempt (without unnecessarily boring the reader) to cover every factual statement about me that he makes in this book.

Brock begins his account of my career inauspiciously with a reference exaggerated to the point of distortion. “In the 1960s, Horowitz had been an editor of Ramparts, one of the most violently radical organs of the New Left.” (Brock, p. 100) While Ramparts was indeed a radical organ, it was hardly “one of the most violently radical organs of the time.” Among these one might include Prairie Fire (the publication of the terrorist Weather Underground), The Black Panther, the Revolutionary Worker, the Berkeley Barb and other vanguard publications of movements actively organizing for terrorist and revolutionary agendas.

By contrast, movement activists generally regarded Ramparts as a “sellout” publication because the magazine was published in a slick four-color format for newsstands, as opposed to the “underground” style of truly “movement” papers. Moreover, its staff members were conspicuously not activists themselves. During the 1968 riots at the Democratic Party convention in Chicago, for example, Ramparts’ staff was roundly criticized for setting up headquarters in the “Pump Room” of the Hilton instead of joining other radicals in the dangerous streets. In 1971, Ramparts published an article condemning the violence of the Weather Underground and in 1974 an editorial appeared in the magazine condemning the violence of the SLA. I wrote both pieces myself, a fact reported in my autobiography, Radical Son, which is a text readily available to Brock.

Brock continues: “Horowitz was the author of a book, The Free World Colossus, an influential New Left text indicting U.S. foreign policy. His thinking was shaped by his friend and mentor Isaac Deutscher, a Marxist historian and a biographer of Leon Trotsky” (Brock, p. 100). Isaac Deutscher was indeed my friend and mentor but, as explained in my autobiography, our personal relationship had no influence on The Free World Colossus because I hadn’t even met him at the time I wrote the book in Sweden in 1962-3. I only met Deutscher afterwards when I moved to London, where he resided. The account of our meeting in Radical Son, moreover, refutes Brock’s specific claim that my thinking in the book was shaped by Deutscher. In my autobiography I describe our first encounter in the living room of a mutual friend where I eagerly presented him with one of theses I had advanced (and was most proud of) in The Free World Colossus. This was the notion that Russia’s possession of nuclear weapons was a principal cause of the Sino-Soviet split. Deutscher was so contemptuous of my idea that he rudely turned his back on me and refused to speak to me for the rest of our meeting....

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...."