All Too Human: A Political Education.

• Author: Pitney, John J., Jr.
• Position: Review

by George Stephanopoulos, Boston: Little, Brown, 456 pages, $27.95

Quick: What exactly did George Stephanopoulos do in the Clinton White House? He hosted the daily press briefing for a few months, but he botched the job so badly that Clinton handed the job to Dee Dee Myers. So how did he spend the rest of his tenure?

Don't feel bad if the answer escapes you. Stephanopoulos himself seems confused about what he was supposed to be doing, a problem that has apparently plagued him for years. In 1989, he signed on with Rep. Richard Gephardt (D-Mo.), then the House majority leader. "My new job was as exciting as I expected," he writes, "even though I couldn't explain exactly what it was."

Two years later, he joined the Clinton presidential campaign: "Although my duties were not defined with precision, I didn't press for clariFication." After victory, the Clintons told him that he would have a place in their White House, and that he would keep on doing what he did in the campaign. "Exactly what they meant would be worked out later," he writes. "For the moment, it was just nice to hear." When Clinton dragged him from the briefing room, he says, "my new title was the nebulous 'senior adviser for policy and strategy.' Only time would tell what it would mean." Clinton reassured Stephanopoulos that he wanted him by his side, but when Leon Panetta became chief of staff, fears of unemployment strafed his mind, "which meant that I needed a job description beyond 'by my side.'"

All too typical. Washington teems with young people sporting such titles as "assistant," "deputy," and "liaison," all of them hoping to become George Stephanopoulos. They spend 60-hour weeks churning out "policy initiatives" and writing frantic memoranda on "damage control," never reflecting that most of the damage comes from all those initiatives. If they'd all just go home, the government would shrink, the storm would clear, and their mental health would improve. Instead, they settle for Band-Aids: Stephanopoulos grew a beard to cover the stress-induced hives on his chin.

It wasn't just the workload that was making him tense. Anybody in the Clinton White House ran a high risk of legal trouble, and Stephanopoulos was no exception. During the Whitewater probe, he griped to a Treasury official about a Resolution Trust Corporation investigator's GOP connections, wondering aloud if there was a way to fire him. Unknown to Stephanopoulos, the official was keeping a diary, which later fell...