Between Washington and Jerusalem: a reporter's notebook.

• Author: Ignatius, David

Between Washington and Jerusalem: A Reporter's Notebook.

Between Washington and Jerusalem: A Reporter's Notebook. Wolf Blitzer. Oxford University Press, $15.95. Wolf Blitzer may have the best job in daily journalism. As Washington correspondent for the Jerusalem Post, the covers the endlessly fascinating and frustrating saga of American Mideast policy and the U.S.-Israeli relationship. He writes for a great newspaper and a readership that follows his every word. His dispatches are lucid and generally accurate, an illustration of how a good journalist performs his task of writing "the first rough draft of history.'

Unfortunately, Blitzer's second draft of history, Between Washington and Jerusalem, is a disappointment. Blitzer mentions that in preparing the book, he reviewed "literally thousands of articles' he had written on the subject during the past dozen years. Reading the book, you can almost see the marks of scissors and paste.

Blitzer's basic problem in this book is a familiar one for daily journalists: too many facts, too little perspective--too much of the raw material of history and too little of the refined product. A reader senses in the book a caution, a wariness about offending sources. For example, there is a lengthy discussion of the role of the Israeli ambassador in Washington, drawing on Blitzer's relationships with the last four: Evron, Dinitz, Arens, and Rosenne. But Blitzer shies away from making strong judgments about the...