Character Above All.

• Author: Walker, Martin

edited by Robert A. Wilson Simon & Schuster, $23 By Martin Walker

Under the current standards of public morality, it is hard to see any of the presidents of the mid-20th century making it into the White House. What a waste that would have been. Franklin Roosevelt would have suffered from his dalliances, and probably from his wheelchair, too. Trutman's loyalties to Boss Prendergast would have given him an ethics problem. Kay Summersby was no bimbo, and Eisenhower was too guilt-wracked to consummate their passion. But imagine the press conference question: "Have you ever attempted adultery with an alien in wartime?" The issue barely needs raising over Kennedy, and LBJ's cozy financial deals on TV franchises would have done for him, even without his serial exercise of the Presidential droit du seigneur.

This leaves us with the startling conclusion that in the 40 years from 1932 to 1972, the only president who would have passed the test of what we are now pleased to call "the character issue" would have been Richard Nixon. Certainly he was no lecher, and in the sense of graft, he was not a crook. But in a test which Nixon passes and FDR fails, something is evidently amiss with our current prejudices about the kind of character we desire in political leaders.

Wait a minute. What character? Whose prejudices? There seems to be a gap between the assumptions of the media and political elites inside the Beltway, who pontificate about elections, and the voters who actually decide them. The Beltway crowd, which claims to know the difference between a venal and a mortal sin for a politician, assumed that Clinton was unelectable after Gennifer Flowers and the Vietnam draft. George Bush, the war hero in youth and war leader in office, should have won the character election hands down. But in their wisdom, preferring a clouded candidate who cared and thought about the economy to an upright president who didn't, American voters threw Bush out of office.

The problem here is Beltway-speak, the lazy confusion of presidential character with "the character issue," which is media shorthand for whether or not voters trust Clinton after Whitewater and Troopergate and Paula Jones and so on. This kind of confusion made it a useful idea to gather 10 historians, or rather eight historians and two speechwriters, to offer brief canters around the characters of the last half-score of presidents.

The result is not altogether a success, although we get some agreeable essays...