Friend & Foe: Dick Morris's unreliable, intoxicating tale of Clinton.

• Author: Sullivan, Margaret
• Position: Because He Could - Book Review

Because He Could By Dick Morris and Eileen McGann Regan Books, $29.95

Bill Clinton, so the story goes, once almost punched Dick Morris in the nose. But, at the last second, Hillary restrained her husband's cocked-back arm. The blow never landed.

These days, Clinton must wish he had knocked Morris off his feet when he had the chance.

Morris, once the former president's closest confidant and advisor, his poll-wielding Svengali, and now a FOX News commentator and New York Post columnist, is keeping busy of late with his own cottage industry: Clinton-trashing. In a matched pair of books, Morris (writing with his wife Eileen McGann) delivers a one-two punch of his own at each of the recent Clinton autobiographies. First, last came his Rewriting History, which took on Hillary's Living History.

Now Because He Could--a response to Clinton's huge, and hugely success autobiography, My Life--arrives on the scene, wailing noxious fumes of ingratitude and score-settling, which the author attempts to cover up with the righteous perfume of providing historical accuracy. Because He Could is essentially a long, cranky review of My Log, in which Morris deconstructs, denies, and disses much of what Clinton wrote, setting forth his own version of the truth. (Here's a Zen koan to ponder: How overwritten must a presidential autobiography be to deserve a 300-page rebuttal?)

Morris's book portrays Clinton as a weak-willed, amoral, and visionless wanderer, saved--in a limited way--only by his vaunted empathy and communication skills, coupled with his head for wonkish policy detail. According to Morris, it was only his own wise counsel that made Clinton the success he was. Without him, Morris writes, Clinton was too focused on minutiae to see broad patterns or form sweeping strategies:

"It was as if I were staring up at the stars with Clinton, trying to get him to pick out the constellation Orion among the many glittering stars. 'Over there,' I'd point. 'You see the three stars. That's his belt."' But Clinton, Morris reports, could never see it. Morris sees Clinton's autobiography as a metaphor for his personality--ambitious, but undisciplined and chaotic. He writes: "Clinton's My like his political life, has no organizational motif beyond simple chronology. It is, simply, one darn thing after another."

The book's title, of course, is a reference to Clinton's reply to Dan Rather that he had his affair with Monica Lewinsky "because I could" Morris, in high dudgeon...