Friends in High Places.

• Author: Bailey, Charles W.

The office was a triumph of political ergonomics. From where the visitor was seated, his eyes were irresistibly drawn to the view through the window behind his host's desk: There, under the sheltering elms, stood the White House. It was a prospect that bred hubris, the archetypical Washington malady that infects so many men drawn to great affairs. And of no one was this truer than of Clark McAdams Clifford, who did to himself what no one else could have done: He destroyed his own good name.

Friends in High Places, written by New York Times reporter Douglas Frantz and congressional staff member David McKean, is a compelling political biography that explores both the man and the creature he exemplified, the Washington lawyer-lobbyist. Based largely on interviews with more than 100 of his acquaintances and associates, as well as 50 hours with Clifford himself, the book meticulously traces the long arc of Clifford's half century in Washington.

He served in the government for only six of those 50 years. But for those few years he was at the top--first as a White House aide under Truman and two decades later as a cabinet officer. By the mid-sixties, a time when politics was still much more an insider's game than it is now, Clifford's reputation was assured. He had been an advisor to the Kennedy Administration and an intimate counselor to Lyndon Johnson.

There is a great deal of interesting detail in this book: about Clifford's life and family, about his years in the Truman White House and the Johnson cabinet, about his role in changing America's Vietnam policy, about his law-and-lobbying career. But it never quite answers the most intriguing question about Clifford: Why, in the twilight of a legendary career as a lawyer-lobbyist, did he ignore the advice he had given so many others and involve himself with a pack of international bankers of dubious repute?

In his prime, Clifford was improbably handsome, tall with wavy blond hair turning to silver, a rich baritone voice, and a dignified manner. Always impeccably groomed and clothed, he personified respectability, prosperity, and success. Beneath this velvet exterior, though, was a hard, cynical core that delighted in the acquisition of power and the use of influence.

This combination drove him to remarkable achievement. "He reshaped the way lobbying worked in the nation's capital," the authors write, "making it respectable and even desirable to trade quietly on relationships with government...