Hell of a Ride: Backstage at the White House Follies.

• Author: Fallows, James

This is a terrific book, which almost anyone interested in politics will enjoy reading. It clarifies aspects of the Bush years that had seemed to be inexplicable quirks, and it provides hilarious new illustrations for timeless truths of political and governmental life.

Structurally, John Podhoretz's book might seem to be a successor to What I Saw at the Revolution, Peggy Noonan's memoir of her years as a speechwriter for Ronald Reagan and George Bush. Podhoretz served briefly as a Reagan speechwriter, during that administration's last few months, and for the first few months of the Bush regime he worked in the office of "Drug Czar" William Bennett. (By the way: now that Kristine M. Gebbie has become head of the government's anti-AIDS efforts, can we either drop titles like "AIDS Czar" or change them to "Czarina" as appropriate?) Like Noonan, Podhoretz throws out occasional right-wing chestnuts to show that he really does believe in the "empowerment" agenda, a strong national defense, cuts in the capital-gains tax, and so on.

But the emotional tone of this book is completely different from Noonan's, in a way that makes it more delicious reading and that also illustrates differences between Reagan and Bush as politicians. Noonan's book had a sentimentality about Reagan - the man, the symbol, the leader of a movement. While reading it I was reminded constantly of World War II movies, in which stoic GIs and brassy dames back home would go all teary-eyed when they thought about the Big Causes that little people like them were fighting to defend. The emotional model for Noonan's book was, in short, Casablanca. Seemingly tough guys, who were idealistic deep down inside, pulled together to beat an evil foe.

Perhaps this tone reflected the way the world really looked to Reagan loyalists during the 1980s. Podhoretz hints time and again in this book that it would have been great to be part of a crusading administration like Reagan's, rather than that of a conservator, like George Bush. (Although Podhoretz doesn't say this, anyone who has ever written speeches envies those who wrote for Reagan, a man whose long training as a professional announcer taught him, first, that delivery mattered and, second, that it was not shameful to stick to a text.) Perhaps Noonan's soft-focus rendition of those in power reflected either a conscious or an instinctive trait of her own personality. For instance, she presented George Bush as being so completely selfless and other-oriented, so Gary Cooper-like in his modesty, that he could barely bring himself to use the word "I." This trait, she said, accounted for the odd subjectless syntax of Bush's acceptance speech at the 1988 convention ("moved to Texas, raised a family," and so on).

Podhoretz presents Bush, more hard-headedly and much more convincingly, as being just the opposite sort of person: a man so completely absorbed in his...