Call the Briefing! Reagan and Bush, Sam and Helen - A Decade with Presidents and the Press.

• Author: Gigot, Paul

If I had to choose the most perilous job in Washington, White House press secretary would be it. You have to serve two masters, the president and the press, who measure your performance by converse standards. A president wants you to reveal only the best news about him, if that, while the press corps wants you to be able to confirm, at a moment's notice, the worst. Self-immolation lurks behind your every utterance.

So it's saying something that Marlin Fitzwater was the most effective and well-liked press secretary since Pierre Salinger served John Kennedy. Fitzwater spent six years as spokesman for two presidents of markedly different public styles, Ronald Reagan and George Bush, and lived to tell about them. This memoir helps explain his remarkable survival. The book resembles his own tenure as press secretary: It reveals enough for the reader to think he's getting something for his time, but not so much that Fitzwater is disloyal to his bosses.

Both of his bosses-presidents and press. Everyone seems to be blaming the media for something these days, but Fitzwater actually likes reporters, or at least most of them. Hence, this is not a book full of the fashionable, Naderite critique of reporters as celebrities. There is no lament about falling press standards or "sound bites" or talk shows as ego trips. Fitzwater has a simple, traditional way of judging the press: He likes reporters who are straight with him, and who get it right. He has nice things to say about many reporters, even Sam Donaldson, whom he credits with being a hard-working pain.

For those who failed to meet those standards, Fitzwater can settle scores like a loan shark. He all but breaks the kneecaps of Andy Rosenthal, the reporter (and son of famous Timesman and columnist A.M. Rosenthal) who broke the non-story, in 1992, about George Bush's astonishment upon seeing a supermarket checkout scanner. That story became, during the 1992 presidential campaign, a metaphor for Bush's detachment from the lives of average Americans. But, as Fitzwater reports, Rosenthal never even saw the event himself. Bush had expressed his usual gee-whiz politeness at some genuinely new technology. Rosenthal took the account of the event from the media "pool" and spun it into an exaggeration that made page one. "It was one of those stories where the truth never catches up with the lie", Fitzwater writes. The Times defended the story, and most of the media repeated it, with a laudable exception or...