Somoza Falling.

• Author: Massing, Michael

Somoza Falling. An >;thony Lake. Houghton Mifflin, $18. 95. Few events in recent times have been hashed over as frequently as the Nicaraguan revolution.

Anybody choosing to write about it now, ten years after the fact, should have a compelling reason. Anthony Lake offers his in the preface to his book. A veteran of the State Department, Lake describes how he left Washington in 1981 to teach at Mount Holyoke College, only to find that his students had a seriously twisted view of how U.S. foreign policy is made. He wrote >;this book to help set them straight. "What does a member of the National Security Council staff do every day?" he asks. "What is it like to be an assistant secretary?" Lake uses Somoza's overthrow as a case study.

Somoza Failing reads like a handbook for bright graduate students intent on entering the foreign service. Worried about telephone protocol? Somoza Falling offers some useful guidelines, ("The junior officer defers to the senior by coming on the line first, so the latter is not kept waiting. >; This requires very nice judgement by the secretaries who initially place and receive most calls.") Concerned about getting around the State Department? Somoza Falling provides a floor-byfloor guide. (If an official is sighted carrying a memo "in an ascending elevator, the text of a draft is probably being delivered to some superion If in a corridor, the hurried official is probably off to persuade a counterpan in some other bureau to clear such a draft before it can go upstairs.") Since the windows at the >; State Department don't open, offices can grow uncomfortably warm, but Somoza Falling offers a solution: "An enterprising occupant may be able to adjust the heating with a bent paper clip. Bribery or pleading may elicit a window key from one of the maintenance people. . . ." There are tips on parking (country directors are just senior enough to get a coveted spot in the basement lot), food at the cafeteria ("somewhere between edible and enjoyable"), and weekend attire (sport shins and tennis shorts are >;acceptable, blue jeans are not).

Lake introduces us to a series of mid-level bureaucrats, each of them heroic in his own small way. Patricia Haigh, a junior economics officer at the embassy in Managua, inadvertentIy gets caught in a firefight, then rushes back to the embassy with dirt on her face to announce that there's "a war out there." Deputy chief of mission Tom O'Donnell is "a goodhumored, unflappable professional,"...