Spin Cycle: Inside the Clinton Propaganda Machine.

• Author: Cooper, Matthew

First, the caveats. I covered the White House full time from 1993 to 1996 and I'm friendly with many of the people in this book, including the author. My wife, who used to work for the Clintons, gets a couple of mentions in here. And I get a pat on the back for a scandal scooplet -- getting the White House to reveal that it had long known about Dick Morris' second mistress, the one with whom he had a child. So mine isn't, in the traditional book-review sense, an objective view.

That said, this is a solid read buttressed by a terrific amount of reporting. Kurtz has delved deeply into White House-press relations in the Clinton era. And while the title of the book focuses on the administration side of the equation, Kurtz scrutinizes both sides of the podium. There's the White House, obsessed with controlling the story and containing the damage from the latest scandal. And then there's the press corps -- afraid always of getting scooped on the latest scandal. As is true of almost any issue that one explores in depth, it's a complicated story. There are no villains and no saints.

Take Mike McCurry. He's got qualities that make him an ideal press secretary. He's well informed; he fights for the press within the administration. It was McCurry who lobbied for reporters to spend more time with Clinton in small, off-the-record sessions -- something that Clinton had resisted and continues somewhat inexplicably to believe, despite his considerable charms, is a waste of his time. (Having been in some of those, I think they're good for all sides) Still, even a straight shooter like McCurry can wander into the gray zone. At one briefing, he fails to mention what he knows to be true -- that he had personally coached Texas oilman Truman Arnold on how to respond to press inquiries about whether Arnold had been personally solicited by the president. It's not quite a he, but it's pretty close. It seems like a small matter but it's a telling instance of the administration's larger difficulties with the truth. Just look at the Al Gore imbroglio. First, the veep only remembered making a few fundraising calls. Oops. Then it turned out to be 46 calls. First they were just for the DNC. Shucks. Then it turned out to be for the Clinton-Gore re-election campaign as well -- an important legal distinction. On the Buddhist temple affair, only under duress did Gore aides come up with the slippery phrase that it was a...