THE BUYING OF CONGRESS.

• Author: Overby, Peter
• Position: Review

THE BUYING OF CONGRESS by Charles Lewis and the Center for Public Integrity New York, Avon Books, $25

When Kenneth Starr sent his report to Congress this summer, President Clinton's relationship with Monica Lewinsky wasn't the only one he deemed noteworthy.

In what Starr labeled the "President's Day [February 19] Break-up," the intern was worried about the relationship. She went, uninvited, to the Oval Office. The president tried to call it quits. She argued; he insisted. As she left, she later told the grand jury, Clinton was on the phone with "a sugar grower in Florida whose name, according to Ms. Lewinsky, was something like `Fanuli.'" Starr tells us it was Alfonso Fanjul, of the sugar-baron Fanjuls of Palm Beach, and that Clinton and Fanjul talked for 22 minutes. Alfie Fanjul and his brother, Jose, have a soft-money tag team: Alfie is one of the Democrats' top donors; Jose gives hundreds of thousands to the G.O.P.

Even for a president, some relationships are less expendable than others.

These kinds of lasting relationships are the stuff of The Buying of the Congress, the latest and most comprehensive work from Charles Lewis and the Center for Public Integrity. Lewis is the Clark Kent of the money-and-politics beat--modest, dogged, and with the Center's investigators backing him up, able to leap the Federal Election Commission building in a single bound. Buying is the center's first book since Lewis was blessed as a genius by the MacArthur Foundation. It's further evidence that in today's Washington journalism, nobody else works as hard at investigating the twin roles of money and influence.

The Buying of the Congress does have a few shortcomings. Four hundred pages can hold a lot of sordid episodes, but not enough detail to capture Congress in all its glory. Compared to Brooks Jackson's Honest Graft (revised edition: Washington, D.C., Farragut Publishing Co., 1990)--the tale of how Tony Coehlo and the Democrats pursued campaign funds straight into the S&L crisis, and still, I believe, one of the best on the subject--this isn't a story with a strong narrative. Potential investigations, potential books zip by as Lewis rattles off case after case of Congress' attentiveness to its benefactors' needs. One of the book's most intriguing features, an appendix of "Top Ten Career Patrons of Congressional Leaders," cries out for a chapter of its own.

That said, The Buying of the Congress does its job more thoroughly than anything that's come...