Time Present, Time Past: A Memoir.

• Author: Cooper, Matthew

There is, of course, much to admire about Bill Bradley. As has been noted often, he's plugged away at a number of dull but important issues. In the mid-eighties he fostered a bipartisan consensus that the tax code should - and, more importantly, could - be shorn of its worst excesses, despite the entreaties of encrusted lobbies. Bradley's tax reform was the best kind of political alchemy. He got pols - Ronald Reagan, Dan Rostenkowski, and Bob Dole, to name a few - to do the right thing. Tax reform withered away in the late eighties and early nineties, but that is not Bradley's fault. He's not a part of either of the left and right choruses that want to muck up the tax code with deductions for college tuition (Robert Reich) or treat capital gains differently (all Republicans). On the issue of taxes, Bradley has stayed pure.

Purity, in fact, is at the heart of Bradley's public persona. Since adolescence, he has cultivated the image of someone who is thoughtful and pure of heart. His athletic ability, combined with his academic skill, made him a national celebrity at a young age. John McPhee's book on the Princeton basketball star, A Sense of Where You Are, chronicled Bradley's dedication to his craft - the relentless hours of putting weights in his shoes to perfect his jump shots, of putting on blinders to perfect his dribbling. The book also established him in the public mind as pensive, reflective.

Bradley never sought to quash that persona. Rather, he fueled it. In his likable memoir Life on the Run, Bradley reflected on race, money, and fame as he took readers inside the world of professional sports. It was a good book, but it was not a self-deprecating book - except in the way that people use self-deprecation as a form of self-promotion. When Bradley wrote that he wasn't good at small talk or didn't like a lot of hoopla, he was, doubtless, being honest. But he was also telegraphing that he was thoughtful.

When Bradley announced his pending retirement from the U.S. Senate last year, his tone was more than self-consciously thoughtful. It had become self-righteous. He managed to quote both Bertholt Brecht and Robert Frost. In the days after his retirement, he condemned both parties, triangulating himself above the fray. Republicans, said Bradley, believe that "government is the source of all evil," while Democrats "distrust the market and prefer the bureaucrat they know to the consumer they can't control." This is hyperbole, not insight...