Trust Betrayed: Inside the AARP.

• Author: Longman, Philip J.

by Dale Van Atta Regnery Publishing, $24.95

Suddently, the juice seems to have gone out of the so-called third rail of American politics. Messing with Social Security used to be considered political suicide in Washington; "touch it, and you die" went the conventional wisdom. But now politicians across the political spectrum are openly calling for fundamental reform of what was once America's most popular social program. This spring, for example, President Clinton used a town hall meeting in Kansas City to launch what he hopes will become a "national debate" on Social Security; the Senate passed a resolution calling for privatization of at least part of the program, and even Daniel Patrick Moynihan, one of the program's staunchest supporters, introduced legislation calling for partial replacement of Social Security payments with private accounts.

What's behind the new politics of Social Security? There are many obvious factors, including the aging of the baby boom generation, the increasingly wide-spread and profitable participation by middle-class Americans in mutual fund investing, and the evermore dire reports by Social Security's own trustees about the program's dismal future. But there is another factor that has received far less attention: The political decline of the American Association of Retired Persons.

For nearly a generation, the AARP has been among the most feared lobbies in Washington. With over 30 million members, the AARP is the second largest organization in the United States, after the Catholic Church. Its flagship magazine, Modern Maturity, has a larger circulation than Time, Newsweek, and U.S. News & World Report combined. If AARP were a for-profit company, its total revenues would rank it in the top half of the Fortune 500. Not surprisingly, a 1997 Fortune article called AARP's executive director, Horace Deets, "Washington's Second Most Powerful Man"

But inside AARP's lavish headquarters, staff members are trying hard to keep the lid on a secret many Washington insiders already suspect: The AARP is losing membership fast, and as a result, is losing its ability to take strong political positions.

This is by far the most important revelation in Dale Van Atta's new expose of the AARP. An investigative reporter who earned his stripes working for the Jack Undersign column, Van Atta spent years probing the AARP, in the process developing a network of disgruntled former employees who provided him with a treasure chest of...