Whispering In Clinton's Left Ear

Reich's diary is fun but frothy

By Craig Staats/AllPolitics

WASHINGTON (April 24) -- As one of the first Clinton White House refugees to write his memoirs, former Labor Secretary Robert Reich has a natural advantage.

Locked In The Cabinet

By Robert B. Reich
Alfred A. Knopf, Publisher
327 pp., $25
Random House AudioBook, $24

He can produce a witty "inside" look at Clinton's first four years, as he has done, and get his version of the internecine tug of wars out before anyone else.

Going first lets Reich portray events in a way that makes him look both remarkably prescient and a voice of common sense, trying to pull Clinton away from the evil influences of people like Dick Morris and Alan Greenspan.

But Reich's diary, as direct and engaging as it is, is too cute by half. It lurches from issues that Reich deeply cares about, like the income gap between rich and poor, to the search for his next funny story, like his pre-employment drug test before he took over at the Department of Labor.

Still, 'Locked in the Cabinet" is a worthwhile read, because Reich is a good storyteller. He opens a window into what it's like to be, as he modestly puts it, "the secretary of a minor department."

He makes us care about the people at the bottom of a rapidly changing economy and tells us why the nation needs to invest more in helping people adapt to those changes.

He was one of the champions of the minimum-wage increase that Clinton signed in August 1996. "Our side doesn't have much political heft," he writes. "There's no National Association of Minimum-Wage Workers, and people who earn $4.25 an hour don't have spare cash to donate to political action committees.

He is on point, too, about the culture of the workplace. When he travels the country, talking to workers, Reich administers what he calls "the pronoun test."

He asks workers about their company, and if they describe the company as "they" or "them," Reich says, that's proof of a psychological divide between workers and management. If it's "we" and "us," Reich says, it's a sign that people have a stake in their company's success.

Reich is a genuine "Friend of Bill," though he says that group numbers in the tens of thousands. The two men have known each other since their days as Rhodes scholars at Oxford.

Reich is frustrated by Clinton, but ultimately loyal. He rationalizes Clinton's swing to the right and pursuit of "swing voters" in preparation for 1996, even as he detests the influence of consultant Morris. Reich wonders, all through his Cabinet stint, how much Clinton will give up to reach agreement with the Republicans.

After Clinton, the dominant character in these pages is Fed Chairman Alan Greenspan, whom Reich calls "the most powerful man in the world."

Reich recounts a pleasantly bland conversation over lunch with Greenspan in the chairman's private dining room, then imagines what a real one-on-one debate with him would be like.

In their mythical confrontation, Reich asks Greenspan why, in the interest of stamping out inflation, he would put the interests of bond traders and lenders above other Americans.

Greenspan's imagined answer: "Because I'm a capitalist and capitalism is driven by the filthy rich. They make their money off bonds. Your constituents are just plain filthy. They have to work for a living." Their dialogue degenerates further. In his dream, Reich ends up calling Greenspan a "robber-baron pimp" and Greenspan retorts with "Bolshevik dwarf." (Reich stands just four foot-ten and he tells plenty of short jokes on himself.)

Traditionally, one job of Democratic secretaries of Labor has been to reach out to organized labor. Reich does his share of that, but big labor comes off badly, too.

Some of its leaders are more interested, Reich says, in trying to protect workers' places in a fading smokestack economy than in promoting the retraining that will win them good-paying jobs in the new technology- and information-based economy.

On a couple of points, Reich's diary excerpts have him looking remarkably perceptive. Early on, he says the Clinton health care plan is too complicated for average people to understand and that leaves it vulnerable to attack. Later, of course, the plan blows up in the president's face.

And Reich recounts a conversation with Newt Gingrich in November 1995 in which Reich predicts Republicans will be blamed if they shut down the government in the budget dispute. They did, and they were.

If you thought Bob Woodward is adept at recreating extended conversations, you'll love Reich's extensive use of the technique. He offers no explanation for his prowess, aside from one throw-away line: "When I especially wanted to remember what occurred I jotted notes to myself, usually late at night." It doesn't inspire much confidence in the voluminous quotes.

And in some of his best anecdotes -- for example, how Reich convinced four lawmakers in July 1994 to change their vote on an appropriations measure that would have shifted money from job training and workplace safety to neighborhood health centers -- he leaves out their names, so this "inside" account doesn't take you very far inside the government at all. Maybe Reich didn't want to burn too many bridges, in case he decides to return to Washington after his sons go off to college.

In rushing into print so soon after leaving the administration, Reich trips over a few facts, too. His entry for July 31, 1996, begins: "The minimum-wage bill-signing has come and gone." In fact, Clinton didn't sign the minimum wage bill until Aug. 20.

Ultimately, Reich decides to leave the Cabinet and return to his wife and sons in Boston and a teaching job at Brandeis University. The death of Commerce Secretary Ron Brown is his catalyst for leaving, a symbol of the "everyday loss" his family experiences while Reich labors away in Washington.

In his final meeting with the president, Secretary Reich lectures Clinton one last time about the impact of deficit reduction on the nation's poor.

"I've got to deal with these Republicans," Clinton answers.