IN 1989, WHEN ANTHONY LAKE was toiling as a professor at Mount Holyoke College in Massachusetts, he published a well-received book about U.S. policy toward Nicaragua entitled Somoza Falling. Among the explanations he offered for the Carter administration’s slow response to the Sandinistas’ rise was a weak CIA. “It is essential,” wrote Lake, “that the director of Central Intelligence be an official who is prepared to present a president with unpleasant information. When the director is a loyalist more than an analyst, an enforcer of the president’s ideology rather than a skeptical and independent figure, the result can be disastrous.”

Fast-forward eight years, and those two sentences take on new meaning. Far from the ivory tower now, Lake is Bill Clinton’s nominee to be director of central intelligence. And one of the many questions swirling around him is whether, after four years as the president’s national security adviser, he can make the transition from ideological loyalist to skeptical analyst.