&quot. . . BECAUSE HE’S JUST MY BILL”;

You never have to pan this stream too long to find a glittering nugget. There’s one every few pages, popping up when you, and apparently the author, least expect it. To show the president’s lighter side, for example, Morris discusses plans for a Clinton family vacation in 1995. Morris had conducted a massive national survey to identify the swing voters the president would need for reelection, and he put the data in service of deciding how the commander in chief should recreate. Crunch, crunch went the numbers. “Camping out,” Morris concluded, “was a favorite for swing voters.”

The president should camp out.

The president was incredulous: “This was carrying things too far.” Morris recounts a couple of not terribly funny presidential wisecracks about his pollster’s overambitious polling. “I deserved the ribbing,” Morris writes sheepishly.

But the most startling point is quickly passed over: The president did, in fact, camp out. He dragged his family to a national park, where they hiked and slept in tents, and where the president himself could be photographed jiggling in his Izod shirt astride some loping, sedated steed. A swing-voter vacation! And worse, it left the approval ratings untouched. Morris writes: ” ‘That’s the first vacation I’ve taken that didn’t help me in the polls,’ Clinton said irritably upon his return.”

This story, like so much of the book, is offered to us with seeming insouciance, as if Morris isn’t quite aware of what the words mean — as if he doesn’t know that he has confirmed, yet again, the picture of a president afraid even to draw a breath without the approval of polls.

Readers will have to decide for themselves how far to trust Morris’s innocent tone. He is a smart man, or at least a man with an energetic intelligence, but as a memoirist he is not particularly self-aware. In long expository passages, he strives to convince us of Bill Clinton’s prodigious virtues — his lack of vanity, his depth of feeling, his indifference to political calculation. (“Lincoln and Clinton, it seemed to me, had a lot in common.”) But then the passages end and we run headlong into an anecdote that proves quite the opposite.

This discontinuity is all the stranger given the self-consciousness of the relationship between the two men. One of their conversations was so important that Morris relates it three times. “I know we both have a duty to talk about this relationship,” the president told him. “It’s very likely unique in American history for a relationship like this to exist.” This is not just another stretch of the president’s imagination, like his pronouncement a few years ago that he was more familiar with farming than any previous president (forgetting such professional farmers as Jefferson, Jackson, Truman, et al.). The relationship was — is — unique, if only because two men of such character have never before operated successfully from the White House. At times it’s almost as if the Duke and the Dauphin had been lifted from the pages of Huckleberry Finn and handed the reins of power.

Morris reveled in the relationship. Both men, of course, are famously and strenuously heterosexual, but it must be said that the author’s account verges on the homoerotic. There are volcanic rages, despairing estrangements, abject apologies, sighing reconciliations. In spirit they were twins, Morris writes, but “what wasn’t the same were our bodies.” To the Munchkin-sized pollster, the president looms as a “Sequoia”: “six feet two inches of oozing charm.” When the president “reaches out” to him, it “soothes my hurt.” Sometimes, it is the president who is hurt: “I get the sense,” Clinton pouts, “that you’re not interested in talking about Whitewater with me.”

At first, the president keeps their relationship secret from his staff. “I called you as soon as I got rid of those guys,” he says into the phone. Morris understands: “He wanted to keep me for himself and not share me with his staff.” But then days go by and the president doesn’t call! “I felt intoxicated,” Morris says. “I wanted more and more and more. I called Clinton day after day. I left messages He didn’t return the calls.” And then, at last, the president does call: “A fix, rushing, warming, stimulating, enticing, addicting.” Who can blame him? “Clinton has bags under his eyes. I like them. They remind me of JFK.” Nowhere, however, does Morris mention the president’s feet.

This passion explains why Morris is always, for public purposes anyway, willing to extend the president the benefit of the doubt. There has been talk — surely you’ve heard it — that the president avoids taking responsibility for his mistakes. Dick Morris knows the reason: “He doesn’t articulate his responsibility because his mind is so filled with self-criticism.” Ah. Some people have questioned the sincerity of the president’s frequent public displays of emotion, as when Clinton was inconveniently filmed leaving Ron Brown’s memorial service wiping away a non-existent tear. Welllll . . . “In private he is more shy and reserved, usually keeping his feelings within.” But “in public Clinton is deeply emotional.”

Occasionally, Morris raises the art of euphemism to unprecedented heights. Is the president indecisive, as detractors have claimed? He may not be a snap decisionmaker, but “he has an almost Oriental way of waiting until the forces move, as they naturally will, in the direction he prefers. .. If he feels the force is with him, he’ll wait for the force to produce results. If he feels things are moving against him, he’ll usually wait then too. . . . Only when all else fails does he take direct, personal action.” From the Ozarks, our first Zen president.

But where does euphemism end and outright mendacity begin? And who is fooling whom? The president is often accused of “flip-flopping,” as we know. The problem, Morris explains, arises from leaks. They often convey the impression that he has decided something when he hasn’t: “If he ‘reversed’ the decision he had actually never made he was accused of flip-flopping.” Morris describes an Oval Office meeting in 1993: “The president was livid because a story had leaked on April 15 that he was considering a valueadded tax. . . . Clinton was determined not to raise taxes again that year. . . . He also felt that a valueadded tax was dishonest. . . .” Even under the kindest interpretation, the levels of guile here are dizzying. Clinton himself publicly raised the possibility of a value-added tax in early 1993, at a town meeting in Ohio. He talked about the idea as late as May 27. Is Morris lying to us, or was Clinton lying to Morris?

No matter. After all, we are here in the funhouse world of “spin” — itself a favorite Washington euphemism for “lie,” or, more charitably, “shading the truth.” “Reporters like to use the word ‘spin’ to describe what political consultants do,” Morris writes. “I don’t spin anything. I put new substance and ideas before the voters. . . . I take the general themes from the candidate and then find new specific issues to illustrate them. This is not spin. It’s substance.”

This is spin. As a political consultant, Morris is a master manipulator of surfaces, and in Bill Clinton he found his perfect politician. Their collaboration began in Arkansas, early in both their careers. One incident in particular suggested to Morris the immensity of his client’s gifts. It is a splendid story, worth repeating. Clinton had been defeated for reelection after his first term as governor, largely because he had doubled car-license fees. He was determined to run again. Reading the polls, Morris recommended a commercial in which the candidate would apologize for the fee increase. Clinton, citing a vague commitment to “principle,” refused to apologize. This deeply impressed Morris, who is impressionable. But Clinton agreed to film the ad with his own words. Soulfully he addressed the camera:

“When I became governor we had serious problems with our streets and roads, and I did support those [carlicense fee] increases to solve the problems. But it was a mistake because so many of you were hurt by it. And I’m really sorry about that.”

By his own account, Morris was floored. “I was amazed, just amazed,” he recalls. “I could never have scripted those lines. And he had stayed within his principles. He wouldn’t lie. He wouldn’t apologize. . . . But the voters would feel that they had heard an apology when he apologized for their pain.” One can see here the birth of Clintonism as we have come to know it. In his ad, the future president had fudged (he not only “supported those increases,” he rammed them through the legislature). He had misled (he said he was sorry but, somehow, wasn’t). And he had found a consultant who could watch it all and still testify that Bill Clinton “had stayed within his principles.”

As Morris writes: “We were a match.”

The strategy reached its perfection in 1995 and 1996, when the matched pair orchestrated perhaps the greatest political resuscitation in American history. Conventional wisdom has its own accounting for this comeback: Buoyed by a strong economy, the president adopted the essence of his adversaries’ popular agenda. He agreed to reform welfare and balance the federal budget in seven years. And he advanced a series of bite-sized initiatives like school uniforms and juvenile curfews, which, while essentially meaningless, nevertheless repudiated the left-wing meandering of his first two years and solidified his reformed image as a cultural conservative.

Morris agrees with the conventional wisdom, but his elaboration of it is definitive, even discounting for the self-aggrandizement that invariably enters in. And try as he might, he cannot obscure the essential cynicism of the enterprise.

Polling, of course, was at its heart. But don’t get the wrong idea: “Bill Clinton uses polls in an important and unique way. It’s not the way many suppose it to be: ‘What should I be for? What should I do?’ He knows that already. He wants to know how to get there, and he uses a poll to help him find out.” Plus it tells him where he’s going on his summer vacation.

Morris is at pains to refute the notion that Clinton is, as the phrase goes, “poll-driven.” His testimonies to Clinton’s political courage sound like Macaulay extolling Horatius at the Tiber bridge, if Macaulay had been a semi- literate political consultant. So florid is his praise that he occasionally sounds like Bill Clinton talking about himself.

But then Morris runs up against the hard evidence of his own anecdotes. He devotes a long chapter to those bite-sized, culturally conservatire initiatives that characterized the winning campaign. Each story is intended to paint a miniature profile in courage — a cameo in courage, you might say – – in which the president rises above partisan interests to do what’s right ” for the people.” You will recall how he “took on” the fearsome tobacco companies. “I fought hard to extend the values agenda,” Morris writes, “to include a ban on advertising tobacco products to teenagers.”

At first Clinton didn’t much like the idea. “It’ll cost me whatever chance I had in North Carolina,” he told Morris. “I’m most concerned about Kentucky and Tennessee. I need those states.”

The pollsters went to work. Soon the president was shown survey data from each tobacco state that demonstrated such a position would actually help him. Amazingly, his courage rose. “Clinton acted,” Morris concludes with a flourish.

But action was not always so easy. One of the more curious of the bitesized issues was a proposal to ban the sale of handguns to persons convicted of domestic violence. It seemed an issue made in focus-group heaven, almost too good to be true: Handguns + wifebeaters = a winner.

But the president again was wary. What about the NRA? His housing secretary, Henry Cisneros, worried about alienating rural voters; as a Texan, he understood the electoral prowess of crackers who slug their wives. The pollsters took to the phone banks once more. The president’s worries, Morris found, “had no basis in political reality.” Once more, the president’s steel hardened. “At our next meeting, the president approved the idea.”

Where to make the formal announcement was a dicier question. How about a meeting of the NAACP? No: too racially sensitive. Then perhaps one of those policeunion confabs the president so enjoyed? No again. “Police groups [said] they might not endorse Clinton because many policemen might be affected by this proposal.” (There goes the wife-beating cop vote!) The announcement “soon faded.” Sometimes it is hell being a New Democrat, especially a courageous one.

Even when the polls were with him, the president would not necessarily act. Morris discovered that 60 percent of Americans supported handing out condoms in high schools. Clinton liked the idea, if it were coupled with a program encouraging sexual abstinence. But in the end they decided to scuttle the proposal — unless support rose above 70 percent. Morris is unclear whether this is a profile in courage or another instance of the president’s ” pragmatism.”

The president, of course, hates the suggestion that he is unwilling to take risks, that he refuses to make courageous decisions. Many of the firsthand glimpses we are offered of him in Behind the Oval Office have him losing his temper over such talk. “He was red-faced as he yelled. . . . ‘I will not have decisions that I make’ — his fist now pounding his chair arm, keeping time with his words — ‘that take guts, that take courage, where I’m really risking everything, and have them transformed into’ — his lips curling into a sneer — ‘seamy, seedy, political decisions. . .'”

And so on. For four years, rumors have circulated about the ferocity of these presidential temper tantrums, and Morris’s book piles example upon vivid example. On those rare moments when he comes truly alive in Behind the Oval Office, the president is red-faced. The tantrums sometimes approach the kind normally associated with autistic children — except in the president’s case they are overlaid with self-righteousness and megalomania. When George Stephanopoulos mentions that White House staffers object to a bill the president is about to sign, Clinton erupts:

“Well, I get a vote, don’t I? I mean, I’m the president so I get a vote, don’t I? Don’t I? If there are people here who don’t like it, well, I’ve created seven and half million new jobs and maybe it’s time for them to go out and take some of them.”

The incident is noteworthy not only for its childishness but also for the president’s apparent belief that he created new jobs. It is of a piece with his account of negotiating budget-cutting provisions in the welfare bill with Senate majority leader Trent Lott. “He loved cutting off children,” Clinton shouted to Morris. “You should have seen his face. He was delighted that he could savage them, delighted.“

Contrast this picture of Lott with the president’s picture of himself. Clinton told Morris that “when he has to do things that hurt the poor — like budget cuts or welfare reform — he suffers physically with headaches and stomachaches.”

It’s hard to admire, much less love, a man so consumed in moral vanity. But with Dick Morris’s coaching, Bill Clinton became a man Dick Morris could love — and a man the country could tolerate. “It’s time,” Morris told Clinton in 1996, “to be almost the nation’s father, to speak as the father of the country, not as a peer and certainly not as its child.” And sure enough, “the more he presented himself as America’s father, the more he became it.”

Well, it’s a bit of a letdown after George Washington Clinton may not have become the father of his country, but even so, 1996 was a year of amazing transformations. If nothing else, it was the year, to borrow Morris’s terminology, when spin became substance. Or maybe substance became spin. Whatever. As this book proves, it was the year when many people could no longer distinguish between the two.

Senior Editor Andrew Ferguson’s book of essays, Fools’ Names, Fools’ Faces, is out in hardcover from Atlantic Monthly Press.