The Insider’s Insider : COUNSEL TO THE PRESIDENT: <i> By Clark Clifford</i> ; <i> with Richard Holbrooke</i> ; <i> (Random House: $25; 693 pp.) </i>

This fine and valuable Washington memoir is not history according to a gifted and impartial historian, but history according to a great liberal who saw men and events through a certain prism. It has its biases, of which more later, but they are redeemed by the fact that this is first-person testimony from a man of enormous and focused energy who was there in the room when many of the political decisions that shaped the modern postwar world were being made.

First-person history is something history needs more of, William Safire once said--and that is this book’s great contribution. (Or, as Clifford and his talented collaborator, Richard Holbrooke, might put it, “On a crisp, bright winter morning in January of 1990 I breakfasted with the eloquent and pugnacious New York Times columnist William Safire who, according to my notes, mentioned in passing a fact that would linger: ‘First person history is the one thing history doesn’t have enough of!’--this uttered with his usual conviction, and a certain colloquial zip.” It’s that kind of book, written with precision in a kind of modern-stately style.)

Some people want to go to the party. Clifford, for a quarter-century beginning in 1945, was of the small group in Washington who threw it. He mixed drinks in the smoking car on the train to Fulton, Mo., as Truman played poker with Churchill and chatted about the Iron Curtain speech. He helped create the Truman Doctrine and the Marshall Plan. He played a critical role in the U.S. decision to recognize and support the state of Israel. He was John Kennedy’s lawyer, helping him fight plagiarism charges and survive the Bay of Pigs. He was Lyndon Johnson’s Secretary of Defense and, as one of the fabled Wise Men, tried to get L.B.J. to get out of Vietnam. The stories he tells are of great moment.

His recounting of how the United States came to recognize Israel is tantalizing--it was young White House aide Clifford toe to toe in the Oval Office against the revered George C. Marshall--and surprising. There is no Jewish tailor here, telling his friend Harry at a pivotal moment that the Jews of the world, having suffered through Hitler, have a simple right to a homeland. Instead, a Truman generally inclined to help the Jews seems to allow himself to be maneuvered into recognition.

Clifford even seems to have overstated the President’s commitment to opponents of recognition in order to make the outcome he sought appear inevitable. He reminds us that a significant segment of American Jews--including Arthur Sulzberger of the New York Times and Eugene Meyer of the Washington Post, opposed Zionism, and almost the entire American foreign-policy Establishment, from Secretary of State Marshall to Undersecretary Robert Lovett and including Dean Acheson, Charles Bohlen, George Kennan and Defense Secretary James Forrestal--opposed recognition. Marshall, who heatedly told the President that if he took this decision he would vote against him in the next election, broke with tradition to record explicit minutes of the meeting, sure that history would find him in the right.

All this is riveting. Still, Clifford communicates the passion of the disagreement somewhat better than the content: He doesn’t fully explain why he felt it both morally right and in America’s interests to recognize Israel, nor does he do full justice to the arguments against.

Clifford paints the New Frontier in broad and loving strokes. His Kennedy is a fallible prince, his Camelot a territory to be celebrated by the campfire but left, essentially, unexplored. He offers an unsurpassed portrait of the tension in the Johnson White House during Vietnam, and a knowing and compassionate portrait of Lyndon Johnson. And he gives the fullest account I have seen of the tragedy of Defense Secretary James Forrestal.

(Note to mystery- and screen-writers: This is a fascinating story, still not known or told in its entirety, of how a brilliantly successful and influential cabinet member, suffering under the delusion that somebody was after him--and maybe somebody was, or some thing --was placed in the psychiatric section of a military hospital where he was not allowed to see visitors, and from an unguarded window of which he jumped to his death. He left behind a poetry anthology from which he had copied by hand the “Chorus from Ajax” by Sophocles: “Better to die, and sleep/ The never waking sleep, than linger on/ And dare to live, when the soul’s life is gone.”)

Clifford is a self-assured and easygoing ideologue, an old-time liberal who wouldn’t be embarrassed to show up in a limousine, or to take the attitude when America gave Ronald Reagan double landslides that the country is just a little bit behind those of us in Pamela Harriman’s drawing room, and America just ought to catch up!

His politics reflect biases and viewpoints that once were known as standard Eastern elitist: Robert Kennedy is given more than his due, Reagan less, supporters of the American anti-communist movement of the 1950s were fascists, Speaker of the House Joseph Martin spoke primitive know-nothingism when he began the session after the 1946 Republican sweep saying, “There is no room in the government of the United States for any who prefer the Communistic system,” which to most of us these days sound not ominous but commonsensical.

Vaclav Havel feels the same of his government; so does Lech Walesa. (Was McCarthy vulgar and demagogic? Yes indeed. But in the long run his work did more damage to the right, by leaving an entire ensuing generation embarrassed to call itself or be vigorously anti-communist, than the left, a point Clifford exploits without admitting.)

Clifford has been lauded and labeled as an insider’s insider, a member of long standing of the Establishment; and in fact a certain smugness--an unconscious assumption that when he and his friends were pulling the switches the right sort of people were in power--pervades the book.

He thought he had the right, in his young manhood, in his late 30s and early 40s, to have a significant say in the national security of an exhausted and imperilled nation. I don’t mean he shouldn’t have had it. I mean I wish he’d acknowledged and explored it. Young men in the White House almost always think they’re the ones who should be there--I think of the 35-year-old chief of staff Hamilton Jordan, and the young men around Donald Regan and John Sununu.

The right to power is a fascinating and, I think, largely unexplored Washington phenomenon. One always wonders: Why do they think they’re the right ones? Why do they want such a big say?

And there is a certain unthought-out quality to Clifford’s oft-quoted statement, when he went into private law practice, that he always told new clients when they signed up with him that the one thing they were not buying was influence.

I once spent an afternoon with a comparable Washington force named Edward Bennett Williams, and it was clear from how everyone treated him, from the Congressman who came to our table all hearty deference to the waiter who nodded like a pasha, that Edward Bennett Williams didn’t have to say anything to be powerful, to have influence: He just had to sit. Clifford was the same.

Of the recent scandal involving accusations that Clifford wittingly fronted for an unsavory group of foreign investors in the purchase of a Washington-based bank, much has been written and broadcast. But maybe the most interesting point is that a recent basically negative “60 Minutes” piece on the scandal was followed by a basically positive “60 Minutes” piece on Clifford’s life and career. I’ve never seen “60 Minutes” give you two bites of the apple. That’s influence.

I wish he had talked more, or more forthcomingly, about the nature of such influence, about how it’s got and kept. In fact, I wish this alert and deeply experienced man had dug deeper in this book and told us the secrets he may have learned, not the secrets of John Kennedy’s bedroom or Lyndon Johnson’s bathroom but the big secrets: What is the engine of ambition? What are the things that ruin men? What does the presence or absence of a good marriage add to or take from a career? And when you’re near the end of a long and dense-with-movement life, do you sit back and think the most important thing was the kids?

But I guess that would be a different kind of book, and he would be a different kind of man, a philosopher instead of a gifted bureaucrat, problem solver and governmental force.