Advise and Somnolent

THERE IS A FUNDAMENTAL injustice in the publishing world. Books by famous people get on the bookstands. They are promoted. Book reviews are written about them and people buy them. Memoirs of political figures usually fit into this category.

Roll Call, by Sen. William S. Cohen is in that desultory tradition. This "liberal" Republican from Maine portrays the mix between tedium and excitement that makes up a Senator's life. He is best known as one of the Republicans on the House Judiciary Committee who voted to impeach Richard Nixon in 1974. A senator since 1978, he has few accomplishments to his name.

Roll Call is a journal of Cohen's first year in the Senate. He recollects the important committee hearings and votes as well as speeches before constituents and his family life. Thrown in with this are reflections on the difference between the Senate and the House of Representatives, the problems that public recognition brings, the control the staff has over a Senator, and the importance of the seniority system in the Senate. Cohen attempts to coalesce all of these things to form a general portrait of the life of a Senator. He sets high goals for himself. He tells us that he hopes his book will serve as a "lens that will allow the viewer to see the flowing metamorphosis of power, people, and events."

By most accounts, this effort falls short. The finer journalistic works on the Senate have interesting vignettes and biographical portraits, while the political science books have some kind of historical background. Lacking both, Roll Call is an anomaly--a 300-page roller coaster that leaves us exactly where we started.

Some of Roll Call is worthwhile. Cohen succeeds best when he describes the legislative bargaining from which we get our laws. In his entry for April 9, Cohen tells how the manueverings of Senate Majority leader Robert Byrd and Senator Dennis Deconcini defeated a prayer-in-school amendment proposed by Jesse Helms. The two democrats made Helms offer his amendment to court legislation that they knew would never pass the House of Representatives.

Throughout the book, Cohen talks about President Carter's lobbying on behalf of the SALT Two treaties. His entry for June 18 describes a speech President Carter gave to a joint session of congress on the treaty, Many Republicans boycotted the speech and pages had to be used to fill in the empty places. Although his speech was well-prepared, Carter received little applause.

In another part of the book, Cohen talks about Secretary of Defense Harold Brown's tactics in testifying before the Senate Armed Services Committee on the SALT Two treaties. Senators are given only ten minutes to question a witness and rarely stay at meetings to hear other Senators' questions. Thus, by stringing out the simplest answers to several minutes apiece, Brown was able to avoid answering any difficult questions.

There are several other interesting moments. Cohen must play by an older Senator's rules in a basketball game because of the seniority system. Cohen's former colleagues in the House of Representatives warn him not to become cold and distant like other Senators. Somebody spray paints Cohen's car in what he describes as a typical outbreak of anger against a public figure.

ASIDE FROM THESE few moments, Roll Call flounders. The diary form forces Cohen to describe items of marginal interest at great length. His descriptions of trips back home are particulary dry. Not content merely to tell us that constituent services interfere with the legislative process, he must go into great depth about those services. In his entry for May 19, Cohen describes a typical trip back home, two speeeches, lunch with one group, dinner with another, and visits with relatives and supporters--neither exciting nor enlightening. In an attempt to avoid angering anyone, his descriptions are all painfully complimentary. Cyrus Vance is a man of great "sincerity;" Ronald Reagan has "personal charm;" and former Senator John Culver is knowledgeable and articulate. Everyone in government seems a saint caught in a crazy system.

COHEN SPENDS a great deal of space showing himself as a person. We learn of his basketball ability, his youth, and his love for his family. This fluff may make good campaign literature in the future, but does nothing for the reader. In some parts, Cohen carries it to an extreme. Poetry, Cohen says, plays an important part in his life, and he tells us that a passage from Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance convinced him not to run for Senator two years earlier in 1976.

Cohen is a poet and his first book was a collection of poetry (Of Sons and Seasons), But his poetry does more than influence his life, it infects his prose. His analogies are vivid. He describes the arms race as "a combination of poker and chess. The movement of fire-breathing, life-annihilating pawns on a global board of a spinning planet." At another point he says, "the news accounts of congressional travel plans rubbed like shards of glass in an oozing wound." His fear of losing his campaign is "a gray moth of doubt that had ballooned into a terrifying pterodactyl whose razored jaws were shredding what remained of my confidence."

When we can get past this heavy-handed language, Cohen's book is not bad. But we should expect more from a literate politician. Cohen concludes that he has been recording events without reflecting enough about them. He should have noticed this before he wrote the book. Perhaps some day he will reflect seriously on the political process. Until then, however, we must look elsewhere for an adequate account of life in the United States Senate.