THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1996, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Sunday, February 4, 1996 TAG: 9602010387
SECTION: COMMENTARY PAGE: J2 EDITION: FINAL
TYPE: Book Review
SOURCE: BY TIM WARREN
LENGTH: Medium: 91 lines
TIME PRESENT, TIME PAST
A Memoir
BILL BRADLEY
Alfred A. Knopf. 442 pp. $25.
Somebody should keep Bill Bradley out of the library. All of that reading might have made him smarter, but it has also made him a nerd - and a pretty boring one as well.
That is the inescapable conclusion one reaches after reading Time Present, Time Past: A Memoir. Bradley adopts a curiously distant tone throughout, one more appropriate for a term paper than a work that is supposed to be self-revealing. When in doubt, Bill Bradley hits the books, and they become an effective (and limiting) shield.
When Ernestine Bradley was diagnosed as having breast cancer in 1992, her husband admits, ``I coped with my great anxiety by reading scientific articles about the disease and the various regimes of treatment.'' That response is understandable to anyone who has faced the potential death of a spouse, but Bradley's recounting doesn't move.
Nor does much else of Time Present and for that Bradley has no one else to blame. The Democratic senator from New Jersey has led a distinguished and fascinating life: All-American basketball player at Princeton, Rhodes scholar, pro athlete with the New York Knicks and, since 1978, a member of ``the greatest deliberative body in the world.''
In the Senate, he has proved to be thoughtful and substantive, two characteristics that automatically put him in the minority there. It may be, though, that others, such as John McPhee, whose landmark profile of Bradley appeared in the New Yorker in the mid-1960s, write about him best. This book is depressingly bland.
I suspect that's because, in addition to Bradley's disposition to use books to explain everything, this volume was begun at a time when he was considering running for president. Bradley explains its birth in 1992 this way:
``I felt an urge to declare myself - to get beyond the politician's pragmatic ambiguity to the clarity of the facts as I saw them. I wanted to sum up my position at mid-passage of my life . . . More than anything, it is my attempt to come to terms with our country, its history, its people, its problems, its potential, its current circumstance, even as I struggle with where I am in my own life and in my career as a public servant.''
This isn't the Bill Bradley story: The senator has the whole world in his hands. Thus, we get endless generalizations, tepid characterizations and careful navigation through anything that could be controversial (and, for the reader, interesting). Bradley is too private a person to reveal much, and too careful to offend anyone.
His chapter on the Senate is partly a history of the institution and partly a recounting of his own time there, and it barely draws blood. He concludes the chapter by describing the Senate as ``that rectangular room with the swinging oak-bronze-and-glass doors, where bombastic voices and soft-spoken words of wisdom have an equal right to the floor.'' That's telling 'em, Bill.
And on it goes: chapters on his first campaign, the media, politics and money, the American West, the unions, American Indians, immigration, race, religion. We learn that Bradley isn't afraid to confront these serious issues, that they trouble him, but that he thinks America has the wherewithal to handle them.
Here's how he feels about the many recent immigrants in this country: ``If we can absorb these new influences that make us a world society, even as we take note of the perspectives they offer about who we are as Americans, we can truly show the world the future.''
Even as Bradley writes about more personal matters - growing up in small-town Missouri, his religious crises of faith, tracing his Scotch-Irish roots - we never get the sense that this book is a true memoir. It's an extended piece of campaign literature, full of platitudes and predictable, faintly liberal characterizations.
And not only is Time Present earnest and humorless, it's also disingenuous. Bradley mentions in a brief afterword his August 1995 decision not to run for re-election. Why? ``Thinking about the events you have experienced, and developing perspective about them, in some way completes them, and finding the words to express that perspective brings about a sense of closure.'' In other words, Bradley is leaving the Senate not because of misgivings about himself or the institution, but because he has been thinking about his life. After the buildup, we deserve better.
Bill Bradley can write a good memoir. His 1976 book, Life on the Run, was an engaging and insightful look at his life in pro basketball. But then he wasn't serious and he wasn't writing about big issues. He was writing about himself. MEMO: Tim Warren is a writer who lives in Silver Spring, Md. ILLUSTRATION: Photo
by CNB