See Dick Run The Country

AS DICK MORRIS TELLS IT IN his new memoir, "Behind the Oval Office," he called up the president one day last August to lecture him on ways to improve his place in history. He told Bill Clinton that, barring a war, he would never rank in the "first tier" of presidents. "I broke the news to him gently," writes Morris. " "Okay'," said Clinton, who then ventured hopefully, " "[How about] second tier?' " Morris was starting to tell Clinton "the three big things and four medium things" he had to do to break out of the "third tier" when the president asked him to wait a second. He needed to get a paper and pen. " "Okay'," said Clinton when he returned to the phone. " "What are the big things?' "

Are we to believe this story? It could, of course, just be Morris's vast ego talking. The disgraced consultant claims he was able to reconstruct his private conversations with the president from memory. During these talks, it often appears that Morris was busy running the president's re-election campaign as well as much of the federal government. On the other hand, Clinton, ever eager to please, does worry deeply about his historic standing. And no one doubts that the president got a lot of advice from Morris, right up to the day, during the Democratic National Convention, when a supermarket tabloid revealed that his chief political adviser had been consorting with a call girl.

So it goes in Morris's $2.5 million Random House memoir, which appears in bookstores this week. The book will be dismissed as self-serving, and it certainly is. Morris's grandiosity begins with his justification for writing a memoir that betrays the president's confidences. In his introduction, he quotes Clinton saying, " "I realize that our relationship is a subject of legitimate historical interest. It's probably unique in American history'." A White House spokesman, eager to dismiss the book, said that parts are "wrong, factually off." But he added that the president found it "interesting" and that "some of it provides insights."

The most intriguing insights are into Clinton's character. The president's temper surfaces repeatedly. "The president, red faced, turned towards me, jabbed me with his forefinger, and yelled . . . " begins a typical passage. Clinton is constantly exploding about the press. Reporters " "love to destroy people. That's how they get their rocks off'," he tells Morris. During the election, Clinton also seethes that Bob Dole is " "evil, an eee-vvv-illl, eee-vvv-illl man'." (A spokesman for Clinton denied the remark about Dole.)

Morris also captures a less-well-known side of Clinton, the oddly passive figure who "made himself elusive. At meetings [the president] would often say nothing. Nothing. He would let others talk, keep a poker face . . . He trusted no one." Clinton is famously energetic, but Morris reveals a personal cost. "I estimate that during the period I worked closely with the president, he was exhausted, seriously depleted, and sometimes even ill about one quarter of the time." Morris describes Clinton as "drowning in information . . . immobilized by the mass of material he consumes, rather than empowered by it." Lucky thing, then, that Clinton had Morris at his side to "focus on the big picture."

The two men share a love of secrecy. When Clinton began meeting with Morris after the 1994 GOP sweep, the president kept his old friend's identity concealed from the rest of his staff; the consultant would sneak into the White House like an illicit lover. Morris describes Clinton "whispering" to him over the phone so that others in the Oval Office wouldn't hear. And Morris compares himself to Charlotte BrontE's Jane Eyre--and Clinton to her mysterious inamorato, Rochester. "I like subterfuge," Clinton tells Morris. "That's why I like you." Embarrassed, Clinton hastily adds, "One of the reasons."