AND THEN I TOLD THEM...

By MARGARET CARLSON

As Labor Secretary, Robert Reich couldn't get a buzz going if he'd crossed a picket line. Now he's the talk of the town for his bestselling memoir, Locked in the Cabinet. But the talk has turned decidedly sour since one reviewer, Jonathan Rauch, saw through the forest of short-guy jokes to find a book that was too good to be true. Writing in Slate magazine, Rauch found that Reich had cooked the raw material of Washington life into an unrecognizable stew of half-truths in which he comes off as morally superior.

Take this scene at a hearing: Reich recounts that Republican Representative Jim Saxton yells, "'Where did you learn economics, Mr. Secretary?'" and, jumping up and down, "'Evidence! Evidence!'" Reich says he was attacked by cigar-puffing capitalists at a lunch speech: "There isn't a lady in the room. All men...ready for the kill." They hiss and shout, "'Wrong!' 'Bull____!' 'Go back to Harvard."' Great stuff, but it never happened, according to tapes and transcripts dug up by Rauch. Saxton was less Savonarola than Mister Rogers; the hearing was dull, even for C-SPAN. The lunch was breakfast, the room nonsmoking and nonhissing, and a third of the audience was women. Reich responds that transcripts couldn't reflect the hostility he felt. Who does he think he is--the President?

When Reich tried to expose the pretentiousness of bold-type names at play, he chose an evening at the house of then AFL-CIO chief Lane Kirkland and his wife Irena, and got just about everything wrong: the Kirklands aren't high society, and Irena is not a snooty Hungarian but a Czech survivor of the Holocaust who does her own cooking. She did not shout "No!" at Reich, grabbing his wrist to keep him from misusing the mint jelly, causing the table to go still, appalled by the "country bumpkin."

I went Rauching through the book to see who else might have been Reiched. For starters, his predecessors, who he claims did not, like him, eat in the cafeteria or talk to the Working Man. At the very least, Ray Marshall and Lynn Martin did so. Reich says he rescued Frances Perkins' portrait from a 12-year exile in a closet. But old Frances was hanging above Martin's desk until she turned out the lights a few days before Reich moved in.

Reich didn't respond to my calls about this. In his June 7 reply in Slate, he makes light of the discrepancies and Reiches Rauch. "My phone rings. 'Hello. Is this Robert Reich?'" he writes of a call from a "reporter in heat" who later snaps, "Where I come from, there are such things as journalistic ethics." A colleague of Rauch's who was within earshot swears there was no snapping and not a word about ethics. And Reich was returning Rauch's call, so no phone rang.

The famous libel case--psychoanalyst Jeffrey Masson against the New Yorker's Janet Malcolm--turned in part on whether an interview took place over goat cheese at Chez Panisse in Berkeley, Calif., or breakfast at Malcolm's Manhattan home. Details matter, especially when they wound real people. Reich is safe: his meals--lunch, breakfast, whatever--were with public figures. Not so the reader who thought Reich was being true to what happened.