These attitudes aren't particularly startling. They don't belong exclusively to the people who clustered about the highest office in the land. It's a bit revealing, though, that they pervade these books to such a large degree.

THERE ARE ALSO more subtle attitudes at work in The Canfield Decision and The Company. For instance, Agnew's portrayal of Canfield makes him out to be similar to Henry II in his relationship to the assassination of Thomas a Becket. Canfield joins forces with certain devious elements, but only involuntarily at first and eventually in an indirect way. According to the evidence in the book, Canfield is guilty of lesser crimes than those with which he's finally charged. He's only guilty of misfeasance, not malfeasance (though he can't prove it because important witnesses have disappeared).

While everybody else in The Company is clearly labeled good guy or bad guy, William Martin's morality is presented in much more complex terms. Sure he's saving his own skin, Ehrlichman seems to say, but he is also working in the best interests of The Company (and thus, of the U.S.), he's trying to preserve former President Curry's high standing for posterity, and he's fighting White House dirty tricksters who want to use his secret info in devious ways.

On at least one level the two novels are Agnew's and Ehrlichman's exercises in rationalization; they are attempting to show Washington "as it really is" to vindicate themselves.

On second thought, maybe it isn't worth reading these thriller-chillers. It sure is funny though when Spiro Agnew kills off his fictional counterparts to Walter Cronkite, Ben Bradlee, and Barbara Walters. His powers for delineating detail (with gory, sensationalistic precision) seem to reach their apex at these points in the narrative.

And Ehrlichman? Well, the book cover blurb says that he wrote The Company "in an old adobe house in Sante Fe, New Mexico."

Whuppy doo.