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"Passion for Truth"
By Senator Arlen Specter with Charles Robbins
William Morrow, 542 pp. $26

Biographies aren't always historically notable - celebrity bios, for instance, might have lots of gossip and colorful details, but no historic significance. But political biographies usually are chockfull of history: the fateful intersections with the events that shape the subject's world and time.

Not all politicians have lives of significance, of course. But Arlen Specter, the Republican senator from Pennsylvania, has lived such a life. As a young attorney, he was the member of the Warren Commission who came up with the famous and controversial "Single Bullet Theory" (he calls it the "Single Bullet Conclusion" because he says it's proven beyond theory) that found that one bullet from Lee Harvey Oswald went through both President John F. Kennedy and Texas Governor John Connolly before dropping out on a hospital gurney miraculously almost intact.

For conspiracy buffs everywhere, that single postulation is enough to make a Specter biography de rigueur reading. Likewise for anyone who has an interest in some of the other historic events Specter has been directly involved in: The Senate confirmation hearings of Supreme Court justice nominees Robert Bork or Clarence Thomas, and the impeachment of President Bill Clinton over the Monica Lewinsky affair.

Unfortunately, Specter's career may have been impactful in terms of legislation, politics and even criminal law, but it doesn't make a good read.

There's no denying Specter's a smart guy, and that he has some notable accomplishments to his credit. But not all history is worth preserving, and not all public figures have lives worth chronicling in minutiae. And, not all smart people can write. Specter, for instance, writes like a colloquial but dull law professor, and this memoir co-written by his publicist reads like one very, very long first-person press release, broken up with ill-placed and often unnecessary personal passages about his family's Jewish roots, bouncing between Pennsylvania and Kansas.

The book suffers painfully from poor transitions, lousy editing, and way too much self-aggrandizement. To read his tale, Specter as district attorney of Philadelphia almost single-handedly (with help from the staff he assembled, most of whom have become notable judges or politicians in their own right, thanks to him) reformed the city's justice system and prosecuted bad cops for brutality. I'm not denying the accomplishments are notable - as DA, he brought national attention to the abuse of inmates in prison. But does he have to sound so smug about it?

"We arrived by 8:00 a.m. at the State Office Building, and stayed late," he writes of his efforts to clean up Philadelphia's corrupt magistrate system "We pored over 50,000 documents. We interviewed 250 witnesses…. We disclosed more than 40 cases of payoffs demanded to fix criminal cases…. We laid bare the magistrates court to public view.

"We put it all into a 515-page report. By mid-1965 I was running for district attorney, but I reserved Saturdays for dictating to my secretary, Mary Perelman, from 8:00 a.m. to 6:00 p.m. Then I would go home and go out with Joan (his wife) on Saturday night, as we've done throughout our marriage."

We should of course, be in awe of Specter's feats, both public and private.

The book follows Specter's life chronologically, starting with his first public job, not long after graduating from law school, as a feisty assistant DA in Philadelphia who helped Robert Kennedy fight the mobsters despite opposition from within his own office. He made enough of an impression that he was asked to join the Warren Commission investigating the death of JFK in 1963. He became the city's celebrated DA, but lost several campaigns for other offices, including mayor and governor of Pennsylvania, before winning a seat in the Senate in 1980.

There are admittedly bits and pieces of details about politics and life behind the scenes on Capitol Hill that are either entertaining or enlightening (he makes no bones about President Reagan being odd during his first years in the Senate). But there's too much stultifying, ungraceful verbiage to sift through to find the nuggets. There's even verbiage from other sources thrown in as filler.

Specter constantly uses newspaper headlines and clippings about himself to emphasize his public impact, and snippets of contemporary interviews with colleagues reminiscing about his past performances.

"Bork's handlers urged him to avoid lengthy exchanges with me," he writes about the 1987 nomination of Robert Bork to the Supreme Court, before launching into a Bork handler's recollections of how Specter stymied the nomination. Specter was one of the key Republican Senators who opposed Bork's nomination from a constitutional perspective.

Likewise, Specter places himself squarely in the middle of both the Clarence Thomas Supreme Court hearings (or more accurately, the Anita Hill accusations of sexual misconduct against Thomas) and the Clinton impeachment. By then, however, Specter-the-writer has exhausted any interest a reader might have had in the topic by the stentorian pace and relentless self-promotion.

Maybe the book wouldn't have been so dreary and irritating if Specter hadn't written the book about himself, both because a better writer could have tackled the project, and it wouldn't have come across as a whole lot of hubris. As it is, unless you're fascinated or obsessed with the guy, stay away from "Passion for Truth." As for you conspiracy buffs, there's nothing here that will either light you on fire or quench your thirst for more information.

This review is unpublished.