ALL TOO HUMAN: A POLITICAL EDUCATION.

FROM ALL TOO HUMAN: A POLITICAL EDUCATION, BY GEORGE STEPHANOPOULOS. LITTLE, BROWN AND COMPANY. 456 PP. $27.95.

For more than a year, Bob Woodward had been chronicling the economic policy wars inside our White House. His book, The Agenda, as he predicted in the letter I had hand-delivered

In the summer of 1993, several months into this project, Woodward's first call to me had sparked two simultaneous thoughts: Oh, not and I have arrived. His books invariably created embarrassing headlines for their subjects, but his sources were assumed to be the most important, connected, and knowledgeable people in Washington. I was wary of Woodward but flattered and curious too. I also considered it part of my job to know what he was up to and make the best of it. We met for a late dinner at his Georgetown town house, where I received the full Woodward treatment.

The polished wood of his dining-room table was topped with neatly stacked, typed notes and a pocket tape recorder. Over home-roasted chicken, he hit me with memos from one of our first economic meetings, then some handwritten notes from another, followed by word-for-word transcripts of what I had said at a third. Woodward's technique is no less effective for being so obvious: He flashes a glimpse of what he knows, shaded in a largely negative light, with the hint of more to come, setting up a series of prisoner's dilemmas in which each prospective source faces a choice: Do you cooperate and elaborate in return (you hope) for learning more and earning a better portrayal -- for your boss and yourself?. Or do you call his bluff by walking away in the hope that your reticence will make the final product less authoritative and therefore less damaging? If no one talks, there is no book. But someone -- then everyone -- always talks. The deadliest initial response was my instinctive one: "Well, it wasn't like that exactly...."

"Really? ... Innnteresting.... I didn't know that.... Tell me...."

Our dance had begun, the mutual seduction of reporter and source. Woodward's calculated charm was custom-tailored to my intellectual vanity, professional pride, and personal loyalty to the president. I knew that Woodward always beguiled sources into. saying more than they should. But like so many others who had supped at his table and spoken into his cassettes under the cover of "deep background," I was arrogant enough to believe that I could beat him at his own game, that my spin would win.

Stephanopoulos was senior adviser to President Clinton.