Mimesis

By LANCE MORROW

IN THE NATIONAL INTEREST by Marvin Kalb and Ted Koppel Simon & Schuster; 371 pages; $10

United States Secretary of State Felix John Vandenberg--slim, silver-haired, tallish, Wasp--speaks with "the lingering trace of a British accent, which had been acquired at Eton and Oxford." In every other respect, save perhaps his fingerprints, the "Vandenberg" concocted by Television Diplomatic Correspondents Ted Koppel and Marvin Kalb is a pretty fair forgery of Henry Kissinger. Vandenberg is brilliant, indefatigable, charming, overbearing, devious, menacing even in self-deprecation. To his oldest friend and subordinate he says things like, "You know, Frank, with a superhuman effort on both our parts, we might manage to elevate you to the dizzying heights of mediocrity." The Secretary's nominal identity change is only briefly disconcerting to the reader--no worse, say, than getting used to Abbott Lawrence Lowell speaking Yiddish.

In frenzies of shuttle diplomacy, the elegant Vandenberg caroms around the Middle East at some unspecified moment in the future, trying yet again to avert yet another war. The dull-normal President at the Washington end of the scrambler phone -- Vandenberg privately calls him an "incompetent moron" -- has a "locker-room smile" and bears an-unkind resemblance to Gerald Ford. The Koppel-Kalb Palestinian leader, Dr. Jamaal Safat, stands in for the P.L.O.'s Yasser Arafat. And so on. In the National Interest is a roman with a very large clef.

After a labored beginning -- like the starting strokes of a helicopter rotor --Koppel and Kalb take off on a brisk and entertainingly authentic tour. An ancient duplicity hangs in the Middle Eastern air. Vandenberg, citizen of the world, sweeps through it like Bogart through a waterfront fog. The crack correspondent for the National News Service, Darius Kane (whom the reader takes to be Koppel-Kalb's unblushing idealization of themselves) approaches the many-sided treacheries with savvy and analytical powers only slightly less awesome than Vandenberg's. Somehow between ricocheting from Jerusalem to Damascus to Beirut to Zurich to Aswan, "satelliting" back his TV spots and getting his laundry attended to, Darius finds time to bed the beautiful CIA station chief in Beirut and unravel the dark, multilayered conspiracies of Israelis, Palestinians, the CIA and Vandenberg.

Fiction is the reporter's best revenge. Toward the end of their tale, Koppel and Kalb record: "Vandenberg stared blankly at Darius for a long moment, struggling to understand how the reporter could have constructed a scenario so close to reality." The answer is journalistic mimesis. Police reporters who spend too much time at headquarters begin to dress and talk like homicide squad detectives. Veterans of the Secretary's shuttle try to sound aggressively elegant, heavy with ironic charm and Realpolitik: Kissingers with notebooks. -- Lance Morrow

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