Missile Man : HARD LINE, <i> By Richard Perle (Random House: $21; 286 pp.)</i>

Were it not for the brilliant, gutsy and somewhat rotund assistant secretary of defense in this first novel by Richard Perle--himself a former assistant secretary of defense--the genial if dimwitted President of the United States would have given away the nuclear-arms store at that summit meeting with the Soviets in Helsinki in 1986.

Perle has been promising or threatening to write a novel for years. And now that he has, the result is what one might expect from someone who still seems to revel in his Reagan-era “Prince of Darkness” nickname. For he has written a strident, maybe even passionate, partisan tract that evens old scores, exposes a feckless State Department, re-demonizes the Soviets, damns all liberals, brands the Joint Chiefs of Staff as wishy-washy and canonizes a dead U.S. Senator who bears a close resemblance to the late Henry (Scoop) Jackson, stalwart Cold Warrior, Democrat senator from Washington State (and Boeing, some said), who was once Perle’s employer and revered mentor.

The hero of “Hard Line” is Michael Waterman, no longer an assistant secretary of defense but now a professor at Harvard College. Professor Waterman employs a conceit in the form of an “Author’s Preface” to explain that he has written his book in a “novelistic style” for reasons of national security. But novel or tract, the professor makes certain his readers won’t miss its main thrust, which is “the struggle for a President’s mind, a struggle waged by men appointed to high office, some of whom shared his vision and sought to advance it, some of whom did not and undermined him at every turn. It is dedicated to those who stood by him--and won the Cold War.”

One of the President’s chief underminers is Waterman’s counterpart at Foggy Bottom, the assistant secretary of state for European affairs, Daniel Bennet, “who was as tall and flamboyant as Waterman was compact and reserved.”

The fictional Daniel Bennet bears a striking resemblance to the real and elegant Richard Burt, an assistant secretary of state for European affairs, whose feud with Perle once kept Washington all atwitter. A former New York Times reporter, Burt later went on to become ambassador to Germany, a plum assignment that must have proved galling not only to Perle but also to his fictional Professor Waterman.

At first, Waterman had only contempt for “Bennet’s ostentatious style and extravagant wardrobe. But he’d learned from experience that while Bennet’s Savile Row suits, bold striped Turnbull & Asser shirts with white collars and cuffs, floppy breast-pocket handkerchiefs and antique cuff links gave him the look of a dandy, the man was a talented--and deadly--infighter, who used the system, as well as his influence with the secretary of state, to full advantage.”

Even though there seems to be a touch of jealousy here, it seems only fair to quote from the beginnings of books, because that’s usually where writers have done the most polishing. The assessment of Bennet-Burt is from Page 5, and from there on the writing continues in like vein, brand names and all.

Regardless of what the fictional Professor Waterman claims in his preface, this is not a novelistic book about the struggle for a President’s soul. Instead, it’s about a skirmish over bureaucratic power and turf and perquisites that pits the sensible, down-to-earth Department of Defense hard-liners against all those sly nice Nellies at the Department of State.

Memoranda seem to be the weapon of choice. Some memos begin with that time-honored phrase, “As you know,” which usually means “Here comes a zinger.” Others describe “Managing the U.S.-U.S.S.R. Relationships in the Second Term” and “Intermediate Nuclear Forces Proposals.” One goes on for six pages; all are written in traditional bureaucratese, and none is much more gripping than those that will circulate tomorrow at the departments of agriculture and commerce.

Waterman, our hero, makes sure that we know how hard he worked, which was almost hard enough to wreck his marriage. In the five years he served in the Department of Defense, he made 72 overseas trips and nearly 100 domestic ones. Ever meticulous in detail, he tots up the 204 weekends he worked and the mere 139 times he made it home in time for dinner with his wife, Laura, who, before she became a Defense Department wife (and thereby a nonperson), was an admired advertising-agency artist.

The Watermans and their young son, Jason, live in the farther reaches of Chevy Chase in a house to which they have added a restaurant-sized country kitchen where Waterman occasionally cooks gourmet meals. Below the kitchen is a wine cellar and tasting room. Waterman, it seems, is a very serious eater.

He spends most of his time, however, in his office hard by that of the Secretary of Defense, James Ryder, who has a face that looks “as pulpy as if it had been beaten with a length of two-by-four,” which is a reasonable description of former Secretary of State George P. Shultz’s face. On the other hand, the fictional Secretary of State, Anthony Winthrop, is described as an “elfin figure,” which is a fair description of former Secretary of Defense Caspar Weinberger, who I’ve always thought resembled Punch.

But apart from his appearance switching, Perle doesn’t make much effort to disguise either characters or events. Suddenly, at least in State Department time, a summit with the Soviets is to be held at Helsinki, which is just far enough north to resemble Reykjavik, where a real, if rather strange, summit was once held.

Once the summit is announced, the bureaucratic fight is on over who will go and who will stay home. Waterman has despaired of going when he is summoned by the Secretary of Defense and told that he and he alone will be representing the department in Helsinki. The Secretary, having lost a fight with his counterpart at State, will remain in Washington.

Waterman arrives in Helsinki with a cache of food--as previously noted, he’s an eater. The food is “the sort of munchies that sustained assistant secretaries out to save the free world: kosher salami, cheese, crackers and chocolate brownies from Suzanne’s on Connecticut Avenue.”

Soon after the summit begins, Waterman suspects that something’s wrong, that the Soviets, as always, are determined to trick and trap the gullible Americans. But can he locate the trap? and if he does, will the misty-minded President listen?

Well, we all remember what happened at the real summit in Reykjavik when Reagan stalked off with Gorbachev yapping at his heels. But are the terrible reasons why it happened now at last revealed in Professor Waterman’s (and Perle’s) novelistic novel?

The problem with all now-it-can-be-told novels is that they are fictional ax-grinders, a problem that Professor Waterman himself recognizes in his preface when he writes: “What is particularly galling is the claim made by liberals of the period that the Soviet Union never really threatened the Free World, that the Pentagon overstated Soviet military power to justify huge military budgets . . . that the American President was at best a minor player and, more commonly, a mere bystander, haplessly witnessing events he neither understood nor influenced.”

But despite Professor Waterman’s best efforts, that may well be how one still remembers the Cold War’s last years, even after reading about a plucky unsung assistant secretary of defense who may have saved us all from nuclear holocaust.