God Screens His Phone Calls : THE FIRST DISSIDENT: The Book of Job in Today’s Politics, <i> By William Safire (Random House: $23; 274 pp.)</i>

“In the sublime relationship of Man to God,” political columnist William Safire writes, “or the secular relation of citizen to governor, the same question arises: how do we get access?” By giving that question priority over all others, Safire manages to draw practical, political lessons from a work that few before him have read as a practical or political: the Book of Job.

In the Bible, Job, an upright and blameless man, suffers because God has accepted a challenge from Satan. “Whatever (Job) does you have blessed,” Satan taunts, “and his herds have increased beyond measure. But stretch out your hand and touch all that he has, and then he will curse you to your face.” Job never quite curses God, but he does insist on his own innocence and his right to demand an accounting of God. Eventually, God answers Job, but he neither alludes to the initial Satanic challenge nor otherwise addresses the question of Job’s innocence. Instead, he silences Job with an overwhelming assertion of divine power over nature--and then restores Job’s prosperity. What are we to make of this? The central problem of the Book of Job has most often been seen to be “the problem of evil.” Taking Job as the archetype of innocent suffering, many have concluded, to quote Archibald MacLeish’s Job-drama “J.B.”:

If God is God, he is not good

If God is good, he is not God.

Safire moves this problem--and with it Job’s suffering--to the margin. It matters far less to Safire that Job receives no direct answer to his question than that he has, finally, got the access he sought. God is enormously angered and affronted at Job’s insistence. Clearly, the deity did not wish to speak to Job at all. Whatever the content of God’s speeches, then, Job has won a victory by forcing God to address his concerns in the first place. The imbalance of power between the two has shifted by at least that much.

Once the content of God’s answer has, in this way, been rendered secondary and Job’s tactical victory rendered primary, the way is clear for a series of reflections on power tactics in American politics. Safire, a New York Times columnist who first came to prominence as a speech writer for Richard M. Nixon, has 30 years’ worth of political anecdotes to draw on, and each of his anecdotes comes with its practical lesson. His time with Nixon seems to live more vividly in his memory than anything that has succeeded it, but tales are told here out of every school in American politics and every graduating class since 1960. All, one way or another, are linked to the Book of Job.

To give just one example, Safire extols Nixon’s shockingly unconservative first-term decision to impose wage-and-price controls. That decision was economic folly, Safire still believes, and yet he finds its unpredictability literally godlike: “Simple inconsistency shows only a lack of principle, but calculated inconsistency demonstrates authority’s understanding of the potency of public puzzlement. ‘There can be no power without mystery,’ Charles de Gaulle wrote in ‘The Edge of the Sword.’ ‘There must always be a “something” that others cannot altogether fathom, which puzzles them, stirs them, and rivets their attention.’ Poet-Job (the author of the Book of Job) introduced the governed to that mysterious ‘something’--the power of a leader’s unpredictability--in the voice from the whirlwind.”

Other anecdotes, in many of which the connection to the Book of Job is even more tenuous than it is in the one just cited, move in an almost diametrically opposed direction: anti-mystery rather than pro-mystery. Like proverbs, they are all true even when they are mutually incompatible. The trick is knowing which one is applicable at any given time. No anecdote lasts longer than a tale told at a cocktail party. Most, like the food at a cocktail party, are more appetizing than satisfying. As for reading them in succession, well, the latter chapters of “Joban politics” were to this reader what one more canape might be to the party-goer who has already had several. Though by no means without interest, “The First Dissident” is almost entirely without suspense and, as a result, is all too easily put down.

The author has three only partially compatible tasks in hand here. First, he wants to make peace with himself as an insider who is still, in his own eyes, a dissident. Second, though still at the top of his form as political columnist, he wants to distill his experience as an observer of political vice and virtue into some more lasting literary form. Third, via an original reading of the Book of Job, he wants to rescue a kind of secular religiosity for people like himself who are uncomfortable with too total a break with religion’s legacy.

Unfortunately, a confessional account of how Safire has managed to be a dissident without ever ceasing to be a highly paid organization man would call for rather more in the way of autobiographical detail than the columnist ventures in this book. By the same token, a collection of practical truths about American political life--attending no less to why they are truths than to why they are practical--would call for a more searching look at the American political tradition as such, beginning with the Founding Fathers, than Safire has patience for. And as for the Book of Job as a religious classic for the unreligious, when Safire says that the Job poet “rerooted religion in real life by taking God entirely out of moral law enforcement,” he advances a thesis in the history of Judaism that would require immensely more argumentation than he gives it.

It is in the nature of a personal synthesis, however, to combine elements in an ad hoc and highly personal way. Those too strongly interested either in the Book of Job or in American politics or (and why not?) in William Safire himself will all come away from this book frustrated. There is not quite enough of any one of the three to suffice. Those, however, who may be attracted by an improbable but at times impressive personal synthesis of those three elements may discover this very attraction as they read the book and conclude that, on Safire’s terms, they too are “Jobans.”

“The First Dissident” is, if nothing else, a striking lesson in the revelatory power of a point of view. The work life of a political journalist is shaped, notably, by two kinds of people: first, those who want to talk to him, who insist on talking to him, whom he resists talking to, but to whom he sometimes yields; and second, those he wants to talk to, insists on talking to, who resist talking to him, but who sometimes yield to him. In the never-ending battle for access, getting the big interview can come to seem the main victory: What the interviewee actually says can seem secondary. By the same token, when the journalist yields to the importunate caller and picks up the phone, that concession can loom large (sometimes to both parties), whether or not anything results from it. Safire’s decades-long, life-shaping immersion in all this--in the politics of who deigns to talk to whom, who calls whom to account, etc.--has given him a new, political angle on an ancient classic and new evidence for the old thesis that everything, including religion, is political.

BOOKMARK: For an excerpt from “The First Dissident,” see Opinion, Page 2.