BOOK REVIEW : A War Only Hollywood Could Produce? : AMERICAN HERO <i> by Larry Beinhart</i> , Pantheon, $23, 429 pages

Why settle for being a spin-doctor if you can be the genuine article, why put a spin on reality if you can arrange for reality itself to do the spinning? That is the thesis of Larry Beinhart’s funny, ingenious and outrageous political thriller joining Hollywood and the Bush Administration in a revisionist fiction about the Gulf War.

“American Hero” begins with Lee Atwater, supreme political stage manager, dying--as he did--of a brain tumor. But there are none of Atwater’s historically recorded gestures of contrition. Instead of deathbed repentance we get deathbed recalcitrance. It is contained in an envelope he slips to James Baker, who passes it to George Bush.

To arrest the President’s steady decline in the polls it proposes a war but one that will be popular. Atwater’s recipe: hire Hollywood’s biggest talent agent to package a script, a director, a cast and financing for a real war tailored both to work well--it must be punchy and tidy--and to hold public attention and support--it must be short.

It is an outlandish notion yet Beinhart, who has absorbed a mass of public records and insider portraits of the Bush presidency, seems to render perfectly the macho intimacy and bluff rivalry between Bush and Baker as they first reject the idea out of hand and then, as the polls keep going down, begin to be tempted.

The tempter is David Hartman, the Hollywood packager proposed by Atwater. In a comically disingenuous footnote, Beinhart assures us that Hartman is not actually Mike Ovitz, however close the resemblance. Because, he writes, “if it is and he doesn’t like it, or even if his people think he wouldn’t like it, does that mean I will never work in that town again? And am I afraid of that? You bet I am . . . So, Mike, let me say this to you: This is not a thinly disguised portrait of you. If anything, it is a sort of homage.”

Beinhart does not hesitate to use real names for his top political figures, however nefarious the schemes he gives them. If he is coy about Hartman-cum-Ovitz it is the clown’s wry face of terror at the ringmaster. It both mocks and points up his satiric message: that real clout lies with the packagers of images.

Like Richard Condon, Beinhart embeds his scheme in a thriller format.

A protracted, steamy sex scene turns out to be faked for the benefit of electronic eavesdroppers; the joke is also on us. And at the end, the good guys cannot be allowed to win though they do all right.

The Gulf War, after all, has to take place. And the remarkable aspect of “American Hero” is how its startling gimmick is so wittily sustained. A common throw-away phrase about a war that could have been scripted by Hollywood has been given moment-by-moment life. There is enough plausibility about each step so that the next one seems to follow. Here is a suggestive portrait of pre-Gulf Bush as a flounderer who might, just might, go for such a scheme:

“And George was a doer. He liked doing. It was strange that as President, although he did an incredible amount of running around, he didn’t do so much doing. It was in part because he was committed, sort of, politically, to not doing very much. Actually to carrying out the Reagan mandate, which was undoing. But it just wasn’t the same for him as for his predecessor . . . he didn’t actually believe in undoing; and finally, he didn’t nap nearly as much as Reagan had, so that the absence of constructive, or even destructive, activity weighed pretty heavily on his hands.”

It is a cartoon but in the best sense of the word. The features are distorted, the action is far-fetched, the taste is terrible; and yet they work not only to provoke but to suggest; to proclaim not a truth to what has been concealed from us--though a heavy-handed afterword tends in this direction--but the peculiarity of what has been revealed.