BOOK REVIEW / NONFICTION : Crash and Burn in the White House : MADHOUSE: The Private Turmoil of Working for the President by Jeffrey H. Birnbaum; Times Books $25, 260 pages

“The presidency is a train wreck waiting to happen,” Jeffrey H. Birnbaum says in this profile of six members of the Clinton White House staff. Because the public unrealistically expects the president to “dictate the laws of the land like a king, negotiate compromises like a prime minister and also act as a spiritual leader,” disillusionment is inevitable.

And when the president is Bill Clinton, who had trouble making up his mind and “a radically impaired view of what he could actually accomplish,” given “the potency of the forces arrayed against him,” the letdown was harsher than usual for the 400-odd staffers who sacrificed their family lives and worked 20-hour days to translate his rhetoric into action.

“More often than not,” says Birnbaum, a Time magazine writer who covered the White House for the Wall Street Journal, wrote “The Lobbyist” and coauthored “Showdown at Gucci Gulch” with Alan S. Murray, the energetic and optimistic young people “who reach the pinnacle of public service on the White House staff leave their posts weary, diminished, sometimes even broken. . . .

“It is wrong . . . to think of the president and his staff as striving warriors or visionary leaders. . . . They are better imagined in a defensive crouch, waiting for the next crisis to erupt and then scurrying to cope as best they can. The White House is a madhouse almost all the time.”

White House staffers burn out after an average of 18 months, Birnbaum says. Of the six he interviewed for this book, only two remain.

Lobbyist Howard Paster, 48 years old on Inauguration Day, 1993, realized his life’s ambition when he was made point man for Clinton’s agenda in Congress. His corporate experience, however, had given him little idea just how fractious and unpredictable the nation’s lawmakers could be. Losses on gays in the military and Clinton’s economic stimulus package set the tone. Paster’s skin broke out in stress-related rashes. He resigned after less than a year.

White House Press Secretary Dee Dee Myers, 31, discovered that the Clinton administration, “despite its rhetoric about the virtues of diversity, was a boys’ club of the most awful kind. Whenever big decisions were made, it was a group of white men who made them,” and Myers was left out of the loop. Unable to get the power to match her title, she quit after two years.

Spin doctors Jeff Eller, 37, and Paul Begala, 32, figured they had slick new ways of polishing the president’s image and getting his message across to the American people. The Republican landslide of 1994 made those tasks almost impossible, so they bowed out.

Policy wonks Gene Sperling, 34, and Bruce Reed, 33, represented the warring side of Clinton’s soul, Birnbaum says. Both Reed and Sperling were whipsawed by the shifting priorities that helped doom Clinton’s health care plan, though they are still on the staff.

“People dismiss the sincere beliefs held by government officials as meaningless posing for public consumption,” Birnbaum says, but Sperling and Reed “were honest, dedicated policy experts” trying to “make a tangible improvement in the daily lives of real people.”

Generally, though, the staffers in “Madhouse” strike us as young hotshots lacking in perspective, so intoxicated with White House perks and power that they set themselves up for the fall to come--after which, of course, they took cushy jobs in the private sector.

Birnbaum’s book is strong on Washington insider anecdotes and the drama of half-forgotten crises (remember Zoe Baird and Nannygate?). He makes a few suggestions: Staffers should realize that campaigning isn’t the same as governing. Maybe presidential candidates should be allowed to form “shadow governments” like opposition parties in a parliamentary system. The public should grow up and expect less.

But “Madhouse,” too, lacks perspective. Birnbaum gives little sign of how he feels about the events that marked the Clinton administration. Whitewater and the war in Bosnia, Lani Guinier’s nomination as Justice Department civil rights chief and U.S. intervention in Haiti--Birnbaum treats them all as his subjects do: as public relations coups or disasters, boosts or hindrances to careers, all vaguely equivalent. Not so. It’s tough to work in the White House--we’ll grant him that--but otherwise why should we care?