Our Man in Rome : HIS HOLINESS: John Paul II and the Hidden History of Our Time.<i> By Carl Bernstein and Marco Politi (Doubleday: $27.50; 582 pp.)</i>

Soon after Karol Wojtyla’s investiture as Pope John Paul II in 1978, a Vatican reporter dreamed of walking through a large apartment and encountering a woman combing her hair a la Rita Hayworth. She was standing in front of a mirror, back turned, but when the reporter saw her face he realized it was that of . . . the new pope. “Damn it,” the surprised newsman said to himself in the dream, as he later told the Italian co-author of this volume, “he can be everything: even a woman!”

That anecdote plays a minuscule role in “His Holiness.” It takes up only eight lines, yet is significant for several reasons: for what it says about the pope and what it says about the authors. The reporter’s dream evocatively captures, first, the world’s early hopes with regard to John Paul II; poet as well as athlete, scholar as well as actor, well-spoken yet reserved, seemingly as sensitive as he was strong, Wojtyla could show an appealing side to almost anyone. At the same time, the Wojtyla/Hayworth association is insubstantial and misleading, saying much more about the dreamer than the pope himself. Carl Bernstein and Marco Politi (the former of Watergate fame, the latter a longtime Vatican correspondent for La Republica and Il Messaggero) have included the anecdote not because it’s significant but because they couldn’t resist (what journalist could?) the opportunity to put the pope and Rita Hayworth in the same sentence.

Make no mistake, “His Holiness” is a work of journalism, not current history, which is why it has received, in some quarters, a harsh reception. Bernstein was no doubt braced for the brickbats: The book is a vast expansion of a cover story he wrote for Time magazine in 1992 suggesting that the Reagan administration and John Paul II had engaged in a “holy alliance” intended to destabilize the Communist government of Poland. (In the book, that phrase becomes the more measured “informal secret alliance.”) The article was widely criticized at the time as an unsupported stretch, and pope-watchers have been waiting for “His Holiness” ever since, most doubting that Bernstein could back up his claims.

Has he? Well, yes and no, for the book both claims less and proves more than its magazine incarnation. No, Reagan and the pope weren’t active co-conspirators as Bernstein previously argued but yes, they were very cooperative allies, more than one might comfortably imagine. Bernstein and Politi’s sources are top-drawer: They talked with Reagan, Alexander Haig, William Clark, Jeanne Kirkpatrick, Robert MacFarlane, William Casey, Vernon Walters, Robert Gates, George Schultz and Zbigniew Brzezinski, to name just a few. So far, at least, these sources haven’t publicly disputed Bernstein and Politi’s conclusions (although Gates stressed in the New York Times business section on Sept. 30 that the Reagan administration and John Paul II were less in alliance than “following parallel tracks”). One hopes these sources would speak out, if what the authors say is untrue: Bernstein and Politi write, for instance, that after martial law was declared in Poland in 1981, “the pope (according to U.S. officials) began secretly sending money to the Solidarity underground out of papal discretionary funds.”

Decades from now, when U.S. government documents are released, we will probably gain a better sense of how deeply the pope involved himself with Solidarity and with the Reagan administration. In the meantime, it’s too bad “His Holiness” is overshadowed by political controversy; most of the time the biography makes for effective and compelling journalism. The fall of Polish communism is described in detail; the candid remarks of General Wojciech Jaruzelski are riveting; the dissections of church infighting, particularly with regard to contraception, the role of women and liberation theology, are also absorbing.

It should come as no surprise that the best sections of “His Holiness” concern the sort of political issues just mentioned. That’s the strength of the book as well as its weakness. Bernstein and Politi paint John Paul II in flesh and blood, illustrating nicely his camaraderie with young people, his friendships with particular women, his thoughtfulness with regard to sexuality despite personal inexperience. At the same time, though, the authors over-politicize the pope, and not only with regard to international intrigue. One senses they can’t help but read John Paul II’s moral and religious positions in political terms--his intransigence on contraception or the ordination of women, for example--and as signs of personal stubbornness. Although Bernstein and Politi often mention that the pope spends many hours daily in solitary prayer, as journalists they seem incapable of crediting the notion that John Paul II might have earned his convictions.

That’s most evident in the last section of the book, “The Angry Pope,” in which John Paul II is portrayed as a curmudgeon railing against recalcitrant followers and willful dissenters. To some extent the depiction is accurate; with external foes like Communism much diminished and the pope’s honeymoon long since over, one expects to see the church and its leader turning inward. What Bernstein and Politi barely touch on, however, is perhaps the most obvious reason for the pope’s apparently increased anger (more like frustration, really) that the end of Communism has brought forth not a flowering of thankful rectitude but a flood of Western commercialism: Poles dancing in the streets, not to Chopin waltzes but imported, industrial techno. Perhaps a future portrait (at least two more major English-language biographies of John Paul II are due to be published in the next few years) will tell us whether Wojtyla fears that the victorious battle with communism may be followed hard upon by loss of the moral war.