HE SHOOTS, HE DOESN'T SCORE

By John Elson

In his 10 years with pro basket-ball's New York Knicks, Bill Bradley was a solid team player who was tough on defense, moved smartly without the ball and hit timely jumpers from all over the floor. In three terms as a Democratic Senator from New Jersey, the Missouri-born, Princeton-educated Bradley (Rhodes scholar, 1965-67) has also been a pretty good team player. He worked hard for his state and was a determined if quixotic battler for such causes as tax reform, equitable water distribution in California and retributive justice for South Dakota's Lakota Sioux.

Two brilliant careers, and yet...Bradley the hoopster, despite his awesome work ethic, was about three strides short of greatness. Bradley the legislator, despite his intelligence and moral probity, never fulfilled the hopes of liberals who saw him as a potential Democratic superstar. Last August he shocked his constituents by announcing that he would not seek a fourth Senate term. Then he confounded them again by hinting he might run for President as an independent.

Is Bradley's new memoir, Time Present, Time Past (Knopf; 442 pages; $26), a prologue to that candidacy? The book has an impressive first printing (100,000 copies), and the author is committed to a 20-city publicity tour. Nonetheless, says Bradley, "what I'm doing is not about candidacy. The book is something I had to do for my soul." Not that that precludes a campaign for the White House. But Washington insiders doubt Bradley will run, mainly for the compelling reasons he cites here when discussing his 1992 decision, arrived at after much agony, not to challenge Bill Clinton for their party's nomination. Bradley, a deeply private man, feared that his German-born wife Ernestine would face unfair questions about her father's role in Hitler's Germany (he served in the air force but had no Nazi ties). Bradley also knew that he was a wooden speaker and, despite a lifetime of achievement, feared deep down "that this small-town boy could never win the biggest contest of all."

On the off chance that he does decide to make a go of it this year, Time Present, Time Past seems unlikely to jump-start a Bradley steamroller. Ever the gentleman, he writes about his Senate colleagues so blandly that even North Carolina's Jesse Helms, a bitter ideological foe, gets praised for being "courtly." Bradley is fiercely proud of his German and Scotch-Irish forebears, but in his tepid prose they come across as proto-suburbanites rather than daring pioneers.

The Senator claims to have composed the book in longhand, drawing upon journals he kept for years. Aside from a sprightly epigram or three, which read as if they were recycled from speeches, he is scarcely more convincing as a writer than as an orator. Time Present, Time Past is outrageously padded with long lists that gobble up lines without clarifying issues. It's not enough for Bradley merely to mention the nation's polluted industrial rivers: he has to add a litany of nine, from the Ohio to the Penobscot. Most Angelenos of Mexican heritage, he notes, are laborers--documenting the obvious by reeling off 14 trades in which they are employed.

If nothing else, Bradley's book unintentionally explains why liberal Democrats got whacked so badly at the polls in 1994. Time and again he offers trenchantly observed summaries of an American social problem--failing schools, for example, or popular fears of violent crime--that trail off into unhelpful cliches. "Only by reducing poverty," he writes, " ... can Americans achieve economic security." Well, what country ever abolished poverty? For a solon of "Dollar Bill" Bradley's reputed acuity, this is small change indeed.

--By John Elson. With reporting by Andrea Sachs/New York

With reporting by Andrea Sachs/New York