RIght Cross

And, worse, no one would have taken the book seriously, because Bartlett would have been forced to hide his estimable credentials, which are still touted on the NCPA's Web site. Without his résumé, Impostor would have been dismissed by the right and ignored by the left.

Bartlett does have very serious credentials, the kind that make him dangerous to the right. When he was fired in October, lefty and centrist bloggers came to his defense, celebrating him as a man of "integrity" who "[followed] his conscience and has paid a price." Former New Republic editor Andrew Sullivan wrote last October that Bartlett "has principles...his loyalty is to his ideas, not to the conservative intelligentsia's think-tank welfare-state."

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Until now, Bartlett's credentials have done most of the speaking for him; he's always referred to as a former Reagan and Bush I insider, a policy advisor on economic issues. But he will tell you up front that he did very little during his tenures in those administrations, especially when George H.W. Bush was president. He, like his son after him, also was not a man open to policy discussion, debate or dissent. Bartlett's major victories came earlier in his political life, when he worked for Republican Congressman Jack Kemp, who Bartlett helped advise during the creation of the Kemp-Roth tax bill, which called for the largest tax cut since the Kennedy era and helped stimulate economic growth during a particularly nasty recession.

"I remember clearly one day I was just sitting at my desk, and Kemp came in," Bartlett recalls. "He said, 'You know, we keep talking all about this Kennedy stuff all the time, so why don't we just duplicate the Kennedy tax cut and get rid of all this other horse shit?' OK, he didn't say 'horse shit,' but basically it was, let's just redo the Kennedy tax cut, and I said, 'OK, fine.' My job was to figure out, well, what the hell does it mean to redo the Kennedy tax cut in today's tax law and today's economy?"

It was during his time with Kemp that Bartlett was introduced to some of the intellectuals who would come to define economics during the Reagan era, among them the late Jude Wanniski (who coined the phrase "supply-side economics") and Arthur Laffer (creator of the Laffer curve, which suggested that it was possible to boost tax revenue by cutting tax rates). To be in such heady company was a kick for Bartlett, who was born in Michigan but didn't stay there long. His old man was always moving the family around in search of jobs he never kept too long, Bartlett recalls. Finally, they landed in New Jersey.

"Unfortunately, each new job he got was worse than the one he had before, so we had sort of a downward standard of living," he says. "The only reason I went to Rutgers is because it was the state university, and it was the cheapest school I could get into, and I still had to work my way through. I put myself through college and graduate school by stocking shelves in the supermarket."

He's not sure when he got interested in economics and politics--he recalls supporting Richard Nixon in 1960, but not why, because he was 9.

He went to Georgetown University to get a master's degree in history. During his tenure there, Bartlett wrote the thesis that became his first book: Cover-Up: The Politics of Pearl Harbor, 1941-1946, which was published in 1978 and suggests that Franklin Roosevelt wanted the U.S. to enter World War II in order to obliterate the country's policy of isolationism. For a while, Bartlett pursued his doctorate at Georgetown, thinking he might want to teach.

"But as time went by, I gradually realized that I was just wasting my time," he recalls. "There was just no chance I was ever going to get a teaching job at a decent university. I was in a field by that point that was in decline. They weren't hiring very many people, and I was the wrong race and the wrong sex and the wrong philosophy--everything. I just had no chance whatsoever, so I remember clearly sitting in class one day, and I said, 'I'm just wasting my fucking time.' I just got up and walked out of the class and took incompletes in all of my courses and never went back, never finished the Ph.D."

But he'd read that down in Texas, Democratic Congressman Robert Casey had been appointed head of the Federal Maritime Commission by President Gerald Ford and that a Republican named Ron Paul had won the special election to fill Casey's seat. In a short story that appeared in The Washington Post, Paul said he was to the right of Barry Goldwater, which tickled Bartlett. So he sent Paul a letter asking for a job, got the interview and was working for his first congressman as a legislative assistant by 1976, at the age of 25.

His résumé for the next decade included stints working with Kemp and as the chief legislative assistant for Iowa Republican Senator Roger Jepsen, who put Bartlett on the Joint Economic Committee of Congress; a gig at the Heritage Foundation think tank, where he wrote about tax reform; and a period working at Jude Wanniski's firm called Polyconomics, which advised Wall Street firms about economic and political developments on Capitol Hill. Then, in 1987, Gary Bauer, who was then the president's chief domestic policy advisor, invited him into the Reagan White House.