Germs: Biological Weapons and America's Secret War. (Political booknotes: plague upon us).

 
GERMS: 
Biological Weapons and 
America's Secret War 
by Judith Miller, Stephen Engelberg, 
and William Broad 
Simon & Schuster, $27.00 

YEARS BEFORE ANTHRAX-BY-MAIL terrorism horrified America, Bill Clinton had a harrowing germ-war scare of his own. At the elite Renaissance Weekend in Hilton Head in 1997, a molecular biologist urged Clinton to read The Cobra Event, a thriller involving a mad scientist who unleashes a specially engineered virus in New York, causing victims to claw out their eyes and gobble their tongues. The plot may sound like the product of a high-school creative-writing class, but it badly spooked the president. Clinton began pushing the book on friends and fellow government officials, including House Speaker Newt Gingrich, and had Pentagon officials brief him on its plausibility. The response he got was not reassuring. From then on, in the words of one national security official, Clinton became "obsessed" with the threat of biological weapons. He grew haunted by the thought of a crop duster spraying disease over the Mall in Washington, and, in the last years of his presidency, he demanded a strong…