Robert G. Kaufman, Henry M. Jackson: A Life in Politics (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2000), 548 pp., $30.

IT WAS Reagan National Security Adviser Richard Allen who characterized Scoop Jackson by evoking the legend of Horatius, the Roman soldier who single-handedly held off an advancing army at the bridge to Rome. In his new biography of Jackson, Robert G. Kaufman goes a long way toward explaining why Allen would evoke such a figure. There are two related stories ...