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NEW YORK -- Leaning forward and speaking in his animated style, Ron Suskind discusses his view that the nation's public-policy debates are too politicized. He talks passionately about the need for "truth therapy" and of finding a way "out of the food-fight model of public discourse." Then he laughs.

"In attempting to do this with O'Neill," he admits, "we've unleashed one of the greatest food fights in history."

The "food fight" follows the recent publication of Suskind's political bombshell, "The Price of Loyalty." Based on the extraordinary cooperation from and 19,000 documents provided by former Treasury secretary Paul O'Neill, the book portrays O'Neill -- a maverick ousted by President Bush in 2002 -- as a sensible, truth-telling hero out of step with an administration driven by ideologues and expediency. Not surprisingly, this stinging indictment of the Bush administration caused a major flap in Washington.

Among the memorable excerpts is O'Neill's description of the president as acting like "a blind man in a roomful of deaf people." He also concludes that Bush decided to get rid of Saddam Hussein at the very outset of his term, well before Sept. 11, 2001. And the book conveys O'Neill's discomfort with what he sees as the administration's reckless economic policy and describes his shock when Vice President Dick Cheney tells him that "Reagan proved deficits don't matter."

Reaction was swift and forceful. A White House spokesman claimed O'Neill was simply "trying to justify personal views." Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld denied that Hussein was targeted early and said he had called O'Neill to express his concern about the book. More ominously, after O'Neill discussed the book on "60 Minutes," the Treasury Department launched an investigation into whether he had provided classified documents to Suskind.

"We are in such a ferocious partisan maelstrom," says Suskind, no stranger to maelstroms.

An author, visiting scholar at Dartmouth College, and Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist who spent six years working in Boston, Suskind, 44, is experienced at provoking ire. A controversial 1991 profile incurred the wrath of famed financier Warren Buffett, and his 1995 story connecting cocaine to the death of Celtics star Reggie Lewis roiled Boston and brought threats of a lawsuit from the basketball team. Aggressive, ambitious, outgoing, and armed with an uncanny ability to get sources to warm up to him, Suskind always seemed destined to make waves.

Mark Maremont, a Suskind friend from their days at Columbia University School of Journalism, describes Suskind as a "force of nature." Boston Phoenix editor Peter Kadzis, who knew Suskind from his Boston Business magazine days, says "his ambition always had an efferverscent quality. It was like champagne. He was always a big game hunter."

The "Price of Loyalty" is the latest Suskind effort -- based on the help of some unlikely and unusually cooperative sources -- to expose the inner workings of a White House famous for staying on message and controlling leaks. In a July 2002 Esquire magazine story about the departure of Bush confidante Karen Hughes, Suskind made big news by quoting chief of staff Andrew Card fretting that her exit would destroy the "whole balance of the place." Card said he had been "standing in the middle of a seesaw with Karen on one side and [political adviser] Karl [Rove] on the other, trying to keep it in balance. One of them just jumped off."

In a January 2003 Esquire piece on Rove, Suskind quoted former director of the White House Office of Faith-Based and Community Initiatives John DiIulio saying the White House had "a complete lack of a policy apparatus" and that everything is "being run by the political arm." In a notable turn of phrase, DiIulio called it "the reign of the Mayberry Machiavellis."

The Hughes story was attacked by White House press secretary Ari Fleischer; on PBS's "NewsHour with Jim Lehrer," Card cast aspersions on the piece but danced around the question of whether he was quoted accurately. After the Rove story broke, Fleischer called it "baseless and groundless," and DiIulio issued a hasty apology. (There was a paper trail, though. Suskind's piece was based on a lengthy letter written to him by DiIulio, labeled "For/On the Record.")

"I think the story came out and DiIulio was hit with a wave of angry calls from the White House," Suskind says. "You realize that they play for keeps." Esquire editor David Granger says "the Bush administration objects to any kind of scrutiny. Ron's been one of the few that has gotten inside looks at this particular White House."

In January 2003, one month after O'Neill had been fired and with the DiIulio dust-up still percolating in the Beltway, Suskind showed up at a speech the former treasury secretary was giving at a club in Washington. The two had never talked, but Suskind sidled up to O'Neill and, amid "the clinking gin and tonics," cracked a joke about his tenure at the Treasury.

"With your opening line, you better get a laugh," Suskind says. The two started talking and meeting regularly. Roughly a year later, that relationship produced "The Price of Loyalty."

O'Neill decided to work with Suskind after reading his 1998 book, "A Hope in the Unseen," and says Suskind is "one of the most energetic persons I've ever met. He was so determined he was going to write a book [and] he convinced me he was prepared basically to give his life to this project for however long it took."

A native of Kingston, N.Y., Suskind earned his own political stripes before turning to journalism. He worked for Virginia Democrat Charles Robb's gubernatorial campaign, John Anderson's independent campaign for president, and the US Senate bid of Connecticut Democrat John Downey. After Columbia, Suskind spent two years on the low rungs at The New York Times and then moved to the St. Petersburg Times, where he says he was "young and impatient and high maintenance" and had a less-than-amicable parting. In 1987, he came to Boston to write and edit at the now-defunct Boston Business magazine, and he worked in The Wall Street Journal's Boston bureau from 1990 to 1993 and was a senior national affairs writer at the Journal until 2000.

In 1995, while at the Journal, Suskind won a Pulitzer Prize for a series featuring Cedric Jennings, a kid from Washington, D.C., struggling mightily to succeed academically. The bond between writer and subject led to the acclaimed "A Hope in the Unseen," that Suskind calls "the most important thing I've done" and characterizes as a transforming experience. The book generated much talk about the rapport between the short Jewish writer and the tall young African-American. If Suskind is good at anything, it's winning the confidence of sources.

"Ron sort of has this amazing reporting technique," in which people "come to think of Ron as a trusted friend in addition to being a reporter," says Esquire's Granger. Maremont, who is The Wall Street Journal's deputy Boston bureau chief, calls him an "incredibly bright, engaging guy with an ability to zero in on a person and make them feel they're important." One former co-worker recalls how Suskind disarmed a CEO by approaching him at a conference and asking him to think of two reporters as "aliens who arrived from Mars. We don't know what you do."

Suskind says his technique is based on opening the lines of communication on both ends. "If you're really developing a relationship in which you're going to be the steward of someone's essence to the public, they need to know who you are," he says.

Investment guru Buffett declined to be interviewed for Suskind's 4,700-word profile in the Journal. But Suskind still fashioned a vivid contrarian portrait of the folksy, Midwestern "Oracle of Omaha" as a man who wore expensive suits, stayed in lavish suites, and enjoyed the close companionship of a woman who was not his wife. The piece generated some "corrections," "amplifications," and a private response from Buffett to the paper. Buffett "was angry," recalls Suskind, who says his story was intended to expose "the real Warren Buffett" and debunk the mythology about the man. "It's not Frank Capra," he says. "It's Fellini."

In a 1995 Journal story, Suskind strongly suggested that cocaine was the culprit in the 1993 death of Celtics star Lewis. The news struck like an earthquake, infuriating the team, generating a new investigation of the autopsy, and triggering a frenzied effort by the Boston media to chase the story. To this day, the drug's role in the tragedy remains a subject of serious dispute. But Suskind remains confident of his conclusion. "Sometimes you get a lucky break, a crack in the dike of silence," he says.

Suskind's uncanny ability to open that crack has marked his career and created his fair share of controversy. At a party marking his departure from the Journal's Boston bureau, one celebrant presented him with a Lionel model train bridge with the middle burned out. The not-so-subtle idea was that Suskind was a reporter who had burned some bridges.

"The humorous message [was] that some people who engaged early on in the process of `truth therapy' felt discomfort at the heat of disclosure and exposure," he says. "We're a long way past the burned bridges days."

And despite the politcal heat generated by O'Neill's dramatic disclosures, the former Treasury boss firmly endorses Suskind's work. While acknowledging that some of his highly publicized language in the book was "more vivid" than he would have preferred, O'Neill says simply: "I don't have any trouble with the book at all."