(FORTUNE Magazine) – I have never met Herb Schmertz, Mobil's celebrated public affairs maestro, but until quite recently I was inclined to admire the man. I liked his combative style in dealing with the media -- an agreeable contrast to the instinctive timidity of most executives when the investigative reporters come calling. To be sure, nobody really knows what ''works'' in this area, and I cannot say whether Mobil shareholders would have done better, or worse, or exactly the same, if the company's public relations posture had been less confrontational over the years. For all I know, craven submission to Mike Wallace would have been worth an extra 10 cents a share. But it is at least plausible that large corporations are better off when they assertively talk back to their critics than when they just roll with the punches. In any case, I also liked a lot of those argumentative ''advertorials'' Schmertz was (and still is) placing on various op-ed pages and found myself frequently scoring them superior to the editorials they were arguing with. Alas, something has now happened to disillusion me about Herb. He has written a book telling how he does it. Or, to be much more precise, he hasn't written the book. The first off- putting detail about Good-bye to the Low Profile: The Art of Creative Confrontation (Little Brown, $16.95) is the author's credit, which reads: ''Herb Schmertz with William Novak.'' The deeper meaning of the preposition surfaces in the acknowledgments, where Herb thanks Bill for the ''brilliant organizing of my thoughts'' that made the book possible. Why a professional writer-editor-arguer and cultural impresario like Herb needs Bill to do so much of the author's job is not explained, but presumably the party of the first part was just too busy to brilliantly organize his own thoughts. Not that the results on display here are all that brilliant. Good-bye to the Low Profile is essentially a how-to book. Its central premises are that Mobil's confrontational public relations strategy (a) has been broadly successful, (b) can be implemented by other companies if only they get the hang of it, and (c) rests on some large intellectual foundation needing to be explicated at book length. My own score card at the end of Good-bye showed a reader mostly assenting on (a) and (b) but harboring deep, deep doubts about (c). A major shortcoming of Good-bye is its clunky handling of ideas. The book's literary style evokes Sunday supplement features, and the authors look to be in instant trouble anytime they have to marshal an argument about some moderately complex issue. This problem is on display early, when Good-bye first sidles up to the case for ''creative confrontation.'' What the book ought to be doing in these passages is telling you clearly what creative confrontation is, telling you why Schmertz thinks it's a better P.R. strategy than any alternative, and also telling you why not everybody has bought it. None of this happens. Instead you find yourself awash in preachy admonitions like: ''If you engage in confrontation when the situation calls for it, you'll not only feel better, but you'll also be more effective in your job.'' In a major cop-out, you are encouraged to think that the alternative to confrontation is just letting problems fester. Good-bye is most readable when it's not trying to think very deeply but is simply telling stories about Schmertz's wars with the media. My own favorite is the infamous tale of the tankers. Back in December 1973, with the Arab oil embargo in effect, the U.S. was swept by rumors about a huge fleet of oil tankers that were said to be poised offshore, unwilling to unload their cargo until oil prices ratcheted up still higher. In fact, as Schmertz kept trying to explain at the time, the rumors made no sense. The oil companies were operating under price controls that worked through profit-margin ceilings and meant, in effect, that the final price for any oil on tankers had been established when it was first loaded. So even aside from the expenses involved in keeping tankers at sea, there would be no point in hovering offshore waiting for prices to rise. And yet the rumors, obviously sustained by broad public hostility to the oil companies, refused to die. On December 29, 1973, the New York Times ran a front-page story giving some credence to the rumors, and all through the following spring they kept surfacing on radio and television news stories. The tankers turned up again in an NBC documentary in 1976. SCHMERTZ HAS A LOT of media horror stories to tell, most of which would leave an average reader concluding that the media, and especially the networks, have a serious ''liberal bias'' problem -- or at least concluding that this is what Schmertz believes. In addition to his anecdotal evidence in support of this view, Herb approvingly summarizes the findings of the famous Rothman-Lichter studies of the ''media elite,'' showing, for example, that 81% of its members voted for McGovern in 1972 and 40% thought the U.S. government should guarantee jobs for everybody. And yet a curious thing happens whenever it is time for Good-bye to pass judgment on the meaning of these details. What happens is that Schmertz denies liberal bias is the problem. ''While reporters often distort business stories to the detriment of the corporation they're describing,'' he writes in a typical passage, ''the problem usually isn't one of bias. In most cases, what's really at fault is the reporter's limited experience.'' That formulation just doesn't make sense. If the general problem was that reporters were inexperienced, you would expect Herb to be complaining about stories that were naive; however, his main gripe concerns news stories that repeatedly gravitate to some antibusiness angle. If the general problem is ignorance about business, furthermore, why are we reading all these details about the media elite voting for McGovern? In short, why are Schmertz and Novak creating this muddle? Why are they repeatedly offering us evidence of liberal bias and then persistently stating that bias isn't the problem? I assume that in some measure their ambivalence reflects Schmertz's traditional posture toward liberals. One of the reasons for viewing Mobil's public relations as particularly sophisticated is that the company made Herb its P.R. kingpin precisely because he had some liberal credentials himself, having worked for both John and Robert Kennedy, and was therefore more persuasive and credible when the company had to ask favors from some liberal Democrat. (This is Rawleigh Warner Jr., then Mobil's C.E.O., quoted in a 1976 FORTUNE article: ''Some of us began to think around here that maybe there were two sides of the street to walk down, and maybe we ought to walk down the other side of the street. One of the things that Herb brought in that context was an ability to talk to the Democratic side of the House and Senate . . .'') In 1979 Schmertz took a leave of absence to work on Ted Kennedy's presidential fling. So he really would be in an anomalous position if he characterized the media problem he's always groaning about as a liberal problem. Good-bye features major muddles in other areas too. Question: What is Mobil trying to accomplish by ''confronting'' its adversaries? The principal answer, I have always assumed, is that by scoring points in the court of public opinion it hopes to deflect legislation and regulation that might make the company less profitable. I don't see anything shameful about this goal and would have assumed that, in a book addressed to other businessmen, Schmertz would be fairly open about what he's trying to do. HE ISN'T. Instead, he repeatedly represents Mobil's positions as matters of principle. (On the company's right to finance political action committees: ''We saw the issue as one of constitutional principle, on which we should take a stand.'') You are evidently supposed to think Mobil is out there slashing away at all those dragons just because it's the right thing to do. A lot of Mobil's reputation for combativeness depends on the famous advertorials, which have been appearing in the New York Times since 1970 and now run in other publications as well. Good-bye is interesting in describing how the advertorials are produced; you rather get the impression that the editing and decision-making process isn't much different from what you might observe in a newspaper editorial office. Occasionally a talented writer has been pretty much given his head and allowed to rush into print with some particular enthusiasm of his own. The lead time between the germination of an idea and the transmission of copy to the Times can be as little as two days. Partly in an effort to remind readers of some themes covered by the advertorials, and possibly also to pad out the book, the authors have included reprints of 14 advertorials. They cover a wide range of subjects but have one thing in common. They're all better written and more carefully reasoned than Good-bye to the Low Profile.