It's true that Mike Kelly was empathetic-and as much toward cab drivers and carpenters as toward his fellow scribblers. He was genuinely humane. Given his reputation as a sword-wielding columnist, people often found this strange: He seemed so gentle in person for someone so hard-edged on the page. After first meeting him, many remarked on his unpretentiousness, and indeed on the unlikeliness of the entire package-this intrepid war correspondent, this he-man career man, this relentless politico. He was elfish, affable, open-faced, bespectacled, curly-haired, rumpled, distracted, often thoughtful and endearingly disorganized. When he didn't show up for lunch dates or follow through on plans, you knew it meant nothing at all. His apologies afterward were sheepish and good-natured. He was just a very decent guy.

But those who decided that he was modest or shy got him wrong. He was not merely very capable, but utterly certain of it: In his inner world, he was not modest at all. As he gained experience, his life became an exercise in self-confidence, a loop in which his certainties begat successes, which begat further certainties. It's no wonder then that he rejected the liberal culture of self-doubt, and that his politics turned right-wing-how could they have turned otherwise? He achieved financial success, but he never became a selfish man. Quite the opposite. Money obviously meant little to him, and his conservatism remained purely of the self-confident kind. All this came out in conversation with him, hours upon hours of it, during which he delivered his thoughts and opinions as if they were absolute truths, enjoying himself hugely, as inevitably his companions did, too. Whether people agreed with him or not, his confidence was infectious. It swept aside the cautions and fears that might have diminished the writers in his stable, or the staff of the magazine as a whole. To the question of "Dare we proceed?", his answer was so often "Yes" that people learned not to ask. It's true that Kelly's "Yes" was usually tempered and shrewd, but his deep-seated courage was more important still. He was like a furnace on fire. His flame burned for his work, for his country, and most fiercely for his two young boys and his wife. He went to Iraq because he believed in the war, and knew he could cover it well. That does not make this end any easier for his friends to accept. It still seems impossible that our dear Mike Kelly has died. He has left an unfillable emptiness behind.

-William Langewiesche

For those of us hanging about the Kuwait Hilton and the military briefings in the past weeks, and paying the occasional easy-does-it visit to the frontier zone or to the safer bits of southern Iraq, the name of Michael Kelly was a frequent and somewhat guilt-inducing reference. In the first place, we had all read or were engaged in re-reading Martyrs ' Day , his enviable account of the last Gulf War. In the second place, we knew that he was miles up the road ahead of us, at the sharp end with the Third Infantry Division. I don't approve of "embedded" journalism myself, but nor was I pretending that I'd have had the discipline or fortitude to go that way. So, as we fiddled with gas masks during mostly false-alarm air-raid warnings in Kuwait City, one would say facetiously to another: "Mike must be within commuting distance of Baghdad by now." There had already been enough reportorial casualties to make this a respectful understatement.

The longest time I ever spent with him was very different. He heard that I was going to a Farrakhan rally at the Howard University campus a few years back, and asked if he could keep me company. We ended up as the only white guys present during an especially lurid harangue from the late Khalid Muhammad. The atmosphere wasn't all that menacing despite some efforts in that direction, and afterward we spent a good deal of time talking to the organizers and the members of the audience. The rest of the night, we sat up forever while he told me of growing up in D.C., of being by family origin a member of the opposite Irish-Catholic faction to Pat Buchanan, and of going with his mother to early civil-rights rallies. His curiosity and his humor, and his quick impatience with bullshit, were all of a piece. I often thought he was wrong, but I never knew him to be wrong for an ignoble or cowardly reason.

One tries to avoid sentimentality on occasions such as this, but Mike saw the essence of the conflict over Iraq very early on, and never relaxed his hold on the point. The advocates of regime-change have now lost a real champion and-this is where I dare to take the risk of sentimentality-the people of Iraq have lost a friend who would never have deserted them in the rugged times that they are passing through and that lie ahead. Everybody who cares about the survival of tough-minded journalism has lost an ally, too, even if (like the Iraqis) they may not have had the opportunity to know him.

-Christopher Hitchens

Mike Kelly was one of the happiest smart people I've ever known-continually amused (as well as outraged) by the world, mischievous, conscious always of living exactly the life he wanted to lead, but never smug about it. If you knew him only though his column in The Washington Post , which was often bellicose, you might think he was an ill-humored sort. Those of us who worked with him, and remembered that experience as singular in our careers for its high-spiritedness and sheer fun, its sense of being with Mike on a madcap but meaningful ride, know better.

I met Mike when I was on maternity leave with my first baby, and he had just been chosen as the editor of The New Republic , where I then worked. When he called to propose that we meet for lunch, I was feeling particularly milky, sleepless and disheveled. The prospect of squeezing myself into acceptable business attire, heading downtown for the first time since the baby, and making intelligent conversation with the famous journalist who was my new boss, seemed hopelessly intimidating. Maybe Mike noticed my moment of hesitation; maybe he just intuited how I felt because he and his wife, Max, had a new baby, too. But the next thing I knew, he was proposing bringing lunch to my house in Bethesda, and the next day he was there, bearing pâté and a baguette and the ingredients for a lovely simple pasta, which he cooked for me while keeping up a riveting patter about all the things he wanted to do at the magazine. He never made a big deal about instituting a "family-friendly" policy at The New Republic, where the staff was young and childless; he just said that, if I preferred, I could work at home a couple of days a week when I came back.

Mike was deeply courteous, and he managed to make the various accommodations he offered on behalf of my family life feel like a natural extension of that courtesy-just something you did to make somebody's life easier, without making a fuss about it or boasting about what a progressive employer you were. But part of it was that Mike delighted in his own children, in a way that made him generous toward and bemused about all children. He was the only male colleague I've ever had with whom I could exchange what-our-kids-did-last-night stories without feeling that it bored him, or pigeonholed me. He was a great and close, but unneurotic and noncompetitive, observer of his kids. There are so many ways in which the public Mike will be remembered and deeply missed-as an extraordinary war correspondent, a charismatic editor, a passionate columnist and a beautiful writer. I will remember him as my beau ideal of a working father.

-Margaret Talbot

I met Michael Kelly when I was an intern at The New Republic in 1996 and he was the magazine's incoming editor. I wrote to him asking for a staff job. He responded by taking me to a nice lunch in downtown Washington. Our lunch confirmed everything you'll hear about his kindness toward aspiring young writers whom other editors might impatiently brush off. At the time, I had a mere handful of short and rather insubstantial clips to my name, and came to lunch nervous and slightly intimidated. After 10 minutes, I felt completely at ease. Michael complimented my writing more than he needed to, showed a sincere curiosity about my interests and goals, and described his plans for the magazine with the enthusiasm of a man about to renovate his dream house. He never once condescended. I was still just a punk, but he treated me like a serious person.

But that lunch was less interesting than the second conversation we had. Michael had offered me a job as a TNR fact-checker, with a chance to write on the side. I had another offer, to write about politics for an alternative weekly in Boston, and decided I couldn't turn down a full-time writing job. Not only did Michael understand my decision, he seemed to turn a bit wistful. He began to offer me advice with a fatherly air that suggested that he envied a young writer setting out down the open journalistic road. He painted a romantic, admiring picture of Boston as a place where politics can be seen on its most primal level. He gave me names and numbers to call. A great mentor himself, he urged me to find "wise men," detached from the biases of daily political skirmishes, who could explain how the city really worked. (He recommended one man in particular, a Machiavellian political operative whom he described, with a hint of admiration, as "a real rat-fucker.")

He was most passionate in urging me to devote myself completely to my work. Go to every last campaign event and city council meeting you can, he told me. If you have a girlfriend, drag her along. Work hard, he said. "You don't have as much time as you think you do."

-Michael Crowley

Michael Kelly had so many things, but I will miss him most for what he lacked. He had brilliance, humor, stature, energy, generosity, taste, guts, vision. He lacked arrogance. He lacked the genetic code for smugness. He lacked the presumption, which so many vastly less gifted people carry around like change in their pockets, that something was true because he said it, or deep because he thought it. In a world full of people who never miss a slot through which to drop a name or a point of flattering self-reference, he lacked any particular urge to enlighten one that he had, oh, driven across a desert as it was being bombed in the Gulf War, or earned the fear and loathing of both Clintons. In short, he lacked that whole link between success and self-worship. This made him both a great guy and a great example.

It is generally vile, and particularly untrue to Mike Kelly, to overstate one's relationship to the celebrated deceased. I was miles away from the center of his life; just one of many writers lucky enough to have appeared in his line of vision. But that's just it. There are scores of us; underlings and aspirants of one sort or another who feel deadened by this death.

My memories of Mike are like my college diploma: very special to me, even though lots of people have them.

I remember the second I knew, before we even met, that I liked and trusted him completely, because he couldn't even smooth-talk me. It was the very end of 2000, and he was calling me in New York to talk about a job.

"Have you ever thought of moving to Washington?"

"No."

"Well, you should; it's really a very stimulating city, and just as vibrant in its way as New York and … oh, what the hell, you'll hate it, it's one big law firm-but you should come anyway."

I remember that when I did come anyway, it was inauguration week, and all the hotels were triple-booked. He sent me to stay at the Victorian manse on Capitol Hill where he was brought up-and where I could clearly see, in the sharp, sweet, much-loved parents, the origins of the sharp, sweet, much-loved son. I remember the time that I wrote an Atlantic piece that was an absolute disaster, and he wrote a rejection note that was an absolute gift: straightforward, to be sure, but so full of kindness and encouragement that I still have it. I remember thinking, pretty much every time I spoke to him, that I had drawn the long end of the straw.

When I left my job, to head for the war that claimed him, Mike called me up. With typically amazing grace, he wished me luck and offered me everything: useful friends, credentials, advice, ideas, editorial support. Even then, I choked up at what he said last, although he said it lightly. He said he wanted to keep me "in the gang."

What I wouldn't give to keep him there, too.

-Tish Durkin

In The Reprieve , the second novel of his "Roads to Freedom" trilogy, Jean-Paul Sartre captured the dismal atmosphere of France on the eve of war with Hitler, when defeatism often wore the badge of pacifism. His character Brunet notices the slogans-"No more war. Negotiations not war. Peace first"-and reflects sourly on how many of the activists are female: "Women always get it wrong; in 1914 they bundled their men off to the front, when they ought to have lain down on the rails to prevent the trains from starting, and now when there might be some sense in fighting, you're founding peace leagues and doing all you can to break your men's morale."

I would not normally have dreamed of deploying Sartre against Sontag, but quite late in Regarding the Pain of Others , a beautiful but rather confusing book, she poses the following question: "Is there an antidote to the perennial seductiveness of war? And is this a question a woman is more likely to pose than a man? (Probably yes.)"

If it weren't for the "probably," she would not be Susan Sontag. She knows as well as anybody about the war-relish record of Margaret Thatcher and Indira Gandhi and Golda Meir, as well as the pacifism of Robert Lowell, Mahatma Gandhi and Leo Tolstoy. So it's a cause for regret that she doesn't resolve to answer her own chromosomal questions, except by posing another one: "Could one be mobilized actively to oppose war by an image (or a group of images) as one might be enrolled among the opponents of capital punishment by reading, say, Dreiser's An American Tragedy ?"

The difficulty here is the use of the word "war" without any definite article. It was Susan Sontag's tough-minded stand on Greater Serbia's war of aggression which helped galvanize many people to swallow their own misgivings about an American military counterstroke. On that occasion, she went very bravely to see for herself. But there were many photographers and filmmakers who made Sarajevo fairly real to those who never saw or smelled it.

This book, a successor in some ways to On Photography (1977), approaches the problem of imagery from multiple perspectives, one of which is female. Ms. Sontag quotes with apparent sympathy from Virginia Woolf's Three Guineas (1938), where, in an exchange with a male correspondent, Woolf asserted that atrocity photographs from Spain would depend for their effect on whether the viewer was a man or a woman. I've always thought this a very dubious proposition: The fieriest propagandist for war in Republican Spain was Dolores Ibarruri ("La Pasionaria"), and one of the finest poems of the period is Edgell Rickword's "To the Wife of a Non-Interventionist Statesman," picturing the loathing any decent woman must feel for a man so spineless as to be neutral in the face of fascism. It may well be true that men have more feeling for war as a matter of pride or testosterone, but the most frequently offered justification is the defense (or avenging) of women and children, and there have been as many Pasionarias urging the men folk on as there have been Lysistratas. The war gene is part of our common mammalian makeup, proof of our animal and partly evolved status as well as a potent spur to innovation. With such large adrenal glands, we may one day exterminate each other completely; without them, we might have died out already.

Once at a bullfight and once at an execution, I experienced the simultaneous urge to look away and to keep looking. (One can experience the same conflict at crime scenes and accidents.) The central part of Ms. Sontag's essay asks whether our exposure to cruelty and suffering, or rather our exposure in its vicarious form, has a coarsening or a pedagogic effect. And the cleverest part of it compares the recent prevalence of photography to the older school of painting. In my experience, Goya's sequence The Disasters of War is infinitely more powerful than Matthew Brady's rather wooden shots of the Civil War, or Robert Capa's overexposed frame of a single Spanish soldier at the moment he apparently takes a bullet. Many of the most celebrated early war photographs were in fact staged and posed: Ms. Sontag points out that it's not until Vietnam that we can be fairly certain we're not looking at propaganda. Nothing can lie like a camera, in other words. Whereas Otto Dix's Goya-like paintings of the Western front, or Jacques Callot's series of 17th-century etchings, The Miseries and Misfortunes of War , will stand for all time as a reminder of what we do when we make war. And nobody ever accused the Old Masters of daubing away in order to titillate. Ms. Sontag, whose review of Callot is a high point, might have done well to quote Auden's "Musée des Beaux Arts," with its opening line: "About suffering they were never wrong / The Old Masters."

The Old Masters also had briefer and riskier lives, whereas we permanently suspect ourselves of "glamorizing" or even "aestheticizing" violence, and of doing so from a safe distance. This moral danger can be overstated, as it often is by those who want to demonstrate their own superior sensitivity. ("Compassion fatigue" is a syndrome from which only others are alleged to suffer.) People want to see as much as they can, and this instinct is not deplorable. The photographers who bring us the most graphic and haunting material-I'm thinking of Don McCullin and Sebastiao Salgado and Susan Meiselas-do not become numbed or affectless by repeated exposure, and their desire to share at secondhand is not ignoble. Ms. Sontag deftly points out that witnesses of calamities or crimes like the World Trade Center attack now typically say "It felt like a movie," where they used to say "It felt like a dream." I'd say that was a slight improvement, from the point of view of realism. She also pleads for less shame about the beauty of certain images, instancing some of the hypnotizing panoramas of Ground Zero. One might go further and say that the film of planes blossoming into towering pyres is also weirdly beautiful-and should be shown more often than it now is, though not for "aesthetic" reasons.

In point of fact, the truly horrible is hardly ever recorded. Planes crash all the time, but this is the only real film we have of such an event. Those who made souvenir pictures of lynchings decided to show only the aftermath, not the drawn-out mutilation and burning. At the J.F.K. museum in Dallas, the exploding head of the President is not shown in the Zapruder film, and most people have never "really" seen this, the first televised assassination. There's no film of the Final Solution, or of Rwanda while the machetes were still at work. Even the subhuman goons who decapitated Daniel Pearl spared us one or two crucial frames of their ritual murder snuff video. The ambition of the camera, to approximate as nearly as possible to reality, has some distance to travel before it's vindicated. We're still being shielded more than we're being exposed-as Ms. Sontag implicitly concedes when she identifies past fakes and euphemisms in the photographic world. Surely she doesn't feel that we were more humane then? (If the Somme and Verdun had become a "living-room war," the conflict might have ended sooner.)

There are one or two near-miss generalizations that express her ambivalences. It may be true to say that "all politics, like all of history, is concrete." But is it wise to add: "To be sure, nobody who really thinks about history can take politics altogether seriously"? Is it really the case that "Nobody can think and hit someone at the same time"? Muhammad Ali would seem to offer one refutation of this, and the recent evolution of "precision guided missiles" and selective targeting another, even more compelling one.

The book closes with a rather unsatisfying statement about the unimaginability of war except at firsthand. But this seems to risk a tautology-it was presumably unimaginable to the combatants and survivors also, until it became their turn, as it so often does. There's no real way of being "antiwar," but there are several means of evading the dilemma. Dalton Trumbo wrote Johnny Got His Gun (1939), one of the greatest "antiwar" fictions in the American canon, as a satire on the "war to end all wars," and many years later made it into a splendid film. But when it was first published, he was appalled to see his masterpiece pirated and reprinted by American fascist groups, many of them masquerading as "Mothers for Peace" and what have you, and tried hard to prevent this abuse of his work. But was it really an abuse to take him at his word? Those who are most genuinely repelled by war and violence are also those who are most likely to decide that some things, after all, are worth fighting for. This supplies the element of tragedy in human affairs, but it also contains a much-overlooked aspect of hope.

Christopher Hitchens is a columnist for Vanity Fair . His most recent book is Why Orwell Matters (Basic Books).

At last, a decent H.U.D. story; something a shoe-leather journalist can really get his teeth into. Alas: "In working on it, I had gotten in touch with Cuomo's staff to seek some backup material and ran across Cuomo's new press secretary, somebody I knew from an earlier incarnation. It was Karen Hinton, the woman who in 1994 had described to me the unpleasant sexual overture Clinton had once made to her 10 years earlier."

There was just no escaping it. As you can see from Mr. Isikoff's Capitoline prose ("rising stars" intersecting with "insiders" all the way), he didn't become a reporter in order to be scraping congealed jizz off unlaundered garments. I used to see him around Washington a bit, looking sincere and committed and doubtless imagining a chance to make some public figure go straight. I remember giving him a sympathy call, a few years ago, when he was suspended by The Washington Post for believing that the Paula Jones allegations ought at least to be reported. (Now, doesn't that seem a while back?) The whole charm of his book consists in the extreme reluctance with which he became involved in this skein of intrigue–that, and the exemplary doggedness with which he did pursue it when he came to appreciate its importance. As if in overcompensation, he worries still about being used by right-wing talk-show hacks, about spending too much time in the national underwear drawer, and about "getting too close to" or indeed (gasp) "becoming part of" the Story. I've been there, Mike, and I say deal with it. This was all Mr. Clinton's idea, not yours.

Here is how he finds out about the Gap dress, and here's how we almost didn't:

"So what do you think?" Tripp whispered over the phone.

"I think that's incredible."

Tripp paused. "Should I take it?"

"And do what with it?" I asked.

"Give it to you," she told me.

I paused. "What am I supposed to do with it?"

"Have it tested," said Tripp.

To say that nobody had ever before proposed anything along these lines would, to put it mildly, be something of an understatement.

"What in God's name are you talking about?" I said to Tripp, my voice somewhat elevated.

He had the same incredulous, back-away reaction when offered the Lewinsky tapes, when told about Kathleen Willey's hot moment in the Oval Office, when informed about Vernon Jordan's go-between role and when confronted by the Paula Jones deposition. If any of this is true, in other words, the President is a serial dirtbag. Can that be right? As a result, The Post and Newsweek both very nearly missed the story, not because it was inauthentic or unimportant or ill-sourced but because it was too foul to be true. (If you should desire an example of the idle, snide journalism that gave Mr. Clinton a free pass for so long, Mr. Isikoff supplies it in the shape of some telling recollections of his former Post colleague Lloyd Grove.)

In the intelligence world, the tradecraft expression "blowback" describes the consequences of a failed or even sometimes a successful operation: the shady "assets" that must be disposed of; the cover-up that must be instigated; the mouths that must be shut. In its tawdry way, the analogy holds here. Impeachment was a "blowback" from years of deceit, character assassination, rough and nasty sex and moral (at best) blackmail. Wronged and insulted women decided on their day in court; bits of evidence floated to the surface; those hired to make it go away sometimes tired of their jobs, or just fucked up. "The politics of personal destruction" returned to plague their innovator. In this metaphorical sense, an investigative type like Mr. Isikoff was just the man for the job, because when it did become a matter of tapes and forensic paper trails he knew the form. The fact that he looked and felt like Charlie Chaplin in a brothel in Naples only adds to the cream of the jest.

There are a number of useful glimpses of the way that White House toadies, even the supposedly "straight" ones, went about their tasks. Mike McCurry, for example, knew from his experience on the Bob Kerrey campaign that Mr. Clinton had a loutish way with women. But while in office, he expected to earn brownie points from the press for acting like a "see-no-evil" monkey. However, he wasn't so pure or neutral. When Newsweek put Paula Jones on the cover, he used his publicly financed office to start "a low-level whispering campaign" to the effect that this "was all the work of that renegade Isikoff. He's a zealot on this issue. He got into trouble over at The Post ." Mr. McCurry "voiced some of those sentiments to Newsweek 's new White House correspondent, Karen Breslau.… [He] let it be known that Breslau shouldn't be expecting any exclusives from the White House staff for some time to come." More journalists should be proud of such treatment, but the fact remains that few of them are, and that editors don't invest in such troublemakers for long.

Then there is the dubious figure of Bob Bennett, chief among the President's many attorneys. To hear the Clinton people talk publicly, you could imagine that they found all sexual talk, let alone sexual innuendo, a distraction from the higher callings of politics and law. But Mr. Isikoff has also heard Mr. Bennett talking privately, and spreading a salacious story about Paula Jones having posed in the nude, and thereby hoping "to get messages across without leaving any fingerprints." He had been doing this for some time, and with some success, until he got dealt the following card in return while talking to one of Ms. Jones' lawyers:

Bennett … added the line he had been sharing with every journalist he talked to. "I understand there are some nude photos of her." If Bennett was trying to play hardball, Davis and Cammarata were prepared to retaliate in kind. "Well, Bob," said Davis, "might it affect your thinking if I told you that Ms. Jones can identify certain distinguishing characteristics in the President's genital area?" There was a long pause. "Goddammit, Gil," Bennett finally said. "We're lawyers–and here we are talking about the President's privates…. Well, I guess this is not your usual personal injury lawsuit."

No indeedy. The privates of women, of course, had been fair game up until then. Serves Mr. Bennett right, I say, and bravo to Mr. Isikoff for ratting him out.

This is also the only book, or indeed journalistic account of any kind, that gives a full and serious account of how Kenneth Starr's team became "attached," in the prosecutorial sense, to the Lewinsky matter. Mr. Isikoff relates how a nexus of conservative lawyers and activists developed connections among themselves and with actual and future plaintiffs. But he also shows how Jackie Bennett, a crucial Starr attorney, became impressed by Vernon Jordan's tireless fund-raising for Clintonoids who were in legal jeopardy. To help recruit so much money from Revlon, James Riady, John Huang and the Lippo Group, and for a busted flush and jail-bound man like Webster Hubbell, and then to go back to Ron Perelman when it was a matter of rewarding a perjured affidavit from an intern … well, prosecutors are just bound to have suspicious minds. Now, if Mr. Clinton had run as a man "soft on crime," that might be one thing. But he ran, and governed, as Mr. Zero Tolerance and Mr. Law 'n' Order. So any irony here is strictly at the expense of those who supported the crime bill, with its unusually strict new clauses on sexual harassment and the questions a defendant may be

required to answer.

I have the impression that Mr. Isikoff would still much rather have got a Pulitzer nomination, or some other damn-fool award, for cracking the campaign-finance story. He clearly isn't comfortable in the world of rape charges, soiled linen, heavy-breathing phone tapes and (see that famous Starr report footnote) "oral-anal contact." More credit to him, then, for making an intelligible and serious narrative of it. The Bill Clinton of the China donations is the same Bill Clinton who hired private dicks to push his discarded women around. The hypocrites are those who can look at this evidence of distraught and corrupt and brutish sexuality, and decide that only those who expose it are "pornographers" or "obsessed with sex." The shy, almost apologetic figure of Michael Isikoff is a part of the necessary refutation of this semiofficial lie.

Christopher Hitchens is a columnist for Vanity Fair .

At last, a decent H.U.D. story; something a shoe-leather journalist can really get his teeth into. Alas: "In working on it, I had gotten in touch with Cuomo's staff to seek some backup material and ran across Cuomo's new press secretary, somebody I knew from an earlier incarnation. It was Karen Hinton, the woman who in 1994 had described to me the unpleasant sexual overture Clinton had once made to her 10 years earlier."

There was just no escaping it. As you can see from Mr. Isikoff's Capitoline prose ("rising stars" intersecting with "insiders" all the way), he didn't become a reporter in order to be scraping congealed jizz off unlaundered garments. I used to see him around Washington a bit, looking sincere and committed and doubtless imagining a chance to make some public figure go straight. I remember giving him a sympathy call, a few years ago, when he was suspended by The Washington Post for believing that the Paula Jones allegations ought at least to be reported. (Now, doesn't that seem a while back?) The whole charm of his book consists in the extreme reluctance with which he became involved in this skein of intrigue–that, and the exemplary doggedness with which he did pursue it when he came to appreciate its importance. As if in overcompensation, he worries still about being used by right-wing talk-show hacks, about spending too much time in the national underwear drawer, and about "getting too close to" or indeed (gasp) "becoming part of" the Story. I've been there, Mike, and I say deal with it. This was all Mr. Clinton's idea, not yours.

Here is how he finds out about the Gap dress, and here's how we almost didn't:

"So what do you think?" Tripp whispered over the phone.

"I think that's incredible."

Tripp paused. "Should I take it?"

"And do what with it?" I asked.

"Give it to you," she told me.

I paused. "What am I supposed to do with it?"

"Have it tested," said Tripp.

To say that nobody had ever before proposed anything along these lines would, to put it mildly, be something of an understatement.

"What in God's name are you talking about?" I said to Tripp, my voice somewhat elevated.

He had the same incredulous, back-away reaction when offered the Lewinsky tapes, when told about Kathleen Willey's hot moment in the Oval Office, when informed about Vernon Jordan's go-between role and when confronted by the Paula Jones deposition. If any of this is true, in other words, the President is a serial dirtbag. Can that be right? As a result, The Post and Newsweek both very nearly missed the story, not because it was inauthentic or unimportant or ill-sourced but because it was too foul to be true. (If you should desire an example of the idle, snide journalism that gave Mr. Clinton a free pass for so long, Mr. Isikoff supplies it in the shape of some telling recollections of his former Post colleague Lloyd Grove.)

In the intelligence world, the tradecraft expression "blowback" describes the consequences of a failed or even sometimes a successful operation: the shady "assets" that must be disposed of; the cover-up that must be instigated; the mouths that must be shut. In its tawdry way, the analogy holds here. Impeachment was a "blowback" from years of deceit, character assassination, rough and nasty sex and moral (at best) blackmail. Wronged and insulted women decided on their day in court; bits of evidence floated to the surface; those hired to make it go away sometimes tired of their jobs, or just fucked up. "The politics of personal destruction" returned to plague their innovator. In this metaphorical sense, an investigative type like Mr. Isikoff was just the man for the job, because when it did become a matter of tapes and forensic paper trails he knew the form. The fact that he looked and felt like Charlie Chaplin in a brothel in Naples only adds to the cream of the jest.

There are a number of useful glimpses of the way that White House toadies, even the supposedly "straight" ones, went about their tasks. Mike McCurry, for example, knew from his experience on the Bob Kerrey campaign that Mr. Clinton had a loutish way with women. But while in office, he expected to earn brownie points from the press for acting like a "see-no-evil" monkey. However, he wasn't so pure or neutral. When Newsweek put Paula Jones on the cover, he used his publicly financed office to start "a low-level whispering campaign" to the effect that this "was all the work of that renegade Isikoff. He's a zealot on this issue. He got into trouble over at The Post ." Mr. McCurry "voiced some of those sentiments to Newsweek 's new White House correspondent, Karen Breslau.… [He] let it be known that Breslau shouldn't be expecting any exclusives from the White House staff for some time to come." More journalists should be proud of such treatment, but the fact remains that few of them are, and that editors don't invest in such troublemakers for long.

Then there is the dubious figure of Bob Bennett, chief among the President's many attorneys. To hear the Clinton people talk publicly, you could imagine that they found all sexual talk, let alone sexual innuendo, a distraction from the higher callings of politics and law. But Mr. Isikoff has also heard Mr. Bennett talking privately, and spreading a salacious story about Paula Jones having posed in the nude, and thereby hoping "to get messages across without leaving any fingerprints." He had been doing this for some time, and with some success, until he got dealt the following card in return while talking to one of Ms. Jones' lawyers:

Bennett … added the line he had been sharing with every journalist he talked to. "I understand there are some nude photos of her." If Bennett was trying to play hardball, Davis and Cammarata were prepared to retaliate in kind. "Well, Bob," said Davis, "might it affect your thinking if I told you that Ms. Jones can identify certain distinguishing characteristics in the President's genital area?" There was a long pause. "Goddammit, Gil," Bennett finally said. "We're lawyers–and here we are talking about the President's privates…. Well, I guess this is not your usual personal injury lawsuit."

No indeedy. The privates of women, of course, had been fair game up until then. Serves Mr. Bennett right, I say, and bravo to Mr. Isikoff for ratting him out.

This is also the only book, or indeed journalistic account of any kind, that gives a full and serious account of how Kenneth Starr's team became "attached," in the prosecutorial sense, to the Lewinsky matter. Mr. Isikoff relates how a nexus of conservative lawyers and activists developed connections among themselves and with actual and future plaintiffs. But he also shows how Jackie Bennett, a crucial Starr attorney, became impressed by Vernon Jordan's tireless fund-raising for Clintonoids who were in legal jeopardy. To help recruit so much money from Revlon, James Riady, John Huang and the Lippo Group, and for a busted flush and jail-bound man like Webster Hubbell, and then to go back to Ron Perelman when it was a matter of rewarding a perjured affidavit from an intern … well, prosecutors are just bound to have suspicious minds. Now, if Mr. Clinton had run as a man "soft on crime," that might be one thing. But he ran, and governed, as Mr. Zero Tolerance and Mr. Law 'n' Order. So any irony here is strictly at the expense of those who supported the crime bill, with its unusually strict new clauses on sexual harassment and the questions a defendant may be

required to answer.

I have the impression that Mr. Isikoff would still much rather have got a Pulitzer nomination, or some other damn-fool award, for cracking the campaign-finance story. He clearly isn't comfortable in the world of rape charges, soiled linen, heavy-breathing phone tapes and (see that famous Starr report footnote) "oral-anal contact." More credit to him, then, for making an intelligible and serious narrative of it. The Bill Clinton of the China donations is the same Bill Clinton who hired private dicks to push his discarded women around. The hypocrites are those who can look at this evidence of distraught and corrupt and brutish sexuality, and decide that only those who expose it are "pornographers" or "obsessed with sex." The shy, almost apologetic figure of Michael Isikoff is a part of the necessary refutation of this semiofficial lie.

Christopher Hitchens is a columnist for Vanity Fair .