Decca, or Jessica, Mitford came from a family of unapologetic extremists. Her sister Unity didn’t just admire Hitler (as did their mother) but fell in love with him, and shot herself in the head when her preferred country of Germany and her native England went to war. (Hitler then sent the gravely injured girl to Switzerland in his private train so her parents could get her home.) Diana, the beauty of her day, married Sir Oswald Mosley, the head of the British fascists, and was a cheerful presence in Holloway prison when Churchill jailed the Mosleys as potential dangers during the war. Deborah, or Debo, married not just any duke but one of the most important ones, the Duke of Devonshire; novelist Nancy, living and writing in Paris, became more French than the French. A family of vivid colors, except for Pam, the least colorful, who was acknowledged as such and stripped of her name by her sisters, who would refer to her only as Woman—lovingly, of course.

Which leaves Decca, whose career may be the most unlikely of them all: renegade marriage to Churchill’s nephew Esmond Romilly, running a bar with him in Miami, early motherhood and widowhood, putting down roots in Oakland, ardent communist, queen of the muckrakers via her best-seller The American Way of Death (1963), fierce civil-rights activist, part-owner of a Scottish island (which she tried to give to the Communist Party—they weren’t interested). She was also a passionate friend to famous people like Katharine Graham and Maya Angelou, and countless other regular folks, and a compulsive correspondent for whom letters were the staff of life.

Although Decca: The Letters of Jessica Mitford is over 700 pages long, the letters it contains, very well edited by Peter Sussman (his biographical essays and notes are invaluable in keeping track of this eventful life), represent a modest fraction of Decca’s epistolary output. That’s all that’s modest about these exuberant and take-no-prisoners missives to the world. “Darling Muv, Thank you so much for the lovely bread board, we were so thrilled with it …. As you can imagine we are frightfully busy, trying to get the Communist leaders out of jail & hoping to stay out ourselves.”

Whether she’s chiding Hillary Rodham Clinton, who worked (pre-Bill) in the law office of her second husband, Bob Treuhaft, or counseling her daughter Constancia Romilly (known in the family as Dinky), or reporting on her muckraking investigations—into the Famous Writers School, which she demolished; Maine Chance, the famous fat farm (which, unlike most people, she hated); and, most famously, the funeral industry—she was always herself: that is, a funny maker of fun at other people’s expense and, at the same time, loving and loyal to her family and friends. To Hillary Clinton: “Do write back. I’d love more news of Chelsea Victoria—what a marvelous name! How did you come by it? Was she conceived in Victoria Station, or Chelsea?”

But she wasn’t always serene. For years, living in America, with violently different politics and lifestyles from those of her family—the Treuhafts lived in a modest house; her sister Debo lived in one of England’s greatest stately homes—the gap between Decca and her background was vast, but whatever her politics, she never cut herself off from her aristocratic roots, even eventually resolving her fraught relationship with her somewhat chilly, pro-German mother, whom she (and her sister Nancy) found it hard to forgive for denying them the education they longed for: Not one of the Mitford girls was sent to school.

Decca’s double life meant that her letters reveal two separate and equally fascinating worlds, of the English aristocracy and American radical politics, and she never loses a certain note of deracinated fascination with American goings-on. As late as 1980, her letter to Sally Belfrage about sister Diana Mosley’s book The Duchess of Windsor (“It made me turn quite pink to think that one of us could write such total trash & so badly—it’s Woman’s Day all the way”) reveals that she still thinks of herself as one of “us,” that is, a Mitford, with all that implied.

The personality that emerges in these letters is that of a woman for whom everything is a tease, and at the same time deadly serious. She’s provocative, self-mocking, eloquent sometimes, silly, generous and brave. She had to endure more tragedy than most people—she lost her first husband, her favorite sister and two children—yet she seems to have faced all this with unwavering stiff upper lip, whether she’s in physical danger (as during the civil-rights period) or personal sorrow. Despite her disapproval of the American way of death, when she went down with all flags flying (lung cancer at 78), she had organized a corking funeral for herself, with horses and plumes.

Diane Johnson is the author of 14 books; her most recent novel is L’Affaire (Plume).

Decca, or Jessica, Mitford came from a family of unapologetic extremists. Her sister Unity didn’t just admire Hitler (as did their mother) but fell in love with him, and shot herself in the head when her preferred country of Germany and her native England went to war. (Hitler then sent the gravely injured girl to Switzerland in his private train so her parents could get her home.) Diana, the beauty of her day, married Sir Oswald Mosley, the head of the British fascists, and was a cheerful presence in Holloway prison when Churchill jailed the Mosleys as potential dangers during the war. Deborah, or Debo, married not just any duke but one of the most important ones, the Duke of Devonshire; novelist Nancy, living and writing in Paris, became more French than the French. A family of vivid colors, except for Pam, the least colorful, who was acknowledged as such and stripped of her name by her sisters, who would refer to her only as Woman—lovingly, of course.

Which leaves Decca, whose career may be the most unlikely of them all: renegade marriage to Churchill’s nephew Esmond Romilly, running a bar with him in Miami, early motherhood and widowhood, putting down roots in Oakland, ardent communist, queen of the muckrakers via her best-seller The American Way of Death (1963), fierce civil-rights activist, part-owner of a Scottish island (which she tried to give to the Communist Party—they weren’t interested). She was also a passionate friend to famous people like Katharine Graham and Maya Angelou, and countless other regular folks, and a compulsive correspondent for whom letters were the staff of life.

Although Decca: The Letters of Jessica Mitford is over 700 pages long, the letters it contains, very well edited by Peter Sussman (his biographical essays and notes are invaluable in keeping track of this eventful life), represent a modest fraction of Decca’s epistolary output. That’s all that’s modest about these exuberant and take-no-prisoners missives to the world. “Darling Muv, Thank you so much for the lovely bread board, we were so thrilled with it …. As you can imagine we are frightfully busy, trying to get the Communist leaders out of jail & hoping to stay out ourselves.”

Whether she’s chiding Hillary Rodham Clinton, who worked (pre-Bill) in the law office of her second husband, Bob Treuhaft, or counseling her daughter Constancia Romilly (known in the family as Dinky), or reporting on her muckraking investigations—into the Famous Writers School, which she demolished; Maine Chance, the famous fat farm (which, unlike most people, she hated); and, most famously, the funeral industry—she was always herself: that is, a funny maker of fun at other people’s expense and, at the same time, loving and loyal to her family and friends. To Hillary Clinton: “Do write back. I’d love more news of Chelsea Victoria—what a marvelous name! How did you come by it? Was she conceived in Victoria Station, or Chelsea?”

But she wasn’t always serene. For years, living in America, with violently different politics and lifestyles from those of her family—the Treuhafts lived in a modest house; her sister Debo lived in one of England’s greatest stately homes—the gap between Decca and her background was vast, but whatever her politics, she never cut herself off from her aristocratic roots, even eventually resolving her fraught relationship with her somewhat chilly, pro-German mother, whom she (and her sister Nancy) found it hard to forgive for denying them the education they longed for: Not one of the Mitford girls was sent to school.

Decca’s double life meant that her letters reveal two separate and equally fascinating worlds, of the English aristocracy and American radical politics, and she never loses a certain note of deracinated fascination with American goings-on. As late as 1980, her letter to Sally Belfrage about sister Diana Mosley’s book The Duchess of Windsor (“It made me turn quite pink to think that one of us could write such total trash & so badly—it’s Woman’s Day all the way”) reveals that she still thinks of herself as one of “us,” that is, a Mitford, with all that implied.

The personality that emerges in these letters is that of a woman for whom everything is a tease, and at the same time deadly serious. She’s provocative, self-mocking, eloquent sometimes, silly, generous and brave. She had to endure more tragedy than most people—she lost her first husband, her favorite sister and two children—yet she seems to have faced all this with unwavering stiff upper lip, whether she’s in physical danger (as during the civil-rights period) or personal sorrow. Despite her disapproval of the American way of death, when she went down with all flags flying (lung cancer at 78), she had organized a corking funeral for herself, with horses and plumes.

Diane Johnson is the author of 14 books; her most recent novel is L’Affaire (Plume).

We Californians had focused briefly and sympathetically on Mayor Giuliani last fall at the time of the primaries, when it came out about his prostate cancer and he was replaced as a contender by what seemed an interchangeable Italian-American Republican, Rick Lazio; but the West Coast press has not been paying such close attention since then. What a world of events has passed, what a lot of moral confusion to untangle, what an absence of victims as these principals scramble for the leading role in some sort of sweepstakes to be the worst villain, least sympathetic human being and biggest groveling, publicity-seeking, seemingly oblivious fool.

Since the beginning of the Giuliani-Hanover-Nathan saga, it has been hard to decide which is the most fascinating aspect of what has been, for New Yorkers, a long, slowly unfolding drama: the resolute compulsion to humiliation; the depth of marital hate (so unlike political and other forms of hate); the absence of shame; the sheer mismanagement; the intrusive and strident nature of the press coverage; the lawyers ( always the lawyers); the riddle of how Americans get these public officials anyhow; the satisfaction of seeing that other people's families are worse than one's own, that art cannot come up to life (soap opera, Sopranos ) for sheer disgusting excess, unless we think of a play like John Webster's The Duchess of Malfi for the thrilling Elizabethan quality of the mighty overreacher's fall. A friend recently pointed out to me that the denouement of the Nepalese royal dinner party played like the end of Hamlet .

Family hate, Nepalese-style–though more dramatic than we have reason to expect from the Giulianis–leaves no doubt about the irrational intensity of household passions. Marital hate, with its annual toll of batterings and corpses, is especially intense because of the large component of self-hate. How can I have been such a fool? Will this person, to whom I have revealed my weakest and silliest selves, reveal them in turn to the person who will take my place? The chagrin of knowing that once one loved a person now so clearly revealed to be faithless, ugly, poor, altogether unworthy and unsuccessful! What this shameful blunder says about oneself is nearly unbearable. Logically, we ought to wish the wildest success on the person who leaves us. We never do.

The slow unrolling of events–each day a new, dismal installment–gives an effect that's absorbing and suspenseful. Yet taken all together, the Giuliani divorce isn't much worse than anyone else's divorce: The girlfriend is always a problem, teenagers always add an exasperating note, money is always an issue (like all divorcing men, this deadbeat is claiming to have only $7,000 to his name), the injured party is always bitterest–and Ms. Hanover is bitter. So is Ms. Nathan when it comes to her custody battle–nothing new, really.

Among them, this crew has some experience with divorces and annulments: one failed marriage each among the principals (and this without knowing the marital history of Mr. Nathan and Mr. Hanover). Experience might have helped them avoid some of the mistakes they seem eager to make. Provocations–like the Mayor inviting Ms. Nathan into the family home–should have been prevented by responsible lawyers if Rudy and Judi didn't have common sense themselves.

It's too bad. Divorce probably ought to be thought of and presented more positively. It can be a happy experience, or at least a relief, freeing the bridled spirit from a disagreeable bond, reconstituting a bleak future, setting everyone up for the better. Usually it is not, but maybe only because society views it negatively, sometimes even forbids it, and really hasn't worked out any adequate rules about those important components, kids and money, that the Giulianis and Nathans are thrashing out in our view.

And here the difference is that politics and publicity are involved, and also what the courts have called a tangible and material asset, that which the lawyers refer to as the "celebrity status" of the principals, though who would want such celebrity can be answered briefly: Only they would. All three, or four, or eight (counting judge and lawyers) seem to cling to the futile idea that if somehow a public-relations battle could be won, the war would be won, rather like Palestinians. Meantime the poor couple has broken the cardinal rule of successful divorce: hold no face-to-face discussions. They have faced off in the public arena, and everyone hates all sides. (Though I have the impression that Donna Hanover may have a slight edge, owing to the Mayor's tarnished record–wasn't there someone called Christyne?) The lawyers are trying to get the rest of us to break the cardinal rule about friends' divorces: don't take sides. "Remember," our mothers used to say, "there are always two sides to every story." But not to choose sides would spoil the bit of fun we're entitled to, for bearing our own feelings of regret and responsibility for voting these people into office.

Does all this sell newspapers? Is the New York Post doing better than before all this? The role of the press need hardly be discussed, since we don't expect any better. If the thing weren't covered, we wouldn't be disgusted; meantime there's the public's right to know, the seeming compulsion of the lawyers to say quotably revolting things, and so on. For me, the weirdest sign of a looming sensibility chasm may be when the Mayor's lawyer, Raoul Felder, trying to vilify Ms. Hanover, announces that the Mayor, on chemotherapy for his prostate cancer, has to clean up his own vomit because he doesn't have a wife. How even to deconstruct such a revelation? Why would the Mayor tell his lawyer such a thing? It isn't that one wouldn't hold the head of a loved one, it's that–what? That the Mayor doesn't receive adequate medical care? That intimate health care is part of a wife's job description, no matter how weak her stomach? That the Mayor would allow someone to watch him throw up? Is cleaning up vomit expected of wives, no matter what their health-care training? (If not, of whom then?) Should the Mayor be on medical marijuana? This lawyer assumes a definition of family relationships that many people can't imagine. Who is supposed to clean it up, actually? And are there no basins in Gracie Mansion?

Next to the Giuliani-Nathan-Hanovers, Bill Clinton and Monica Lewinsky were models of reticence, generosity toward each other and good will: "Oh, Monica is a good girl." One hates even to advance this idea, but–can this shameless self-destruction be a Republican thing? Can the sense of election among Republicans be so profound that any sense of personal moral culpability is unknown to them?

Or is it merely religion itself, whether Catholic or fundamentalist, that intensifies in people a search for Justification? And religion also introduces the idea of confession, which the principals are so enthusiastically availing themselves of here. It's just that these things are usually private. In either connection, think of Newt Gingrich and his many wives. Remember Congressman Henry Hyde, chairman of the House Judiciary Committee? In the Clinton impeachment affair, the most truly embarrassing thing was the prurience of the so-called House managers, all of whom professed to be religious, and most astonishing of all was their inability to see any connection between their own acknowledged behavior and the behavior they were so anxious to excoriate–remember the famous remark by Mr. Hyde that his own infidelity was a "youthful indiscretion" (at 41) and therefore had nothing to do with the situation at hand? (In retrospect, the delicacy of Congressman Bob Livingston in resigning seems almost un-American.) But now all these proud role models are exceeded.

The ego of politicians explains a lot. The rest of us cannot imagine the serenity of such inner conviction of importance. But history affords lots of examples of the disastrous collusion of ego and power–think Nero, or Idi Amin. Originally, Mr. Giuliani presented himself as a serious and dignified person: He was the Mayor who promised to improve the quality of life of New Yorkers. He did. He got all that squeegeeing stopped, crime reduced, graffiti down; and he continues, it appears, to function as a serious Mayor, protecting the city against, among other things, ferrets. It was reported that the Mayor's office even circulated memos like "Talking Points against the legalization of ferrets," and that passions ran high among both pro and con. Mayor Giuliani is strongly anti-ferret. It's not clear what sacrifices the citizens of New York will be making by having no First Lady now that the Mayor has "stripped" his wife of her duties. In any case, from being an effective Mayor with a political future after he leaves office next year, Mr. Giuliani has moved into being a public suicide.

But of course, it is celebrity–that is, publicity–that has made all the protagonists cease to be pitiable human beings, suffering and angry, and degraded them into being television-sitcom characters, especially for the rest of the country, non-New Yorkers who undoubtedly are not following as closely, and feel less keenly, any local loss of pride that may be involved here. (In San Francisco, Mayor Willie Brown was revealed to be the father of an illegitimate child, but this news was received with indifference, or actually a feeling of general satisfaction at having at least one question that has lingered locally resolved.)

New Yorker and Californian alike must feel some sympathy for the self-destructiveness of the doomed protagonists. With cancer, his fall from power, impotence and the ruin of his political future, the Mayor clings to a version of his life involving himself as a romantic protagonist sacrificing all for love, and there's something sort of sympathetic about that. He even seems to feel a kind of relish for a smoldering finish, blood, a heap of broken bodies. Once the situation spun out of control, it became a kind of soap-box derby of powerless vehicles hurtling downhill toward an appalling crash. No one's steering, not even the embarrassing lawyers.

There's the 12-step idea that you have to hit bottom before you can pick yourself up. These people seem to be testing that proposition, and maybe as a country we are testing the same proposition, involved in a kind of collective cultural self-destruction, with the leading Mayor vicariously enacting the expressive role, like a priest or a ritual designated human sacrifice. Though we thought the bottom was Congress dragging the country through the mud in the name of some hypocritical version of purity thinly masking partisan hatred, now we know that at the bottom is our own surrogate dragging us all through the mud in the name of ratings.

We Californians had focused briefly and sympathetically on Mayor Giuliani last fall at the time of the primaries, when it came out about his prostate cancer and he was replaced as a contender by what seemed an interchangeable Italian-American Republican, Rick Lazio; but the West Coast press has not been paying such close attention since then. What a world of events has passed, what a lot of moral confusion to untangle, what an absence of victims as these principals scramble for the leading role in some sort of sweepstakes to be the worst villain, least sympathetic human being and biggest groveling, publicity-seeking, seemingly oblivious fool.

Since the beginning of the Giuliani-Hanover-Nathan saga, it has been hard to decide which is the most fascinating aspect of what has been, for New Yorkers, a long, slowly unfolding drama: the resolute compulsion to humiliation; the depth of marital hate (so unlike political and other forms of hate); the absence of shame; the sheer mismanagement; the intrusive and strident nature of the press coverage; the lawyers ( always the lawyers); the riddle of how Americans get these public officials anyhow; the satisfaction of seeing that other people's families are worse than one's own, that art cannot come up to life (soap opera, Sopranos ) for sheer disgusting excess, unless we think of a play like John Webster's The Duchess of Malfi for the thrilling Elizabethan quality of the mighty overreacher's fall. A friend recently pointed out to me that the denouement of the Nepalese royal dinner party played like the end of Hamlet .

Family hate, Nepalese-style–though more dramatic than we have reason to expect from the Giulianis–leaves no doubt about the irrational intensity of household passions. Marital hate, with its annual toll of batterings and corpses, is especially intense because of the large component of self-hate. How can I have been such a fool? Will this person, to whom I have revealed my weakest and silliest selves, reveal them in turn to the person who will take my place? The chagrin of knowing that once one loved a person now so clearly revealed to be faithless, ugly, poor, altogether unworthy and unsuccessful! What this shameful blunder says about oneself is nearly unbearable. Logically, we ought to wish the wildest success on the person who leaves us. We never do.

The slow unrolling of events–each day a new, dismal installment–gives an effect that's absorbing and suspenseful. Yet taken all together, the Giuliani divorce isn't much worse than anyone else's divorce: The girlfriend is always a problem, teenagers always add an exasperating note, money is always an issue (like all divorcing men, this deadbeat is claiming to have only $7,000 to his name), the injured party is always bitterest–and Ms. Hanover is bitter. So is Ms. Nathan when it comes to her custody battle–nothing new, really.

Among them, this crew has some experience with divorces and annulments: one failed marriage each among the principals (and this without knowing the marital history of Mr. Nathan and Mr. Hanover). Experience might have helped them avoid some of the mistakes they seem eager to make. Provocations–like the Mayor inviting Ms. Nathan into the family home–should have been prevented by responsible lawyers if Rudy and Judi didn't have common sense themselves.

It's too bad. Divorce probably ought to be thought of and presented more positively. It can be a happy experience, or at least a relief, freeing the bridled spirit from a disagreeable bond, reconstituting a bleak future, setting everyone up for the better. Usually it is not, but maybe only because society views it negatively, sometimes even forbids it, and really hasn't worked out any adequate rules about those important components, kids and money, that the Giulianis and Nathans are thrashing out in our view.

And here the difference is that politics and publicity are involved, and also what the courts have called a tangible and material asset, that which the lawyers refer to as the "celebrity status" of the principals, though who would want such celebrity can be answered briefly: Only they would. All three, or four, or eight (counting judge and lawyers) seem to cling to the futile idea that if somehow a public-relations battle could be won, the war would be won, rather like Palestinians. Meantime the poor couple has broken the cardinal rule of successful divorce: hold no face-to-face discussions. They have faced off in the public arena, and everyone hates all sides. (Though I have the impression that Donna Hanover may have a slight edge, owing to the Mayor's tarnished record–wasn't there someone called Christyne?) The lawyers are trying to get the rest of us to break the cardinal rule about friends' divorces: don't take sides. "Remember," our mothers used to say, "there are always two sides to every story." But not to choose sides would spoil the bit of fun we're entitled to, for bearing our own feelings of regret and responsibility for voting these people into office.

Does all this sell newspapers? Is the New York Post doing better than before all this? The role of the press need hardly be discussed, since we don't expect any better. If the thing weren't covered, we wouldn't be disgusted; meantime there's the public's right to know, the seeming compulsion of the lawyers to say quotably revolting things, and so on. For me, the weirdest sign of a looming sensibility chasm may be when the Mayor's lawyer, Raoul Felder, trying to vilify Ms. Hanover, announces that the Mayor, on chemotherapy for his prostate cancer, has to clean up his own vomit because he doesn't have a wife. How even to deconstruct such a revelation? Why would the Mayor tell his lawyer such a thing? It isn't that one wouldn't hold the head of a loved one, it's that–what? That the Mayor doesn't receive adequate medical care? That intimate health care is part of a wife's job description, no matter how weak her stomach? That the Mayor would allow someone to watch him throw up? Is cleaning up vomit expected of wives, no matter what their health-care training? (If not, of whom then?) Should the Mayor be on medical marijuana? This lawyer assumes a definition of family relationships that many people can't imagine. Who is supposed to clean it up, actually? And are there no basins in Gracie Mansion?

Next to the Giuliani-Nathan-Hanovers, Bill Clinton and Monica Lewinsky were models of reticence, generosity toward each other and good will: "Oh, Monica is a good girl." One hates even to advance this idea, but–can this shameless self-destruction be a Republican thing? Can the sense of election among Republicans be so profound that any sense of personal moral culpability is unknown to them?

Or is it merely religion itself, whether Catholic or fundamentalist, that intensifies in people a search for Justification? And religion also introduces the idea of confession, which the principals are so enthusiastically availing themselves of here. It's just that these things are usually private. In either connection, think of Newt Gingrich and his many wives. Remember Congressman Henry Hyde, chairman of the House Judiciary Committee? In the Clinton impeachment affair, the most truly embarrassing thing was the prurience of the so-called House managers, all of whom professed to be religious, and most astonishing of all was their inability to see any connection between their own acknowledged behavior and the behavior they were so anxious to excoriate–remember the famous remark by Mr. Hyde that his own infidelity was a "youthful indiscretion" (at 41) and therefore had nothing to do with the situation at hand? (In retrospect, the delicacy of Congressman Bob Livingston in resigning seems almost un-American.) But now all these proud role models are exceeded.

The ego of politicians explains a lot. The rest of us cannot imagine the serenity of such inner conviction of importance. But history affords lots of examples of the disastrous collusion of ego and power–think Nero, or Idi Amin. Originally, Mr. Giuliani presented himself as a serious and dignified person: He was the Mayor who promised to improve the quality of life of New Yorkers. He did. He got all that squeegeeing stopped, crime reduced, graffiti down; and he continues, it appears, to function as a serious Mayor, protecting the city against, among other things, ferrets. It was reported that the Mayor's office even circulated memos like "Talking Points against the legalization of ferrets," and that passions ran high among both pro and con. Mayor Giuliani is strongly anti-ferret. It's not clear what sacrifices the citizens of New York will be making by having no First Lady now that the Mayor has "stripped" his wife of her duties. In any case, from being an effective Mayor with a political future after he leaves office next year, Mr. Giuliani has moved into being a public suicide.

But of course, it is celebrity–that is, publicity–that has made all the protagonists cease to be pitiable human beings, suffering and angry, and degraded them into being television-sitcom characters, especially for the rest of the country, non-New Yorkers who undoubtedly are not following as closely, and feel less keenly, any local loss of pride that may be involved here. (In San Francisco, Mayor Willie Brown was revealed to be the father of an illegitimate child, but this news was received with indifference, or actually a feeling of general satisfaction at having at least one question that has lingered locally resolved.)

New Yorker and Californian alike must feel some sympathy for the self-destructiveness of the doomed protagonists. With cancer, his fall from power, impotence and the ruin of his political future, the Mayor clings to a version of his life involving himself as a romantic protagonist sacrificing all for love, and there's something sort of sympathetic about that. He even seems to feel a kind of relish for a smoldering finish, blood, a heap of broken bodies. Once the situation spun out of control, it became a kind of soap-box derby of powerless vehicles hurtling downhill toward an appalling crash. No one's steering, not even the embarrassing lawyers.

There's the 12-step idea that you have to hit bottom before you can pick yourself up. These people seem to be testing that proposition, and maybe as a country we are testing the same proposition, involved in a kind of collective cultural self-destruction, with the leading Mayor vicariously enacting the expressive role, like a priest or a ritual designated human sacrifice. Though we thought the bottom was Congress dragging the country through the mud in the name of some hypocritical version of purity thinly masking partisan hatred, now we know that at the bottom is our own surrogate dragging us all through the mud in the name of ratings.

288 pages, $24.95

Reviled as a tart and liar, derided for her figure, claimed as the

poster victim of sexual harassment and exploited by the media, Monica

Lewinsky went on to win esteem for her spunky, poised independent behavior

before press, prosecutors, grand juries and legislators, and for her

reluctance to be a rat. When prurient congressmen, unable to forgo a last

chance to ogle those red, red lips, put her through a final gratuitous

ordeal, she came through as intelligent, courteous, more than their

match–and the nation cheered.

But with an amanuensis like Andrew Morton, Ms. Lewinsky doesn't

need enemies.

Just when we were getting to like her, Mr. Morton shows us a spoiled,

demanding, emotional, tantrum-thrower–indeed, a stalker, a

liar–someone without the slightest sense of proportion about the

Presidency of the United States. On nearly every page of this sodden book

are floods of tears, bursts of tears, torrents of tears: "I was just

suicidal. I was hysterical, I was screaming and crying." And so are

her father, mother, friends, Linda Tripp–even Bill Clinton tears up.

You wonder if all the tears are a stylistic tic left over from Mr.

Morton's books about Princess Diana.

Ms. Lewinsky's limited but hair-trigger emotional

register–tears, hyperventilation, threats–and the giant gulf

between her exalted view of her "affair" with Mr. Clinton and

what boils down to a few sessions of what would have been described in my

high school as "heavy petting" (initiated almost always by her),

goes a long way to explain why everyone babied her along as patiently as

they did. The White House, especially the women staff members, seems to

have realized that she was a loose cannon, even if she could be sort of

nice. What doesn't come across in Mr. Morton's book, though he

mentions that she has these qualities, are the charm, generosity and

intelligence Ms. Lewinsky must have had, to have attracted not only Mr.

Clinton but many other people who knew her, and which were apparent on

television.

Mr. Morton has calculated that people will relate to her pain more than

to her charm. Is this an astute estimation of the American national mood,

or some strangely British misunderstanding? He would not be the first Brit

journalist to fail to understand American events (just read the last six

years of The Economist ).

Americans are post-pain. We have grown up enough to prefer the heroine

Monica to this lying, manipulative, dysfunctional Monica whose apparent

confidence in letting this account of herself be published suggests a

completely egocentric universe.

Mr. Morton's Monica throws herself into suffering, and then people

"owe" her because they've made her suffer. Even her parents

had to "handle" her. No one (except, apparently, William

Ginsburg) just treated her like a grown-up. They were afraid of provoking

an array of symptoms and psychopathology from hyperventilation to binge

eating, to staying in bed and by the phone for days on end, crying, crying,

crying.

What is the culture that could so deform a lively, bright, loyal,

pretty, witty girl like Monica Lewinsky? What made her believe the world

revolved around her emotions? Her family? California? Life in Beverly

Hills, a friend of Ms. Lewinsky's tells Mr. Morton, is "very

unkind to heavy people." Is Ms. Lewinsky unique or a symptom? Reading

Monica's Story , we realize that television's version of

90210 might be true.

Here is Ms. Lewinsky in action. In one of the dozens of similar letters

she sent Mr. Clinton nine months after he tried to extricate himself from

her for a second time, she writes: "I asked you three weeks ago to

please be sensitive to what I am going through right now and keep in

contact with me, and yet I'm still left writing notes in vain. I am

not a moron. I know that what is going on in the world takes precedence but

I don't think what I have asked you for is unreasonable.… I

am trying to deal with so much emotionally and I have nobody to talk to

about it. I need you right now not as President but as a man, please

be my friend."

In response, Mr. Clinton concedes he might manage a short visit the next

day, but when Betty Currie fails to set it up, Ms. Lewinsky becomes

"upset and resentful." So Ms. Currie smuggles her into his study

for a few uneventful minutes. While waiting, Ms. Lewinsky tries Ms.

Currie's desk drawers–locked–and fumes because some gifts

she has brought are gone. Goes home, writes another anguished letter on her

computer ("I am consumed with this disappointment, frustration and

anger …"), then records it aloud, runs the tape by Linda Tripp,

sends it by courier, then calls throughout the next day, "each time

becoming more and more frustrated and tearful because the President had not

yet received her private message." Finally, he gets the package but

tells Ms. Currie to tell Ms. Lewinsky he's too busy to see her. Ms.

Lewinsky has meantime snooped around and found out that Mr. Clinton is

watching a movie with Erskine Bowles. She calls Ms. Currie, "almost

hysterical with rage" and says, "I can't take this

anymore," threatening, "I'm telling my parents

tomorrow."

The sympathetic Mr. Morton explains that "Monica simply felt that

the President had taken such advantage of her that she wanted to hurt him

in return, to make him understand how their affair was affecting her

life." She tells every one of her friends her "secret." No

one is spared her emotional blackmail.

If Ms. Lewinsky and the society that formed her come out badly in Mr.

Morton's account, some of the other players do slightly better. Her

mother, Marcia Lewis, widely viewed as the stage mom from hell who kept the

dress, is here mostly presented as concerned, careful with her volatile

daughter, a bit afraid of her, trying gently to wean her away from her

obsession with Mr. Clinton. Between the lines we also see a hysterical,

suicidal, overdramatic woman who inadvertently left her divorce papers

where the sensitive Monica could find them, and was too scared of Kenneth

Starr's men to venture out and destroy the dress.

Bill Clinton himself, in the Monica's Story version, comes

across as more sentimental, naïve and considerate than one would have

expected. A lonely man in a stressful job, he behaves with the

affectionate, doomed docility of the true Don Juan. With a fairly good

grace he seems to recognize he will pay a heavy price for his weakness, in

exasperation, not to mention eventual humiliation, though once he does

snap, after she extensively berates him for not paying enough attention to

her: "In my life no one has ever treated me as poorly as … you.

Outside of my family and my friends and my staff, I have spent more time

with you than anyone else in the world. How dare you make such a

scene?" And when she berates Betty Currie, he lashes out: "You

had no right to talk to anyone like that." Ms. Lewinsky whines,

"All I want to do is see you and you don't give me an answer. I

don't understand–why is it so hard?" She really doesn't

get it that he might have important things to do. When Mr. Clinton begins

to understand that this girl is trouble, she twists the knife:

"Trouble? You think I have been trouble? You don't know

trouble."

For impeachment junkies, the main interest of the book lies in Ms.

Lewinsky's account of her treatment by Mr. Starr and his minions,

something she was obliged by the immunity agreement not to talk about, but

for some reason can write about. Here was an opportunity, underutilized,

for a serious examination of the misbehavior of Kenneth Starr's brutal

prosecutors, who threatened, bullied, intimidated and illegally detained

her in a hotel room without a lawyer–a 24-year-old who had committed

no crime. They brandish guns and handcuffs, won't let her call her

mother or lawyer (which would have saved her from filing her false Paula

Jones affidavit and denied them their hold over her) and tell her

she'll go to prison for 27 years. She was scared. Surely that should

scare all of us.

The miserable performance of American journalists (who with few

exceptions have chosen merely to sniff around Ms. Lewinsky's wardrobe)

is beyond Mr. Morton's brief, though he does give some details of what

seems in his presentation a conspiracy between Newsweek 's

Michael Isikoff, Lucianne Goldberg and her son Jonah Goldberg, and Linda

Tripp to entrap the President. For instance, Ms. Tripp encourages presents

for Mr. Clinton, then suggests to Ms. Lewinsky that she send the presents

by courier, and then suggests a courier company that belongs to Goldberg

mère et fils , which in turn hands over delivery records to

Mr. Isikoff or Mr. Starr. The role of the appalling Ms. Tripp emerges in

this account as so Machiavellian as to be nearly incredible, even requiring

as it does a naïveté from Ms. Lewinsky that is also nearly

incredible. Is it really possible that Ms. Lewinsky never tumbled to this

sting?

It was clear early on that the impeachment prosecution, besides being

generated by a dislike for Mr. Clinton that seems irrational to Washington

outsiders, was an aspect of the so-called culture wars. It seemed to many

almost a revival of the Civil War, largely driven by Southerners (though

the quarry, too, was a Southerner). What Yankee did not view those House

Managers with as much mystification as dislike, with their strange accents,

unapologetic hypocrisy and completely unfathomable cultural assumptions

about womanhood (Mr. Morton refers to misogyny) and God?

No doubt strong passions lurk in Southern hearts about godless Yankees.

But maybe it's a Generation X thing. Neither Ms. Lewinsky nor Mr.

Morton seems to feel Ms. Lewinsky is anything but right when she resents

that her "Handsome" has to go meet with Israeli dignitaries or

deal with a military crisis. She is entitled to a job at the White House or

some other good job. Why? Because by not being available to see, be alone

with, hang out with her, Mr. Clinton has caused her to overeat.

If nothing else, Andrew Morton has made it clear that beside the

steaming American social fissures that this case opened, separating North

from South, and Baptist from Episcopalian, and Gen X from Boomer from

elderly legislators, and the press from the rest of the nation, the

distance between California and the East is greater than we imagined. And

California is usually thought to indicate the direction of the nation.

Scary–though Washington is much scarier.