Herewith, a Hail Mary play for Bush 43.

The other night, Charlie Rose asked Tim Russert who Bush would want to follow him as President. Great question, Russert said. Then he said that if Cheney was somehow forced to leave the VP spot, Bush's choice would be Condoleezza Rice. The two get along, he trusts her.

Bush should be the decider right now. He should seek the resignation of the toxic Buddha and nominate Rice to step in, under his 25th Amendment powers. Notwithstanding the complete disaster that Bush has unleashed on the world and on world opinion of the U.S., naming the first black vice president, and the first woman, would make all of us proud of him in spite of ourselves—including historians.

"You boys have to remember, I don't give a fuck who the governor of Arkansas is," Lee Atwater said back in 1989, echoing the sentiments of a nation. But Atwater knew more than we did, and was a good deal meaner. "My only job as chairman of the Republican National Committee is to get George Bush re-elected. The media's full of talk about Mario Cuomo or Bill Bradley. We know how to paint them up as Northeastern liberals like Dukakis. That's easy!" No, what worried Atwater was a Southern moderate or a conservative Democrat–"and the scariest of all, because he's the most talented of the bunch, is Bill Clinton." Atwater sniffed around Little Rock for a few days, making it clear that if the Governor ran for President, the Republicans would "throw everything we can think of at Clinton–drugs, women, whatever works."

The tarring of Governor Clinton started out modestly, more George Bush than Lee Atwater. Remember the "$8 gallon of milk"? That was George père ("Middle America, watch your wallet") foundering on the stump in 1991, trying to scare you into believing Bill Clinton was the walking embodiment of Carter-nomics, the return of malaise and "double-digit inflation." When Carter-baiting died next to the Governor's unbearably suave touch with the town hall format, the Bush camp panicked and began raising the Red specter of Bill Clinton's student junket to the Soviet Union. Conveniently blurring his language, Mr. Bush made it sound as if his opponent had conducted antiwar demonstrations in Moscow (he hadn't–he demonstrated against Vietnam at Oxford). When the Arkansas Governor objected to this as a gross mischaracterization, Mr. Bush replied with a trope that has dogged the First Couple ever since: "vintage Clinton … a pathological pattern of deception."

Ah, "the pattern of deception," what an evergreen that turned out to be. In the absence of any wrongdoing, Jim Leach bruited it about in the House Whitewater hearings; in the Senate, Alfonse D'Amato followed suit, while journalists looking to push stories to the front page or the top of the broadcast happily played along. On the verge of unseating a twice-elected President, House Republicans, hovering stiffly over their flow charts, summoned it one last time, urging Americans to see the "pattern" in Bill Clinton's behavior, that "events and words that may seem innocent or even exculpatory in a vacuum may well take on a sinister or even criminal connotation when observed in the context of the whole plot."

How on earth we could have ever arrived at impeachment by "criminal connotation" is the implicit subject of The Hunting of the President , by Joe Conason and Gene Lyons. Mr. Conason is the editor-at-large for this paper, Mr. Lyons a veteran Arkansas reporter and editor, and together they have unearthed a pattern of their own: Terrified of Bill Clinton since the late 1980's, the Republican Party conjured an aura of wrongdoing around the First Couple so pervasive they would always seem guilty, if nothing else, by association with themselves and each other. And the message could be narrowcast: For tabloid junkies, News of the Weird was perpetually minting fresh evils–coke smuggling at the Mena Airport, a black love child, and of course, Vince Foster. For the discerning consumer, there was The Washington Post and The New York Times , where, pitted against visions of losing out on a Watergate-size scoop, the impulse to downplay a scandal with thorough reporting sometimes got lost.

Mr. Conason and Mr. Lyons lead us back, past the conniving resentnik Linda Tripp, the downmarket literary jade Lucianne Goldberg, past even that mealy paragon of Huis Clos tedium himself, Kenneth Starr, to uncover the entire history of Clinton "opposition research." The story begins with Lee Atwater's 1989 visit to Little Rock, aimed at snuffing out Mr. Clinton as a national candidate with talk of a "skirt problem," and culminates in the group of Federalist Society lawyers who, given the authors' reading of events, may have coordinated the Paula Jones lawsuit and the Starr investigation of Monica Lewinsky to ensure Mr. Clinton's sexual peccadillo rose to the level of criminality.

It should be pointed out, the authors remain fairly agnostic on the open issues: Did then-Governor Clinton assault Juanita Broaddrick? Were there, in fact, dozens of bimbos waiting to erupt? Why would Susan McDougal prefer 23-hour-a-day lockdown to testifying before Mr. Starr?–but a book like this can be used for two purposes, exoneration or sociology, and perhaps the latter (knowing that the President lied to us) is more compelling. Into the great swag belly of Arkansas we go, where (as Mr. Conason and Mr. Lyons illustrate) two mentalities dominate the impressive roster of Clinton-haters. The first is a cloak-and-dagger puerility that lingers on after the demise of the Cold War, a deep attraction to intrigue, which a certain sort of Republican–in the tradition of the old Nixon "ratfucking"–can't seem to outgrow. Thus a decent share of the Arkansas portion of the book reads like Don DeLillo's Libra –socially isolated men seek a purpose in conspiracies that are largely projections of their own prurient imaginations, fomenting wild stories about the Governor's sexual and narcotic appetites.

It's no accident, as the authors demonstrate, that the fantasy of Bill Clinton as sexually potent and ubiquitous–crawling out of virtually every bed in Little Rock–is strangely reminiscent of the old race propaganda about blacks. As a young man just graduated from Georgetown University, Bill Clinton chauffeured Senator J. William Fulbright around Arkansas for his primary fight against Jim Johnson, the last of a breed of Southern politician whose fraternity included, as the authors point out, George Wallace, Lester Maddox and Ross Barnett. Mr. Johnson fought integration, branded his opponents "nigger-lovers" and openly courted the support of the Klan and the White Citizens Council. Crossing campaign paths with Mr. Johnson, young Bill couldn't help blurting out, "You make me ashamed to be from Arkansas." As the future President grew up to be the paradigm of the New South politician, Jim Johnson and his Old South cronies largely faded from the political scene, but they hardly disappeared: Mr. Johnson himself remained a devoted Clinton-hater, and an expert in the smear demagoguery he had brought to the race-war politics of his heyday.

The authors paint a remarkable portrait of the jealousy and "white fear" that went into concocting the portrait of Bill Clinton (in Jim Johnson's words, "a queermongering, whore-hopping adulterer; a baby-killing, draft-dodging, dope-tolerating, lying, two-faced treasonist activist") that his more "mainstream" critics still draw upon today. Mr. Johnson, ensconced in his country estate (White Haven), shared his views with the meddlers from The American Spectator who came to Arkansas searching for dirt on the President. In fact, Mr. Johnson's slimy trail wends its way through The Hunting of the President : He seems to have been in nearly daily contact with David Hale, the only witness other than Jim McDougal to come forward, in all of the various Whitewater trials, and directly accuse Bill Clinton of doing something wrong; and editorials Mr. Johnson once wrote blasting a judge as "friendly" to the Clintons seem to have played a role in the removal of that judge from the trial of Jim Guy Tucker, the only prominent conviction Mr. Starr has been able to win.

That Mr. Starr would find recourse in Jim Johnson's "triple hearsay" screeds is meant to underscore another of the book's clear implications: Though the standard the independent counsel repeatedly applied against the President was, fish or no fish, "fishiness," Mr. Starr's own office must have smelled like something of a canning factory. We're all familiar with the complaints against Mr. Starr: He failed to resign his law partnership, a fairly whopping hypocrisy given that his predecessor (the respected New York lawyer Robert Fiske, who had effectively exonerated the Clintons) was removed for a remote appearance of conflict of interest, while Mr. Starr himself continued to represent tobacco litigants; he was promised a deanship at Pepperdine University that turned out to be the brainchild of Richard Mellon Scaife, chief sugar daddy to Clinton tormentors; and, most extravagantly dubious, before being appointed independent counsel, he had drafted an amicus brief to the Supreme Court in favor of the Paula Jones harassment lawsuit, at one point even serving as a paid consultant to Ms. Jones, via attorney Gilbert Davis.

But devout fans of Joe Conason's impeachment columns know what the proverbial "money shot" in this book will feature: the tight-knit cadre of young Federalist Society lawyers, two of whom ended up working behind the scenes for Paula Jones, one of whom ended up on Mr. Starr's legal team. I must say, after reading The Hunting of the President , it is no longer possible to believe that the Arkansas troopers ever told the truth about anything, that Ken Starr was even remotely impartial, or that the Jones suit was anything more than a vehicle for the public humiliation of the President. But I don't believe the authors fully deliver on their most daring implication, which is that the Jones team and the Office of Independent Counsel were in active collusion in the person of Paul Rosenzweig, the Starr lawyer who was both personally and professionally very close to Richard Porter and Jerome Marcus, who essentially worked for Ms. Jones. They come very, very close: And given how shamelessly Bill Clinton's enemies have been willing to chum up the waters around him with talk of "patterns," it is certainly curious that "Mr. Starr hired an ambitious young lawyer at a time when the Whitewater investigation and Filegate, Travelgate and the Vince Foster investigation were near completion," that that lawyer spoke with Ms. Jones' lawyers frequently and, finally, that he met them for dinner only days before the Lewinsky sting.

Such implications must be allowed to hang, at least for now. In the meantime, Mr. Conason and Mr. Lyons have done some service–enormous service–if not to the state, then to the citizenry. From the bait shack to hate radio, from hate radio to The American Spectator , to The Wall Street Journal and The New York Times , conjecture and half-truths were allowed to float their way up through America's opinion hierarchy–and once something has nested in the Lexis database under the imprimatur of the "paper of record," it more or less takes on the indelible coloring of established fact. Thankfully, the authors have interposed themselves here, before "fact" has been allowed to become history.

I was witness as well, there in the Senate Chamber, as your Observer Impeachment Trial Correspondent, simultaneously awed and bored. Awed, at the very least, that it had come to this . But I'd wanted to be there for that trial. I'd felt cheated out of that once-in-a-lifetime ritual spectacle–something primal, mythic, something that conjured up the ritual slaughter of the king in The Golden Bough –when I'd covered the impeachment crisis of Richard Nixon. I'd felt cheated out of the trial by Nixon's resignation, although I was there in the White House for that amazing moment in the East Room when Richard Nixon made his weepy tribute to his dead mother before heading out the exit for the copter that would take him into exile.

It was high drama, but the trial we were cheated out of might have resolved some of the maddening gaps and absences, enigmas and conflicts that still riddle the historical record of Watergate. Did Nixon order the initial break-in, for instance. (See my analysis of the clues on newly released tapes, "The Great Unsolved Nixon Mystery: Did He Order Watergate Break-In?" Jan. 11, 1999.) He was driven from office for the cover-up but till the day he died never stopped claiming he was innocent of the original act subsequently covered up. Same with Bill Clinton; he was almost driven from office for perjury and obstruction of justice over the Paula Jones case, but has never stopped insisting, with great indignation, that he was innocent of the initiating act, the crude hotel room sexual harassment of Paula Jones.

I think Nixon is still a valuable lens through which to look at the Clinton scandals. At the very least, a useful test of hypocrisy and consistency. Imagine if a Republican President as unpopular with liberals as Richard Nixon was accused of what Bill Clinton was accused of–not the blowjobs, but perjury before a Federal grand jury and the obstruction of justice in a sexual harassment case. I know Mr. Clinton's defenders would want that Republican President hounded to within an inch of his life to sweat out the truth of his possible malfeasance (as would I). And I know they'd revile anyone who said a Republican President should get a pass because his opponents are partisans and the initiating offense he perjured himself about was not grave. But Mr. Clinton, we're told, should get a pass for abuse of power because he's "good on the issues" (i.e., gives lip service to them) and his opponents are bad. This stance empowers the next Nixon.

Yes, impeachment was disproportionate but thorough investigation is not. And that's the problem; not just Ken Starr's puritanical fanaticism but Mr. Starr's disgraceful incompetence as an investigator. The real Starr scandal is that while sniffing for semen stains, he utterly botched the genuinely important investigations. Not Whitewater but Filegate, a truly shocking Presidential abuse of secret F.B.I. files by White House political flunkies looking for dirt on their opponents under the guise of "security checks." Imagine if a Republican President had been caught doing that. I have a feeling a number of Clinton defenders would be talking about impeachment for that alone. They wouldn't be satisfied with an inconclusive investigation.

But we still don't know who was really behind this disgusting civil liberties violation, and we probably never will because Ken Starr, who was able to discover and report every orgasm in the Oval Office couldn't get to the bottom of it.

And Hillary's billing records being "lost" and then materializing out of thin air: Imagine if Richard Nixon tried to put over a story like that about long-subpoenaed documents suddenly appearing in a room in the White House, and blamed it on some low-level flunky. Right. But Mr. Starr couldn't get to the bottom of that either.

I was thinking about these questions recently after reading Jeffrey Toobin's smart, opinionated book on the Clinton scandals, A Vast Conspiracy . I don't always agree with Mr. Toobin's opinions, but his reporting serves to focus and define the areas of continuing mystery. Some of which, it seems, may forever be beyond definitive resolution. Which means we are now entering Stage III in the Natural History of National Scandals: After the Huh? Moment comes the Buff Moment.

I love the Buff Moment. I am a student of buff moments, having written about assassination buffs, Watergate buffs, Philby-Angelton-mole war buffs, Mary Meyer buffs (the J.F.K. mistress whose murder in Georgetown in 1964 is still officially unsolved–although I know who did it), Danny Casolaro buffs (the reporter whose 1990 death under mysterious circumstances in a West Virginia motel is regarded as the work of a vast "Octopus conspiracy" by some buffs).

I suppose you could think of me as a buff buff (if I were in better shape I could call myself a buff buff buff). The difference between a buff and a buff buff, I would say, is that the buffs are almost all convinced they have the truth, an alternate truth, a suppressed truth, a conspiratorial truth, but the truth. They know the answers. The buff buff still has questions, the buff buff is willing to admit uncertainty, to evaluate both the evidence and the fantasies of the buffs for what they tell us about the thing itself–the crime around which the subculture of buffdom has bloomed. And for what they tell us not just about the buffs, but about ourselves, about the fantasies, the longings and the consolations that are embodied in buff theories. One argument I made in my book, Explaining Hitler , is that Hitler theories often tell us as much about ourselves as they do about Hitler. The fantasies projected upon the blurry Rorschach of the historical evidence are often cultural self-portraits in the negative.

So now it seems we've come to the Buff Moment in the Clinton Scandals. I suppose, if you count Vince Foster buffs, we've been there for a while. But I'm sorry, Homey don't play Vince Foster. Homey tuned out Vince Foster buffs when he saw them cite as "evidence" of a conspiracy, some alleged witness to the murder plot who claimed that 20 people stared at him as he was walking through the streets of Washington. Very mean stares, too. Homey don't buy the idea of a secret Government SWAT team of grim starers (The Frowning Ninjas? The Bad Mood Bears?) dropped in the city by black helicopter to give the evil eye to key witnesses to secret White House murders. It's a sign of an inability to distinguish paranoia from evidence in those who cite the starers. The problem with many conspiracy fantasies is that they just aren't very economical about security. You'd think at least one of the Frowning Ninjas might have talked about their Vince Foster staring assignment by now. Or maybe they're too terrified of heavyweight starers being targeted on them? Homey don't play staring conspiracies.

But let's shift from grim stares to a closer look at some of the genuine unresolved enigmas of the Clinton scandals. A kind of map of future buff territory. Beginning with:

1. What exactly happened in the hospitality suite of the Excelsior Hotel between Bill Clinton and Paula Jones? One of the most interesting aspects of Jeffrey Toobin's book is the argument he makes that Paula Jones lied. Actually what he says is that both Paula Jones and Bill Clinton were lying. That he lied when he said he didn't remember her, and that nothing sexual happened. And she lied when she said it was an unwelcome sexual advance. That, in other words, it was a "consensual deal," to use a crass phrase Mr. Toobin reports Bill Clinton used when he confided his version of the Juanita Broaddrick rape allegation to "a friend."

I've always tended to believe Paula Jones was telling the truth, in part because it seemed pretty clear that Bill Clinton was lying. It rarely turns out to be a mistake to assume Bill Clinton is lying. Remember when Billy Martin said of Reggie Jackson and George Steinbrenner, "One's a born liar and one's convicted"? Well, now (thanks to Judge Susan Wright of Little Rock who convicted him of contempt) Bill Clinton is now both–born and convicted.

Of course, only the two of them know the truth about the encounter. Mr. Toobin builds his case against Paula Jones by adducing various instances in which he implies Ms. Jones appears to have prevaricated. Over whether she'd had nude pictures taken of her, for instance. Here it depends on what the meaning of "nude" is. It turns out she had pictures of her and a boyfriend, both wearing bikini bottoms. (Hey, I just report the news.) And Mr. Toobin cites the testimony of a scummy-sounding ex-boyfriend of Paula Jones on the issue of whether she did in fact have the distaste for oral sex she expressed as a reason she would never have considered the crude Clinton overture. But the ex-boyfriend seems to have heard the scummy story secondhand. And then there's the evidence that Paula Jones didn't immediately express outrage, that she gave some people the impression she was flattered by the President's attention. Neither of which is inconsistent with her feeling humiliated and perhaps not wanting to let others know of her anguish.

It was fascinating to watch Mr. Toobin and Ms. Jones face off on Larry King Live recently. I just couldn't make up my mind what to think for sure, although I have to go with my gut feeling that Bill Clinton is the bigger liar. Still I respect Mr. Toobin's thorough reporting on a mysterious incident that we may forever be denied absolute certainty about. An uncertainty that may not be important constitutionally or politically, but is at the very least novelistically interesting, because it asks the question Who is Bill Clinton, will we ever know? As does that other He Said, She Said conundrum dredged up by the Paula Monica scandals:

2. The Juanita Broaddrick allegation . This is perhaps the most disturbing, most crucial novelistically–and least likely to yield up certainty. Mr. Toobin confines himself to saying "Two decades later it was simply impossible to determine what if anything had occurred between these two people." He does, of course, give us that inimitably Clintonian remark to "a friend" that it was a "consensual deal."

That has the ring of truth. Not as to consensuality, but the ring of the real Bill Clinton. It's how he'd phrase his lie about it, although that doesn't mean it was a lie. A "consensual deal ." Everything with this guy is a deal. The truth for him is a "deal." You can see how he drove his investigators and defenders crazy. A fascinating instance of which, further illuminated by Mr. Toobin (and sure to be a staple of buffdom) is:

3. The "love tie" conspiracy . I'm not saying this is the most earthshaking question raised by the Clinton scandals, but you have to love the additional detail Mr. Toobin discovered: the second love tie. It's almost a too-good-to-be-true comic echo of the "Second Oswald" theory in J.F.K. assassination buff subculture.

You know about the first love tie, right? That blue-gold Ermenigildo Zegna number that Bill Clinton donned for a public appearance on the day of Monica Lewinsky's grand jury testimony. Donned, Mr. Starr's office believes, in order to send her a secret signal that she was "still close to his heart," in hope he'd limit the damage her testimony could cause him. (Poor Monica believed not just in the signal, but in its sincerity.)

Mr. Toobin reports that Mr. Clinton and his aides emerged from his videotaped White House testimony laughing at the ridiculous far-fetched nature of the "love tie signal" question he'd been asked. And Mr. Toobin argues that his discovery of a second love tie supports its absurdity.

The second love tie emerges from the world of the second Clinton brother, Roger. Someone recently suggested to me that Roger Clinton was the real Bill Clinton. Beneath the policy-wonk New Democrat shell Bill Clinton is Roger Clinton. Anyway, Mr. Toobin reports that at the height of the Impeachment crisis, Bill Clinton's lawyer received a videotape featuring scenes of Roger Clinton shopping in Italy. "Roger Clinton's agent had told him to look up another one of his clients, a woman named Marina Castelnuovo who made her living as Italy's foremost Elizabeth Taylor impersonator." (Could we pause a moment to pay homage to the lovely absurdity of this detail?) "In Rome, Castelnuovo took Roger shopping for Christmas presents for his brother, an expedition that was tape-recorded by RAI television network. When Italian television broadcast photographs of the Zegna tie in question," Ms. Castelnuovo took time out from her strenuous Liz Taylor impersonation schedule and "realized that she and Roger had purchased that tie for the President."

Sounds fishy, but Mr. Toobin tells us the Roger Clinton shopping tape was made two years before the love tie signal. Still, I don't think this necessarily ruled out Bill Clinton using either love tie as a way of sending a disingenuous signal to Monica. (She would certainly think it was the one she gave him.) Again, it's not a constitutional but a novelistic question: Just how thorough and nonstop a con artist is Bill Clinton? I say, bet on 24-7.

But to return to more substantive matters. Ones that have still been left in the limbo of historical irresolution, given over to the buffs by the failed official investigators. Such as:

4. The F.B.I. files . I want an answer to this one, the one I think is the most disgraceful official, as opposed to personal Clinton scandal. Liberal Clinton defenders have not exhibited much zeal about finding out who's responsible for this Nixonian crime. Conservatives blame Hillary but lack a smoking gun, and they tend to blame Hillary for everything. But here liberals seem relieved that Mr. Starr has failed to find a culprit (suddenly here, Ken Starr is the wise and judicious prosecutor), when in fact they ought to be outraged by Mr. Starr's disgraceful Inspector Clouseau-like performance on this issue. Hillary's alleged culpability is even more in the foreground in:

5. The billing records mystery . The Rose Law Firm billing records that were under subpoena, but which disappeared for months and then suddenly mysteriously reappeared on a table outside Mrs. Clinton's study in the White House residence. But she had nothing to do with their appearance or disappearance, she insists. Her story is that she welcomed their discovery because they were exculpatory (when in fact they were not). And now we see (in a fascinating moment in Gail Sheehy's Hillary Clinton bio) one of her scandal handlers is trying to pin the blame on a hapless, long-suffering and loyal underling. Very Clintonesque. Again, it's not what the billing records show, so much as the novelistic question: Who is Hillary? Naïve, out of the loop, and innocent? Shocked, shocked when the records turned up? Which brings us to what is sure to be the growth area in Clinton Scandal Buffdom:

6. The Hillary questions . They all come down to, Who is she, really? Hillary's defenders tend to employ arguments that amount to saying she was naïve and even stupid rather than cynical and calculating. She was too naïve to suspect she might be manipulated by a well-wired Arkansas stockbroker who steered her into a $100,000 windfall on cattle futures (to put the governor in his debt). She was naïve enough to believe it was her own instinctive savvy in commodity futures trades that earned her the $100,000 with her own wits. And she was too naïve or too much "in denial" to know her husband was lying about Monica for nearly a year. She really believed him when he told her he was only "ministering" to Monica, feeling her pain, not her panties. O.K., it's possible. I've always kind of liked her and could in some ways feel her pain at being consigned to the hideous hog pit of Bill Clinton's Governor's Mansion–and Bill Clinton's idea of marriage. I've always felt she deserved any kind of comfort, platonic or otherwise, she derived from Vince Foster.

Who from all accounts seems like an incredibly decent, thoughtful guy, destroyed by his loyalty to the Clintons but not murdered by them. A guy who deserves better than to become an icon of idiot conspiracy theories. Still, once again, novelistically, the real Vince Foster question might tell us a lot about the way the Clinton marriage shook up the history of the Presidency. When I say the real Foster question I mean:

7. Not who killed Vince Foster but why he killed himself . And whether his relationship with Hillary Clinton was at the heart of his tragedy. I don't think it's a question for the Senate race; it has nothing to do with her qualifications for that job. But love triangles can often cast larger shadows than their tabloid origin; Tolstoy turned a love triangle into Anna Karenina . Was Vince Foster's relationship to Hillary Clinton, whatever it was, a factor in his decision to kill himself, as some have argued? Inquiring buffs want to know. This is the second "love tie" that matters.

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 .

When we look at Monica reporting on her dance of flirtation, a little of this, a little of that, we see a man tempted by the oldest demons in the world, ones he told her have been at him for years. He tells her he has deceived and lied and is now trying to be good. These are not the words of an immoralist or a hedonist or a man wrapping himself in the sexual revolution. They were not said to seduce or to woo. He had already accomplished that. We should take them at face value. In fact, Bill Clinton is the very epitome of the 1950's. He squirms in the arms of desire and chastises himself when he fails and succumbs to temptation. He has a very clear idea of what his God expects of him, and he tries but he fails. This Bill Clinton is very much the product of a Baptist upbringing. He is not a sophisticate, a moral relativist, a cad without remorse.

He may raise funds from liberal New Yorkers, but he is certainly not one. We in this town are not so involved in issues of sin and repentance. We are not guilty in the eyes of our Lord in quite the same way or with the same literal images of the fiery damnation that waits. We have unconscious guilt, we have regrets, we erode the natural joy of our souls with unceasing doubt and recrimination. But without the voice of the preacher in our ears, without hell waiting for us, we develop a different sensibility. We don't so much drop to our knees in prayer as whine at the universe or tell all to our therapists. Of course we know right from wrong. We sometimes do one or the other, but the feel and the smell and the weight of the torment when we betray ourselves is very different. We are more tolerant than others of things in the mind and believe less in literal salvation and more in struggling on and on. Guilty New Yorkers grow impotent at the crucial moment or break out in rashes or get bleeding ulcers. They do not tell their partners, "That would be wrong." It's a difference of style but is well worth considering.

The President is a Southern Baptist and he can feel the Devil's hand on his private parts, while we grow old wondering what matters and who cares, and search for happiness with oftentimes equally uncertain results. Mr. Clinton has more in common with the stern House Managers than he does with us. Imagine the many times he heard from the pulpit that hell and damnation wait for the sinner. Imagine the attitude toward sex that rose from those preachers, those teachers, that community. Only reproductive sex was all right, and even that wasn't to be spoken of in polite society. Desire, masturbation, lust were all evils, human failings, sins. This sense of sin with a capital S pervades the Baptist position and certainly casts human behavior in a sharp light: This is wrong, this is right. When Jimmy Carter told us that he lusted in his heart, he was speaking out of that tradition.

The particular split President Clinton shows between wife and girlfriend, between raw sexuality and the rest of his life, is not so strange when one thinks of its origins. The sinfulness of sex is a religious theme undiluted by Freud, undiluted by the Enlightenment with its anthropology and its moral relativism. It takes on an aura of cruel Puritan repression. "Don't" is the operative word, and it is hard for the normally lusty to live with. Something gets distorted in the process. Sin and desire get confused. We are now so well trained not to speak critically of other people's religious choices that we overlooked the role of this particular religion in Bill Clinton and misunderstood his compulsive womanizing as weakness when it was in fact an expression of religious anguish. When Monica says, "Satan, get thee behind me," she wants to know if the C.E.O. Demon thinks she looks fat. For Mr. Clinton, the position of Satan is no mere metaphor.

I am not attacking Baptists here. I am simply observing that every culture responds to its unruly sexual impulses in its own way. The hellfire solution does, however, create its own problems. It offers little by way of positive sex education. It demands abstinence. It speaks of sinners and devils that tempt. It creates an environment where sexual problems breed like cockroaches in our urban panties. Think of Martin Luther King Jr. and his transgressions. It must have racked his soul, too. Think of the trashy Paula Jones and the others whose power to arouse the President must have come right from the heart of the sin problem, the need to tempt, the need to fall, the need to be punished for one's transgressions. If Mr. Clinton told Ms. Lewinsky that he had been struggling with lies and deceit all his life, he meant it. He was caught in the sin-and-redemption game. He could not cleanse himself of guilt. He stopped short of intercourse because of his fear of the hereafter, because he was struggling. It is not nice or reasonable to go around psychoanalyzing public figures, but it is clear that this President was not a happy philanderer or a no-good exploiter of young bodies. Something else, a bigger and more universally meaningful American drama, was going on.

When I watched attractive Monica, I saw that she was caught by her own immorality. She imagined neither the feelings of others nor the consequences for the public. Her absence of sexual guilt was in stark contrast to the President's. Monica is Self run rampant, desire and sexuality given free rein and clothed in teenage language of love and crush. Bill Clinton, on the other hand, gives us Crime and Punishment, American version. Baptist religion comes down so hard on the individual sexual urge and in such a way that the President can go to Oxford and Yale, read the French philosophers and go to the cinema instead of the movies, and still remain the little boy the Devil wants for his own. This is not fun. Not for him, at any rate.

Everyone loves a victim, but not everyone loves the same one. Victims abound, but the choice of comrades is what produces a choice of martyrs. Paula Jones is a worthy victim, in the jaundiced eyes of righteous Southern Manhood, and so, these days, it is striking whose plight does not interest guardians of the nation's morality whatsoever.

Monica Lewinsky, for one. Ms. Lewinsky interests Republicans as a noose around the neck of the man they love to despise, the non-inhaling, Hillary-husbanding, gay-recruiting draft-dodger himself. That is their sole interest in her. She interests them not at all as the instrument of Ken Starr's yearlong sting and inquisition. It goes without saying that they were unfazed by the ethics of Linda Tripp's tapes, by her entrapment at the Ritz-Carlton Hotel, by Mr. Starr's maneuvers to keep her lawyer away from their folksy little interrogation last January. To turn Monica Lewinsky into Federal evidence against Bill Clinton was a matter so stunningly imperative for their cultural jihad that they could not be diverted for one moment to consider the fate of her liberties. They had room for only one specimen of young, wronged womanhood, and that was Ms. Jones. So it should not have been surprising when the House managers reached across the continent to summon Ms. Lewinsky for one more affirmation that she had told the grand jury the truth, one more reminder that Mr. Starr could try to pull a Susan McDougal on her. They had happily published her grand jury testimony, along with piles of surveillance gathered from her family and friends and, by the way, her therapist. So much for the solicitude of helpless womanhood! Such affection for liberties!

Consider also Julie Hiatt Steele, Kathleen Willey's friend who was recently indicted by Prosecutor Starr's grand jury on charges that, by no stretch of the imagination, touch anyone's high crimes or misdemeanors. Where are the barely moderate Republicans, so deeply offended by Mr. Clinton's ostensible abuses of power? Where are the libertarians? More aroused in defense of Internet pornography than in behalf of a citizen who got trapped in the Starr web.

Where is the outrage? So Republicans cry, when it suits them. Jackbooted thugs draw the wrath of antigovernment zealots, but a careening prosecutor troubles them not at all. A finger-wagging President pricks their moral sense, but a subpoena-waving phalanx of investigators, scattering grand juries across the land, holds no interest for them.

Where is the outrage?

And speaking of fundamentalism …

A Note on Fundamentalism in the Holy Land : I write these lines from Tel Aviv, where the intensity of sectarian passions leaves even those of the American left in the shade. On Jan. 25, the Sephardic chief rabbi of Israel, Eliyahu Bakshi-Doron, declared to a reporter: "The damage being done to the Jewish nation by Reform elements is greater, numerically, than the damage caused by the Holocaust. According to statistics, the Jewish nation is in the process of disappearing, because the Reform group is encouraging and supporting intermarriage. One has to study the lessons of the Holocaust and do everything one can to preserve the Jewish people."

The ultra-Orthodox have stiffened their backs now that Israel's High Court has ruled that Reform and Conservative Jews have a right to sit on local religious councils. The modern-day antimodernists, whose devout schools are cheerfully subsidized by the Government of Benjamin Netanyahu, would rather boycott religious council meetings altogether than sit down with Jews who, in their view, are not only insufficiently Jewish but, in effect, hostile to Jews. This is the atmosphere in which Rabbi Bakshi-Doron complained that Reform Jews exploit his references to the Holocaust, and said: "Tomorrow they'll be saying that we've sanctioned bloodshed."

If such remarks came from the goyish side of the street, American rabbis and right-minded civic leaders would rush to the pulpits and the press conferences to denounce this trivialization of the unfathomable sufferings of the Jewish people. Yet legions of American Jews have thrown their support, financial and moral, to the Netanyahu government, which bows and scrapes to the fundamentalists at every turn. Mr. Netanyahu's religious affairs minister, Eliyahu Suissa, threatens to resign if the Government steps on the toes of the Orthodox. "I will not implement even half a measure if it contradicts the position of the rabbis and the Chief Rabbinate Council. If any conflicts arises, I will no longer be religious affairs minister." I can see why out-and-out theocrats would relish this sort of down-the-line zealotry, but believers in pluralism should shudder at where their enthusiasm for Mr. Netanyahu has landed them.

And besides, she's considered somehow too disreputable, too déclassé: Although she was the one who spurned the sleazy advances Monica provoked and welcomed, she didn't dress in Donna Karan, and therefore she's the one condemned as trashy.

So she's become a kind of unwelcome guest at the media feast, a phantom unspoken presence in the Senate chamber as the arguments drone on. It's not fashionable to speak of her, or to take her claim seriously; it never was. It was so easy to dismiss her: First it was her nose, and then it was the nose job, and always there was her nasal twang. Then it was her allies: a woman with no means of support taking on the most powerful man in the world, and she actually got help from people who opposed him! Quel scandale ! The New York Times actually front-paged last Sunday, Jan. 24-as if it were a terrible, sinister secret-the not-so-new revelation that her lawyers got help from other lawyers who didn't like the President! The President has the entire Justice Department carrying water for him, and this woman's lawyers accepted advice from other lawyers! The Times has got the damning billing records to prove it! Now we know! Was it a sinister scandal that Anita Hill got help? Only a media culture that reflexively delegitimized Paula Jones' case, her claim, her very being from the beginning, would consider this a front-page scandal.

Ms. Jones' case, her claim that Bill Clinton exposed himself to her, finds only an echo in Dale Bumpers' meretricious defense of Mr. Clinton, which, by the way, was perhaps the single most overrated utterance in the history of public oratory, the ecstatic praise for which afterward seemed a desperate effort to validate the indiscriminate, unquestioning buildup the media gave Mr. Bumpers beforehand as an exemplar of Senate oratorical greatness. It was a speech whose concatenation of corn-pone clichés, a speech whose self-congratulatory exhibitionism ("I practiced law in this little town for 18 years." Who cares?) demonstrated the shockingly low standards for "greatness" that subsist in the U.S. Senate chamber. It was the Emperor's New Clothes of political oratory.

But her case, her claim, did have a faint echo in one of Mr. Bumpers' overblown asseverations, his assertion that he can vouch for Bill Clinton's essential propriety: "The President and I have been together hundreds of times at parades, dedications, political events, social events. And in all those years and in all those hundreds of times that we've been together, both in public and in private, I have never one time seen the President conduct himself in a way that did not reflect the highest credit on him, his family, his state and his beloved nation."

It was an attempt to address the underlying uneasiness about Mr. Clinton that has kept the case alive. The uneasiness about the possibility that, in addition to being a familiar kind of womanizer, he is something much uglier: the kind of boss who exposes himself to underlings.

That's the subtext of Mr. Bumpers' assertion that in all those "hundreds of times we've been together," Mr. Clinton has behaved himself: In other words, because he didn't take his dick out and wave it in Mr. Bumpers' face and tell him to "kiss it" during their "hundreds of times together" (as Ms. Jones alleged Mr. Clinton did to her), Mr. Clinton must be a paragon of moral virtue whose every act reflects the "highest credit" on him. But Mr. Bumpers is a great orator, everyone says so, and Ms. Jones is what, if not trailer trash, then so easy to snicker about, her claim so easy to disparage. So easy for the power women among the Clinton apologists (but not all feminists, fortunately) to dismiss. Even if the story Ms. Jones tells were true, they've told us, it wouldn't matter because powerful male bosses should be able to expose themselves to powerless female employees without penalty so long as they put it back in their pants when it's unwelcome.

And then there's the insinuation, sometimes whispered, sometimes implicit in what is written: Because she wore less than elegant miniskirts and didn't have a chic hair-person on call, she must have invited it, she must have wanted it, she wouldn't have gone up to that hotel room unless she was somehow hoping the Governor would, in one way or another, expose himself to her. Over and over, elaborate interpretations of her motives are imputed, substituted for a skeptical interpretation of Mr. Clinton's denials.

Because it's-apparently in these circles-less important to be for strict enforcement of sexual harassment laws than to prop up Mr. Clinton-and to receive, for being props, those lovely White House luncheon invitations and those confidential heartfelt chats with the First Lady. Who gets respect as the First Victim while the woman who may be the President's real first victim (the first one to dare to speak out) is turned into a non-person. She's been assiduously "disappeared," as they say, from the arguments of the Clinton defenders, in a shell game exemplified by the endlessly repeated mantra that the whole impeachment imbroglio is a puritanical inquisition into an act of "consensual sex"-thus making the scandal all about Ms. Lewinsky. And eliding into nothingness Paula Jones, whose claim was for an act of non-consensual sexual harassment. And in another triumph of sophistry, you hear over and over again in the Senate trial-the President's lawyers keep repeating with repellent disingenuousness-that a Federal judge had dismissed Ms. Jones' claim as having "no legal merit." Ignoring the fact that the judge didn't dismiss her claim as untrue . Far from it, she dismissed the case on technical grounds because Ms. Jones couldn't prove she was denied promotion for resisting Mr. Clinton's advances-a strained, weakening interpretation of the sexual harassment law shortly thereafter repudiated by a Federal appeals court, a dismissal that Mr. Clinton's pro-feminist defenders should have raised an outcry over. But instead his defenders try to twist the dismissal on technical grounds into a denial of the truth of the story Ms. Jones told.

Even Clinton opponents seem to deny, dismiss, the significance of this awkward woman and her claim. There were few moments of eloquence exhibited by the House impeachment prosecutors (and let me make clear, for those who missed my previous dispatch from Washington, that I hold no brief for the House impeachment prosecutors, who are ineradicably tainted by their refusal to repudiate Representative Bob Barr's and Senator Trent Lott's connections with the white-supremacist Council of Conservative Citizens, the CCC. As I put it last week, "The CCC is the stained dress of the Clinton opponents.") Still, in one of those few moments of eloquence, Representative Lindsey Graham asked the right question, but he based it on the wrong premise. Mr. Graham's premise was that the Senate needed to pay close attention to the nature of Mr. Clinton's equivocations under oath (over such issues as whether he asked Betty Currie to hide the presents under her bed) "because you need to know who your President is ."

Absolutely right: That is the real question, "who the President is"-or the deeper question. But it's not a question that's going to be answered by the evidentiary issues before the Senate in the impeachment trial, by whether or not the equivocations he's charged with in the articles of impeachment fit the definition of high crimes and misdemeanors in the Constitution. (I'd say they probably don't. Although it's not a slam-dunk either way, and I must admit that if the President in the dock were Richard Nixon and the charges-perjury and obstruction of justice-were the same, regardless of their origin, I'd probably be arguing Nixon ought to be thrown out for them. And I think those Clinton supporters who don't recognize the double standard they're using to give Mr. Clinton a pass are neglecting the real danger that in cutting so much slack for Mr. Clinton's behavior now, they're cutting slack as well for the next President they don't like-making it possible for the next Richard Nixon, say, to get away with murder.)

But we could parse the equivocations of Mr. Clinton over his consensual (though pathetically exploitative) sexual relationship with Ms. Lewinsky forever, and it won't tell us anything about "who the President really is." Not something we don't already know. We already knew that Mr. Clinton was a compulsive womanizer who lied and tried to hide his affairs from his wife and his enemies with weasel words in sworn testimony. And we may, some of us, think that's not such a big deal compared with the puritanical sexual intolerance and the inexcusable tolerance for racism of his most fanatic opponents.

Yes, we already know he's a slob, but Ms. Jones' claim might tell us something different, something darker, about "who the President is." Whether he's not just a womanizer but a sexual harasser, a predatory boss who exposed himself to an employee and then used threats to silence her ("You're a smart girl; let's keep this between ourselves").

He's apologized for the womanizing repeatedly and tearfully-once the stained dress forced him to admit it, anyway; until then, the plan was to "just win," to lie and smear the woman in question. But he hasn't apologized to Paula Jones. Perhaps it is because he doesn't owe her an apology, perhaps because it never happened the way she said it did. But it could be he won't apologize because her claim is true, and because it tells us more about "who the President is" than he can afford to let us know. It's the one thing that might make even his most pathetically loyal apologists and enablers uncomfortable. Because enabling a womanizer is kinda, sorta understandable, but enabling a sexual harasser makes the enablers less fellow victims of the unfortunate fallout from a human failing than co-conspirators with a predator.

Determining the truth or falsehood of Ms. Jones' claim could tell us something we don't know for sure about "who the President is." And it is here that we find the real analogy between Mr. Clinton's plight and Nixon's impeachment crisis. Ms. Jones' claim occupies the same originary status in the Clinton crisis as the break-in order question does in the Nixon Watergate scandal-it's a question of who the President really is.

The Nixon break-in order question: For those who missed the column I devoted to this disgracefully unexamined historical controversy ["The Great Unsolved Nixon Mystery: Did He Order Watergate Break-In?" Jan. 11], you might still recall that the articles of impeachment drawn up by the House Judiciary Committee in 1974 against Nixon did not charge him with ordering the Watergate break-in, but only with covering it up afterward. The smoking-gun tape that drove him from office did not link Nixon to a break-in order, but to the cover-up afterward. And in all his confessions and mea culpa s ever after, Nixon admitted to the cover-up afterward but denied to his dying day that he ordered the break-in. Historians have tended to accept Nixon's denial as an essential element of "who the President was"-too sophisticated to order a thuggish crime like that, merely caught up in the cover-up afterwards to keep his loyal subordinates from further embarrassing him (as I pointed out in my Jan. 11 column, new tapes undermine that denial).

Did Nixon come clean with us in finally admitting the cover-up, or did he take a dirty secret, the break-in order-a defining lie-to his grave? The answer to that would tell us a lot more than we can say for sure about who Nixon really was . Similarly, Mr. Clinton has confessed scores of times to lying or, anyway, misleading the American people and various judicial proceedings about his affair with Ms. Lewinsky, but he will, I suspect, to his dying day deny he exposed himself to Ms. Jones. He might be telling the truth, for all we know, but we don't know. And the truth might tell us more than we know-or, for some, more than they want to know-about who Bill Clinton is.

I won't say it's determinative, but it's at least interesting that in dealing with this claim, the origin of the whole tortured impeachment imbroglio (though it's been erased from the actual articles), Mr. Clinton exhibits the same wounded, ostentatious affrontedness that Nixon did in denying he ordered the Watergate break-in. Nixon was shocked, shocked when he heard about the break-in, he maintained from beginning to end. And Mr. Clinton was so shocked and outraged about the injustice and persistence of Ms. Jones' claim that he's made it his justification for lying about Ms. Lewinsky.

I'm not making this up: There's an amazing moment in Mr. Clinton's August grand jury testimony in which he explained to the grand jurors that he lied (or "was misleading") about his affair with Ms. Lewinsky in his deposition in the Paula Jones case because he was just so gosh-darn steamed at Ms. Jones' persistence and the way the Jones legal team was pursuing her claim for political purposes-when they knew just how weak their case was, "when they knew what our evidence was"-that he wasn't going to give them any truthful collateral information to help persecute him over this falsehood. Of course, he doesn't come out and say Ms. Jones' claim was false; he just says the case was weak -the kind of quibble we've learned to pay attention to from a President who's so punctilious about "what the meaning of 'is' is." (Imagine how much fun ridiculing this line liberals would be having if Nixon tried to foist it on us.)

Mr. Clinton, more than anyone in the world (aside from Ms. Jones), knows whether the case was weak or strong on a factual basis-he knew and knows whether he exposed himself to Ms. Jones. But he didn't choose to deny that ; he didn't express outrage over the falsity of that claim but rather-in another triumph of weasel wording-outrage over the weakness of the case. I particularly love that Nixonian touch-"they knew what our evidence was"-the insinuated smear that he's got some bombshell evidence that would blow her case out of the water or blacken her reputation, evidence that somehow never showed up, did it? Evidence that didn't stop him from paying Ms. Jones off in a panic when he thought an appeals court might reinstate her case.

It is in this answer, I'd suggest, that Bill Clinton exposes himself over the question of whether he exposed himself. Exposes his Nixonian essence. I think if it were Nixon in the dock, every liberal now defending Mr. Clinton would seize on an answer like that and call it a typical Tricky Dick prevarication, a kind of meta-lie about lying. But because it's Mr. Clinton, who's "right on the issues," he gets a pass.

Whether Clinton defenders actually buy this story-the fact that he lied about Monica kinda, sorta proves he was telling the truth about Paula-or just opportunistically adopt it for the sake of the cause, is not clear. But in a certain sense, they've adopted a version of it in diverting attention from the lie Mr. Clinton may still be telling to the one he confessed to when they repeat ad nauseam he's only lied about "consensual sex." They're implicitly asking us to believe that although we know he lied about Gennifer Flowers, lied about Monica Lewinsky and made a habit of lying on just about every other difficult question about his life until the equivalent of a stained dress showed up, nonetheless, in this case, this one time, this one most damaging claim about him, in this one case that might really tell us who Bill Clinton is , he's telling the gospel truth.

Well, it certainly makes it more convenient to think that way, more convenient for the Clinton defenders, anyway, to frame it as a case of puritanical inquisition into a "consensual sexual affair" and the lies told to hide it. And they'd be right, if all we're judging is whether Mr. Clinton should be impeached on those grounds, the Paula Jones story is not "material."

But if Ms. Jones is telling the truth and has been all along, and he's been lying about it from the beginning, it is material to who Mr. Clinton is. It's not the only thing he is; there's an admixture of idealism and passion for justice in his nature-especially about race. But it may be the one thing he's concealing about who he is.

I'm not saying I know for a fact Ms. Jones' claim is true, or that it will ever be proven true. It is one of those much-deplored "he said-she said" questions, isn't it? (Those who invoke "he said-she said" somehow suggest that because we can't prove who told the truth that it doesn't matter who told the truth.) And maybe it will turn out that Ms. Jones is the one who's been lying all along. Maybe she pursued these allegations, subjected herself to obloquy and ridicule as "trailer trash," suffered the sneers of the fashion magazines who prefer to put the chic First Lady on the cover as the real role model for the women of America. (The Tammy Wynette "Stand by Your Man" role she once so snootily deplored.) But if Ms. Jones is telling the truth, I'd argue that she is a far more admirable role model than Hillary Clinton, that she's a brave woman who suffered an injustice and took on the most powerful man in the world to vindicate her dignity.

As for myself, when it comes to trying to decide who's telling the truth on this originary question-on the one that might reveal or define who the President really is -I have as much faith that Mr. Clinton is telling the truth on his defining question as I do that Nixon was telling the truth about his. Let's face it, that's who Bill Clinton really is: He's our Nixon .

As the Senate ponders how to dispose of impeachment, the effort to ruin Mr. Clinton through allegations about his private life continues unabated. It matters no more today than it did in the past that such allegations have no bearing on the loftier issues of perjury and obstruction of justice.

Among the least inhibited politicians of destruction is House majority whip Tom DeLay (although he whines piteously whenever his friends are exposed). Fearing that Senate majority leader Trent Lott might prefer censure to an embarrassing trial, Mr. DeLay has urged senators to examine certain sealed materials regarding Mr. Clinton before they vote. Those materials reportedly concern a 20-year-old rape charge against Mr. Clinton that the alleged victim has denied; none of the supposed corroboration has been subjected to public scrutiny, let alone cross-examination. That doesn't trouble Mr. DeLay, a constitutional purist who clearly feels that the Bill of Rights doesn't apply to his political enemies.

While the rape canard circulates, another old charge against Mr. Clinton is being revived by the Drudge Report , the Star tabloid and the New York Post . A Little Rock prostitute named Bobbie Ann Williams apparently has claimed again that the President is the father of her 13-year-old son.

The history of this story provides a primer in the politics of personal destruction, as practiced by certain Republicans. Ms. Williams-or someone claiming to be her-was paid to talk in 1992 by the Globe , another supermarket tabloid. Mr. Clinton's adversaries seized upon her account as a potentially devastating weapon in that year's Presidential election. Republican officials in Arkansas tried without success to find an attorney who would file a paternity lawsuit on Ms. Williams' behalf as a publicity stunt. At the same time Peter Smith, a Chicago investor and G.O.P. moneyman who later paid two state troopers to talk about the Clintons, tried to interest reporter David Brock in publishing Ms. Williams' story as well. (For unscrupulous conservatives, the fact that she and her son are black no doubt added a titillating racial frisson .)

Mr. Brock wisely passed, for the same reason that no lawyer would file a paternity claim: There was no proof beyond the unsworn testimony of a drug-abusing prostitute. The story remained dormant (except for a fictionalized version in Joe Klein's Primary Colors ) until early last year, when Ms. Williams was included in lists of alleged Clinton paramours that accompanied coverage of the Monica Lewinsky affair and the Jones lawsuit. One newspaper that printed Ms. Williams' name was the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette , in an article that appeared Jan. 28, 1998.

The next day, strangely enough, a woman identifying herself as Bobbi Ann Williams (with a slightly different spelling) appeared in the Democrat-Gazette newsroom to demand a retraction. She looked like the woman whose photo had appeared in the Globe , and she said that her sister, a crack-addicted prostitute with no children, had sold the tabloid a phony story. On Jan. 30, a brief article appeared in the Democrat-Gazette , reporting that Ms. Williams had "denied … that she ever slept with President Clinton or told a tabloid that she did."

There the matter rested, until laboratory data about the President's DNA-prepared as proof that his semen was on Ms. Lewinsky's dress-appeared in a supplement to the Starr report. Since then, various tabloid journalists have vied to purchase DNA from Ms. Williams and her son, an auction reportedly won by Richard Gooding, an enterprising Star reporter.

By comparing the Starr report data with DNA tests on Ms. Williams and her son, Mr. Gooding hopes to prove Mr. Clinton's paternity. Even if the results are positive, a possibility that cannot be discounted, it remains to be seen whether anyone else will be permitted to conduct an independent examination of the "evidence." (After the Star bought the Gennifer Flowers tapes, it never allowed anyone to test the originals for tampering.) And Barry Scheck, the law professor and leading expert on genetic forensics, says that without tests on other men with whom Ms. Williams had sex 13 years ago, the results will provide no final proof of paternity.

Meanwhile, powered by tabloid money and partisan animus, the politics of personal destruction proceeds unabated. Larry Flynt, the publisher of Hustler magazine, is excoriated daily for encouraging its harmful effects on our political culture. And no doubt his forthcoming account of Republican peccadilloes will provide still another occasion for breast-beating and soul-searching. But the pundits and politicians who find Mr. Flynt's behavior so deplorable have no problem controlling their outrage whenever the President is in the bull's-eye.

This Anonymous is the author of the "Talking Points," a three-page memo that Monica Lewinsky gave Linda Tripp on Jan. 14, urging her to make a false statement in Paula Jones' sexual harassment suit against the President. These blunt instructions to Mrs. Tripp on how to destroy the credibility of Clinton accuser Kathleen Willey (and slur Monica Lewinsky as a stalker and liar) are a smoking gun that Kenneth Starr and the Clinton Administration have been pitching constitutional battles over. Indeed, the President's appeals on attorney-client privilege might be seen as an effort to protect White House lawyers from having to answer questions about this one incriminating document. The talking points are so damnable, some speculate that their authorship is the one thing Monica Lewinsky doesn't want to tell Kenneth Starr.

"The talking points are the click of it," said Lucianne Goldberg, the literary agent who counseled Mrs. Tripp. "Monica has always thought, because Bill told her, that after he leaves office Hillary is going to leave him, and she thinks if she saves his Presidency, they're going to be together walking into the sunset." "Do you really believe that, Lucianne?" I asked. "I do," she said. "I understand this as only a 62-year-old woman who has seen it all does. I've written five novels about women. She has a Cosmo girl in her head to this day."

The press has speculated, and the White House has denied, that Clinton intimate and deputy White House counsel Bruce Lindsey is the author. Now I've studied the talking points, and with a tip of the cap to the bard of literary forensics, Don Foster, here are my speculations:

(1) "TPA"–the Talking Points' Author–works on Pennsylvania Avenue.

There is so much White House jargon in the talking points that only an Administration insider could have produced them. He or she throws around terms like JCOC (for what USA Today says is the Pentagon's Joint Civilian Orientation Course) and twice uses the phrase "the oval" to refer to the Oval office. "She [Kathleen Willey] allegedly came out of the oval …"

The only place I've seen that term is Spin Cycle , Howard Kurtz's book on the White House press relations operation.

"I'd never heard that expression before in 20 years of reporting in Washington," Howard Kurtz told me. "It's White House lingo. It's not a shorthand that journalists used. But you'd hear it there. 'He can't come to the phone, he's in the oval.'" Rule out Bob Bennett, David Kendall and Vernon Jordan.

(2) Did President Bill Clinton write them?

Rumor has it that Monica typed up much of the document at her computer, taking phone dictation. Well, Monica reportedly spent a lot of time on the phone with the President. Indeed, Newsweek recently compared language in the talking points with language in Bill Clinton's deposition in the Jones case with a big wink that the same guy's talking.

TPA: "I now do not believe that what she claimed happened really happened." President Clinton: "I have no idea why she said what she did or whether she believes that actually happened."

Sorry, that's pathetic. President Clinton didn't write them. There are countless reasons, notably the characterological one that Bill Clinton is a seducer who is not going to open up to Monica about another woman he supposedly put the make on. Most important, though, the document coaches Mrs. Tripp that President Clinton says he met with Kathleen Willey "after her husband died." This assertion directly contradicts Mr. Clinton's own statement in his deposition three days later; twice he told Ms. Jones' lawyers that he had met with Mrs. Willey before her husband died.

TPA may be close to President Clinton, but Mr. Clinton wouldn't have gotten that wrong.

(3) TPA is a lawyer. Friends of the President say the talking points are too crude to have come from a lawyer. "I don't think a lawyer wrote it," says Mitchell S. Ettinger, one of President Clinton's attorneys. "They don't look like lawyer words to me," William Ginsburg said. This is the party line, and it's wrong.

The talking points advise Mrs. Tripp that by filing an affidavit showing she's on the Clinton team, she will stave off a deposition. "Therefore you want to provide an affidavit laying out all of the facts in lieu of a deposition."

Did you know that you could avoid a deposition with an affidavit? Have you ever used the phrase "in lieu" in your life? Ladies and gentlemen, I submit to you that this is a lawyer talking.

(4) TPA is a ringleader. He or she presumes to know the President's private thoughts and says darkly to Mrs. Tripp, "Do you really want to contradict him?" He or she knows that Linda Tripp has a lawyer, "Kirby"–Kirby Behre –and speaks familiarly about what Mr. Behre has been advising her before running roughshod over his advice. In TPA's most assumptive moment, he or she tells Linda Tripp that before she signs her affidavit "you want Bennett's people to see your affidavit"; i.e., have the President's attorneys approve it.

This profile certainly points to lawyer Bruce Lindsey. Even President Clinton has said he was his point man on the Jones case.

"Did you ever talk with Monica Lewinsky about the possibility that she might be asked to testify in this case?" Ms. Jones' lawyer James Fisher asked Mr. Clinton.

"Bruce Lindsey, I think Bruce Lindsey told me that she was," Mr. Clinton said.

Or here is what Jim McDougal (with Curtis Wilkie) said about Mr. Lindsey in Arkansas Mischief , his wonderfully entertaining new book on Whitewater: "[Lindsey] was extremely defensive about any criticism of Clinton. He began developing a network of Arkansas attorneys loyal to Clinton, a group, I later learned, that included my own lawyer, Sam Heuer.… During my discussions with Sam, I told him of [David] Hale's visit to my home. Without my knowledge or consent, Sam told [James] Blair and Blair told Lindsey. So much for lawyer-client confidentiality."

(5) Let's build the case for Bruce Lindsey.

Like TPA, Mr. Lindsey is a crafty dodger of depositions. Once, in 1996, he boxed out House investigators of the Travel Office affair by showing up for questioning with a tape recorder and arguing that because he didn't have an attorney he had a right to tape. The House lawyers angrily postponed their questioning.

When he was finally deposed, Mr. Lindsey had a seasoned, clipped tone, like TPA's. The two speakers share cadences and word choices.

Mr. Lindsey: "Jeff Eller, who was the press person on the plane, came to me and said that they were going to announce that at some point, I don't recall exactly when …"

TPA: "She came to you after she allegedly came out of the oval and looked (however she looked), you don't recall her exact words …"

One hallmark of TPA's style is that he or she refers to ordinary people informally, by first or last names, then stops short when he comes to President Clinton. It's Kirby. Bennett. Kathleen. But Clinton is "the President" six times. Never Bill. Never President Clinton. Typically: "You and Kathleen were friends. At around the time of her husband's death (the President has claimed it was after …)"

Bruce Lindsey shares this toadying tic. "Oftentimes I become sort of a contact for people who see the President. Because the President says, why don't you talk to Bruce about that. So Jeff around that time … he wanted to talk to the President …" Or, of participants in a meeting: "Bernie, Vince, me, the President …"

(6) That isn't proof.

Those coincidences of language are nice but not conclusive. Lots of White House people toady and prevaricate in similar ways. But Mr. Lindsey would never be so stupid as to write the talking points. And Kirby Behre says: "I've never spoken to Bruce Lindsey in my life. Period."

But TPA refers to Mr. Behre by his first name. One explanation is that (according to Lucianne Goldberg), Linda Tripp always called Mr. Behre "Kirby," so her phone mate Monica picked this up and, when talking and typing with Mr. Lindsey, rendered Mr. Behre's name informally. But if Monica's a co-author, why not assume she is responsible for other portions of the document? "The oval" and JCOC could be Monica. So could the advice to do affidavit not deposition. Monica had just done that herself.

Putting the talking points on Monica, in fact, seems to be the Clinton strategy. When the President's defenders say that it's a crude document, it's not a lawyer's, that's where they're pointing. O.K., sure, Monica talked to Vernon Jordan and Bruce Lindsey. But she went out and did this foul deed on her own.

But she couldn't have.

(7) I name my suspects.

The week that she got the talking points was a desperate one for Linda Tripp. She had been giving her attorney Kirby Behre the tapes she'd made of Monica, and Mr. Behre had (rumor has it; he won't discuss it) told her that she was at great personal risk for prosecution and advised her to turn the tapes over to Bob Bennett so that he could settle the Jones case and end the risk for everybody. But Linda Tripp was sickened by years of Clinton Administration lies, from Vince Foster on; if she could finally expose Bill Clinton, she was willing to go down herself. Giving the tapes to the President is the last thing she wanted to do. Out of the belief that her attorney was loyal to President Clinton, she fired him. She got a conservative lawyer with connections to the Jones camp and gave her tapes to Kenneth Starr.

Having "chosen the path of truth," as Linda Tripp put it so dramatically in her one public statement two weeks later, she now became the true orchestrator of the scandal. It is obvious that she gave Ms. Jones' lawyers enough information about Monica that on the following Saturday, deposing Bill Clinton in the White House, they were able to blindside him with questions about jobs and gifts, thereby creating a perjury trap. (Q. "Well, have you ever given any gifts to Monica Lewinsky?" A. "I don't recall. Do you know what they were?") And apparently with Kenneth Starr's guidance, Linda Tripp steered her last taped conversations with Monica toward Vernon Jordan, to get Mr. Jordan into the mix.

Why stop with Vernon Jordan? Through her new friends, Mrs. Tripp surely knew something that no one else knew, that certainly Monica didn't know: The other side was suddenly desperate.

This is the most important hidden fact about the talking points, their timing. On Sunday, Jan. 11, days before the points were delivered, Kathleen Willey dropped a bombshell on the Clinton team. After weeks of speculation about whether she would be loyal (and two months before she went public, on 60 Minutes ), Mrs. Willey turned coat. Ordered by a judge to testify about her encounter with the President, she told a secret session in a Richmond courthouse attended by two lawyers for Ms. Jones and Bob Bennett that Bill Clinton had made a crude pass at her in 1993.

This account–by a Democrat and former Clinton friend–provided eerie backup to Paula Jones' account of a crude pass in 1991 in the Excelsior Hotel in Little Rock, Ark. It surely fostered panic in the Clinton camp. After all, the window on depositions in the case was about to end. They needed help on Kathleen Willey, and fast.

Linda Tripp was a witness to the Willey incident. She'd seen Mrs. Willey after Mrs. Willey came out of the oval. Indeed, in the only public mention of the case, the previous summer, Linda Tripp had been quoted by Newsweek saying Kathleen Willey had told her of a sexual encounter with the President. After the Newsweek story came out, Bruce Lindsey reportedly phoned Mrs. Tripp to discuss it.

Why would the Clinton team now go back to a woman who had sold them out just months before? The key is that they were desperate, and that Linda Tripp knew that they were desperate. She saw that their desperation presented her with a golden opportunity to implicate the big kahuna. My theory is that Bruce Lindsey dictated the talking points, but that Linda Tripp's is the intelligence behind them. She did to Bruce Lindsey what she had done to Monica–lured him into her confidence, made him think she was on their side after all and, probably using Monica as a go-between and typist, pleaded for help on an affidavit. Because he was so desperate, Mr. Lindsey ignored the warnings and stepped willingly into the trap.

On Jan. 21, Linda Tripp filed an affidavit in the Jones case. Short and pointed, "true and correct," it followed none of the rather costly legal advice with which she had been provided.