I won't vote for Hillary because of Iraq. To me her decision to side with a dangerous president, creating a crisis for America's legitimacy in the world, is disqualifying.

But I'm also a former Clinton-hater. Hating's no good for anyone, I like to think I've gotten over it. But I do know something about Hillary's baggage, and if she runs for President, I think one piece of that baggage (apart from the commodities score) will legitimately come out on the carousel. That's what this entry is all about.

Back before he had a beard, blueskinned Michael Chertoff, the secretary of homeland security, made his bones as chief counsel to a Senate committee that was investigating Whitewater and related stuff. (I should warn the reader right now, some of my little facts are going to be wrong here. It doesn't matter. The facts are generally accurate, and in the end this is about interpretation.) At the time, 1996, then-Senator Al D'Amato wanted to use Whitewater to delve into the Vince Foster death, the deputy White House counsel who died six months into the Clinton presidency, his body discovered in a park on the Virginia side of the Potomac River. D'Amato later thought better of it. It was a bad move for him politically in New York, and much as he loved the seamy side of politics, and was steeped in it himself, D'Amato backed off. But for a while he investigated aspects of the death, and held hearings in the Senate that touched on it.

One of the problems surrounding the investigation of Foster's death (apart from the disappearance of his pager from the evidence collected by the Park Police!) was that in the hours after the police and White House learned of his death, his office was not secured. And later, files belonging to Foster (maybe from his Little Rock office) turned up in the White House residence. Hillary produced them. Chertoff brought forth strong evidence that in the day after Foster's death, people went into Foster's office and nosed around, looking into his files. Chertoff demonstrated that before investigators finally got access to Foster's office, Hillary was on the phone with her friends—her close political associates. Susan Thomases was in on the phone calls. So were Maggie Williams, Hillary's chief of staff, and Bernie Nussbaum, the white house counsel. Several phone calls, right after one another. The pattern was a little feverish.

And then in the end, these files that Foster, a meticulous man, had maintained, wound up in the White House residence. The ones that Hillary produced were billing records having to do with the Rose Law Firm, back in Arkansas, at which Hillary and Foster had both worked, and the file spoke to questions about Hillary's role on a land deal called Castle Grande. All that is very boring. I didn't understand it then, I'm not going to understand it 15 years out. If anyone brings it up in a presidential campaign I will jump out the window.

Here's what's interesting, and what is bound to be brought up.

In the weeks before Vince Foster died, by whatever means, maybe his own hand, he was under a ton of pressure. He couldn't handle it. He was cracking up. Basically this abstemious upright repressed lawyer had taken this big job with his old "friends," and he found out who his friends were, and it was a super-political job. Foster was a rube. He wasn't ready for big time politics. He should have gotten out of there, but he had such a giant superego he couldn't do it. It's a true tragedy.

Some of the pressure Foster was under involved the beginnings of Whitewater, Travelgate, the real estate stuff—boring stuff. He made a famous "can of worms" notation on some tax record. But there is plausible evidence that Foster was also involved in the beginnings of a far more significant political process, as history would later show: the issue of Clinton's relationships with women. Everyone knows about the Paula Jones case which so deranged the country (and myself) in the second Clinton Administration—after a 9-0 vote by the Supreme Court to let the case go forward, something no partisan Democrat ever wants to think about, but a Court acting unanimously, on a principle best expressed by Bob Dylan, that even the President of the United States sometimes must stand naked. Anyway, that happened much later, and as you know, Paula Jones's civil case led to Monica Lewinsky. But the Paula Jones case was actually brought about by events that gelled in the first six months of the Administration. To wit: As Clinton himself knew, a group of Arkansas state troopers were for whatever reason (greed, resentment for not being brought to Washington, jealousy, or honest plaindealing, take your choice) getting together back in Ark. with the idea of going public about his sexual peccadilloes. They finally came forward in October 1993, in the American Spectator. What matters to this story is it was known in the spring, as early as May, maybe earlier, that the Troopers were talking about going public. Clinton dangled a federal job to one of them, there was an effort to buy them off.

The general point here is that that portion of the democracy that cares about marital fidelity in their leaders (a principle I myself couldn't give a fig about)—that component or its agents was taking steps to expose Bill Clinton, and the Clintonites justly regarded this as dangerous. And, I'd argue, the Clinton machine was gearing up to do what it had always done in those circumstances: lie and abuse power and trash women.

What follows is more arguable, so let me talk about my source on it. In Little Rock in 1996, for the New York Times Magazine, I interviewed a Clinton hater named Gary Parks. Parks was a former auto salesman and something of a troubled youth. He'd kicked around, he'd had physical injury. His dad had been murdered: Luther "Jerry" Parks, a former state cop, who had been head of security for the Clinton headquarters in Little Rock during the presidential campaign in 1992, had been murdered less than a year after the election. This is incredible and true: Two months after Vince Foster dies, Jerry Parks, Clinton's former security aide, is slain gangland style, with a semiautomatic handgun, his car shot up in West Little Rock. The media didn't touch it, and they were allowed to drop it. There was no internet then, as there is now, able to play the media as it did with Dan Rather.

I liked Gary Parks. I felt he was honest and smart. His assessment of Bill Clinton's personality was the best I heard. He said if Bill Clinton had gone to bed with your sister and then screwed her over, and you were enraged with him, he could walk in the room and ten minutes later you'd have forgotten about it completely, he was that seductive. Parks said he'd hung out some with Clinton, back in the day, at the State House.

It was Parks' assertion that his late father and Vince Foster had once investigated Clinton's affairs at Hillary's behest. He said that Vince Foster had called up his father, who was working as a private investigator, to look into Clinton's romantic life in about 1980, after Bill Clinton had lost the governor's office following his first term. Parks said Hillary wanted a divorce. It looked like maybe the juggernaut she'd believed in, and married, was over. Clinton had by then lost two big races and won two. Till the Comeback Kid—boy is Bill Clinton gutsy—won back the governorship in 1982. But in the early 80s, Parks said, Hillary asked her law partner Vince Foster to prepare a divorce case and Foster called Parks, who compiled a dossier of women's statements. Parks said that Hillary later decided against a divorce, but that his father held on to the dossier. Then in 1993, Parks said, after Vince Foster went to Washington, he demanded the return of the file, and even called Jerry Parks in the days before his, Foster's, death, to demand it. And that two months later his father was murdered, because, Parks said, he had held out on returning the file. (The L.R. police never solved his father's murder, not when I was looking into it a few years afterward.)

Clintonites will say there's a lot of supposition in what I've laid out here. They're right. There is. But there is little supposition in the statement that Clinton's personal life, which became so politicized in his second term, had been intermittently politicized before then, and the Clintonites feared that more than Travelgate. (This is, by the way, a big plot point in the bestseller Primary Colors by Joe "Anonymous" Klein). To make the leap that Vince Foster's agonies, and Jerry Parks's death, had some connection to the coming-forward of the Troopers is supposition, based on Gary Parks's story. But it's logical. What was the White House most fearful of that spring? I wonder if Vince Foster was worried about that stuff, and what they were looking for in his office.

Myself, I think I might forgive Hillary her connection to these events. They were so long ago, she was hitched to Bill's horse. She's done a lot on her own since. She's been gutsy and strong on her own two feet. She has great presence. But I don't think we know all the facts about this case, and people are going to bring it up and ask about it. Real baggage.

I know because a copy showed up in my office the other day ahead of the publisher's embargo.

Only the latest in an ever-expanding catalog of bad books claiming to tell us the "truth" about the former First Lady and potential Presidential candidate, Mr. Klein's poisonous invention reveals far more about its author-and its publisher-than about Mrs. Clinton.

Even the most fanatical Hillary-haters will be disappointed if they're expecting to wallow in fresh sewage. Almost all of this crud floated through the pipeline long ago.

To anyone who, like me, has been required to read previous entries in this subliterary genre, The Truth About Hillary emits a strong smell of toxic mold. Its 250-plus pages are padded out with the same old tales and the same old innuendoes, recounted by the same old parade of discredited or unnamed sources. Even the cover bears a startling resemblance to Joyce Milton's The First Partner, upon which Mr. Klein leans more heavily than that flimsy work can bear.

His clichéd writing soon achieves a predictable rhythm, with page upon page of rehashed material punctuated by a juicy quote or sensational allegation from someone unnamed. In the ultimate form of junk recycling, his footnotes cite books that relied upon anonymous sources. Among computer scientists, this method is called "garbage in, garbage out."

No doubt aware of recent controversies in journalism, Mr. Klein realizes that skeptical readers may be wary of his reliance on so many sources that he won't name. So he offers this peculiar reassurance: "I felt an extra obligation to the reader to redouble my efforts to verify the fairness and accuracy of all their statements."

Just how he verified their statements he doesn't explain, although he helpfully provides dates on which he claims to have spoken with an "anonymous medical authority" and a "Wellesley college classmate who requested anonymity" and a "Clinton biographer who requested anonymity."

Whatever news Mr. Klein claims to report, he gleaned from such nameless whisperers. They told him that Mrs. Clinton knew all about her husband's relationship with Monica Lewinsky months or years before he confessed it to her and the country. They told him that she is "soulless." (His secret informants obviously include Beelzebub, who usually confides only in Peggy Noonan.)

And they allegedly told him that Mr. Clinton had to "rape" the frigid Mrs. Clinton during a Caribbean vacation to impregnate her with their daughter Chelsea.

Obsessed by his fantasies of Mrs. Clinton as a lesbian, he devotes some of his most embarrassing prose to developing such pornographic themes. In a typical passage, he defames not only his subject but also the White House staffers who supposedly gossiped about her over the West Wing "water cooler:"

"Were there any telltale signs on the presidential sheets that they ever had sex with each other? For that matter, did [Mrs. Clinton] have any interest in sex with a man? Or, as was widely rumored, was she a lesbian?"

According to Mr. Klein's guilt-by-association theory, she must be a homosexual "gender feminist," and couldn't possibly love her husband, because "many of her closest friends and aides were lesbians." But he repeats the old rumor that she had an affair with Vince Foster, the White House counsel who committed suicide, although my sources still insist that Foster was a man.

It is all so drearily familiar, and yet so uniquely nasty that even some conservatives with a hearty appetite for Clinton-bashing are appalled.

Indeed, the instant revulsion of publications and writers not necessarily known for elevated standards indicates just how terrible Mr. Klein's book is-and how irresponsible Penguin Group was to publish it. The Drudge Report's disclosure of the rape charge sent nauseous waves through the right-wing blogosphere.

"This is sick, people," cried a blogger at Redstate.org. "I have had just about enough of these so-called 'insider' true stories that are really nothing more than smear jobs, regardless of the target," said another Republican blogger, whose complaint echoed many more.

Even Page Six, the New York Post's Clinton-bashing gossip column, derided the book as a "hatchet-job" and the author as "error-prone." The tabloid mocked Mr. Klein for identifying a happily married former classmate as Mrs. Clinton's rumored lesbian lover. He never spoke with this lady-who denied the smear to the Post-and he repeatedly misspells her surname, which he evidently copied from another book. The New York Times management must cringe whenever Mr. Klein's former employment there is cited as his main journalistic credential.

As for the management of Penguin-a company once regarded with universal respect and admiration-they should be cringing for years to come.

Myself, I'm more involved in the conversation about money. My story is like everyone else's in my class, probably worse. A little over a year ago, I confided to friends that I was rich, worth over a million on paper. But that was heavily leveraged and almost all tech. I guess I'm down 60 or 70 percent–I'm not even sure how much. When my wife's elite retirement account went from 100 to 33, we took our financial consultant out to the Oyster Bar. I paid.

I used to look forward to glancing at the financial pages every morning; now I never look at them. Who wants to? It isn't fun any more, as Hemingway said.

That regular source of pleasure, reading the financial pages, has been taken away from everyone, and has given way to a feeling that we may be on the threshold of a major recession or depression. Suddenly people who wear Prada are talking about how they will hunker down to weather a long storm. They're thinking about how little they can live on.

The latest Fast Company is filled with inspirational accounts of people who went through terrible adversity. The headlines teem with woe. "How to Bounce Back from Setbacks." "Dotzombies." "Masters of Disaster." The editors' letter counsels readers to remember Jim Stockdale's experience in the Hanoi Hilton. Who didn't survive? The optimists, Stockdale said.

Of course, it is just like my generation to compare their paper misfortunes to prison camp with a straight face. We can only do it because we made sure that we had no experience of the war, either–our source of information on prison camps being Hollywood.

The poor-mouthing is as self-dramatizing as everything else my generation has gone on about. Because this is, so far, a financial collapse experienced by the rich. And even if it turns into something more, we have too many assets for it to be anything truly grinding for us. We are cushioned; we will export our troubles to the Third World.

It may even be that we want a depression. So much affluence was getting boring. Life had become somewhat manic; everyone was a booster. My old crowd, leftie intellectual Jews, had turned into a bunch of Babbitts. There was something a little distasteful about it. You didn't have to be Leo Tolstoy to wonder what else life holds.

Now our "hard times" can be a jewel-like moment in our generation's journey. We will rediscover good values. We'll be able to say, afterward, that we were tested. Martha Stewart will show us how to make hoecakes.

Some of the belief in the depression is political: It's about pulling against George Bush. I remember pulling against Ronald Reagan and Bill Clinton's economy for the same reason; I wanted the political discourse to change. When the economy turns, people are more critical and dark. The chickens come home to roost.

People love to hate George Bush. There it is, in the pumped-up headlines about the Chinese plane collision, which somehow doesn't feel like a real crisis, and in Anthony Lewis' earnest talk of a Bush coup (echoing Alan Dershowitz's hyperventilations last fall), and in Maureen Dowd's withering comments on the Bush dynasty. I heard it on photographer Duane Michals' answering-machine message. "If this is George Bush, George W. Bush, Barbara Bush … Trent Lott … or Ralph Nader, get off my phone!" he said.

"Oh, I hate him," a friend told me lately over dinner on Madison Avenue. "I get up in the morning hating him. And I hate that Karl Rove, the way he looks, and I hate that Grover Norquist. I hate their names. You know, I once had dinner with him. He's just a backslapper–he should be running a chain of Ponderosa steakhouses. Nothing like his father. His wife was there, and they called each other 'First Person.' 'First Person, will you pass the salt?' 'First Person, do you want more water?' It was so cute, it was like eighth-graders making out in public."

I can't argue with my friends; George Bush is a mediocrity, impossible to admire, and Kyoto is a reminder of the downside to all of us who wouldn't vote for Al Gore.

The interesting thing about hating George Bush is how swiftly the swoon has happened, and how ennobled people feel by their hatred. Eight years ago, when the hatred against Bill Clinton began going into the nation's bloodstream, it wasn't nearly so easy. You were made to feel guilty about having such feelings and, if you weren't on the right, had to keep them in the closet. It was wrong to hate, disfiguring. Even four years ago, friends would take you aside and seek to counsel you. "Why do you hate him so?" they would say, as if you were hypersensitive, or maladjusted.

The suddenly fashionable hatred for George Bush feels a bit like political payback: You successfully demonized Bill Clinton to the independent voter, we will now demonize George Bush. And some of it seems racial, too: that most unexamined of racisms, anti-WASP. (I just rewatched Meet the Parents , which is a landmark in the casual and thoroughly acceptable vilification of WASP's as shallow morons.)

But Bush hatred isn't going to catch on, not nearly the way that Clinton hatred did. Hatred isn't about ideology, it's personal. The right wing was able to gain recruits from the mainstream in its rage against Bill Clinton because of Bill Clinton's monstrousness, his contempt for individuals and the truth when they got in the way of his self-interest. Almost precisely eight years ago, Travelgate and Waco were the first public demonstrations of a tremendous personal failing, the first in a long string culminating in the impeachment bombings and the description of Monica Lewinsky as a "stalker."

Bill Clinton was an extreme character. There was nothing halfway about him. He had big appetites and a Macbeth-size dark streak to him. George Bush is like a minor Shakespeare bad guy, Rosencrantz at best, some character whose name you forget.

People talk about George Bush's meanness, but even his meanness is a garden-variety character flaw, and before long would embarrass President Bush himself. Bill Clinton was unembarrassable. That is why the Clinton haters are so grateful to him for Marc Rich: After everything, he couldn't and wouldn't learn.

And he isn't going away, either. At 9 o'clock the other night, Reed Irvine of Accuracy in Media called me to tell me about new evidence in the Vince Foster case. The evidence involves the gun found in Foster's hand, which repeated official investigations have said was an heirloom, a Colt revolver that Foster supposedly moved from Arkansas to Washington with him at the outset of the Clinton administration and kept somewhere in his house before turning it on himself in July 1993.

According to Mr. Irvine (and as first reported on the Web site NewsMax.com), a Freedom of Information Act request to the Justice Department's National Crime Information Center determined that there have been four official requests by law enforcement agencies for information on that gun's serial number, three of them in March and April 1993, then one three months later, the night Foster died. If it was an heirloom, then why were police asking about it months before Foster's death? Was it a drop gun? (The big if here: It's possible the serial number also belonged to a different gun.) "Very interesting," says the leading Foster theorist, Hugh Sprunt. "We can use this information offensively."

The FOIA requests were filed by an apprentice machinist in Michigan. What's the likelihood that, months after George Bush leaves office, apprentice machinists will still be investigating him with such zeal? None. It takes a real monster to foster such hatred. I bet Bill Clinton did something to the Nasdaq, too.

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.

What liberals have blinded themselves to about the Clinton operation is a long history of commingled sex and violence and, specifically, the threats experienced by anyone who has even thought about airing the President's dirty laundry.

Dolly Kyle Browning, a lawyer who says she was Bill Clinton's longtime lover, testified in the Paula Jones case: "My relationship ended with him when I warned him about the Star magazine article coming out and he threatened to destroy me …" The threat was through an intermediary; Ms. Browning did not cooperate with the Star .

Sally Perdue, a former Miss Arkansas who claimed to have been Bill Clinton's lover in 1983, has been quoted saying that during the '92 campaign a Clinton ally warned her that she better not talk about the affair because she was known to go jogging and "we can't guarantee what will happen to your pretty legs."

Trooper Roger Perry: "Buddy Young called me–and I'm under oath here, and I swear on my mother's life–the man threatened me … 'Let me give you some advice. If you do [go public], you will be destroyed, and I represent the President of the United States,' exactly what the man said."

Gennifer Flowers: "I felt vulnerable and scared–and for good reason. My apartment had been illegally entered on three separate occasions, and my life was threatened … I've seen what has happened to people who try to cross Bill Clinton. As in the case with Mafia dons, it is never the No. 1 man who directly makes threats, much less commits acts of violence."

Lately, Kathleen Willey was reported in Newsweek to have told F.B.I. agents that two days before her testimony in the Paula Jones case, a strange man "suddenly came up behind her and called out her name," before asking threatening questions about incidents in her life and telling her her children's names.

And now Linda R. Tripp, in her statement at the Federal courthouse, says that on the basis of having worked for the Clinton Administration between 1993 and 1997, she became "increasingly fearful that this information [about illegal behavior] was dangerous, very dangerous, to possess."

These people may dislike Mr. Clinton (Daniel Ellsberg didn't care much for Richard Nixon, either), but they're not crazy. They know the political culture Bill Clinton came from.

In her book Sleeping With the President: My Intimate Years With Bill Clinton , Ms. Flowers says that she was moved to go public (for big bucks from the Star ) out of fear. As so many in Arkansas do, she cites a Faulknerian case that took place in March 1985: the vicious attack on Wayne Dumond.

The previous fall, a teenage girl living in the Delta town of Forrest City accused Wayne Dumond, a mechanic, of raping her. The girl was cousin to then-Governor Clinton and the daughter of the town's leading citizen, and weeks before Mr. Dumond was scheduled to go to trial, his sons came home from school to find him hogtied on the kitchen floor, two-thirds of his blood leaking across the linoleum, castrated. For days after that, the St. Francis County sheriff, a political ally of Mr. Clinton's, displayed Mr. Dumond's testicles in a fruit jar on his desk before flushing them down the toilet. Thirteen years later, Mr. Dumond is still rotting in prison for a crime he says he never committed. Meanwhile the hideous crimes against him have never been investigated, never prosecuted.

As Gennifer Flowers observes, it's not that Mr. Clinton authorized such acts. It's that he comes out of a primitive, one-party political structure that uses violence, and he has always looked the other way.

Linda Tripp's statement about danger is the most provocative, because, unlike Watergate, there is a body in Whitewater, and Ms. Tripp was one of the last people to see that body alive. Deputy counsel Vincent Foster Jr.'s demise eerily parallels the first rumblings of Troopergate, which begat Paulagate, which begat Monicagate.

In the weeks leading up to his death, Foster was under enormous pressure. Friends have described him as grim-faced and displeased with the President and First Lady. He was having anxiety attacks at night and consulting books about ethics. He had become paranoid, and felt that his phone was tapped.

Simultaneously, team Clinton was surely aware of a burgeoning sex crisis. Back in Arkansas, the Troopers were talking about going to the press, and the Administration had confederates who were close to them. "We started talking about how many people of this country would love to know the true colors of the man they elected President," Trooper Roger Perry said.

On July 21, 1993, the day after Foster's death, Bill Clinton appointed R.L. (Buddy) Young, then head of the State Police unit that guards the governor, to a high-paying Federal job, heading a region of the Federal Emergency Management Agency, in Denton, Tex. Buddy Young was Mr. Clinton's cat's-paw among the Troopers–the man who allegedly dangled jobs for silence. "There's no question in our minds that Young was a participant in the effort to suppress bimbo eruptions and suppress the Troopers," said James Fisher, Paula Jones' attorney.

The same day that he promoted Mr. Young, Mr. Clinton addressed the White House staff about Foster's death and issued an oblique warning: "What happened was a mystery.… I hope when we remember him and this we'll be a little more anxious to talk to each other and a little less anxious to talk outside of our family."

The coincidence of Foster's death and a sexual crisis may merely be coincidence. But the sinister view is held by the survivors of another former Clinton aide who met a violent death soon after Foster's.

Jerry Parks was a private eye who provided security to the Clinton-Gore campaign headquarters in Little Rock in 1992. Parks was a big man and a bully, and two months after Foster died he came to a stop sign in suburban Little Rock and was gunned down by a man with a semiautomatic pistol who then flew off in another car. The Little Rock homicide chief said the gangland hit was an "assassination."

Jerry Parks' son and widow have said that he was friendly with Vincent Foster, and that he had created a file on Mr. Clinton's sexual activities at Foster's behest, back in about 1989, when the Clinton marriage experienced trouble. "Vince contacted my dad and said, I need you to get this for Hillary, a basic divorce case, and my father began researching Clinton's girlfriends," Parks' son, Gary Parks, has told me (and zillions of right-wing radio listeners). Jerry Parks' widow, Jane Parks, has said that in the days before his death, Foster called her husband, demanding the file's return, but that Parks refused. (Jane Parks never agreed to talk to me; she has spoken with the highly enterprising London Daily Telegraph reporter Ambrose Evans-Pritchard.)

These are wild charges, indeed. But five years later, Parks' murder is still unsolved, we have countless reports of people who say they were threatened with destruction for talking about affairs, and the head of the Little Rock homicide department is defiant about the fact that he has never investigated the family's claims. "What am I going to do, call the White House?" Clyde Steelman said mockingly, before asserting that the charges were substanceless.

Maybe they are, but Martin Luther King Jr.'s survivors' assertions about who killed him are treated very seriously. The other day, Mr. Steelman said to me, "That's the first time I've heard Vince Foster's name [in the Parks context]." The statement reveals a stunning degree of indifference to possible clues. For the Parks family's belief that there was a Foster connection has been reported widely, in videos and obscure books. And meanwhile Gary Parks says that his mother has often been afraid for her life.

If the threat of violence is a fantasy, it is widely shared among common people who know of shady doings in Clintonville. "I encountered a level of fear and paranoia in Arkansas that I had never encountered before except in crime situations," said Los Angeles Times reporter William Rempel, who reported on the Troopers. "The thing I noticed, definitely, was a climate of fear. People behaved more like Jews or Christians in a Muslim country than people in a free society," said Patrick Matrisciana, the maker of The Clinton Chronicles , the video compilation of the right-wing's accusations.

As I have written here before, my Clinton moment came the night of his 1996 victory, when I stood in the crowd welcoming the President at the Old State House, and two people who said they knew about the famous "boys on the tracks" killings, nine years earlier, refused to talk to me out of fear for their lives. Subsequently, I met a relative of one of the victims in that highly politicized case (which had no sexual component) who would only talk to me at night, in his car in a parking lot, the engine running all the while, and lamented that he had given up any search for justice because "this goes too deep."

Everywhere Bill Clinton goes, he makes Chinatowns .

When he considered running for President in 1988, he was specifically warned about the women's names that would come out and decided not to subject his family to the process. A moving moment in the President's Jan. 17 deposition to Paula Jones' lawyers was his explanation of that decision: "I wasn't sure I was mature enough to be President … My little girl was very young. She was about seven in 1987, and I could tell that she was afraid of it.… and we knew that in all probability she'd be the only child we ever had, and I just didn't, I just didn't think she was ready for it."

But in the years that followed, to judge by the Troopers' accounts, Bill Clinton chose not to change his sexual practices, to run for President, and to deny deny deny (as he told Gennifer Flowers). Even if you believe that his sexual behavior is politically irrelevant–and I am in this camp–you must acknowledge that in the age of Bob Packwood such behavior is a matter of keen social interest. Some may be offended by it, some may want to make something of it, and not just people trying to roll back abortion rights. Joyce Maynard's affair with a famous and arrogant man 35 years her senior who demanded her silence preyed on her life for a quarter-century. Lately, she discovered the need to talk openly about it, and good for her.

When Dolly Kyle Browning set about trying to publish a fictionalized memoir of Mr. Clinton, she was smeared and threatened. Our sexpig President is surrounded by enablers. When I said that Mr. Clinton was "tough," former Arkansas State Police director Lynn Davis corrected me. "He's not tough, he's ruthless." Others are tough–the men whom Wayne Dumond remembers pulling on surgical gloves before he blacked out on that day in 1985.

The media have all but ignored Mr. Clinton's brutalized side because his wonky overachiever side so reflects the reporters' own overachiever boomer values. His ambitions reflect their ambitions, narcissistically and practically. Have we ever seen such a revolving door between government and the press? And so The Economist in England and the hysterical right-wing Clinton Chronicles made by Jeremiah Films out of trailers in Hemet, Calif., have been more reliable on this score than The New York Times or The New Yorker , or for that matter Mike Nichols' film Primary Colors , in which the belligerent manner of the Clintonites–Kathy Bates holding a gun to someone's crotch–is rendered as ha-ha comedy in a cartoon state.

"When somebody takes a cheap shot at us, we ought to knock their goddamn head off. O.K.?" James Carville once said about the Clinton operation. Sometimes these people should be taken at their word.

What liberals have blinded themselves to about the Clinton operation is a long history of commingled sex and violence and, specifically, the threats experienced by anyone who has even thought about airing the President's dirty laundry.

Dolly Kyle Browning, a lawyer who says she was Bill Clinton's longtime lover, testified in the Paula Jones case: "My relationship ended with him when I warned him about the Star magazine article coming out and he threatened to destroy me …" The threat was through an intermediary; Ms. Browning did not cooperate with the Star .

Sally Perdue, a former Miss Arkansas who claimed to have been Bill Clinton's lover in 1983, has been quoted saying that during the '92 campaign a Clinton ally warned her that she better not talk about the affair because she was known to go jogging and "we can't guarantee what will happen to your pretty legs."

Trooper Roger Perry: "Buddy Young called me–and I'm under oath here, and I swear on my mother's life–the man threatened me … 'Let me give you some advice. If you do [go public], you will be destroyed, and I represent the President of the United States,' exactly what the man said."

Gennifer Flowers: "I felt vulnerable and scared–and for good reason. My apartment had been illegally entered on three separate occasions, and my life was threatened … I've seen what has happened to people who try to cross Bill Clinton. As in the case with Mafia dons, it is never the No. 1 man who directly makes threats, much less commits acts of violence."

Lately, Kathleen Willey was reported in Newsweek to have told F.B.I. agents that two days before her testimony in the Paula Jones case, a strange man "suddenly came up behind her and called out her name," before asking threatening questions about incidents in her life and telling her her children's names.

And now Linda R. Tripp, in her statement at the Federal courthouse, says that on the basis of having worked for the Clinton Administration between 1993 and 1997, she became "increasingly fearful that this information [about illegal behavior] was dangerous, very dangerous, to possess."

These people may dislike Mr. Clinton (Daniel Ellsberg didn't care much for Richard Nixon, either), but they're not crazy. They know the political culture Bill Clinton came from.

In her book Sleeping With the President: My Intimate Years With Bill Clinton , Ms. Flowers says that she was moved to go public (for big bucks from the Star ) out of fear. As so many in Arkansas do, she cites a Faulknerian case that took place in March 1985: the vicious attack on Wayne Dumond.

The previous fall, a teenage girl living in the Delta town of Forrest City accused Wayne Dumond, a mechanic, of raping her. The girl was cousin to then-Governor Clinton and the daughter of the town's leading citizen, and weeks before Mr. Dumond was scheduled to go to trial, his sons came home from school to find him hogtied on the kitchen floor, two-thirds of his blood leaking across the linoleum, castrated. For days after that, the St. Francis County sheriff, a political ally of Mr. Clinton's, displayed Mr. Dumond's testicles in a fruit jar on his desk before flushing them down the toilet. Thirteen years later, Mr. Dumond is still rotting in prison for a crime he says he never committed. Meanwhile the hideous crimes against him have never been investigated, never prosecuted.

As Gennifer Flowers observes, it's not that Mr. Clinton authorized such acts. It's that he comes out of a primitive, one-party political structure that uses violence, and he has always looked the other way.

Linda Tripp's statement about danger is the most provocative, because, unlike Watergate, there is a body in Whitewater, and Ms. Tripp was one of the last people to see that body alive. Deputy counsel Vincent Foster Jr.'s demise eerily parallels the first rumblings of Troopergate, which begat Paulagate, which begat Monicagate.

In the weeks leading up to his death, Foster was under enormous pressure. Friends have described him as grim-faced and displeased with the President and First Lady. He was having anxiety attacks at night and consulting books about ethics. He had become paranoid, and felt that his phone was tapped.

Simultaneously, team Clinton was surely aware of a burgeoning sex crisis. Back in Arkansas, the Troopers were talking about going to the press, and the Administration had confederates who were close to them. "We started talking about how many people of this country would love to know the true colors of the man they elected President," Trooper Roger Perry said.

On July 21, 1993, the day after Foster's death, Bill Clinton appointed R.L. (Buddy) Young, then head of the State Police unit that guards the governor, to a high-paying Federal job, heading a region of the Federal Emergency Management Agency, in Denton, Tex. Buddy Young was Mr. Clinton's cat's-paw among the Troopers–the man who allegedly dangled jobs for silence. "There's no question in our minds that Young was a participant in the effort to suppress bimbo eruptions and suppress the Troopers," said James Fisher, Paula Jones' attorney.

The same day that he promoted Mr. Young, Mr. Clinton addressed the White House staff about Foster's death and issued an oblique warning: "What happened was a mystery.… I hope when we remember him and this we'll be a little more anxious to talk to each other and a little less anxious to talk outside of our family."

The coincidence of Foster's death and a sexual crisis may merely be coincidence. But the sinister view is held by the survivors of another former Clinton aide who met a violent death soon after Foster's.

Jerry Parks was a private eye who provided security to the Clinton-Gore campaign headquarters in Little Rock in 1992. Parks was a big man and a bully, and two months after Foster died he came to a stop sign in suburban Little Rock and was gunned down by a man with a semiautomatic pistol who then flew off in another car. The Little Rock homicide chief said the gangland hit was an "assassination."

Jerry Parks' son and widow have said that he was friendly with Vincent Foster, and that he had created a file on Mr. Clinton's sexual activities at Foster's behest, back in about 1989, when the Clinton marriage experienced trouble. "Vince contacted my dad and said, I need you to get this for Hillary, a basic divorce case, and my father began researching Clinton's girlfriends," Parks' son, Gary Parks, has told me (and zillions of right-wing radio listeners). Jerry Parks' widow, Jane Parks, has said that in the days before his death, Foster called her husband, demanding the file's return, but that Parks refused. (Jane Parks never agreed to talk to me; she has spoken with the highly enterprising London Daily Telegraph reporter Ambrose Evans-Pritchard.)

These are wild charges, indeed. But five years later, Parks' murder is still unsolved, we have countless reports of people who say they were threatened with destruction for talking about affairs, and the head of the Little Rock homicide department is defiant about the fact that he has never investigated the family's claims. "What am I going to do, call the White House?" Clyde Steelman said mockingly, before asserting that the charges were substanceless.

Maybe they are, but Martin Luther King Jr.'s survivors' assertions about who killed him are treated very seriously. The other day, Mr. Steelman said to me, "That's the first time I've heard Vince Foster's name [in the Parks context]." The statement reveals a stunning degree of indifference to possible clues. For the Parks family's belief that there was a Foster connection has been reported widely, in videos and obscure books. And meanwhile Gary Parks says that his mother has often been afraid for her life.

If the threat of violence is a fantasy, it is widely shared among common people who know of shady doings in Clintonville. "I encountered a level of fear and paranoia in Arkansas that I had never encountered before except in crime situations," said Los Angeles Times reporter William Rempel, who reported on the Troopers. "The thing I noticed, definitely, was a climate of fear. People behaved more like Jews or Christians in a Muslim country than people in a free society," said Patrick Matrisciana, the maker of The Clinton Chronicles , the video compilation of the right-wing's accusations.

As I have written here before, my Clinton moment came the night of his 1996 victory, when I stood in the crowd welcoming the President at the Old State House, and two people who said they knew about the famous "boys on the tracks" killings, nine years earlier, refused to talk to me out of fear for their lives. Subsequently, I met a relative of one of the victims in that highly politicized case (which had no sexual component) who would only talk to me at night, in his car in a parking lot, the engine running all the while, and lamented that he had given up any search for justice because "this goes too deep."

Everywhere Bill Clinton goes, he makes Chinatowns .

When he considered running for President in 1988, he was specifically warned about the women's names that would come out and decided not to subject his family to the process. A moving moment in the President's Jan. 17 deposition to Paula Jones' lawyers was his explanation of that decision: "I wasn't sure I was mature enough to be President … My little girl was very young. She was about seven in 1987, and I could tell that she was afraid of it.… and we knew that in all probability she'd be the only child we ever had, and I just didn't, I just didn't think she was ready for it."

But in the years that followed, to judge by the Troopers' accounts, Bill Clinton chose not to change his sexual practices, to run for President, and to deny deny deny (as he told Gennifer Flowers). Even if you believe that his sexual behavior is politically irrelevant–and I am in this camp–you must acknowledge that in the age of Bob Packwood such behavior is a matter of keen social interest. Some may be offended by it, some may want to make something of it, and not just people trying to roll back abortion rights. Joyce Maynard's affair with a famous and arrogant man 35 years her senior who demanded her silence preyed on her life for a quarter-century. Lately, she discovered the need to talk openly about it, and good for her.

When Dolly Kyle Browning set about trying to publish a fictionalized memoir of Mr. Clinton, she was smeared and threatened. Our sexpig President is surrounded by enablers. When I said that Mr. Clinton was "tough," former Arkansas State Police director Lynn Davis corrected me. "He's not tough, he's ruthless." Others are tough–the men whom Wayne Dumond remembers pulling on surgical gloves before he blacked out on that day in 1985.

The media have all but ignored Mr. Clinton's brutalized side because his wonky overachiever side so reflects the reporters' own overachiever boomer values. His ambitions reflect their ambitions, narcissistically and practically. Have we ever seen such a revolving door between government and the press? And so The Economist in England and the hysterical right-wing Clinton Chronicles made by Jeremiah Films out of trailers in Hemet, Calif., have been more reliable on this score than The New York Times or The New Yorker , or for that matter Mike Nichols' film Primary Colors , in which the belligerent manner of the Clintonites–Kathy Bates holding a gun to someone's crotch–is rendered as ha-ha comedy in a cartoon state.

"When somebody takes a cheap shot at us, we ought to knock their goddamn head off. O.K.?" James Carville once said about the Clinton operation. Sometimes these people should be taken at their word.

So I went to Washington and got the Webb Hubbell tapes from the offices of Dan Burton (Republican-Scumbag, Indiana) and walked around Capitol Hill, listening to the night of Webb's loyalty crisis, March 1996. Heard Suzy Hubbell crying on the phone to Webb that Presidential aide Marsha Scott was "ghoulish" and taking pleasure in "ratcheting it up" and putting on the "squeeze play." Heard Webb say with resignation, "So I need to roll over one more time." Heard Webb dial Marsha a few minutes later, heard Marsha coo softly as she apologized for upsetting Suzy. And then when Webb talked about suing the Rose Law Firm, heard the grit in Marsha's voice.

"No one, no one looks forward to a public spectacle of this. No one is supportive of anything that's public. You know that."

For all the controversy over the manner of their release, the Hubbell tapes shine a rare light on a pre-eminent operator in the White House. Whenever bad nonpublic stuff has to go down–from Vince Foster to the Travel Office to Paula Jones–Marsha Scott is there. A fox in fox's clothing, Ms. Scott is a slack-jawed blonde with a hippie past, a Dyan Cannon type who knows how to play the California ditz whenever anyone asks her what she's been up to.

"Does the air seem weird in here to you? My eyes are getting really dry," she said when a House lawyer started asking tough questions two years ago. "I feel like everything is kind of closing up on me … I am going to start going into a spaz attack here."

Marsha complained then about being "knee-deep in investigations," but scandal has its winners, and she is surely one of them. Her combination of political canniness and I'm-a-man's-woman yieldingness has made her indispensable to the President. The 50-year-old has known Bill Clinton since she was 19 and, as she reminded Webb, she has the President's ear (and by some reports, other organs as well). But apart from a glimpse of her great gams as she went before the grand jury, Marsha stays under the radar.

"There was enormous competition on that staff among women who could handle stuff, and Marsha seems to have won as the information-bag person," said Lucianne Goldberg, literary agent-provocateur. "The press hasn't focused on her because we never see her with Clinton. I imagine she would deliberately want to not be photographed with him."

No lawyer, no Rhodesy, no Yalie, no suit, Marsha Scott has led a more varied and interesting life than the dweebs of the meritocracy. She grew up in privileged Little Rock, her mother a former Miss Arkansas, her father a silver medalist hurdler in the '48 Olympics who played halfback for the Philadelphia Eagles in the 50's and forgets his daughter's birthday. ("My wife would break both of my legs below the knees if she heard that," Clyde Scott says; is there a gene for toughness?) At Hall High School, she was a cheerleader for Webb, and his father said they should marry (according to Webb's book, Friends in High Places ), but she grew disgusted with the country club scene and moved to California. Word was she became a hippie. Marsha's American journey included stints as a Head Start teacher and newspaper ad salesperson, years selling furniture and doing interior design, and a marriage of seven years, by her father's reckoning.

Politics always interested her, and in the 1992 primary she ran field operations in California for Bill Clinton. That led to her appointment in the Administration, head of correspondence and Presidential messages. Unlike so many of the dour lawyers in the Administration, Marsha was fun. She complained about the Secret Service, looked forward to Arkansas gatherings on Tuesday nights, and liked to gossip about who was the best affair material. Tall, mysterious Vincent Foster, she said.

Her first big moment in the Clinton scandals came in the Foster case. The day before Foster died, Ms. Scott had a meeting said to be as long as two hours in Foster's office with the door closed, a "highly unusual" meeting–"both her coming to see him and anybody taking up that much time with Foster," in the words of a secretary (Linda Tripp). Ms. Scott says the meeting wasn't that long, she was merely checking in on a friend.

Marsha Scott was twice questioned about the meeting by the F.B.I., and as in other encounters with gumshoes, she slipped the narcs with her edgeless California argot. That's the great thing about being a hippie chick. You're always a hippie chick in one part of your heart, you can make it work for you. (Hey, I'm half hippie chick myself, I keep a spliff in the underwear drawer.)

"She said that she hoped everybody would understand that that was an incredibly painful time, and her way of dealing with matters such as that is to block it out. She remembers impressions, she does not remember specific conversations," the F.B.I. duly recorded. "She said she believed Foster had painted himself into a box with no windows."

The blurry talk masks one big lie surrounding the case–what was the White House so worried about that it was applying the full-court political press to Foster in the days before his death? Why on his last weekend is he going to the Eastern Shore estate that Kathleen Willey was escorted to when she was threatening to blow? Why was it so urgent to the Administration to get into his files the day after his death?

In the Hubbell tapes, Marsha Scott speaks coolly of "our friends," meaning the Clintons. "Well–any words you want me to give?" she asks. That's the last thing she asked Foster, too, and that night, Bill Clinton called Foster for the first time in weeks, invited him to come to the White House to a meeting with Bruce Lindsey and Webb Hubbell. Foster said No.

The next day he died, and that night, Marsha Scott went back to the White House residence with the President and others and stayed most of the night. Hillary was in Little Rock, and White House logs of Ms. Scott's visit have fed rumors about her relationship with Mr. Clinton. "Then at some point I would have ended up back where I was staying, and then it's a blur," Marsha Scott recalled of that night, when quizzed by a House lawyer. The American Spectator has quoted a Santa Cruz newspaper that called Marsha Scott the President's former "hippie girlfriend," and quoted former insider David Watkins as saying that Ms. Scott had told his wife, Ileene, that she had had an affair with the President.

Mr. Watkins has enmity toward Marsha Scott. Her next big useful moment came after he wrote a memo blaming Hillary Clinton for initiating the Travel Office firings. Maybe you remember, David Watkins was photographed using a Government helicopter to go play golf at Camp David, and was fired. Mr. Watkins says that Marsha Scott helped set him up. An avid golfer, she agreed to go golfing at Camp David with him that day, then canceled.

"I was sick, I was home with the flu," she told House investigators.

In that same interview, Marsha Scott said she'd had never heard of a White House database: "Well, there was no database at the White House at all." And when it came out days later that there was a database maintained at the White House that the political campaign used to raise money from, The New York Times implied that Marsha Scott was deceptive.

Now we come to my favorite moment in Marsha Scott's back pages, which was exposed in the Paula Jones lawsuit. July 1994, and Ms. Scott, wearing a sleeveless black dress, accompanies her man to the Hot Springs (Ark.) High School reunion. The President's reunion was remarkable for his encounter with one of his oldest friends, Dolly Kyle Browning, a Texas lawyer who founded Lawyers for Affordable Housing. Bill Clinton had cut off dealings with her two years before when he feared that she was going to sell a story about being his lover to a tabloid. But Ms. Browning never did, and she was sore at Mr. Clinton for treating her like Gennifer Flowers. At a reunion, where everyone was getting three minutes of the President's time, Bill Clinton sat with the pretty blonde for 45 minutes.

When they left, Marsha and Bill decided to document the evening. It's one of those Franklin Mint moments in the history of the American Presidency. The hippie chick turned power blonde and the President sitting down together, in private, without any goddamn lawyers, writing out their version of the reunion because they're spazzed about the possibility of another woman coming out of the closet and talking about the President's unit, does it veer.

They're not using a computer, they're writing it out on a legal pad without letterhead. The President writes for a long time:

"At my reunion I saw Dolly Kyle for the first time in a long time. She was obviously angry and sulking … She kept chewing me out for not calling her back and not trusting her … She started talking about her novel … she didn't care if it hurt me or the Presidency …"

And Marsha wrote a brief, ferocious addendum, claiming she had listened in on the whole conversation and characterizing Ms. Browning as "erratic" and "threatening acting."

"It was a bizarre conversation because she repeatedly said her story was not true, but that she was angry and needed money …"

A few weeks back, Sidney Blumenthal said at Harvard that Kenneth Starr had committed a "real crime against history" because no one at the White House keeps diaries out of fear of subpoena, but then high-minded Sid isn't in the chick loop. 'Cause somehow he missed the President's high school reunion diary, nearly 1,000 words in that back-slung slouch of his (I confess I hold the President's sidling handwriting against him, as a character flaw). I mean, that's a diary for you, that's history in the 90's.

Bill kept these diaries tucked away under his desk in his private briefcase. That's where he keeps stuff no one gets to look at. Other Presidents kept their impressions of Charles de Gaulle, or their musings on the loneliness of the office. Bill is writing about Dolly Kyle at the high school reunion, and what she's going to say about him in her novel.

"Parts of what he wrote were true, but the essence of what he wrote is a lie," said Ms. Browning. "And she absolutely lied. First, I have to tell you it would have been impossible for her to be standing where she says she was. There was a big load-bearing column and our chairs were side by side against it, and there were two Secret Service agents on either side and dance music playing and 300 people in the room. She made up a story about me."

And, meanwhile, Marsha Scott went on to become the President's liaison for lesbian and gay issues. "She was very well liked, and she knew her stuff," said Rebecca Isaacs, political director of the National Gay and Lesbian Task Force. "She was good. I felt like she was totally comfortable. Very cool. Very warm."

Marsha Scott's effectiveness on an issue we care about and her effectiveness in dastardly ways embodies the contradictions of the White House mob. Scandal called on her sales background and lack of pretension, her smart-stupid, been-there-done-that blond résumé, her tell-me-who-to-kill, tail-to-the-Chief talents. The President may be closer to Bruce Lindsey, but he just plays hearts with Bruce.

But did Marsha find love? The night Webb asked her whether he'd ever been disloyal ("Never, oh God, no!" spake Marsha), she was home alone, watching the Oscars, and sweet spineless Webb called her "babe" and said, "All the guys are wondering when you're coming back" and they exchanged "I love you"s. Now you could say that's a lonely ending, buzzing around the Lippopotamus, flirting with the prison boys, buzzing around the big boys in the White House, gossiping about affairs. But I don't agree. I mean, Who finds love when they're looking for power? Have you? And how much of these men does anyone want? Would you rather be Suzy Hubbell? On the tapes she emerges as a truly noble person in her devotion to her husband, but look at the giant price she's paid! Besides, Marsha's got her man. Bill needs Marsha more than Marsha needs Bill, Marsha's got Bill by the short hairs, a love story for our corrupted age.

I got Marsha's phone number off the prison tapes and called her in Washington.

"Spring is here and it's time to get down and dirty," said the lusty answering machine message. "Leave your gardening tips."

I told her about the quince I'd bought, asked her if she thought I could force it in winter. I tried to sound sexy, seasoned and unillusioned, too, tried to sound as down and dirty as she is, tried to fill my voice with the Clinton mantra, Everybody does it. I couldn't fool her.

Still, consider how well it fits. Here's this great ship, a miracle of modern technocracy and technology, impervious, it is thought, to all that the fates may decree, steaming implacably through seas that will prove trickier than thought. Such lifeboats as there are have been reserved for the moneyed class (Robert Rubin, Second Officer in charge), which by the standards of the day is as it should be, they having paid the most for their tickets, perhaps even bribed their way to a better stateroom.

Even those confined below decks, in steerage, share the joy: Like characters in a Bruegel or Rubens' Kermesse , they dance and sing and cuddle and swill their mean beer, happy just to be aboard, certain that in the New World beyond the horizon, all will come right and true for them-as promised in the White Star advertisements. What they would say if informed of the lifeboat situation, or that there are no binoculars for the lookouts, is not known to history, since so few survived.

Thus the great liner plows ahead, moving in its own aura of confidence, a halo that guards it like Achilles' shield, at once brilliant and impenetrable-or so it is assumed. All in all, ship and its company taken together, the mightiest engine yet conceived and made by mortal hands. Pressing on at flank speed, navigating by dead reckoning through waters known to be studded with ice floes. Quite a feat, this-not unlike the U.S. economy, which has performed the damnedest high-wire act in economic history, as Lester Thurow points out in a brilliant article in the current New York Review of Books , namely to maintain the dollar's status as the world's reserve currency while running the biggest trade deficits of any nation in history. This has excused us from the consequences of fiscal and monetary habits that have literally bankrupted smaller, lesser countries-and probably would have tapped us out if gold, deprived of its historic franchise by the new norm of thinking digitally, had remained the world's standard of last resort.

And then it grazes an iceberg (for which read the libido of William Jefferson Clinton). Whether the hull is pierced, or metallurgically suspect rivets pop, is really beside the point, a matter for future marine archeologists. What matters is that all hell breaks loose, on deck there is utter confusion, some people behave well, others badly, there are ugly scenes and noble ones, the band plays briefly on, the compartments fill with water. Hell, we all know the rest: "Husbands and wives, little-bitty children lost their lives, Oh, it was sad when the great ship went down!"

What we're going through right now in "_____gate" is like that: everyone running this way and that (in James Cameron's film, there is at least $50 million of budget invested in pointless running up and down corridors), confusion, false alarms, finger-pointing, second-guessing.

I think it's all kind of cool. I haven't the slightest idea whether the President did or didn't. Monica Lewinsky obviously had a major crush on Mr. Clinton, the film clips that show them together evince that clearly enough, and if she came on to him, it wouldn't be the first time in his or a lot of men's history that tumescence got the better of common sense. It's a simple matter of acculturation. In Little Rock, men learn early that money is there to be stolen, tobacco to be chewed and women to give pleasure to guys. And if you think they know about "crony capitalism" in Jakarta, just check out Arkansas-the only state that has a hog as its university's official beast. Soooooeeee , Pigs! I used to have "one o' them red plastic hawg hats," as they say at the Rose Law Firm, and believe me, you'd sooner wear a Green Bay "cheese head" to the Central Park Conservancy ladies' lunch than that topper. Anyway, thank the Lord for small blessings. Since this mess first broke, I've halfway expected W.J.C. to evoke a variation of his famous Oxford marijuana trope and claim that, yes, he … but, well .… he didn't come, you see, I mean it's not like he actually smoked that joint, just held it briefly in his lips. Maybe they should have asked him if he'd chewed the weed. Anyway, if the famous dress-a full-length version of O.J.'s glove-does exist, I guess that defense is out the window.

My own view is that this whole thing starts with Linda Tripp and that it has something to do with the suicide of Vince Foster, for whom she worked. Indeed, my first reaction when I heard about Ms. Lewinsky was that poor Foster died in vain, trying to protect a President whose personal quiddities make him unprotectable. But maybe Foster's suicide was about Foster himself-something on him personally that was going to oblige the Clintons to abandon him for political reasons-that Ms. Tripp for some reason holds against the First Couple. Ms. Tripp looks to me like a woman with a lot of grudges. She has that junk-food overweight and angry look; such women are dangerous.

And then fate, in the way it always seems to sweep aside impediments to the marriage of true minds and lets them find each other across a crowded room, to seek each other out even from the far ends of trackless wastes of civility and discretion with the unerring instinctual accuracy of Walter Isaacson in a roomful of V.I.P.'s, steps in.

Fate delivers into Ms. Tripp's hearing the rancor of a young woman seething with essentially unreciprocated passion. A girl with a story she's aching to sob out on friendly shoulders. One reason misery loves company so is that Company's willing to listen. Over and over and over. Company never gets tired of hearing the bill of particulars, Company becomes adept at the Pavlovian keys: "He did what?" "He said what! Oh, you poor thing! Oh, poor baby!" Company knows how to convert sorrow and shame into shared vindictiveness. Ms. Tripp has enough vengefulness for both of them, indeed for a regiment, but Ms. Lewinsky's got the goods.

The story never grows old, the teller never tires of telling it, once prompted. It tells as well inside the Beltway as in exurban Virginia. It records nicely.

Somewhere in here, Lucianne Goldberg, agent of choice to the Paranoid Set (shortly to initiate Hillary Clinton as a full member, courtesy of Matt Lauer), has entered the picture. Ms. Goldberg smells book contract, Ms. Tripp smells revenge; by now, Ms. Lewinsky's almost ceased to count, the thing is to lock her in so she can't wriggle out. And it gets better, because here comes another dame with a grievance, Mme. Attorney General Janet Reno, herself left to twist in the wind at one point by this President, who-in a disregard of legal rights and constitutional proprieties that would embarrass a sub-Saharan dictatorship-enables Kenneth Starr to horn in on the act.

And so, here we are. I don't want it to end. When Richard Holbrooke's name surfaced, even peripherally, in the Larry Lawrence, Arlington affair, I said to myself, "There is a God." Now that Vernon Jordan's mixed up in this, I know there is, although I keep hoping that the papers will bring up a business a few years back involving Mr. Jordan and incidents in a motel that was at the time widely reported. And it's thrilling to have Dick Morris back on the page.

The media has behaved execrably, as predicted. I'm surprised that no one has been squashed flat in the stampede of the talking heads to get on TV. Out of the mouths and word processors of people I know personally to have cheated-in some cases with regularity-on their spouses has spewed a veritable torrent of moralizing. The hypocrisy has been world-class. Joe Klein leads the league, I think. Primary Colors did well because people thought it really was about a "scandal" like this, a perception that required that book buyers be led to believe (by Random House and Mr. Klein) that this was real "dish" supplied by a true Administration insider, not a fabrication of gossip by another suck-up beat reporter, in which they were deceptively encouraged.

One victim has been Matt Drudge. From Jimmy Breslin to people on this paper, he has been vilified. It's a bum rap. I have been reading the Drudge Report on the Net for two years now, and all Mr. Drudge does is report what's going to be in the papers, or what stories he hears are being worked on. He also gives box-office reports and Hollywood gossip. Not once on Drudge have I read anything that surprised me except the unfounded-and by Mr. Drudge promptly recanted-gossip about Sidney Blumenthal beating his wife; that did surprise me, since I would never have credited Mr. Blumenthal with the character necessary for that kind of decisive if misguided action. Take it from me, folks, there is more that is meretricious, downmarket, misleading and slimy, even in the face of present "verifying" rumor, on a single page of Primary Colors , a minute of Crossfire or a column in any of a dozen papers you can think of, than in Drudge 's entire output. Of course, I grew up in an era when gossip was what people didn't want known about themselves; that was its point, and as such, the fear of being found out exercised a certain measure of control. Now that "gossip" is largely an affair of press releases and preplotted leaks, it no longer seems to.

I say "a certain measure," because there were those who went ahead, anyway-like John Kennedy, probably secure in the conviction that a Nixon-hating press would stay off the story-and in the certainty that even their worst enemies, like Colonel Robert Rutherford McCormick's Chicago Tribune , would find their own high opinion of their calling buttressed by awareness of advertising revenue from the Kennedy-owned Merchandise Mart and would never stoop to retailing "filth."

Unsavory as the present situation is, there is this to weigh. For 20 years, the nation's thinking has been colored by "antigovernment" rhetoric. The press, which mans the spotlights and microscopes, scrutinizes government and reports its institutional and personal failures, has been the beneficiary of this, and so has risen in the esteem of both the public and its own looking glass.

That may be about to end. My guess is that Mr. Clinton is going to survive this. He is a lucky and effective President for the present time, although in my opinion too morally careless and untested to be a great one. The wave on which he has ridden may be cresting; 10 years from now, I suspect the world may be divided into three great economic and reserve-currency blocs-with Africa and Latin America, possibly the former Soviet Union, up for grabs-which could lead to tectonic upheavals in the balance of power for which this country is ill prepared.

Right now, however, this morally defective President looks better than the media. That the press has allowed this to happen is something to think about. And also not a bad thing.

The people in the ballroom for the 25th anniversary of the conservative AIM Report were none of them sexy or light of step. Accuracy in Media was born of anticommunism and the anti-60's, and a lot of the people on the dais were nostalgic for wars nobody I know cares about. A cash bar at the reception, no wine with dinner and Phyllis Schlafly in a pink dress and blond beehive, holding the line against women's lib and porn.

Does anyone care about women's lib? Didn't we come out of women's lib's rib?

AIM is the creation of Reed Irvine, a valiant scold. He's 75 now; he stood at the podium at dinner making jokes about his plumbing.

"Do you not know that I'm an old man. When I rise I must leak!" he cried, faintly echoing the most famous thing ever said about him, 19 years ago when Ben Bradlee called Mr. Irvine a "carping, retromingent vigilante." Retromingent means pissing backwards.

I sat at Table 8 next to my guru in scandal, the bearded, high-foreheaded Hugh Sprunt. Now and then-maybe when the entertainer Paul Shanklin was imitating Louis Farrakhan singing "Won't You Be My Neighbor?" and using a fake ghetto accent, even as black waiters moved among us serving prime rib-I looked over and Hugh's eyes were shut. Hugh has one keen interest, the death of Vincent Foster.

"Hugh, did you ever think, Well, I've chewed this one over enough, time to jump on to T.W.A. 800?"

Hugh Sprunt's eyes glinted warmly. "No. The deeper I get, the more interesting it is to me."

Earlier that day, I'd walked past him in alcoves, surrounded by a circle of fresh disciples.

"But you see, that happens typically in a hanging, but there's no evidence from the medical examiner-"

I guess they were talking about the semen found on Foster's shorts.

Then someone would say, "Our theory with the car is the killer leaves in the blue car with the keys and only later, when he's on the plane to Argentina, does he realize-"

"All right: the car," Hugh says, gearing up.

Hugh Sprunt is glamorous to me because he's never insisted on solving the Foster mystery; he knows what he doesn't know and revels in it. He loves intellectual puzzles even when I ask him about sex.

"What did Woody Allen say?" he said. "A man just needs a place, a woman needs a reason?"

"What does that mean, Hugh?"

"You live in New York, you should be explaining Woody Allen to me," he said-Hugh Sprunt lives in Farmers Branch, Tex.

Other glamorous figures at the AIM ball were no-shows or half-shows. New York City Police Commissioner Howard Safir slipped out after his short speech to get the shuttle. Former White House counsel C. Boyden Gray was nowhere to be seen. And as for Pierre Salinger, Pierre Salinger was in Paris, he didn't even call with regrets, Mr. Irvine said.

Many of the other partisans seemed superannuated, men of the Cold War era who gave bizarre, Dr. Strangelove-y speeches or got tearful talking about their grandparents. The concessions table was loaded with busts of Ronald Reagan.

I'm a fellow traveler with these hard-righters because I share their view of Bill Clinton's corruption. I appeared on a Vince Foster panel the spry Mr. Irvine ran with precision. He sat with a stopwatch, and when you got past your seventh minute, he'd drop a folded card in front of you with the number 2 on it, then a minute later 1, then a third scrawled time . I talked about how independent counsel Kenneth Starr's report on Foster's death is so thin and shabby, he didn't even put his name on it. It dismisses serious questions-like the harassment of Patrick Knowlton, an inconvenient witness at Fort Marcy Park the day Foster died-and offers sweeping psychological conclusions on the basis of superficial evidence. It has no surprises and little intellectual honesty.

Investigative reporter Chris Ruddy sat next to me, and when he spoke he cracked a joke about Mr. Clinton not being "crooked." He wasn't the only one talking about dicks. A little later, Murray Baron, the president of Accuracy in Media, rose to give a wild speech suggesting that Foster had killed himself in a homosexual hideaway, maybe the one linked to Barney Frank.

"Do you think they were having an affair?" the author Dan Moldea, who is writing a book on Foster, asked me at lunch.

The good old Hillary question.

"I do, but there's no way to know," I said.

"I believe they were," Mr. Sprunt said. "Now it may have been long before they got to Washington." He cited the many rumors.

Later I walked out onto 17th Street to get a newspaper with Larry Klayman, the head of Judicial Watch, that organization that is suing Hillary Clinton over Filegate, that scummiest of Clinton affairs in which hundreds of confidential F.B.I. files turned up in the hands of White House goons. Mr. Klayman hopes to depose the First Lady this fall at the White House. We talked about Foster, and he asked the Hillary question himself.

I told him about evidence in the case that Vince Foster agonized about the rumors showing up in the press.

"Well, he was a handsome man," Larry Klayman said. "And if you believe reports about what she had to put up with, well, who could blame her."

The sex talk was still going on back at the Army-Navy Club. After lunch, someone named Judith Reisman was on a panel with Phyllis Schlafly, holding forth against the Kinsey report. Then we went to the ballroom, and F.B.I. agent Gary Aldrich made another joke about Mr. Clinton's allegedly crooked dick, rudely thanked Phyllis Schlafly for "sharing your cross-dressing experiences" with us-Phyllis Schlafly had given a speech where she told of playing Henry in Henry V -and wondered whether Chelsea Clinton wasn't a "Foster child." Vicious.

Ten o'clock, and not a drop to drink. Outside the window that man went by, and I realized how far my new crowd is from real sex and power. The girls at the AIM thing weren't pretty; neither were the men. The pretty people were elsewhere, heads pillowed on one anothers' flushed and concupiscent thighs, and it made me want to walk out of the Army-Navy Club. We're a bunch of gray-haired nuts, combing over events of four years ago, asking people about what car they remember in the parking lot when they can't even remember the car outside the door right now.

Let the next generation figure out what happened to Foster, if they care. The world has things to do, the world has new lies to tell, fresh thighs to lay its head against, fresh skullduggeries to commit in the name of a 10,000-point Dow Jones.

That's why the talk kept going to sex. Everyone likes to be where the action is, and right now the action is in the President's pants. Forget Maureen Dowd's plea on Oct. 18 that America shouldn't go there; I can tell you from a day at AIM that America likes talking about the President's dick. We're ready to have the President in court and to quiz Paula Jones about how she got such a good gander if she didn't kiss it.

"Gentlemen Are Requested to Adjust Their Clothing Before Re-entering the Lobby," the sign in the men's room of the Army-Navy Club said, but that sign is history. America wants your flies open, gentlemen. We're ready for male full-frontal at last; we want to see how it hangs. The biggest cheat in Boogie Nights is the fakeout with Mark Wahlberg's dick at the end. That thing's a hose, it's a putty job, it's Cyrano night at the dinner-theater zipper show. "Men say that they can tell it's fake from the way he handles it," my friend Lynn Hirschberg says. I could tell it was doped because it lay there like rubber sausage bought by the yard at Ziggy's Novelty. Sharon Stone showed us hers, Mark Wahlberg, why can't you show us yours?

We want the President's dick because it's where all the mysteries start. It sought glamour and got it, leaving Paula Jones and the other Ozark mascara cases behind, and with the glamour came everything else, the glory, the lies, the high approval ratings, the F.B.I. files and who knows what, the Arkansas lawyer in Fort Marcy Park.

Vince Foster needed a place, the rest of us still need a reason. The reason's sex, and sorry, Phyllis, it was true in the 60's, it's true now: The Democrats win big.