El Sid, Vicious.('The Clinton Wars')(Book Review)

The Clinton Wars, by Sidney Blumenthal (Farrar Straus & Giroux, 822 pp., $30)

No one really expected Sidney Blumenthal's memoir to be a complete account of the Clinton scandals. There are other places for that. A reader can consult the exhaustive independent-counsel reports on Whitewater and Travelgate, the Senate and House reports on the campaign-finance scandal, and the House's damningly detailed report on the pardon scandal. There is also, of course, the Starr Report on the Lewinsky scandal and, perhaps more important, the volumes of Starr's evidence published by the House. Add to that a few books of reporting, like James B. Stewart's Blood Sport, and the works of Clinton's defenders, like Joe Conason and Gene Lyons's The Hunting of the President, and you've got the picture. If you want to read any more than that, you need professional help.

Given all those accounts, what can Blumenthal offer? There's no real news in his book, no inside scoop. Instead, what he gives readers is a look inside the mind of a true Clinton believer -- perhaps the truest true Clinton believer (in his own memoir, George Stephanopoulos called himself a "true true believer," but he was an amateur compared to Blumenthal). Yes, writers like Conason and Lyons were in the tank for the Clintons, as was Blumenthal when he wrote about the administration from the outside. But after joining the White House staff in 1997, Blumenthal became the tank.

The problem, of course, is that Blumenthal believes so deeply in the Clintons that we can't believe him. Although he devotes the bulk of

his book to the scandals, he appears unable to accept the idea that the First Couple ever did anything wrong -- a lack of comprehension that leads him to some significant omissions of fact.

In discussing the White House Travel Office firings, for example, Blumenthal complains that Hillary Clinton, who claimed she had played "no role" in the firings, was portrayed in the press as the "villainous mastermind"; and he says that independent counsel Robert Ray eventually "issued a report clearing Hillary and everyone else of wrongdoing." But Blumenthal fails to tell readers about top White House aide David Watkins, who wrote that the First Lady had pushed him to get "our people" into the Travel Office and that there would be "hell to pay" if Mrs. Clinton's wishes were not followed. Blumenthal also does not tell readers that the independent counsel actually found there was "substantial evidence that [Mrs. Clinton] had a 'role' in the decision to fire the Travel Office employees," and furthermore that the White House put up "substantial resistance" to the investigation, asserting "unfounded privileges that were later rejected in court" and failing to produce relevant evidence. And what Blumenthal calls a report "clearing Hillary" in fact concluded this: "The evidence was insufficient to prove to a jury beyond a reasonable doubt that any of Mrs. Clinton's statements and testimony regarding her involvement in the Travel Office firings were knowingly false."

On another subject, Blumenthal devotes just one paragraph to the deal in which Mrs. Clinton made $100,000 from a $1,000 investment in the notoriously intricate and treacherous world of commodities trading. He does not mention that when the profit was made public, the White House claimed, falsely, that Mrs. Clinton had made the trades herself on the basis of expertise gained by reading the Wall Street Journal. In fact, the trades were made on her behalf by influential friends in Arkansas, who also shielded her from the catastrophic losses that are possible in commodities trading. A reader encountering the issue for the first time would literally have no idea what the controversy was about -- except to conclude that it was all a bum rap, part of what Blumenthal calls the "scandal-industrial complex."