THOMAS POWERS, THE NEW YORK TIMES BOOK REVIEW, FEBRUARY 13, 2000:

“A Likely Story!: Jeffrey Toobin’s history of the Clinton impeachment unfolds the whole affair so it makes a kind of sense.”

A Vast Conspiracy:

The Real Story Of the Sex Scandal That

Nearly Brought Down a President.

By Jeffrey Toobin

422 pp. New York:

Random House, $25.95.

Anyone who did not spend the penultimate year of teh 20th century in a persistent vegetative state will know roughly what is to be found in Jeffrey Toobin’s narrative history of the investigation and impeachment of William Jefferson Clinton for the high crime or misdemeanor, take your pick, of . . . what? Even now there is little general agreement on just what, at its deepest core, the battle was really about.

The independent counsel, Kenneth Starr, who almost managed to drive Clinton from office, once declared of the president’s transgression (to reporters, while carrying out his trash), “You cannot defile the temple of justice,” by which he narrowly meant lying in a legal proceeding, namely a civil suit brought by one Paula Jones, and more broadly meant lying, period. The House Judiciary Committee formally accused the president of lying in the aforementioned legal proceeding (about which more, much more, below); and further accused him of lying to a grand jury about the initial lie; and finally accused him of lying in his answers to questions put by the House concerning his previous lies. But the president’s fellow Arkansan, the former senator Dale Bumpers, who vigorously defended Clinton during the Senate trial, said the whole thing made no sense until you remembered what the president was accused of lying about. He quoted H.L. Mencken as saying, “When you hear somebody say, ‘This is not about money’—it’s about money.” And “When you hear somebody say, ‘This is not about sex’—it’s about sex.”

There may have been a time, following his appointment in 1994, when Starr thought the moral struggle in which he was engaged was about Clinton’s role, possibly aided and abetted by his wife, in the failure of a small Arkansas bank that had lent him and his partners money for the stupid real estate venture known as Whitewater. And there was almost certainly a moment among the unfolding excitements of early 1998 when Starr believed he was this close to proving Clinton had obstructed justice by tampering with witnesses during the aforementioned Paula Jones legal proceeding. But by the time he reported to the House that fall, Whitewater, the additional scandals known as Travelgate and Filegate and obstruction of justice charges had all faded away to nothing, and the only charge remaining was that of defiling the temple of justice by lying about . . . well, who doesn’t remember the moment on Jan. 26, 1998, when a stern-faced Clinton leaned into the microphone and lied not only to the American people, but even, if Toobin has got this right, to his wife and daughter and his lawyer when he said, “I did not have sexual relations with that woman.” Weird pause. “Miss Lewinsky.” (It appears he had forgotten her name.)

What Clinton said was roughly what he had claimed in a deposition in the Jones case a week earlier. To prove that Clinton had lied, Starr needed to prove that in fact he did have sex with Lewinsky. Procopius recounts how the Empress Theodora got her start and Suetonius tells us what Tiberius did in his swimming pool on Capri in narratives no longer than this review. Starr’s report to the House Judiciary Committee, totalling 452 pages, was placed on the Internet. There all might read his truly exhaustive time and motion studies (if not his 18 boxes containing thousands upon thousands of pages of supporting material) of the president’s dozen moments alone with Lewinsky over a 16-month period. Give Starr credit. He proved Clinton a liar. His relations with Lewinsky were sexual.

How some unanswered questions about a land deal led to the mad extreme of the Starr report is the story related in “A Vast Conspiracy.” A Harvard law graduate who served an apprenticeship in chasing presidents with Lawrence Walsh, the independent counsel in the Iran-contra scandal, Toobin subsequently turned himself into a writer—quite a good writer. His strength lies in his ability to chart a clear narrative line through tangled cases, as he did in “The Run Of His Life” for the O.J. Simpson murder trial. There is an argument in his new book, identifying its larger significance in a trend, disturbing in his view, by which the legal system is subverting and supplanting the political system. By this he means that legal activists, first of the left but more recently of the right, are finding ways through the courts to impose changes on American society they could never have achieved through electoral politics.

But what mostly engages Toobin is the story itself in all its gorgeous improbability, beginning with the wonderfully brief and unexpected line, “This is Danny.” Answering the phone in Little Rock, Ark., in January 1994 was Daniel M. Traylor, a lawyer of modest reputation, and calling him was a friend of Paul Jones, who was upset about a story in The American Spectator that falsely, in her view, described a past encounter with then-Governor Clinton of Arkansas. In due course Jones sued Clinton, by then president, for sexual harassment. Through the barn door opened by this suit troops the starring and supporting cast of “A Vast Conspiracy”—the president and his combative wife; Starr and his fellow prosecutors; Monica Lewinsky, the White House intern who told the president at their first meeting that she had “a really big crush” on him; Linda Tripp, her friend in exile at the Pentagon with the tape recorder; and many more, including, throughout, never far from center stage, the army of attacking and defending lawyers.

Along the way Toobin occasionally adds a new fact or quotes a previously unpublished document, but the main and considerable pleasure of his book comes from watching the astonishing story unfold so it makes sense. The first time around it emerged in fragments like a modernist text, a cross between Joyce’s “Ulysses” and Céline’s “Journey To the End Of Night,” a confusing tangle of unknown names, sensational charges, pregnant silences, offstage cries. As related by Toobin, the story is as seamless as a novel by John O’Hara or Somerset Maugham. What we see above all is the sheer number of people waiting for Clinton to stumble, and the tenacity of their efforts to ensure he went down for the count. The fact is that presidents, like kings, emperors, dictators, and movie stars, exude a fatal attraction, and one zealot with a writ may have the same goal as another with a gun.

Lawyers have a way, once they have slipped the pick through a chink, of working it ever more deeply in. First Clinton refused to settle, then Jones refused to settle, finally the moment arrived for lawyers to depose—that is, to question—witnesses for the opposing side. What is extraordinary is the broad power granted to deposing lawyers who may, under normal circumstances, ask . . . anything. And in this world depositions remain secret to about the same degree that life remains fair. The president was asked about named women with whom he was rumored to have had sexual relations. In the case of Gennifer Flowers, a girlfriend from the Arkansas years, he admitted a single lapse, but when asked if he had been having a sexual affair with Monica Lewinsky, he said no, an answer he claims is somehow narrowly and technically true.

Like most other people I find his argument on this point to be tortured, transparent, self-serving, devious and irritating. But splitting hairs on definitions of “sexual relations” seems far less important to me than the larger question of what social purpose, if any, could possibly be served by allowing Paula Jones, through her lawyers, to invade the president’s private life before she had even claimed, much less proved, that his alleged crude proposal had caused her any specific injury. When the president’s lawyers in due course asked for summary dismissal on the grounds that no injury had been demonstrated, Judge Susan Webber Wright agreed and tossed the case out. In Toobin’s view this act of discretion makes Judge Wright one of he few heroes of the story.

And yet the law had already permitted Jones to ask, and required Clinton to answer under oath, the sort of aggressively intrusive questions any man would do what he could to evade, the law be damned. When he prevaricated in ignorance of the mountain of evidence to the contrary (the semen-stained dress, the interminable hours of taped telephone conversations), the independent counsel, holding in trust a position whose mandate is supposed to include discretion, undertook what amounted to a personal crusade to force an impeachment and Senate trial upon the country if that’s what it took to make the hapless president confess his lies about a series of acts that, examined by Starr from what we might call surgical distance . . . .

But enough. If we haven’t grasped what Dale Bumpers was talking about by this time we haven’t been paying attention. My only serious quarrel with Toobin’s admirably clear, vigorously written, plain-spoken and common-sensical book is that he cannot resist the temptation to join the multitude in condemning “the damning fact” of the president’s infidelity and holding up to ridicule “the squalid details” of what went on with Lewinsky, revealing Clinton as “guilt-ridden, selfish, compulsive.” Infidelity is a charge only the president’s wife can make, and the rest strikes me as mainly nervous posturing. In the line of duty I read the copious details of the president’s moments with Lewinsky, and I failed to find anything there that would have brought a blush to the cheek of anybody who had read “Fanny Hill” or “Portnoy’s Complaint,” both cheerful and enthusiastic about the possibilities of sex. Once you abandon the safety of the posture of horror you begin to see how strange and arbitrary was Starr’s decision to pursue the history of the affair to the bitter end.

Of the four great questions asked of American presidencies in the second half of the 20th century—did John F. Kennedy know of the C.I.A. plots to kill Fidel Castro? did Richard M. Nixon know of the Watergate cover-up? did Ronald Reagan know of the Iran-contra deal? did William Jefferson Clinton have “sexual relations” with Monica Lewinsky?—only the last leaves you wondering what kind of man could have taken it seriously. Toobin makes a persuasive case that Starr was an incompetent who abused the power of a federal grand jury, mishandled witnesses, delayed when he should have moved quickly and vice versa. But Toobin doesn’t really know what drove him. Perhaps someday Starr himself will tell us, but in the meantime he has returned to private life, leaving to a successor the task of explaining why the long ordeal of investigation, impeachment, trial and acquittal was vitally necessary.

There are few heroes in this bizarre story, which will bewilder our posterity. But there are some. In addition to Judge Wright, Toobin admires Jones’s first lawyer, Danny Traylor, for failing to earn as much as a dime from the case. He thinks Dale Bumpers delivered a great speech. Finally and unexpectedly, there is Clinton himself—“the good guy in this struggle.” Toobin, it must be said, kind of backs into this bow of respect. Whatever the president’s sins, Toobin says, they did not include anything like the greed, hatred and vindictiveness of those who tried to destroy him.

Beyond that Toobin does not go, but he might have without getting any argument from me. Looking back, what strikes me most is the sheer grit it must have taken simply to live through that time, and the fact that the only really clear and pointed defense of Clinton’s human right to privacy came from the president himself—in August 1998, at the end of a speech confessing he had not told the full truth. “Now this matter is between me, the two people I love most, my wife and our daughter, and our God,” he said. “It’s nobody’s business but ours.” The president caught hell for that speech. It was said he wasn’t sorry enough and he didn’t apologize enough. Maybe so. But his claim that “even presidents have private lives” seems the one obvious lesson from the whole mess.

Thomas Powers is the author of several books on politics and current affairs, most recently, “Heisenberg’s War: The Secret History Of the German Bomb.”