Active reporter or passive conspirator?

UNCOVERING CLINTON: A REPORTER'S STORY

BY MICHAEL ISIKOFF CROWN PUBLISHING 304 PPS. $24

It wasn't until right at the end, right as Lucianne Goldberg and Linda Tripp were starting the triple play intended to push the story of the president and the intern into the Paula Jones civil suit, the Kenneth Starr criminal probe, and the pages of Newsweek all on the same weekend, that Tripp told Michael Isikoff, the Newsweek reporter working the story, that she was trying to negotiate a book deal as well.

This shouldn't have come as a surprise. Goldberg was a book agent, and Tripp had been planning a White House scandal book as far back as 1996. But it sent Isikoff into high dudgeon, angry that it might compromise her credibility and jeopardize the story he was still trying to write, causing him to think: "You're . . going to muck up my story, you idiot." And so he set out to persuade them not to do this, later coming to realize that two important things had been happening.

The first was that he had crossed the line from reporter to participant. "I was trying to influence the actions of the players," he writes. "As a reporter, that's not my job. But I didn't realize something else: I was at this point too involved to avoid influencing the players."

The second was that while the book plan shouldn't have been any surprise, it had been "well off my radar screen." He had been too focused on Clinton and Lewinsky to pay full attention to Goldberg and Tripp. "I could not have cared less about their motives or their ultimate goal," he now says. "My interest in them was quite simple and fairly well focused: Was the stuff they were telling me true? Could it be corroborated?

Would it make a story for Newsweek?"

If information is accurate it probably doesn't matter where it comes from. Reporters everywhere and forever have been passing along information without sharing the enthusiasms or goals of their sources. But not understanding goals can backfire dangerously. Not warning readers about motives can make stories seriously incomplete. And one of the lessons in Isikoff's book is that sometimes reporters can focus so intensely on the core of the story that they can miss some of the radar warnings blinking off to the side.

What was on his radar right from the start, from back when he was covering the Justice Department for The Washington Post, was the belief that Paula Jones had a' story that deserved serious reporting, not something to be discounted just because the antiClinton far right was peddling it.

Some of his editors were nervous and some were openly scornful of the whole project. In the end he blew up in anger, was suspended for insubordination resigned in a huff and in May 1994, moved on to Newsweek.

The subtitle is "A Reporter's Story" and it's pretty much that. It's not to any large degree the story of the broader Starr investigation or the impeachment process or the performance of the press in covering the scandal. Isikoff gives more attention to the supposedly distinguishing characteristics of the presidential penis than to a serious examination of Starr's many probes. Henry Hyde doesn't appear in the index at all. Those looking for an assessment of Steven Brill's complaint that reporters were co-opted and corrupted by leaks from Starr's office will merely get eyestrain from trying to read between the lines.

Uncovering Clinton is the story of Isikoff's own attempts to document a pattern of sexual recklessness on the part of the president, and of the "culture of concealment" that he says inevitably flowed from it. This began when he came across Clinton aides in the 1992 presidential campaign who were trying to squash the reports of adulterous liaisons that they called "bimbo eruptions." His reporting there later made him think that Paula Jones might be credible. A tip from a Jones lawyer eventually led him to Kathleen Willey, who in turn pointed him towards Linda Tripp. And it was Tripp, along with Goldberg, who put him onto the story of Monica Lewinsky.

This was not a quick journey. It was six years from the "bimbo eruptions" to oral sex in the White House, and along the way he built up an extensive network of sources among people who were working in many different ways and through many different means towards the common goal of hurting, embarrassing, or actually ousting the president. He worked these stories for so long and became so well-connected with so many of the people involved that there are places in this book where it's not clear whether he was an outsider looking in, and insider looking out, or both at once.

Isikoff says that he was never interested in writing about sex for its own sake, and one tends to believe him. He says he kept at it because the allegations against Clinton suggested a recklessness and arrogance that was dangerous when combined with great power, and that required so many lies and so much deceit to keep hidden that it corrupted his presidency.

The president's private weaknesses had led to public wrongs, he now writes, including "lies to the public and to a court, the smearing of innocents, the deployment of an army of hardball litigators, private investigators, and spin doctors whose primary purpose was to smash the accusers and destroy the president's enemies."