ANOTHER ANGLE ON CLINTON SPIN.

Byline: Michiko Kakutani The New York Times

Title: "Blood Sport: The President and His Adversaries"

Author: James B. Stewart 

Data: Illustrated. 479 pages, Simon & Schuster; $25

Our rating: Three stars.

"Blood Sport," the title of James B. Stewart's new book on Bill and Hillary Clinton and the Whitewater scandal, is a misleading one: It echoes the lament made by the White House lawyer Vincent W. Foster Jr. shortly before his suicide, that in Washington, "ruining people is considered sport."

But while the book was virtually commissioned by Susan Thomases, a close friend of Hillary Clinton who believed that Stewart would exonerate the White House, it soon took a very different tack. Promised access to the Clintons and close associates never materialized, and Stewart, a former front-page editor of the Wall Street Journal, proceeded on his own.

The book he has written paints a highly unflattering portrait of the Clintons, their business dealings in Arkansas, their supposedly contentious marriage and their messy handling of Whitewater and other troubles.

It depicts Hillary Clinton as an arrogant hypocrite who was reluctant to reveal her own efforts to make easy money in Arkansas during the '70s while publicly denouncing the yuppie pursuit of "wealth, power, privilege" in the '90s. It disputes the Clintons' depiction of themselves as "passive" investors in Whitewater, while laying out a complicated history of dubious tax deductions and financial disclosures. And it depicts a Clinton White House given to knee-jerk damage control that led to further press investigations, further legal problems and further political damage.

Stewart points out that Hillary Clinton made about $100,000 on an initial investment of $1,000 in the commodities market while her husband was running for governor of Arkansas, and that her adviser in these trades was a lawyer for Tyson Foods, a huge Arkansas-based poultry company that was in a position to benefit from state actions.

Stewart tells us that the Clintons wanted to find a tax shelter for these profits, and that they later made improper deductions concerning their investment in Whitewater, an Arkansas land development deal they had entered into with their friends James B. and Susan McDougal.

And he observes that the McDougals made disproportionate contributions to this venture, even though they were supposed to have been 50-50 partners with the Clintons: an arrangement that at least gave the appearance of conflict of interest when McDougal acquired Madison Guaranty, a savings and loan that was part of Clinton's regulatory responsibilities as governor.

Was covering up this tacky wheeling and dealing worth stonewalling for four years? Worth contending with the scrutiny of journalists, congressional committees and the independent counsel, Kenneth W. Starr? Stewart writes that "nothing in the Clintons' past, on its face, seems to explain the pattern of evasions, half-truths and misstatements that characterized the Clintons' handling of the story." He suggests that the Clintons worried that full disclosure might jeopardize the 1992 election, and that "the official version of innocence and persecution" perhaps "took on a relentless logic of its own."

"It would have been relatively easy, early on, to disclose everything and correct the record," he writes. "But as time passed, their drip-by-drip concessions gave credence to their critics and undermined their integrity."

There is little in "Blood Sport" that's new. There are no smoking guns, no earthshaking revelations about Foster's suicide. "There isn't any conclusive evidence," Stewart writes, "that Clinton, as governor, bestowed undue favors on McDougal in return for being subsidized in Whitewater, or that he influenced Beverly Bassett" - the Clinton-appointed head of the Arkansas Securities Department - "to do so."

For that matter, the hard news that is included in this volume amounts to a recycling of material uncovered by Jeff Gerth of The New York Times (who broke the original Whitewater story in March 1992), as well as the work of other reporters and testimony delivered before the Senate and House Whitewater committees. In one lengthy section, Stewart simply recapitulates the meticulous efforts of Gerth to track down details of Whitewater, piggybacking on his work while turning him into a character in the story.

Certainly, Whitewater has never exactly grabbed the imagination of the lay reader. In order to try to make its complex financial transactions and incestuous business relationships more accessible, Stewart (the author of "Den of Thieves," a best-selling expose of the Levine-Boesky-Milken scandals of the '80s) has created a novelistic narrative filled with colorful scenes: a method pioneered by his fellow Simon & Schuster author Bob Woodward in books like "The Final Days" and "The Agenda." We are not only given explicit dialogue from 15 years ago, but also access to people's private thoughts.

The problem is that this technique sacrifices verifiability for verisimilitude, and substitutes color for hard-headed analysis. Scenes that Stewart could never have observed firsthand are recounted from an omniscient viewpoint.

Stewart rarely identifies the sources for such scenes; nor does he take into account the subjectivity and often self-serving nature of memory. The reader never knows whether the quotes Stewart has put in the mouth of an individual (whom in some cases he has not even interviewed) are from a first- or secondhand source.

Since assertions and denials would mar the smooth novelistic surface of Stewart's tale, an awkward compromise has been made: One account is featured in the text, while divergent material is consigned to a footnote. Bill Clinton's supposed solicitation of Madison Guaranty business for his wife at the Rose Law Firm, for instance, is described in minute detail by Stewart as having taken place on a hot summer day, as the governor dripped sweat on McDougal's new leather chair. Clinton's denial of the visit, as well as evidence corroborating McDougal's version, appear in a footnote. An account of a talk Foster supposedly had with Thomases shortly before his suicide is similarly recounted in omniscient fashion, as though God, not Thomases, were the source.

Although James and Susan McDougal - who were close friends of the Clintons and who now have reason to be resentful - are hardly the most reliable of sources, a good third of "Blood Sport" is related from their point of view. They are portrayed sympathetically as freewheeling, if opportunistic, entrepreneurs.

In fact, almost everyone who served as a source for Stewart comes across remarkably well. In an early meeting with a reporter, Thomases is depicted as cooperative, wanting "to explain what happened, show how innocuous it all was." David Gergen, the former White House spinmeister, is described as taking heat from his colleagues for urging them to turn over documents and financial records requested by the Washington Post in December 1993.

And even Bernard Nussbaum, the tough White House lawyer who had long taken a hard line on presidential privacy, is described as realizing "that Gergen had been right - they should have turned over all the documents when the Post asked for them."

Did all this happen just as Stewart describes it? Maybe it did, but Stewart's narrative technique doesn't inspire that kind of confidence in the reader. Rather, it reconfirms the spin culture of Washington: not just the efforts of the White House to spin the issue of Whitewater, but the efforts of almost all concerned to spin things on their own behalf.

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Photo In "Blood Sport The President and His Adversaries," James B. Stewart uses novelistic techniques to bring the Clintons' personal and professional troubles to life.