El Sid, Vicious.

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."

Blumenthal devotes significantly more space to Whitewater. "There was never anything to Whitewater," he writes. "There was never anything to it in the beginning, middle, or end." But try as he does, Blumenthal is unable to overcome the basic, uncomfortable facts of the scandal. The Clintons' Whitewater business partners, Jim and Susan McDougal, were convicted of fraud. After the McDougals were found guilty, much of the Whitewater investigation focused on whether Bill Clinton had testified truthfully at their trial. Susan McDougal, whom Blumenthal describes as a "heroine," chose to go to jail for 18 months rather than answer this question from prosecutors: "To your knowledge, did William Jefferson Clinton testify truthfully during the course of your trial?" During McDougal's confinement, the president signaled his approval of her actions and refused to rule out the possibility that he might pardon her. In the last hours of his presidency, Clinton, without going through the normal procedure of working through the Justice Department, did indeed pardon her. Despite all this -- and there's much more in the final Whitewater report -- Blumenthal contends that Whitewater was a "pseudoscandal."

After that, much of the book is a recounting of the Lewinsky affair, in chapters titled, successively, "In Starr's Chamber," "The Reign of Witches," and "Show Trial." It was the scandal with which Blumenthal had the most personal experience, as an adviser to the president and a closer adviser to the First Lady. And in the Lewinsky matter, unlike other Clinton scandals, Blumenthal has to explain his own actions. Specifically, Blumenthal appeared before Kenneth Starr's grand jury three times, and afterward made false statements to the press about what had happened inside the grand-jury room.

For example, after his appearance on June 25, 1998, Blumenthal discussed his testimony with the New York Times. On June 30, the paper reported: "In two recent visits to the grand jury, Mr. Blumenthal said, he was asked, 'Does the President believe that oral sex is sex?' and 'Does the President's religion include sexual intercourse?'" But one can search the whole transcript of Blumenthal's testimony and never find those questions.

Earlier, in a courthouse-steps denunciation of Starr, Blumenthal told reporters: "I was forced to answer questions about conversations, as part of my job, with the New York Times, CNN, CBS, Time magazine, U.S. News, the New York Daily News, the Chicago Tribune, the New York Observer, and there may have been a few others." Again, Blumenthal was not asked those questions. So why did he make them up? Blumenthal doesn't explain, except to say that he "related . . . the questions as I recalled them."

All of this is not to say that Blumenthal's book has no value: He offers readers the very convincing self-portrait of a devoted Clintonite. There are, for example, loving descriptions of the president and First Lady, in which their faults almost magically become virtues. Did you think Bill Clinton talked too much? Not Blumenthal. "After a while you almost got the sensation that his endless discussions were like jazz riffs," Blumenthal writes. "He played with them until he felt he had improvised the right composition." Or maybe it was all just talk.

Did you have trouble believing Mrs. Clinton's varying explanations of Whitewater? Not Blumenthal. "Her demeanor struck no false notes," he thought while listening to her story (Blumenthal was still a journalist at the time). "It was not the behavior of someone engaged in a cover- up. Either she was Meryl Streep playing herself or she was telling the truth."

Blumenthal concludes with a big-picture chapter in which he casts the events of Clinton's time in office as "wars over the progressive presidency." In Blumenthal's world, "progressive" presidents are very, very good and "conservative" presidents are very, very bad. "Conservative presidents preserve their power through inertia, which has powerful momentum and interests," Blumenthal writes. "The allies of conservative presidents are indifference, passivity, and complacency."

In the end, that's what Blumenthal believes the Clinton wars were all about. Bill and Hillary Clinton were good people unjustly attacked by bad people. It's an odd conclusion to anyone who has actually looked at what the Clintons did in their eight years in the White House. But not to Sidney Blumenthal, the truest true believer.