Statute of Limitations.

WASHINGTON, D.C., is classy and crass. It's our seat of justice, yet it's a place where a man can hang by innuendo; where the crimes of the accusers are often more egregious than those of the accused. Sidestep its rules, ingratiate yourself with special interests, and you're helped up the ladder of power. Run afoul of someone who remembers you smoked a joint in college, and you become the scandal of the week.

Such is the fate of Tom O'Malley, the young presidential speechwriter caught in the jaded political world of John Buckley's new novel. O'Malley's fateful mistake is his friendship with David Nicole, who was arrested for selling cocaine out of their dorm room at Amherst. Years later, Nicole calls O'Malley, who is scheduled to go to South America with the President, and makes him an offer: Ill keep quiet about the past if you'll smuggle home twenty kilos of cocaine on Air Force One. O'Malley's dilemma: save his career or do what's right.

To show he's serious about blackmail, Nicole plants a story in Newsweek that there's a drug dealer in the White House. O'Malley quickly agrees to Nicole's terms, but gets cold feet in Caracas, forcing the coke messenger to ditch the stuff. At the same time a case is taking shape concerning a young senator who was heavily involved with drugs in his youth and who, by the way, has called for a special prosecutor to investigate O'Malley. It turns out his top aide is the stunning Kit Bowles, girlfriend of the protagonist and the former girlfriend of drug-dealer Nicole.

Then the plot thickens.

Statute of Limitations is really a parody of Washington and the novels it inspires. All of the capital's infamous traits are bundled into a series of events that show the city's true absurdity. Mr. Buckley ought to know: currently a political consultant, he has had an assortment of Washington political jobs.

His prose is smooth and lively, spiced with punchy descriptions of Washington's unscrupulous elite. He neatly cuts the facets of Beltway life: the trifling, megalomaniacal press corps camped outside O'Malley's apartment, eating pizza, waiting for him to say something, anything, they can put on the front page; the news producers who publish accusations from unidentified sources; the consultants vying to get on Nightline; the schoolboy finagling behind the majestic facade of the White House; the bungling, drunk FBI agent; the backstabbing congressional aides, too selfassured for their own good.

O'Malley's dad is a drunk former CIA-type who tampered with too many Third World hell-holes and had to answer to Congress, and who manages, with every attempt to help his son, to make the situation worse. (To the delight of the frenzied press, he argues at his son's drunk-driving trial that Tom should be acquitted because he works at the White House.) Tom's mother is a floozie and supporter of left-wing causes (Peruvian guerrillas, for instance, described as "the Khmer Rouge on crack"). Tom himself is a witty, easy-going kid; part of a generation for whom it was acceptable to snort coke, smoke pot, and laugh off the consequences.

If Mr. Buckley's characters come to life, holding the book together, the message nearly tears it apart. Mr. Buckley argues (through O'Malley) that doing drugs "was a natural part of being an adolescent.... It's not in anyone's interest ... to start leading charges against people who've used drugs years ago. Unless they were on a desert island from about 1965 to 1980."

True, smoking pot in college or law school doesn't necessarily make a guy a threat to national security. And there certainly ought to be a statute of limitations, a point beyond which youthful indiscretions are forgiven. But can they ever be ignored? If a man has ever spent time in the company of drug dealers, isn't that significant enough to warrant examination when considering him for a position of responsibility, in or out of politics?

Tom O'Malley's past certainly affected his present. In college he succumbed to the temptation of David Nicole's cocaine, and now he's subject to his blackmail. Guilt-ridden, O'Malley repeats his school-days mantra: Admit Nothing, Deny Everything." What he has done is more serious than smoking pot in the dorm room or being arrested for drunk driving. Thus, the media storm over O'Malley is not strictly sanctimonious puritanism; it is simply overblown coverage of what could have been a genuine crisis had O'Malley actually smuggled the cocaine on Air Force One.

Mr. Buckley seems to be using an otherwise clever novel as a vehicle to argue against submitting baby-boomers to public scrutiny. By making O'Malley the hero, the author removes the burden of impropriety from his character's actions, and places it instead on the sensationalistic press-and all the other underhanded actions of Washington's players. He's arguing that because a senatorial witchhunt denied John Tower his job at Defense, or because Douglas Ginsburg was refused a spot on the Supreme Court, Tom O'Malley's misdemeanors should therefore be excused.

Washington, remember, is where guilt can be determined by innuendo. In Statute of Limitations, O'Malley's perceived guilt seems to vanish by innuendo. After being suspended by the White House, his scandal having become the topic of conversation, he is welcomed back to work with open arms after an emotional appeal in which he tells all, against the advice of his lawyer, to Ted Koppel on Nightline, as if honesty alone exonerates.

Watch and see if the near future doesn't produce a real Tom O'Malley. By scanning New York's social landscape, Tom Wolfe forecast the Tawana Brawley affair, among other things. Though Statute of Limitations has neither the weight nor the scope of The Bonfire of the Vanities, with similar techniques John Buckley has parodied Washington and come as close to the truth.