To: Bill; Fr: Management; Re: Mind your place.

As I write, President and Mrs. Clinton are under siege by what Hillary Clinton calls a rightwing conspiracy. Actually, the "conspiracies" (there are several) are not so much rightwing, which would imply politics, as a curiously ill-advised war of the rich against everyone else in general and against, in particular, any politician who might want to divert tax money back to the people in the form, say, of health care.

The current attacks on the Clintons are simply warning strikes, warnings to other politicians: Don't touch our wealth.

Warnings duly noted. Although the Clintons are intelligent lawyers from the moderately well-off middle class, they came to "power" with little knowledge of how the ruling class (into which George Bush had been born) operates. Most of our imperial Caesars were either born-in-the-purple patricians like the two Roosevelts or led by the hand--even nose--by the patriciate class, much as the elegant Secretary of State Dean Acheson guided the dazed Harry Truman.

But despite attendance at the Yale Law School, Vatican for the patriciates' would be politicians and managers, the Clintons never seemed to have met a Mellon--like Mr. Mellon Scaife, whose wealth has been used to finance a foundation dedicated, apparently, to the ruin not only of the Clintons but of any other social meliorist who dares speak for the 80 percent.

There are, of course, reasonably sane Mellons and Rockefellers, du Ponts and Pews, whose families own most of corporate America and hire often bright and always obedient lower-class persons--or even foreign helots, like Kissinger--to work for them, often directly, in the family cartel, or indirectly, by placing them in the Congress, on the judicial bench, or in the White House. Once representative government had been replaced by the imperial system of 1950, corporate ownership became the only power in the land. It is not accountable to any authority since, with empire, it has been so internationalized that there is now no place where it hangs its hat and calls home.

At first, the election of Clinton was hardly traumatic: a rerun of Jimmy Carter. Southern moderate. No surprises. Or so the ownership concluded, shifting the Republican candidate Dole from politics to sales, where he contentedly pitched American Express cards on TV.

It was assumed that the Clintons knew the rules of the game: Do nothing at home unless the banks give the green light and the boardrooms sign on. Foreign capers are allowed, but costs must be kept low. Stick to places like Panama, Grenada, the Persian Gulf. Keep Wolf Blitzer, Wolf Blinken, Wolf Nod baying happily on CNN. Makes money for advertisers. Sells newspapers.

Unfortunately, Clinton didn't get it. Or if he got it, then he lost it. He seemed to think that the President of the United States was a man of power who could rev up the economy and even do things that need doing for the people at large.

He seemed not to know that the office he holds is as powerless as it is expensive to gain, rather like elections to the Roman consulships, which were retained to the end of the empire while Caesars did the ruling. They kept the forms of an ancient and revered republic while depriving consuls and senators of those powers to rule that were now the emperor's sole prerogative.

Thus far, corporate power has only twice granted imperial powers to their President. In wartime, Lincoln and FDR were both imperial and tyrannical in their powers, and the people--not to mention their economic masters--more or less willingly supported these temporary usurpations.

But in peacetime, as that clever scalawag Nixon used to observe, you don't really need a President. The place runs itself. Foreign affairs is what's interesting and, let's face it, domestic affairs are pretty boring. In Nixon's eagerness not to be bored, he allowed the "liberalism" of the New Deal to stumble along the Yellow Brick Road for a bit longer while he created havoc in Asia.

Clinton began with what appeared to be no interest in foreign affairs. On the other hand, he would give the people what every other prosperous First World nation had--a health service, paid out of taxes that had for so long been earmarked for "defense."

The war that the Clintons lost so famously to the ownership is a classic example of how the U.S. is actually managed--but not, perhaps, as clear as it ought to be to a people who have been conditioned from birth to believe that Americans possess neither an empire nor a ruling class.

Even so, the point still got through to a great many of those who managed to withstand the overwhelming TV blitz against national health care:

Harry, does this health thing mean we can't use kindly Dr. Haskins, who delivered our precious Buster Brown?

I'm afraid, Louise, that's just what this thing means.

But, Harry, that's common-ism.

That was crude but masterful ER. What the Clintons had done was challenge those insurance companies that, under our present costly private system, collect around a third of what is spent on private health care, for which they give back not even a Band-Aid. To be blunt, the insurance companies are the cash cow of the richest 1 percent of the population. They are also sort of piggy banks for international conglomerates like ITT which, in 1973, bought Hartford Life Insurance.

Methodically, the ownership has set out to destroy the Clintons. Since actual politics may not be discussed in freedom's land, the "crimes" of one's enemies are all that's left. The hapless couple were accused of murder, sexual perversions, larcenies both great and small, as well as--the horror! the horror!--ill grooming.

Nothing personal, Bill, Hillary. Soon as you're out of office, there's big bucks and big jobs with your names on them at any one of our enterprises. Meanwhile, we have to use you to send a message to all the other dummies out there:

Don't mess with us. It's our country, not yours. We paid for it. We're not selling. And forget about taxing us. Anyway, isn't it pret ty exciting now we got just about the whole globe? Soon we'll get into China. Big market. Cheaper than going to war with them, but maybe we'll have to go that route, too, one of these days. The big one. Meanwhile, just keep government off our backs.

There is a chuckle at this one. Ever since the Supreme Court interpreted the Fourteenth Amendment to mean the application of the Bill of Rights to corporations as well as to "persons" within the states of the United States, there has been one law for the lion.... But let us quote the great conservative, E. Burke: "People crushed by law have no hopes but from power. If laws are their enemies, they will be enemies to laws." Enter Reno of Waco.

Although external war has been the traditional means of extending our empire, new technology has made the ultimate war of rich against poor highly tempting and, perhaps, even winnable, as the state, instead of withering away, flourishes like algae in sewage.

For instance, the arbitrary and pointless prohibition of drugs has led to an internal "war" by the government against the "persons" who live under its ever stricter control. The state locks up a couple of million persons more or less at random and keeps millions more under constant surveillance with mandatory blood, urine, and lie-detector tests, while TV cameras record our movements.

We can no longer turn to Clinton or to any politician who can be elected President under the present system. I am often asked by Europeans, Why is there no left, no radical party, no labor party, no just plain representative-of-the-people-at-large party in the United States? The answer is simple: Our media is strictly controlled by interlocking corporations--O, synergy! This means that if a great leader were to come along, would his speeches be reported in The New York Times? No.

Would he get more than a sound bite on the evening news? No.

Would Ted Koppel invite him on his rigged program? No.

But if, by chance, he were to acquire a popular following, like Jesse Jackson in 1988, he would be accused of something bizarre like anti-Semitism (anti-white might have been more to the point, and for good reason). No liberal voice is now allowed on prime-time television or the op-ed pages of a press so partisan that it is not even aware there is another side to its relentless celebration of the way things are. By the way, I use the word "liberal" in the mildest, old-fashioned sense of someone who would like to extend the democracy to include, one utopian day, those without money.

Meanwhile, Clinton has now got the point at last. He is doing what he was hired to do. Bombing the Sudan, Afghanistan. Standing tall. In a blue dress.

This article is adapted from Gore Vidal's latest work, "The American Presidency: An Irreverent Tour of the Land's Highest Office" (Odonian Press).