Politics: Sidney Blumenthal still has the scars from his days in the Clinton White House, including a bout of colon cancer, which, happily, he has overcome. Joe Carroll reviews Blumenthal's The Clinton Wars: An Insider's Account of the White House Years.
The night before he began his stint as a senior presidential adviser, he was denounced on the Matt Drudge website as a wife-beater. It was a complete lie, as Drudge later had to acknowledge while blaming "sources" who later turned out to be conservative Republicans. They had not forgiven Blumenthal for his investigative journalism into their activities years before.
Drudge returned to haunt Blumenthal and his new boss, Bill Clinton, six months after Blumenthal joined the presidential staff. It was the gossipy website that broke the news that a former White House intern called Monica Lewinsky had an "alleged sexual relationship with President Clinton".
The rest is history, as they say, but Blumenthal found himself in the eye of the hurricane as a confidant of both Clinton and his wife, Hillary, and in his official role as a communications adviser dealing daily with a frenzied media. As a result, he was hauled before a federal grand jury to be grilled by the Kenneth Starr prosecutors and was called as one of the three witnesses to testify at Clinton's impeachment trial in the Senate.
He acquitted himself well in these ordeals, but just when he thought it was all over and his boss escaped being dismissed from the presidency, an old friend, British journalist Christopher Hitchens, on the basis of a boozy lunch, accused Blumenthal of perjuring himself in his testimony at the Senate trial.
The saga is told in fascinating detail in this 822-page blockbuster. The Lewinsky affair and its impeachment sequel take up about a third of the book. Blumenthal first has to set the scene by narrating how the Clintons got to the White House, as well as describing his own life as a journalist before he joined them there for the second term.
He also describes Hillary's successful Senate campaign, in which he played some part, and Al Gore's unsuccessful presidential campaign, in which Clinton was kept at a distance. Blumenthal strongly implies that Gore would not have had to depend on the Florida recounts if he had listened to Clinton's advice, but "these ideas were filtered and mostly ignored".
Blumenthal was a fairly recent arrival on the White House staff, yet on January 21st, 1998, the day most of the world learned about Lewinsky through the Washington Post, he was called to the Oval Office, where Clinton spoke to him at length about his relationship with her.
Earlier that day, Hillary Clinton had phoned Blumenthal to explain that "this story involved Clinton's concern for a person with personal problems".
Blumenthal was to learn later that President Clinton's account to him was more detailed than the one he gave even his lawyers. Why?
Blumenthal surmises that Clinton had "told this elaborate story only to me because of my relationship with Hillary. He knew we would share information and develop our politics together". A rather strange comment. We may learn more when Hillary's memoirs, Living History, are published next Monday.
The story the beleaguered president told Blumenthal was a smokescreen in which he denied having sex with Lewinsky and said he had been trying "to help her". She had made a "sexual demand" on him but he had rebuffed her. She had responded by threatening him. She said she would tell others they had had an affair. She said that her nickname among her peers was "the stalker", and that she hated it. If Clinton had sex with her and she could say she had an affair, she wouldn't be known as the stalker any more.
Until Clinton admitted in a television address seven months later that he had "engaged in conduct that was wrong" with Lewinsky, Blumenthal still believed the account he was given in the Oval Office on January 21st.
When he learned that he had been lied to he was "chagrined" and "flustered". "I had wanted to believe him, as the rest of his staff had wanted to, whatever our doubts might have been. But the uncomfortable truth now could not be denied," he writes.
As a Clinton loyalist and friend, Blumenthal puts the former president in the best light possible, but he glosses over the perjury charge as of little account. Clinton denied under oath that he had had "sexual relations" with Lewinsky and justified this denial using a tortured definition which he claimed excluded oral sex.
Clinton, five days after his meeting with Blumenthal, said on television from the Oval Office: "I'm going to say this again. I did not have sexual relations with that woman, Miss Lewinsky. I never told anyone to lie, not a single time - never."
This denial bought him valuable time until the DNA evidence from the notorious blue dress forced him into a corner. Blumenthal in his book says that denial "caused him more lasting damage than any other of his presidency. It was not true". But if it was not true, Clinton had perjured himself. Blumenthal cannot get himself to say the "P" word.
The Republicans believed that Blumenthal was deliberately used by Clinton to smear Lewinsky in the early days as a "stalker" and a sexual predator. As the White House aide with top media contacts, he would be well-placed for such a mission.
Blumenthal convincingly argues that this image of Lewinsky emerged from other sources, such as former colleagues and a lover. But a doubt remains over why he was the one chosen by the Clintons for their confidences the day the storm broke. While the White House spokesman, Mike McCurry, could only refer the media to the blanket Clinton denials in television soundbites, Blumenthal would be better placed to fill in the picture off the record and be able to sound authoritative because of his closeness to the Clintons.
Blumenthal rejects this implication, but reveals how he was the source of Hillary's startling claim that Clinton was the target of a "vast right-wing conspiracy that has been conspiring against my husband since the day he announced for president". Blumenthal had a spy in the enemy camp in David Brock, the journalist who in the right wing American Spectator had broken the Paula Jones story and her allegations of how Clinton propositioned her for sex when he was Governor of Arkansas. A court was later to dismiss this charge, but not before it dragged Clinton into the mire of the Lewinsky affair and the clutches of Ken Starr.
Brock had become disgusted with the conservative right-wing elements who paid for his digging for dirt and he supplied Blumenthal with a breakdown of their attempts to get at Clinton through Paula Jones. Through Brock, Blumenthal also learned who had put Matt Drudge up to the wife-beating smear on himself and the names of lawyers and journalists who helped Ken Starr stumble onto Clinton's affair with Lewinsky.
All this confirmed for Blumenthal that, as Hillary told him, this was "politics". The Starr investigation, he writes, was "an intricate, covert, amoral operation bent on power. The plotters brandished the law as a stiletto to try and destroy a president they considered illegitimate". Clinton told Blumenthal on the day he was impeached that "it's all about power".
Blumenthal's meticulously documented account of how Clinton ended up as the first president to be impeached since Andrew Johnson in 1868 is engrossing, with elements of Shakespearean drama. Some Clinton enemies are also dragged down in sexual scandal: Newt Gingrich, Henry Hyde and Bob Livingston. Ken Starr is ridiculed as a puritan who insisted on putting the Clinton and Lewinsky genitalia into his report, "the strangest sex book ever written".
Dubbed "Sid Vicious" by the right-wing press, Blumenthal paid a price for loyalty to Clinton. "To the right wing, I was the focus of evil in the White House. To the scandal-beat press, as a former journalist I was a traitor, a Lucifer-figure who had leaped from grace to serve the devil," he writes.
He describes Clinton's efforts to achieve peace in the Middle East, combat terrorism and, with Tony Blair, to promote the "Third Way" of governance between statism and laissez-faire. Clinton also "effectively resolved the conflict in Northern Ireland". This was helped along, he writes, when "Clinton granted a visa to Irish Republican Army leader Gerry Adams".
Joe Carroll is a former Washington Correspondent of The Irish Times
The Clinton Wars: An Insider's Account of the White House Years. By Sidney Blumenthal, Penguin Viking , 822pp, £25