A reader knowing nothing of the 1990s might well come away from Sidney Blumenthal's lengthy account of The Clinton Wars with the impression that for eight years, Bill and Hillary Clinton were prevented from reforming and remaking the United States only by tireless and malignant conspiracies to thwart them. Mrs. Clinton even attributed public concern about her husband's affair with a White House intern to "a vast right-wing conspiracy."

As Blumenthal tells it, the original conspiracy was aimed at doing in the Clintons by exposing unethical and even criminal pre-White House behavior on their part; it then morphed without a break into what might be called the "Starr Conspiracy" to impeach and oust President Clinton for his relationship with the intern Monica Lewinsky--and for lying and encouraging others to lie to conceal this involvement.

Between these alleged "high crimes and misdemeanors" came the travel-office incident, the saga of Mrs. Clinton's missing law-firm documents, above all the suicide of White House aide Vincent Foster--all exaggerated into scandals reflecting darkly on the presidential couple, with Foster's death falsely inflated into a murder ordered, or suggested, or hinted at, or maybe just desired by the Clintons ("Who will rid us of this troublesome guy who knows too much?").

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