They plied eager journalists with tales of Clinton's immoralities and illegalities. Aficionados of the Clinton scandal stories will recognize many of the names. They investigate Clinton and publicize allegations for the duration of his presidency. But one of the signal achievements of The Hunting of the President is the authors' ability to demonstrate how little space ever really existed between this paranoid variant of Clinton-hating and the more mainstream type one could find on talk radio, on editorial pages, and in the halls of Congress. Again and again, as the authors relate, conservative cranks, such as the notorious David Bossie, surface as investigators for congressional committees.
Every president has enemies, of course.
And there is really no reason they shouldn't go about agitating and propagandizing on behalf of their antipathies. The detailed refutations of the charges against the Clintons in Whitewater and other scandals that Conason and Lyons provide are too lengthy and complex to describe here. But those who remain skeptical about whether papers like The New York Times and The Washington Post could really have gotten the story so wrong would do well to consider that several separate investigations failed to find any evidence of wrongdoing by the Clintons. C onason and Lyons have each been at the Clinton story for a long time. Lyons, an Arkansas newspaperman, published an earlier book, Fools for Scandal , which challenged the dominant press account of the Whitewater scandal.