Drip Drip Drip

As midnight came and went on Thursday at the White House, the honored guests, all starched and silked, indulged in some good food and stargazing-- at the President and the men who want to be President and the men who play Presidents in the movies. For one brief shining moment, the capital's obsession melted away. There was gentle encouragement from Elton John: "Can you feel the love tonight?" Bill and Hillary Clinton, told they should retire by 12, danced well past their bedtime to old favorites with new meanings: I Heard It Through the Grapevine.

America may be on the brink of war, the Asian markets may be leaning off a ledge, but when the beepers started going off in the East Room, it was not the Secretaries of State and Defense who leaped from their tables and made for the doors. It was newsman Peter Jennings who "shot out of his seat like a rocket," a Clinton aide recalls. White House staff members had heard rumors all afternoon that something big, something bad was about to break. The blow came when printouts of a story from the next day's New York Times began to circulate suggesting that Clinton had coached his secretary, Betty Currie, to make sure her version of his relationship with Monica Lewinsky matched his. The latest leak in a fully liquid story sent reporters and politicos scrambling to find out just how much further the President's credibility might be diluted by the testimony of one of his most loyal aides.

For three weeks now, the leaks have come so fast and steady that they feel like an official daily briefing. But they are an underground river in which fact and gossip and memory spin past the truth and flow straight through any number of agendas. Lewinsky's lawyers want to keep their client out of jail. The President's men want to keep their man in office. Independent counsel Kenneth Starr wants to keep his investigation moving, and the leaks have a way of flushing out witnesses he may not know about. And all sorts of other lawyers and witnesses, dreaming of fame and fortune, have an interest in telling their own stories their own way.

By the end of last week, the accounts had done so much to dissolve the President's denials that the White House unrolled a new strategy. Its best hope was to make a story out of The Story, implicitly strike at the press for trafficking in confidential material while attacking Starr's prosecutors for leaking it--whether they actually had or not. Though the reports may have come from many directions, it served Clinton's purpose to focus his fire on his most powerful, least popular enemy, Ken Starr. The prosecutor's tactics have never been popular with a public increasingly sensitive to invasions of privacy, especially by unaccountable officials with unlimited resources and an army of FBI agents to do their bidding. And if this whole case were to wind up in an impeachment proceeding in Congress, it would become a political fight as much as a legal one, with public perception carrying nearly as much weight as actual evidence.