Whitewater has tested the proposition stated nearly a century and a half ago by the orator Wendell Phillips: "We live under a government of men and morning newspapers." Phillips spoke in a time when editorial writing was considered the height of the journalistic art; it has since been in a long decline and investigative reporting has become newspapers' political weapon of choice. But Whitewater has reawakened the obsolescent editorial page. Investigative reporting -- half enterprise and half leak -- came first, of course, carrying the issue to its place near the top of the national political agenda. When the editorial pages joined in, it was clear that they were again trying to engage in serious business -- seeking to weigh in the balance the fate of an administration, to defend the morality of government, to illuminate the destiny of the nation, and indeed to become the Fourth Branch rather than a mere twig.

Chief among those seeking to play the Thunderer (the ancient appellation for the Times of London, presumably for the awesome rumble of its arguments) were two of the nation's largest dailies, The Wall Street Journal and The New York Times. The Journal's editorial page has been the domain for more than two decades of Robert L. Bartley, who has been called the most influential editorial writer in America and, sotto voce, the most intransigent. The Times challenger is Howell Raines, whose term on the editorial page began, coincidentally, with the start of the Clinton administration. Raines's most recent book is the ruminative Fly Fishing Through the Midlife Crisis (1993); Bartley's is a no-nonsense defense of Reaganomics, The Seven Fat Years (1992). Raines, a native of Alabama, made his way into journalism by reporting the civil rights struggle and then worked his way up at the Times via the Washington bureau, eventually winning a Pulitzer for a feature article about a beloved black family servant. Bartley, an wan by birth, scarcely glanced at reporting before moving to the Journal editorial page in 1964 and becoming its head, at the age of thirty-three, in 1972. He won his Pulitzer, for editorial writing, in 1980. Above all, Raines and Bartley are known by convenient tags -- one a southern liberal, the other one a champion of conservatism. Between them, it seemed, there could be no common ground -- but they converged on Whitewater.

The issue reached public attention by a course as long and twisting as that of the White River, along which lay the 230 wooded acres that were the original holding of the Whitewater Development Company. The purchasers, in 1978, were two couples -- James B. McDougal, a speculator-politico, and his wife, Susan McDougal; and Bill Clinton, state attorney general, soon-to-be governor, and his wife, Hillary Rodham, a soon-to-be partner in Little Rock's Rose Law Firm. Over the years, the Arkansas press gave only routine attention to the largely inactive Whitewater enterprise, or to the Whitewater company's accounts at the rickety savings-and-loan, Madison Guaranty, that McDougal bought in 1982. In 1989, Madison Guaranty, like many others of its kind, was closed by federal regulators, having recklessly lent itself into bankruptcy.

The Great Whitewater Fiasco, by the veteran journalist Martin L. Gross (Ballantine, $ 10), gives a good account of how Whitewater emerged from obscurity: early in 1992, Jeff Gerth of the Times, looking into the finances of the prospective Democratic candidate, produced a story that is now recognized for better or worse as the ur-text of Whitewater journalism. A momentary spark of interest -- marked by one editorial in the Times and a question or two from a rival candidate, Jerry Brown -- faded after the Clinton campaign got friendly accountants to announce that Whitewater never amounted to much and had lost money besides.

But the story, which appeared on March 8, 1992, lit a long fuse. Its references to Madison Guaranty caught the eye of the Resolution Trust Corporation, created to deal with the fallout of failed thrifts. RTC investigators began to poke around in what was left of Madison Guaranty's records, in a warehouse in Little Rock. In September 1992, during the campaign, the RTC forwarded a criminal referral -- a request for investigation of mishandling of Whitewater and other accounts -- to the Bush administration's Justice Department, which did nothing.

But the RTC persisted. In the fall of 1993 the new Clinton administration was informed internally that multiple referrals were on the way, possibly naming the Clintons as witnesses or beneficiaries of criminal activity. To insure that these referrals would stay afloat, "there were leaks out of the RTC to newspapers and to Representative James Leach, an Iowa Republican," as Elizabeth Drew notes in her new chronicle, On the Edge: The Clinton Presidency (Simon & Schuster, $ 24). The new referrals arrived at the Justice Department early in October 1993; within days Gerth and other reporters were on the phones looking for confirmation, and near the end of the month The Washington Post reported that investigators were interested in finding out whether accounts held at Madison Guaranty, including Whitewater, had served as a cash machine for Arkansas politicians.

A new flurry of stories lasted into December; they were followed by the revelation that turned Whitewater into a media frenzy -- that Whitewater papers had been secretly taken from the office of Vincent W. Foster, the White House aide who died of self-inflicted gunshot wounds in July 1993. That news broke on Monday, December 20, called by Drew "the most bizarre day thus far in this and perhaps any other administration," and with reason. Consider the list: The Washington Times offered the story about the Whitewater files under the headline CLINTON PAPERS LIFTED AFTER AIDE'S SUICIDE. Arkansas state troopers charged that they had served as Clinton's sexual secret service. The nominee for secretary of defense was revealed as a social-security scofflaw. And the son of the surgeon general was arrested on drug charges.

In this increasingly fevered setting, the editorial pages tuned up. On December 15, The Wall Street Journal presented its first editorial dealing specifically with Whitewater. It was called "Arkansas Anxieties." To emphasize its weight, the editorial carried a label, "On Ethics," superimposed on a drawing of a brooding Lincoln statue. The Journal averred that it had previously stood to one side of "the fray," but now discerned not only a "narrow issue of scandal" but the possibility that "Arkansas mores," a term of condemnation that the Journal had already found of great utility, had come to infect Washington.

Five days later the Times editorial page took up Whitewater with an imperative: "Open Up on Madison Guaranty." The editorial summarized Gerth's revelations to that point and politely but fretsomely called on the president to "clear the air."

Thus began an extended period of dueling editorial pages -- that is, of almost alternating editorials sounding the same melody but with different styles -- the Times jazzier than usual, the Journal definitely rococo. Moreover, there was an unaccustomed spirit of harmony between Forty-third and Liberty streets. The Journal referred repeatedly and favorably to Gerth's stories, and the Times reciprocated in its business pages with a profile of Bartley under the flattering headline A CONSERVATIVE'S STAR SOARS ON WORDS ABOUT WHITEWATER, to which a Journal editorial responded in a courtly manner that "The New York Times has been both good on Whitewater and elsewhere recently generous to us."

An era of good feelings, indeed, and of near-obsession with Whitewater on both editorial pages. Between the onset in December 1993 and mid-August 1994, when the year's Whitewater congressional hearings ended, the Journal ran fifty Whitewater-related editorials that are included in its collection. In the same period, the Times printed at least forty editorials mentioning Whitewater. That is, those who had the stamina to read both papers had available an average of a Whitewater editorial every other day for six months.

For those who may have shirked their duty of reading The Wall Street Journal editorial pages religiously, A Journal Briefing: Whitewater lays out between covers everything that the Journal claims as part of its Whitewater effort. In his introduction, Bartley notes: "The swirling story is surely confusing to the public. Even the most informed and literate citizens understandably have trouble following the twists and turns and the personalities so fascinating to the cognoscenti." But, he writes, never fear: "This collection is designed to provide a factual base and develop themes that advance understanding and illuminate outstanding questions. A reader who reviews the chronicle here will understand what has happened so far, and be alert and prepared for future turns in the tale."

Indeed, it is a veritable encyclopedia, with the title subject stretched as far and as thin as a water-filled balloon. Some of the topics have no discernible connection with Whitewater as such: among them, Paula Corbin Jones, who has sued the president for harassment, turns up in nine different places; and Hillary Clinton's Health Care Task Force is damned as a "cheap and duplicitous publicity stunt" but no relevance to Whitewater is claimed.

More typically, the collection hints at Whitewater connections without substantiating them. It discusses the Bank of Credit and Commerce International (BCCI) scandal, but sees nothing more substantial than "speculative but still possible connections to Whitewater." There is repeated reference to the conspiracy theories centering on the airport at little Mena, Arkansas, purportedly a Reagan-era shipping point for exporting arms and importing drugs -- a welter, according to an article by Micah Morrison of the Journal's editorial page, of "smuggling, ... covert operations, money laundering, and murder." Later Morrison asks: "But what, if anything, does Mena have to do with Whitewater?" His answer is: "Certainly, something was going on at Mena ...." (The Times is just not up to speed on this sort of thing; it has mentioned Mena primarily as the headquarters of the American Rock Garden Society.)

Not all of the collection is of such dubious relevance, of course. It includes not only unsigned editorials but signed articles by columnists and editorial-page assistants as well as a dozen news stories that -- most of them -- throw at least refracted light on Whitewater. (The inclusion of the news stories reportedly provoked complaints by the news side, which has often been reported to be at odds with editorial, spiritually and factually.) At the collection's heart are the unsigned editorials and the brief articles signed by the editor, Bartley.

The editorials' major refrain emerged months before Whitewater -- that to be from Arkansas and in the administration was to be under suspicion. One White House aide, Patsy Thomasson, is usually named with a reminder that her former boss, Don Lasater, an Arkansas bond dealer and Clinton supporter, was a "drug convict," although, factually speaking, the Journal can hang nothing worse on Thomasson herself than dilatory handling of White House passes. Starting in March 1993, the page presented a periodic series of "Who Is ...?" editorials, directed with a single exception at Arkansans. The most frequent target was Webster Hubbell, associate attorney general and a former partner in the Rose Law Firm, the subject of six "Who Is ...?" essays and a "Who Was ...?" when he left Washington under the cloud of being accused by Rose of having enriched himself by overbilling clients. But the scrutiny had nothing to do with the crimes to which Hubbell later pleaded guilty; his fault in the Journal's eyes was that he was tooolitical and too close to the White House.

The most celebrated "Who Is ...?" was directed at Vincent Foster, another former Rose partner; this editorial, on June 17, 1993, picked a quarel with him over his refusal to send the Journal a photograph of himself. After it was discovered that Foster's torn-up suicide note mentioned the Journal and the Journal was widely slurred as being implicated in his death, an editorial of August 6, 1993, responded bristlingly. It asserted that Ed Meese, Robert Bork, and Clarence Thomas underwent much worse abuse than Foster, and complained that critics "grabbed the occasion to beat up on us" for Foster's suicide. Far from avoiding the subject of Foster thereafter, Bartley -- pre-empting what is usually a prerogative of the news side -- filed a Freedom of Information request and eventually went to court to seek release of investigative reports on Foster's death (access so far denied). In a much later article Bartley offers the only fragment of autobiography in these pages: "For my part, I can testify that getting taggewith blame for the Foster suicide powerfully focused my own attention on Whitewater."

That attention swing most often to "Arkansas mores" -- that term used so repeatedly to suggest the illegitimacy and the corruption of Arkansas political culture and by extension the illegitimacy and corruption of the Clinton administration. Invoking "culture" is, from an editorial writer's point of view, an ideal tool; it is all but unanswerable, an argument that is beyond argument.

The quintessential Journal Whitewater editorial is that of March 21, 1994, headed with the Ciceronian cry of anguish, "O Tempora! O Mores!" (followed by an English translation: "Oh the times! The mores!"). The essay bears down on Hillary Clinton's commodity profits; on trading in stock of a fishing corporation by Arkansas investors, including Patsy Thomasson (who is again identified as "former associate of drug convict Dan Lasater"); on the secretary of agriculture, for going easy on Arkansas's Tyson Foods Inc.; on the Rose Law Firm; and on a catalog of sins venial and otherwise: Whitewater, White House passes, Hubbell's overbillings, the flap over the White House travel staff, the Foster case, Zoe Baird, Kimba Wood, Lani Guinier, Bobby Inman, and finally one Chris Emery, "a White House usher dismissed over phone conversations with Barbara Bush...."

"Whitewater," the editorial concludes, "is not merely about a land deal, it is about all these things, and about the place they are bidding to assume in Washington, which God knows is guilty of enough sins of its own. Above all it is about hypocrisy.... Lay aside all suspicions and accept every cover story. We are now supposed to believe Bill Clinton was elected President to reform the sins of the high-flying 1980s?" This is as close as the Journal comes to eloquence (or outright clarity), but it is a mean eloquence, directed not at Whitewater in any commonsense definition of the term, or at reform or amelioration, but at the discrediting of a president.

The impression given by this meandering collection is that the Whitewater enterprise itself, which is never really explained comprehensively after the editorial "Whitewater: A Primer" of December 28, 1993, did not as such deeply engage the editorial mind. This impression is confirmed in the index, which has less than two and a half inches devoted to Whitewater in thirty-seven pages. Whitewater ends up meaning, Humpty Dumpty style, just what the Journal chooses it to mean, neither more nor less.

This elasticity permits the Journal's editorialists to use Whitewater to concoct a strange, dark, near-criminal world of illicit connections, covert influence, and, in an almost puritan sense, sin. In this context, Clinton's alleged radicalism, a constant target of Rush Limbaugh and his ilk, is not even mentioned. The topic is sin, and that's what the Journal is agin -- so much so that one is left wondering whether this is indeed the Clinton administration, or Caligula's.

Lined up for inspection via Nexis, the Times editorials in the first half of 1994 do not wander so far afield as the Journal's, nor are they so embittered. While the Journal's stance seems to be that of an observer on the shore smiling grimly as the ship takes on water, the Times keeps suggesting ways to bail, even when the ship is listing sixty-five degrees. The Times directs the Clintons to turn over the Whitewater records, and they do so. It urges a special counsel, and one is eventually appointed. But mere policy does not ease the itch. There is deep exasperation that the administration has failed to live up to what the editorial page chooses to call "the normal protocols of governance."

Starting on February 27, the tone changes from testy advice to outrage. Commenting on the "boneheaded conclave" called by Deputy Treasury Secretary Roger Altman to warn White House officials about the RTC investigation, the editorial page reached for an ultimate political insult: "The Clinton team has taken the nation back to the sham ethics of the early Reagan Administration." On March 4, it cast an even more deadly aspersion: that in permitting meetings about the RTC investigation the Clinton administration was "easily the most reckless in interfering with the integrity of Federal investigative agencies since that of Richard Nixon." Of Clinton himself, it adds, "Of course, punishing the incompetent and asserting firm conflict-of-interest principles requires a President who is dedicated to evenhanded justice. So far there is scant evidence of those qualities."

In the end, the Times too resorts to blaming culture. The climactic editorial in this vein -- the parallel to the Journal's "O Tempora! O Mores!" -- is "Arkansas Secrets," March 31, 1994. After reviewing Gerth's Whitewater findings and Hillary Clinton's commodities speculation, the editorial condemns what it calls "The Arkansas Defense": "A central argument is that while the Clintons' dealings were not pretty, you cannot apply the standards of the outside world to Arkansas, where a thousand or so insiders run things in a loosey-goosey way that may look unethical or even illegal to outsiders. This logic holds that whatever the Clintons did was penny-ante stuff that the Republicans and the press ought to be willing to overlook in service to the higher national interests." Of course, this is the culture theme with a difference; where the Journal uses Arkansas culture as a term of condemnation, the Times merely condemns its use as an excuse.

Even though they slightly pulled their punches, the Times editorials were so tough and apparently so out of character with previous perceptions that they became the subject of a New Yorker article by Peter J. Boyer ("The Howell Raines Question," August 22-29, 1994), who offered several possible explanations for them. The most biting was that Raines, a former chief of the Washington bureau, was intent on supporting the bureau's work, as exemplified in Gerth's stories. Another was, of course, culture -- that Raines as a southerner was consumed with envy of a southern president; a less banal theory suggested that a kind of moral perfectionism rooted in covering the civil-rights struggle had left him impatient with a less-than-perfect president. For his own part, Raines, rather convincingly, insists that the matter is not personal. The Times, he observes coolly, endorsed Clinton and owes him the best advice it can give. "But in this White House," the final Whitewater editorial before last fall's election says, " is hard to know if anyone -- including the boss, especially the boss -- is listening."

More than two years after Jeff Gerth lit the Whitewater fuse with his story in March 1992, Gene Lyons, a writer from Arkansas, has come forward with an elaborate critique designed to show that the story was little more than a hoax, that "most of the insinuations in Gerth's reporting are either highly implausible or demonstrably false." In other words, that Whitewater is not and has never been a legitimate issue. His article, "Fool for Scandal," in the October Harper's and the more elaborate documentation he offers in a press kit distributed by the magazine center most of the fire on one aspect of the story: the question of whether Governor Clinton appointed Beverly Bassett Schaffer state securities commissioner as a favor to his Whitewater partner McDougal, so as to keep Madison Guaranty alive with special regulatory handling.

At the least, Lyons demonstrates that Gerth failed to include Schaffer's version of events, although it was easily available. More broadly, he states that Gerth's reporting was tendentious: "all significant mistakes seem to run in a prosecutorial direction italics Lyons's ." Most important, he shows that Gerth did not convincingly clinch his major point -- that Clinton, through his commissioner, exerted corrupt influence on the handling of Madison Guaranty.

While the Lyons critiques are worth reading as an intense case study in the crudities and pitfalls of investigative reporting, they do not obliterate the story. A re-reading of the 1992 original shows that there is a great deal that Lyons lets stand without comment, apparently satisied that pointing out erroneous details suffices to undercut the whole. But even if all the errors are as charged, there is enough there to arouse suspicion of wrongdoing -- or so, at least, the RTC concluded.

A key but understated truth in the Lyons article is his observation that there might never have been a Whitewater issue without the press, without the Times, without Gerth. Gerth's first story got the investigation started; the 1993 follow-up stories set up the clamor for a special counsel. And Lyons is right in resenting the condescension implicit in the harping on Arkansas culture -- but in that respect the Journal would have been a more appropriate target than the Times.

Lyons's implied conclusion is that Whitewater never should have happened, and should not be happening now. But we are far down the road now, and Whitewater has started to accumulate indictments, plea bargains, and congressional inquiries. One can revise, but not repeal, history.

The common fault of the editorial writing on Whitewater in the Journal and the Times is a failure of perspective. The manner differs -- one lectures, the other preaches -- but they both insist, implicity, that Whitewater is very, very important, even when they are not sure just why. As to the historical place of Whitewater in presidential scandals, the Times does no better than making bruising references to Reagan and Nixon. The Journal has references to Truman -- an apt comparison -- but merely to his emergence from Kansas City's Pendergast machine, not to the scandals that rippled through his administration, reaching not only through the Internal Revenue Agency but into the White House staff itself, and by my estimate at least somewhat more serious than anything that has yet been proposed in the Whitewater inquiry.

If we are going to have a government in which morning newspapers play a part, the least we can expect of their editorial writers is that they give us some perspective on what is important. The indication here is that our two most substantial newspapers got swept up in the firestorm generated in part by their own reporters and simply added fuel. O tempora! O mores!

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