The convergence as campaign summer began of three sets of headline-making glimpses into the private life of Bill and Hillary Clinton (insofar as the First Couple retains any semblance of one) also revealed some of the perils and perplexities of the journalistic endeavor, that politically fraught form of public enlightenment and entertainment.

The tantalizing items emerged from best-selling books, any of which might be safely carried on the bus unclothed by an old dust jacket from Middlemarch. In the order of their place on the best-seller lists at this writing:

Unlimited Access: An FBI Agent Inside the Clinton White House by Gary Aldrich (No. 1 at the moment), a quickie of the sort that dismissed valets have been known to do on their former masters.

The Choice, the latest product of the Bob Woodward machine.

And Partners in Power: The Clintons and Their America, a portrait of the First Couple as personifications of a corrupt political system, by Roger Morris, author of Richard Milhous Nixon: The Rise of an American Politician.

Though differing in significant ways, these works offered the lure of the higher titillation. What is an editor to do when presented with charges of dubious provenance about the private peccadilloes of public officials? As these three case histories demonstrate, it all depends.

Unlimited Access

Aldrich made the list with the news or rumor or surmise that the president is wont to sneak from the White House in the small hours to check out the talent at the Marriott Hotel in downtown Washington. The smoking paragraphs are thick with warnings to the discerning reader: "I have been informed by a well-placed White House source" . . . "I have been informed" . . . "It appears" . . . "some information indicates" . . . "is believed to be."

The nocturnal-roaming story was soon admitted to be third- or fourth-hand gossip, the sort of stuff that FBI agents are supposed to keep to themselves. Prurience aside, Unlimited Access is a farrago of complaints about the unbuttoned Clinton White House by a buttoned-down security specialist. Comfortable with the manners of the Bush White House, he appears to have been traumatized by the disorderly young Clintonites with their messy ways and disregard for the sanctity of his duties.

Aldrich's payback might have been consigned to the detritus of the political season had it not been powered by anti-Clinton partisans. Put out by the right-wing Regnery Publishing, Inc., the book provided zesty headlines for newspapers like The Washington Times and The New York Post (it's 4 a.m. and the president is missing).

 More imposing, if less amusing, The Wall Street Journal ran an op-ed piece by Aldrich on the administration's use of FBI files that did not mention his book but lent him an insider credibility. That was followed by an excerpt, along with an article about author and book by John H. Fund of the Journal editorial board, which passed along the hearsay about Clinton's nocturnal tomcatting. The faithful Journal reader must have concluded from the book's unlimited access to the paper's op-ed pages that a work of import was coming.

 Ironically, it was fellow conservatives David Brock (who, having done his own much-publicized job on Anita Hill, has lately produced The Seduction of Hillary Rodham) and George Will who turned the tide on Unlimited Access. Brock, who turned out to be the source for the Marriott story, said he had cautioned Aldrich that it was unverified. And Will left the perpetrator with scarcely a shred of credibility on ABC's This Week With David Brinkley.

 So what are editors with more respect for the rules of reporting and less of an ideological mission than those on The Wall Street Journal's editorial page to do about such a work, nicely retitled by Bill Press, a former chairman of the California Democratic Party and co-host of CNN's Crossfire, as "Old Fart Meets Young Freaks"?

 Much as they may dislike the odor, editors and news directors are in duty bound to try to detect some nuggets amid the rubbish. Once, through the attentions of junk television and the tabloids, a product like Unlimited Access itself becomes a story, it is ever more difficult to ignore.

The Los Angeles Times and The New York Times settled initially for reporting only the claim that Ms. Clinton had picked Craig Livingstone to run the White House personnel security office. It was not a particularly salacious piece of gossip. As for the book's juicer items, which had already seen print elsewhere, The New York Times referred to them in passing only as "a series of unflattering allegations."

 The shredding of Aldrich on the ABC program was followed by cancellations of scheduled interviews with NBC's Dateline and CNN's Larry King Live, rebuffs that seem to have spurred his book's sales, along with providing a new sort of story. In these matters there are few tidy endings. For in reporting the author's embarrassment on network television, the press couldn't help drawing attention to charges that might otherwise have been given short shrift.

As was widely reported, the networks had been under pressure from the White House to ban Aldrich altogether. The healthy journalistic reaction to a demand from any official not to cover a story is, of course, to cover it, and that evidently is what ABC's Brinkley show, whatever its other motives, did to good effect; viewers must have come away from the Aldrich debacle with a better sense of the sort of stuff the man was peddling.

 Maybe, aside from the night-out gossip, Aldrich's investigating is up to J-school standards, but news editors have to base their decisions in part on what they know about the suppliers. We can only hope that the decisions by NBC and CNN to pass on Aldrich were made despite the White House intervention, simply on the demerits, which were ample.

 The Choice

 In his free moments between writing books mostly about Washington's mighty (seven best sellers in twenty-two years), Bob Woodward is said to work as an assistant managing editor at The Washington Post. The association with the nation's most successful inside-the-capital author sheds reflected glory on the paper, which it repaid this time round with rarely equalled page-one attention, not to mention a cover story in Newsweek, which is owned by the same company.

 The show of affection for one of its own did nothing to enhance the Post's reputation for editorial objectivity, but it did demonstrate the usefulness of an ombudsman. In an op-ed column, titled "We Asked For It," Geneva Overholser noted that readers had not failed to detect the reek of promotion. One asked, "Does the term 'conflict of interest' have no meaning at the Post?"

Overholser said what needed to be said about her employer's hypery: "Excerpting any book -- certainly a Post employee's book -- on Sunday above the fold is alone quite a remarkable act. To make a lead news story out of it in addition, taking over most of the top half of the front page, would be hard to defend even if the story were very strong. But a story whose lead is that the challenger for the presidency hopes to pick a really good vice-presidential candidate, and one who won't offend an important group in his own party? We were asking for everything the readers gave us."

Not to worry, the reprimand did not discourage the book's sales, which can only have been stimulated by the Post's page-one report, in the first of four excerpts, that Hillary Rodham Clinton had been consorting with New Age self-helpers. In particular, there was Jean Houston, on whose prescription the First Lady had conferred with Eleanor Roosevelt and Mohandas K. Gandhi. (She turned down a suggested encounter with Jesus.)

Given Ms. Clinton's reputation for tough-mindedness and intelligence, this was delectable stuff, and much of the press and television had a grand time with it. "Guru" was their description of choice.

 Woodward, who does not bother with attributions, much less footnotes that might interrupt his narrative flow or detract from his fly-on-the-White-House-wall persona, has been chided by journalistic sticklers for allowing imagination to play a part in his accounts of meetings he did not attend and conversations he did not hear. Still, relatively serious talk shows, including Jim Lehrer's NewsHour, decided his book was important enough, his opinions valuable enough to warrant an interview. Maybe they were carried away by his celebrity or maybe it was just a demonstration of Beltway palsiness.

It is not hard to figure out from the account of the Jean-Hillary affair that it came mainly from Houston herself, although you can't be sure about every adjective. Woodward writes: "Houston was struck," "Houston believed," "Houston thought," "Houston had found," "Houston recalled," "Houston was amazed." He tells us what Houston felt and wanted and anticipated.

Whatever laughs it may bring from wiseacres who aren't about to seek guidance from the likes of anybody who calls herself a "sacred psychologist" and a "global midwife," Houston's prominence in such a book and her appearance on page one of a major newspaper were a gift from the gods of publicity. With Bob Woodward at her service, Houston did not need Mahatma Gandhi. For a while, you couldn't turn on the set without seeing her.

The New York Times led off its first report with the White House's interpretation of the relationship, in Michael McCurry's carefully framed words, as that of "a graceful First Lady . . . listening to women with ideas and perspectives that differ from her own." Was even this story, though nowhere near page one, overplayed? If the criterion is its significance to the nation's condition, no doubt. But the combination of Woodward's credentials, Ms. Clinton's place in affairs of state, and the White House efforts at spin control made it hard to skip even for editors and news directors not employed by The Washington Post.

Overholser is certainly right that the story should not have been fronted, but once advertised, it could hardly have been ignored. Houston seems to have slept over several times, and although the public may have no business poking into who is sleeping with whom in Washington, it surely has a right to know who is spending the night at the White House. More to the point, anything that sheds light on the operations of this particular First Lady's mind, the quality or quirks of her intellect, her emotional needs and resources has a serious side even if it is also, or even mainly, entertaining.

Partners in Power

 Roger Morris is as profligate with assessments as Woodward is miserly, and in his new book, they are all negative. It's a prosecutor's brief about the careers and extracurricular activities of Bill and Hillary Clinton before they ascended to the White House.

By this account, Little Rock in the 1980s was a stew of corruption in which the young pair romped for fun and gain. Among the allegations: Clinton used his brother Roger to supply an Olympic-sized craving for drugs and women, while selling out to monied interests in the pursuit of power. For her part, Ms. Clinton is described as owing her career to her proximity to her husband and receiving favors from favor-seekers that enriched the family and, along the way, having a kissy-squeezy something going with Vincent Foster.

 The, pardon the expression, mainstream editor faced with Partners in Power will find many "confidential interviews" among its pages of notes about sources. Defenders of the Clintons, like Gene Lyons, a columnist for the Arkansas Democrat Gazette, note that Morris borrowed some of his more lurid charges from local Clinton bashers not known for their reliability in matters regarding the administration. Many editors seem to have come to a similar judgment.

 Morris, who quit the National Security Council in protest over the Vietnam War, may be annoyed that his book has been useful to right-wingers operating on the principle that the enemy of my enemy, etc. The Washington Times decided that Morris's conclusion that the young Clinton was a CIA informant while at Oxford was worthy of a six-column spread at the top of page one.

The liberal establishment has been attacked for not giving Partners in Power the attention it warrants in this election year. Howie Carr, a Boston radio-show host, observed in the Boston Herald about two weeks after the book's publication: "Haven't yet heard it mentioned on any of the Sunday-morning chattering skull shows, have you?"

 Morris himself told The New York Post he saw a double standard in the way his Nixon critique was played up and his Clinton critique played down. In her New York Post media column, Maureen O'Brien said CBS's 60 Minutes had "backed off" from the Morris book because "the content was apparently so explosive," and went on to air Morris's charges. Mike Wallace, who investigated the charge that Clinton was involved in a guns-and-drugs smuggling operation, says he was not able to find independent confirmation.

 I wish that the suggestion that ideology played a part in the scant attention given to Partners in Power was beyond belief. Alas, it's not only journalists on the right who play favorites. Yet Morris's barrage against the Clintons is so relentless that you don't have to be a down-and-dirty liberal to approach with care.

 Morris himself is tough on the "cappuccino journalism" of the mainstream media. From his post on the left, he accuses reporters, producers, and editors of intellectual shallowness, class pandering, cronyism, shrunken sensibility, and conformity.

As an employee of one of the mainstream institutions under indictment, nothing I say on that subject can avoid seeming defensive. And who can fault his unoriginal complaint that "In commercial television, journalists' reporting was shrunk to soundbites and reality to a hackneyed rendition read off by vacant 'talent' "? Amen, but there is more than that to even television news. Since he holds that the pretense of fairness is merely fancy-dress for a compliant press, don't waste time looking for that quality in his book.

 What these three works have in common, what has contributed to their duration on the best-seller list and has given other publications and television programs grist for their own mills is, of course, the flavorsome stuff like womanizing and guruizing. Nothing in the latest Woodward exercise has drawn anything close to the amusement stirred by Ms. Clinton's consorting with the inspirationalist crowd. I think I know which pages are the best thumbed of the 526 of Partners in Power. And what other attraction can readers be finding in Unlimited Access?

Setting forth rules on correct behavior for editors and news directors is about as inviting as putting together a journalism-school primer. Nobody is likely to argue with the principle that ideology or publicity should play no part in editorial decisions -- or that it is possible to keep them altogether out.

As for calling on the press to follow up on every charge that comes its way, that overestimates the resources of even The New York Times; there are some charges that conspicuously don't bear checking. Day by day, editors and news directors have to make decisions based on the seriousness of the material, the credibility of the sources, and their own experience and instinct. The rules are simple; it's the specific circumstances that complicate matters.

At the heart of today's journalistic soul-searching (where is Jean Houston when we need her?) is how much readers and viewers need to know about the recreational tastes of their leaders. It is not a new issue, but fastidious editors have never been harder put to resist rear-window reporting than they are in this bottom-line age.

Tabloid frankness has its appeal, but nowadays peeking into the bedroom is defended even by the high-minded as an effort to reveal Character. Insofar as these examples of election-year literature have much to do with issues, it is the famous Character Issue.

H.L. Mencken lamented in 1914, "There has never been a large political or social question before the American people which did not quickly resolve itself into a moral question." The Character Issue is today's moral question. You don't have to know anything about, say, welfare or immigration or Bosnia to make a judgment about Character. All you need is to know what's right, and which of us doesn't know that?

 Mencken noted that the moralizers "at least offer good sport to the populace here on earth. They keep the newspapers supplied with hot stuff." So it is with The Character Issue, that gift to pop politics from the virtual journalism industry.

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