WhiteWater Web Clinton, yes!

IN THE midst of the 1992 election campaign, when allegations of bed-hopping and draft-dodging were swirling around Bill Clinton, I asked a rather grand American reporter on the press plane if he believed the Democratic candidate's denial of an affair with Gennifer Flowers.

The journalist fixed me with a withering stare and thundered, almost spitting with suppressed fury: "I would never, ever ask a man in public life a question like that." As I made my way to the back of the plane to lick my wounds, the media superstars from the New York Times and Washington Post sat back in the business class seats to settle on the story of the day and agree that candidate Clinton had the Right Stuff for the Oval Office.

Now the US media are waking up to the fact that they missed an important aspect to the 1992 election, perhaps because - as a recent survey found - 89 per cent of them voted for Mr Clinton rather than President Bush.

However much the media gave Mr Clinton the benefit of the doubt, few voters actually believed his denial of the affair with Miss Flowers, a former lounge singer, or were convinced by his tortuous explanation of why he did not go to Vietnam.

This is the genesis of the Clinton "character problem" - a politely coded term which roughly translates as meaning that the President of the United States is a liar, and that everyone knows it, including the wife who stands loyally at his side.

Now in good times this need not necessarily be a problem, especially if the president and his wife eschew the traditional platitudes about family values.

But the Clintons cannot resist the urge to be sanctimonious, not just about the Republicans and the "greed of the Eighties", but also initially about petty issues of government ethics.

They are reaping the whirlwind this week, probably the worst seven-day stretch Mr and Mrs Clinton have experienced since they arrived at the White House three and a half years ago.

Each day has brought a fresh instalment in the Whitewater saga. Publication of the Senate Whitewater report pointed to a pattern of "deception and arrogance" at the White House.

The Clintons' dodgy land investments in Arkansas in the 1980s are one thing; the idea of their political chums poring over secret files looking for political ammunition is quite another

Most serious of all, perhaps, is the disclosure that a functionary hand-picked by Mrs Clinton for a senior White House position had ordered up confidential FBI files on more than 400 officials who served in Republican administrations.

These files are not just private, but intimate, and will typically contain information about an employee's sexual proclivities, political affiliations, adolescent drug-taking, even treatment for psychological problems. The Clintons' dodgy land investments in Arkansas in the 1980s are one thing; the idea of their political chums poring over secret files looking for political ammunition is quite another.

Mr Clinton has called the file scandal a "bureaucratic snafu", but any student of Watergate might be inclined to see it as an illegal and unconscionable abuse of executive power.

This week Whitewater has acquired a momentum that is beginning to look possibly fatal to this administration.

Hitherto, those who most energetically investigated the Whitewater story - led by The Sunday Telegraph's Ambrose Evans-Pritchard - were dismissed as Right-wing conspiracy theorists. No more.

The main metropolitan papers are now splashing stories on Whitewater. Only the magisterially prim New York Times is sticking to its pro-Clinton guns, running its account of the scathing Senate report into the affair under the headline: "Whitewater hearing cleared the Clintons, Democrats say."

If you talk privately to staff at the White House about Whitewater, they will tut-tut and blame the problems on inexperience and incompetence, or on the Arkansas good ol' boy clique which is still well-represented in the capital, even after several members have been sent home in disgrace. But 42 months into this administration, the incompetence defence has worn thin.

Her aides have been evasive and non-responsive in their testimony about her conduct in recovering Whitewater files on the night her friend Vincent Foster apparently took his own life

The significance of this week's Senate report is that it places Mrs Clinton in the middle of all the various Whitewater-related scandals. As Senator Richard Shelby, a Republican member of the committee, put it: "Most roads lead from the First Lady, and back to her. Things come from her, and then they come back, make no mistake about it."

Mrs Clinton refuses to explain how her subpoenaed legal billing records detailing her work for a corrupt property firm mysteriously turned up in her private quarters.

Her aides have been evasive and non-responsive in their testimony about her conduct in recovering Whitewater files on the night her friend Vincent Foster apparently took his own life.

There is the strong smell of a cover-up in the capital, and it could take just one member of the White House staff to crack for there to be sufficient evidence to indict Mrs Clinton.

Until recently, it seemed likely that for political reasons Kenneth Starr, the Whitewater special prosecutor, could not indict Mrs Clinton. He is a Republican, and charges against a Democratic First Lady would appear too blatantly political.

But that changed when Mr Starr won multiple felony convictions against the Clintons' former Whitewater partners in Little Rock last month, and with the relentless flow of new disclosures this week.

We could be entering uncharted territory. If Mrs Clinton is indicted before the election, there is no legal reason for her husband to pull out of the contest, though it would be hugely embarrassing.

There is one outcome that could be even worse: charges are filed against her just after Mr Clinton is re-elected, a development that would all but guarantee that his second term became a fiasco.

Either way, the US media are unlikely to be so acquiescent this time. They will not want to be caught out again in failing to spot a widening scandal in which the conspiracy theorists have been proved right at every turn.

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