Ken Gormley has written a truly frightening book about a popular outsider president whose sordid past meets his scandalous present in the powerful meat grinder of the free world.

It is Washington, a reader is likely to conclude after plowing through nearly 800 pages of text and notes, not Tehran or Pyongyang, which represents the greatest danger to the future of the Republic.

The Death of American Virtue: Clinton vs. Starr

By Ken Gormley

Crown

789 pages, $35

If Gormley's exhaustive research and meticulous reporting strike even close to the mark, one must deduce that:

A lying, compulsive womanizer who has skated around the edges of the law for most of his life can be elected president in an age of 15-second sound bites and slick video images.

Everything in Washington boils down to a game of hardball, cutthroat politics in which truth or falsity, guilt or innocence, become secondary to the reality of the next November election.

In most cases, the media in Washington is outgunned, out-financed and outnumbered by those who would manipulate them like Silly Putty in the hands of a preschooler.

No one inside the Beltway is ever to be trusted; not friend, not foe, not innocent observers, not uninterested bystanders. No one. Ever.

And, if absolute power corrupts absolutely, the modern-day corollary is that the seat of absolute power is the mecca of absolute corruption.

Lest we get way ahead of ourselves, let's back up a few pages. Gormley, a dean and professor at the Duquesne University School of Law and a recognized expert on constitutional law, set out on an impossible quest.

His goal is this: To determine in an objective and unemotional way whether it was a flawed President Bill Clinton or an over-zealous special prosecutor Kenneth Starr who caused more harm to the nation, the rule of law and the Constitution.

To accomplish that goal, Gormley talked to just about everyone with even a tangential connection to the scandal that became known under the umbrella of "Whitewater."

He spoke candidly with the former president, special prosecutor Starr, Monica Lewinsky, Lewinsky's parents, Paula Jones, Linda Tripp, Susan McDougal, Web Hubbell, most of their lawyers, House leaders who voted the impeachment articles, Senate leaders who voted acquittal, even a sitting justice of the Supreme Court and casual diners in an Arkansas hash and eggs joint.

Most of the principals in the sordid affair are still alive and Gormley was remarkably successful in getting them to talk. Yet, like a top-flight reporter, he was quick to point out when what they just told him didn't jibe with the undisputable facts.

Two principals he never was able to interview, of course, are Hillary Clinton's law partner from Arkansas, Vince Foster, who ended his own life in a park just off the Beltway, and President Clinton's one-time associate Jim McDougal, who died begging for his medication while in solitary confinement in a federal lockup.

There are no good guys or bad guys in this book. It is as if Gormley is trolling the nation's collective sanitary sewer to discover the source of the worst odor.

It is easy to argue that President Clinton brought the whole scandal upon his own head, that he never possessed the moral fiber to be president.

But it is just as easy to argue that the investigation that led to his impeachment and left a dark blot on his otherwise pretty successful presidency was pure politics, and that the highly personal details of his private life that took over the news media for two years, wrecking countless lives and supplying endless fodder for the late-night comics were matters that should have been settled in the privacy of the White House living quarters by the president, Hillary, and attorneys for the women he had encountered over the years.

Of course, the Office of Independent Counsel, a legal mega-machine made up of dozens of the nation's highest-powered lawyers, an unlimited budget and all the investigative prowess of the FBI, would protest at the time, and continue to protest today, that Whitewater never was about sex. It was, they insist, about a dishonest president.

Many in the country — maybe a clear majority — disagreed. Retired Senator Dale Bumpers put it this way in an impassioned speech from the well of the Senate Chamber: "When you hear somebody say, 'This is not about money,' it's about money. And when you hear somebody say, 'This is not about sex,' it's about sex."

Prosecutor Starr was harshly criticized at the time of his office's report to the House for the salacious nature of the descriptions of the president's intimacies with intern Lewinsky, Paula Jones, Kathleen Willey and others. Some called Starr a pornographer when the report, which most family newspapers would have had to sanitize before publication, was splashed across the Internet.

The same might be said of Gormley's book. But in his defense, the author's stated purpose is to pull together all the facts of this lurid blotch on our nation so the future can pass judgment. Even the odyssey of the notorious "Gap dress, size 12, dark blue," is spelled out in excruciating detail.

Former federal judge Starr, who many would claim was a runaway prosecutor, while expanding the Whitewater investigation to include the Lewinsky affair through questionable, if not illegal, means, would always wrap himself in the mantle of truth. After a while, he began to sound like a highly educated Sgt. Joe Friday: "The truth, ma'am; all we want is the truth."

That President Clinton gave less than forthright answers — many say he clearly perjured himself — during a legal deposition before a federal judge, and that he later lied to the American public on national television is indisputable.

But the question remains: Did lawyers for the special prosecutor have any right to ask those questions in the first place? Did they knowingly entrap the president through unethical, if not illegal, means? And did the American public have any need to know the squalid details of the president's encounter with a lovestruck 22-year-old whose mental state tottered between adolescence and womanhood?

Bill Clinton's answer: "It wasn't about telling the truth... it was just about power."

According to Gormley, the Whitewater judge in Arkansas considered the Lewinsky testimony "a barely relevant speck of evidence" in the Paula Jones case. Starr himself later described the Lewinsky case as "terribly invasive of privacy, and it was a runaway investigation."

More from Bill Clinton: "[Starr] was into my destruction, not finding the truth about Whitewater."

One question that does not get answered is: Why did Susan McDougal spend 18 months in federal prisons instead of answering Starr's questions before a grand jury? According to her best friend, McDougal was sure an evil Kenneth Starr would find her guilty of perjury and lock her up forever unless she lied and implicated the Clintons in her husband's crooked Arkansas land dealings.

So in the end, what is Gormley's conclusion? Which man did the nation the most harm?

While the president's actions were abhorrent, beyond belief, stupid and inexcusable, Gormley makes the case it is unlikely he ever would have been found guilty of a felony in a court of law, despite the $50 million spent on the nearly six-year investigation.

And for Starr, the very best thing you might say about him is that he was woefully inadequate at controlling a pack of high-power prosecutors, who were aided by an unseen army of elves, dozens of the best Republican lawyers and investigators, working behind the scenes to foster their objectives without ever being tied to the case.

It is clearly too soon after the events for a definitive answer to Gormley's question. Besides, history may prove it was a tossup.

Edward Cuddihy is a retired Buffalo News managing editor.