ONE SCANDALOUS STORY: Clinton, Lewinsky, and Thirteen Days That Tarnished American Journalism.

• Author: Marshall, Joshua Micah
• Position: Review

ONE SCANDALOUS STORY: Clinton, Lewinsky, and Thirteen Days That Tarnished American Journalism by Marvin Kalb Free Press, $25.00

Meditations on Monica Madness

JOURNALISM MAY BE HISTORY'S first draft, but journalists often now write the second draft as well. Many of the reporters who helped break the Clinton-Lewinsky scandal have now written books about the case, mixing gems from their notebooks with Woodwardesque narratives detailing their own hunt for the big journalistic prize. With so much already written, it's a challenge to find much worthwhile left to say. But veteran journalist-turned-Harvard-professor Marvin Kalb has managed to do so, writing a surprisingly brisk story focused not on the actors in the drama but on the journalists who covered it and how they often compromised professional standards while navigating the pressure-filled environment.

Kalb looks at the 13 days between January 13 and January 25, 1998 (The Washington Post broke the Lewinsky story on January 21), zeroing in on reporters, editors, and producers in a detailed narrative that traces various investigators as they piece together the story, and watches them as they plead with their editors to go to press, often only to be scooped by happenstance or bad luck. This minute-by-minute account, which fills roughly half the book, functions like an instant replay, slowing the torrent of events to an analyzable speed. Such an approach could have been tedious, but the result is a strikingly good read: Kalb generates surprising suspense by expanding the narrative to show just how little time journalists had to operate.

The second half of the book is an exacting--sometimes painfully exacting--analysis of the methods and sourcing standards reporters used in the scandal's first days. Like it or not, readers will learn the percentages of single-, double-, and triple-sourced stories; the ratios of off- to on-the-record comments; and numerous disapproving citations of the obfuscatory phrases ("ABC News has learned ...") used to bypass the pesky problem of sources altogether--a practice Kalb finds only slightly less offensive than Monica's semen-stained dress.

The highlight of Kalb's book is his careful dissection of one of the scandal's great non-stories: the allegation that a White House staffer--perhaps a Secret Service agent--had happened upon Clinton and Lewinsky in flagrante in the Oval Office. First reported by Jackie Judd on ABC News, several permutations of the story...