The Arkansas Alibi : NONFICTION : BLOOD SPORT: The President and His Adversaries,<i> By James B. Stewart (Simon & Schuster: $25, 479 pp.)</i>

Growing up in Hot Springs, Ark., in the 1950s, Billy Clinton could navigate his way home by two neighborhood landmarks: the neocolonial red brick Park Place Baptist Church and a glitzy Las Vegas-style nightclub called the Vapors. As described by David Maraniss in “First in His Class,” his recent biography of the president, Hot Springs was “a vaporous city of ancient corruption mingling with purely American idealism.”

It was a town that paid elaborate obeisance to God, a ritual young Billy performed each Sunday morning, marching down Park Avenue clutching his old leather-bound Bible, sitting in rapt devotion through the Baptist services, determined to be “a good person.” It was also a town devoted to fun, much of it on the wrong side of the law. Once Al Capone had held court on a chartreuse couch at the Arlington Hotel, with a machine gun nestled in the closet, while the city’s political boss paraded through town in a buggy pulled by horses called Scotch and Soda.

Even in Clinton’s youth, Maraniss wrote, it boasted not only the restorative waters of the springs but also “the biggest illegal yet blatantly obvious gambling operation in the South” as well as ample booze, dope, prostitution and other diversions, all of which assured their survival with elaborate bribes to the authorities.

The ambivalence of the president’s upbringing kept coming to mind as I read James B. Stewart’s absorbing new book. For “Blood Sport” is filled with fresh evidence of these two strains in Clinton’s--and his wife’s--behavior: on the one hand, a lofty benevolence and at least rhetorical commitment to moral values, all embedded in a kind of public theology, and on the other, what Stewart calls a “pattern of evasions, half-truths and misstatements,” of “dubious assertions,” “reckless” investments, “willful” ignorance, and acceptance of “special treatment from people in business regulated by the state,” all of which, Stewart says, has given “credence to [the Clintons’] critics and undermined their integrity.”

There is no startling revelation or smoking gun in Stewart’s explication of the omnibus scandal we now call Whitewater. The great value of this book lies in its painstaking, richly reported narration, in which each slippery evasion of the law, each obfuscation of the facts, is placed in its historical progression, its legal and social context.

“Blood Sport” is an especially worthy achievement because Stewart is not, by background and experience, a political reporter. A former correspondent and editor for the Wall Street Journal, where he won a Pulitzer Prize for his coverage of insider trading, he left that newspaper some years ago to write “Den of Thieves,” a best-selling account of Michael Milken’s manipulation of the junk-bond market. He’s a quick learner. For this book has plenty of political sophistication, a nice feel for the world of electoral politics in both Arkansas and Washington and a keen understanding of the transactions between press and government.

In that connection, the circumstances that drew Stewart into this project cast a revealing light on the Clintons’ tortured press relations. As he recounts the story, a Manhattan lawyer named Susan Thomases, a longtime Clinton confidante, came to his office in March 1994. Stewart and Thomases knew each other slightly through the death of a mutual friend. Now, as she talked of the first family’s travails, Stewart realized she was offering him full access to the president, his wife and staff in exchange for a dispassionate account of Whitewater, which they hoped would clear their names.

Stewart was “awed” at the prospect of getting to know the Clintons. He did have one meeting with Hillary Rodham Clinton in Washington, others with her staff and finally one with senior Clinton advisor George Stephanopoulos, who asked Stewart to prepare a memo for the president outlining the project. Months went by. The first lady finally promised to cooperate, holding out the hope that, eventually, the president would too. In fact, none of the promised cooperation materialized. Seemingly immobilized by anxiety, the Clintons stonewalled even their handpicked reporter.

In that, I think, Stewart was fortunate. For the kind of access held out by Thomases has disarmed even the shrewdest of reporters. There is something about such largess bestowed by a powerful figure that smothers a reporter’s skepticism. As matters turned out, on his own initiative, Stewart found no lack of sources, in and out of government, willing to talk about the Clintons’ transgressions.

The original transgressions, as opposed to their subsequent obfuscation, all took place in Arkansas. Which raises an interesting question: Is there something in that state’s political culture that breeds vulpine behavior? Stewart tells of Jeff Gerth, the New York Times investigative reporter who revealed the first shreds of the Whitewater scandal, asking a White House official how Hillary could have offered a particularly preposterous explanation for one aspect of the Whitewater puzzle. The official replied: “The first instinct from everybody from Arkansas is to lie.”

Having covered City Hall for the Baltimore Sun and written a book about Boston, I have long harbored the notion that there was something in the political climate of those two cities that nurtured gratuitous malfeasance in their public servants. Given what has happened to the good old Arkansas boys whose lives have intertwined with Bill Clinton’s, one could make an argument for adding Little Rock to that list.

But how, then, does one account for the slippery role played in these events by the president’s wife, who was raised in Park Ridge, Ill., and educated at Wellesley? Stewart’s recitation makes eminently clear that Hillary Clinton is at the red-hot center of the Whitewater story. Over and over, she has asserted that she and her husband were simply “passive partners” in the Whitewater investment, while their friends Jim and Susan McDougal actively managed it. In fact, Stewart demonstrates that after 1986 the first lady not only had custody of all the paperwork and negotiated all the bank loans but fiercely resisted any suggestion that she and her husband get out of the partnership. “No!” she snapped at Susan McDougal, who had the nerve to suggest such a thing, “Jim told me that this was going to pay for college for Chelsea. I still expect it to do that!”

Stewart’s account of Hillary Clinton’s whopping profits on commodities trading is also the most complete and convincing yet. He relates her plunge into the commodities market to her need for cash, prompted by doubts about her marriage, then at its “low point.” Jim Blair and his pal, the commodities trader Robert L. “Red” Bone, were able to present Hillary Clinton with a quick $100,000 windfall through a cozy arrangement that, in Stewart’s judgment, “came precariously close to collusion to manipulate the market.” As general counsel to Tyson Foods, the Arkansas chicken conglomerate, Blair had good reason to cultivate the Clintons, who were in a good position to favor the company through the state’s regulatory powers.

Another area into which Stewart sheds new light is what longtime Bill Clinton aide Betsey Wright called the “bimbo eruption,” triggered by disgruntled state troopers. According to his account, the president was so eager to silence the troopers that he called one of them, Danny Ferguson, and offered him a federal job. If this offer was made in exchange for Ferguson’s silence about the president’s amatory habits--as seems the case--it would be a violation of the law.

Whether any of the Clintons’ Arkansas purported indiscretions result in formal charges being brought against them is up to the independent counsel, Kenneth Starr, and a grand jury. Somehow, the notion of prosecuting a president or his wife for the witless improprieties encompassed here strikes me as quixotic. For what Stewart presents is less a pattern of criminal activity than the behavior of two willful, cocky young people who somehow regarded themselves as beyond the legal and procedural constraints on other less worthy citizens.

They did not raid the nation’s oil reserves as did the Teapot Dome conspirators. Nor did they traduce the Constitution as did the architects of Watergate. The recklessness of Whitewater speaks more to the Clintons’ character than to their legal liabilities.

Which brings us to the curious matter of this book’s title. “Blood Sport” refers to the remark, in Vincent Foster’s suicide note, that in Washington, “ruining people is considered sport.” Once Foster put the revolver in his mouth, it could appropriately be called “blood sport.”

But what are we to make of this title? Does Stewart mean to suggest that the independent counsel, the grand jury and the Washington press corps pressed their investigations to the point of gratuitous cruelty? Surely not, though the Wall Street Journal editorial page, which pursued Vincent Foster with pitiless resolve, may deserve that judgment.

What then is Stewart’s assessment of Whitewater’s place in history? Like the cautious, precise lawyer he is, he withholds judgment while the legal mills grind on. Nonetheless, his meticulous narrative is a cautionary tale of the petty venality which seems to infect so much of our grass-roots politics, and the heavy penalty to be paid for covering up.

It is probably naive to have expected the Clintons to make full disclosure during the campaign when the brass ring was within their grasp. But surely, Whitewater wouldn’t have drawn an independent counsel and a book like this had the Clintons told all once they were safely settled in the White House. Isn’t there an old Arkansas nostrum (if there isn’t, there should be) that goes something like this: “When the hounds start baying, stop trying to throw them off track and give it up!”