WASHINGTON -- Alternately sentimental and scornful, Monica Lewinsky's biography arrived on the nation's bookshelves yesterday, painting a purple portrait of an emotional young woman, her lovelorn presidential paramour and a bloodthirsty prosecutor bent on destroying his prey.

For all the hype about another blow to the Clinton presidency, "Monica's Story" plays more like the Democratic Party's version of the Lewinsky scandal than a damaging tell-all.

Lewinsky does at times regard Clinton as "a selfish man who lies all the time." But, overall, author Andrew Morton lays out a simplistic narrative in which Linda Tripp and Kenneth W. Starr play the villains, and Lewinsky and President Clinton emerge more as misguided, star-crossed lovers than as reckless, self-absorbed accused felons.

"You have a Big Brother in Ken Starr, you have a star-struck lover in Monica Lewinsky, and in some ways, you have a love-struck teen-ager in the president of the United States," Morton writes, calling it "a parable of our time."

The author sees no merit whatsoever in the charges that led to the second presidential impeachment in American history. And though Clinton absorbs his share of personal embarrassment, Lewinsky saves her real bile for Starr and Tripp. She levels still more accusations of prosecutorial misconduct, heartless betrayal and unethical collusion between the independent counsel and the lawyers of Paula Corbin Jones.

"The whole partisan affair bore the hallmark of the political show trials that marked Stalin's regime in Communist Russia," Morton writes of the Lewinsky saga, calling the climactic Senate trial "the triumph of the system over common sense."

White House aides, and much of the country, may be hoping that the book's long-awaited publication will close the last chapter of a scandal that feels utterly spent. Clinton himself, speaking to a gathering at the Interior Department yesterday, joked, "Sometimes I feel like a fire hydrant looking at a pack of dogs."

For the first time, Lewinsky has had her chance to tell her side of the story at length, uncompelled and outside a courtroom setting. But in nearly 300 pages, little is new. Mainly, the White House yesterday stressed again that it was time for the public and Washington to put the saga behind them.

"She has every right to tell her story from her side," said Joe Lockhart, the White House spokesman. "We have every right to move on. That's what the president's doing. He's going to focus on the job he was elected to do."

Lewinsky hews tightly to her oft-repeated account of her affair with the president and the ensuing efforts to cover it up. She strays only once from her official story, to say she did tell Clinton's confidant Vernon Jordan that she and Clinton "had indeed had an affair, but that it had stopped just short of full sex." Before Starr's grand jury, Lewinsky testified that when Jordan asked her whether she and Clinton had an affair, she had replied evasively.

Her one "bombshell" has nothing to do with the scandal. After an affair with an unmarried man in the Pentagon identified as Thomas, Lewinsky found herself pregnant and had an abortion.

Otherwise, the book mostly fills in the gaps with emotionally charged details. Most significantly, Lewinsky lays into Starr, whom Morton identifies as "a right-wing Southern Baptist," and his deputies. One of Starr's staff lawyers, Michael Emmick, is labeled "a revolting specimen of humanity." Another, Jackie Bennett, behaved with Lewinsky "like a pit-bull terrier with a kitten."

In the chapter titled "Terror in Room 1012," Lewinsky recounts her interrogation in a hotel room on Jan. 16, 1998, by "as many as nine armed FBI agents and Starr's deputies," in a sting that her putative friend Tripp helped arrange.

When Lewinsky was cornered by FBI agents, a raspy-voiced Tripp reportedly told her, "Trust me, Monica, this is for your own good." In the hotel room, Lewinsky glowered at Tripp, shouting: "Make her stay and watch. I want that treacherous bitch to see what she has done to me."

What occurred thereafter was terrifying, Lewinsky said. According to Lewinsky, Emmick threatened her with 27 years in prison if she did not cooperate. Bennett warned her, "You should know we are going to prosecute your mother, too, because of the things you have said she has done."

Lewinsky maintains that at least three times she requested a lawyer, only to be rebuffed.

Lewinsky said she considered killing herself by hurling herself from a 10th-floor window to protect the president and her mother. At one point, she slipped away from her questioners to call the president's secretary, Betty Currie, only to get no answer.

Later, Lewinsky said Emmick called her new attorney, William Ginsburg, offering to fax a copy of an affidavit in which she denied having had an affair with Clinton.

"The two FBI agents, however, pulled [Emmick] roughly away from the telephone. They realized that Ginsburg would instantly understand that the [Office of the Independent Counsel] had seen a copy of her affidavit before it had been filed, which meant that in all probability it had come from Paula Jones' lawyers," according to the book.

Starr told the House Judiciary Committee last fall that he had obtained the affidavit from Tripp's lawyer, James Moody, not the Jones lawyers. Tripp, however, had hired Moody at the suggestion of George T. Conway III, a lawyer who was working informally with the Jones lawyers.

Pub Date: 3/05/99