MAKING BOOK ON CLINTON

By ELIZABETH GLEICK.

The scenes are political-family gothic that read as if Tennessee Williams had written them. While riding on the campaign trail, the congressional candidate and his wife get into a screaming match in the car. He punches the dashboard; she slaps the seat. At a stoplight, she suddenly leaps out, and the car roars away. In another scene, years later, a guest in the politician's home overhears him singing a lullaby to his one-year-old daughter: ``I want a div- or-or-or-orce. I want a div-or-or-or-orce.'' The Governor raises the subject of divorce with fellow Governors whose marriages have broken up. Eventually, the marital spats in the Governor's mansion grow so loud the employees want to run away and hide.

The specific anecdotes may be new, but the former Arkansas Governor portrayed in the meticulously detailed First in His Class, a forthcoming Clinton biography by Washington Post staff writer David Maraniss, is a familiar one. The book depicts Clinton as a lover and a fighter and also a smart, eager-to-please, indecisive political animal who was White House bound from early on. But the book, which is due out in March, resuscitates some more troubling issues as well: that as an elected official Clinton used state troopers to help him get sex, and as a presidential hopeful he tried to cover up his earlier efforts to avoid the draft.

According to Maraniss, who won a 1993 Pulitzer Prize for his articles on Clinton's formative experiences, Clinton decided against running for President in 1988 in part out of fears that rumors of extramarital affairs would scuttle his chances and destroy his Family. Maraniss quotes extensively from on-the-record interviews with longtime Clinton friend and aide Betsey Wright, who described sitting down with Clinton and ``listing the names of women he had allegedly had affairs with and the places where they were said to have occurred.'' They went over the list twice, Maraniss writes, trying to figure out which women might tell their stories to the press; at the end, Wright advised the Governor not to run. Wright also expressed concern ``that some state troopers were soliciting women for him and he for them.'' Wright, now a Washington lobbyist, issued a statement last week saying Maraniss ``misunderstood what I told him about the troopers.''

The portions of First in His Class about the President's attempts to avoid the draft also offer up damning new insight. According to Maraniss, when Clinton ran for Congress in 1974, he was worried about a letter he had written to his ROTC colonel thanking him ``for saving me from the draft.'' ``How Clinton . . . persuaded him to return the letter is unclear,'' Maraniss writes, but the colonel did, and Clinton believed he had put the matter to rest. He had not; an aide to the colonel kept a copy, which did near fatal damage during the '92 campaign.

Though concerned about the draft story, the White House has responded that First in His Class is meaningless. In fact, compared with more tangible assaults on the President's character--namely Paula Jones' pending sexual- harassment lawsuit and the federal investigation into Whitewater--words in a book can barely hurt him. Last week trustees of Clinton's legal-defense fund released a list of donors for its first six months of operation. Celebrities such as Barbra Streisand and Garrison Keillor each put up the maximum $1,000 contribution. So far, 5,865 people have donated $608,000, still short of Clinton's estimated legal expenses of as much as $2 million.

--By Elizabeth Gleick. Reported by James Carney/Washington

With reporting by JAMES CARNEY/WASHINGTON