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Those calls provided useful guidance and consultation to the Jones lawyers, as Davis would readily admit (although he understandably took umbrage later when Isikoff suggested that he and Cammarata were small-time practitioners who would have been lost without all the outside help). Youngish hotshots who had gone to better schools and made partner early at important law firms, Marcus and Conway both exhibited a brash self-confidence.

Marcus's own wife had thought him "arrogant" from the day they met. At the University of Chicago Law School, where he had been friendly with Richard Porter, Marcus had been the kind of student who needed to shout out answers before the professor called on him. After graduating in 1987, he had eventually joined Berger & Montague, a heavily Democratic firm specializing in the kind of corporate tort lawsuits that Republicans have long tried to stifle. (Both name partner Daniel Berger and his son, also a firm partner, were personally friendly with Clinton; together, they donated almost $175,000 to the Democratic Party during the 1996 election cycle.) A registered Democrat married to an "inveterate liberal" and living in a Philadelphia suburb, Marcus was an unlikely anti-Clinton conspirator. But he despised Clinton profoundly, had voted for Bush in 1992, and had made his views known in articles for the Washington Times. It was Porter who brought him into the Jones clique early on, as a specialist in the constitutional separation of powers. Having helped put together the Jones legal team, Porter had foreseen the need for expert advice to counter Bennett's argument that the president cannot be sued while in office.

Though a few years younger than the others, George T. Conway III was even more successful and considerably higher profile. In his early thirties, he had made partner at New York's Wachtell, Lipton, Rosen & Katz, one of the biggest and richest litigation shops in the country. His primary occupation was defending the major tobacco companies, and he reportedly made as much as $1 million a year doing it.

With his name and Yale Law School degree, Conway looked on paper like a scion of old wealth; he was in fact the middle-class son of an electrical engineer from suburban Boston. Short, dark, slightly overweight, and painfully shy, he was also, at the age of thirty-three, unmarried and without a regular girlfriend at the time. He aspired to date tall blondes, preferably of the conservative persuasion. Laura Ingraham, the woman he was pursuing in 1997, epitomized that desire. The willowy Ingraham had become a budding celebrity early in 1995 when the New York Times Magazine profiled young Washington conservatives, featuring her on the cover in a fetching leopard print miniskirt. For Conway and other right-wing males of his generation, she was an intellectual pinup.

He began to pursue her several years after both had clerked for Ralph Winter, a federal judge and leading patron of the Federalist Society. Conway's magnanimous courting behavior included inviting Ingraham on all-expense-paid ski trips and island holidays. On a Caribbean trip they once ran into Bob Bennett, an embarrassing moment for Ingraham. Before commencing her television career, she had been an associate at Skadden, Arps, Slate, Meagher & Flom-the firm where the president's lawyer was a partner and her friend.

Evidently it was Ingraham who connected Conway with Matt Drudge during the summer of 1997, though she and the tobacco lawyer insist they played no part in the Internet gossip's Willey scoops. Fascinated by the Drudge Report, as so many in Washington were, Ingraham had befriended its author after they met at the White House Correspondents Association spring awards dinner. In late June, she and David Brock hosted a gala dinner party at Brock's Georgetown townhouse, with Drudge as guest of honor.

About two weeks later, when Drudge returned to spend the Fourth of July weekend at Ingraham's home in northwest Washington, she presented him with a new source and a valuable scoop. Two knowledgeable sources affirm that on the evening of July 3, Ingraham took down the details about Kathleen Willey from Conway over the telephone while she and Drudge composed his stunning holiday "exclusive" about Isikoff's investigation of alleged sexual harassment in the White House. He headlined it "Ants in the Picnic Basket."

But Ingraham, who was working as a commentator for CBS News at the time, said she hadn't brought Conway to Drudge. "Believe me, if I had been a player or a source that first helped expose the lengths to which the President would go to save his own skin, I would have already claimed credit for it."

And Conway was just as emphatic in an August 1999 letter to the authors: "I never received any confidential information from Mr. Davis and Mr. Cammarata; nor did I ever provide such information to Mr. Drudge." He also insisted that he had never tried to "scuttle any settlement discussions" in the Jones case, because he had believed that settlement "was strongly in the interests of both sides ... ."

Nevertheless, there is reason to believe the source's account of that July 4 weekend.

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