White House aide Sidney Blumenthal testifies for the defense during the Senate impeachment trial, February 3, 1999.

Believe me when I say that I knew all that going in. During the next few days, I was to see that the word “snitch” can be made to rhyme with Hitch. I think Geraldo Rivera was the first to make anything of it; anyway, the joke got a good workout. Indeed, only a couple of weeks after Rivera first got his laugh, Maureen Dowd recycled the gag in her waning New York Times column. (This is the same Ms. Dowd, by the way, who gave away the whereabouts of Salman Rushdie while he was staying in my apartment in the fall of 1993—a time when, if I was a really keen rat, I could have made myself some serious reward money.) A snitch, if you think about it, is supposed to be motivated by malice, cynical selfpreservation, or hope of gain. You become a snitch by dropping an anonymous dime, by striking a plea bargain, by “naming names” to get yourself immunity, or by dumping a former associate to save your own skin. Nobody has made any such allegation against me. However, I here repeat my charge that the associates of Bill Clinton were actively, and with taxpayers’ money, spreading false information against truthful female witnesses. They sought to destroy the characters of these women by off-the-record briefings, and by underhanded denunciations. They snitched, in fact. In doing what I did, I testified against the authorities and not to them.

I had the alternative—as who does not?—of keeping quiet. Here’s how it goes in Washington, where I have now lived for nearly two decades. The government, in the person of X or Y, takes you into its confidence. Now, here is a lie, or a halftruth, which we the administration wish to have widely circulated or believed. You are being briefed, let us add, in confidence. We know we can count on you. Thus, you are sworn. You’re in. You hardly notice the oath being administered. If you breach the confidence—well, as they used to say in the trade, then comes ethics. You will know if you have committed an ethical breach, because you will lose your “access.” Capisce?

I have long thought that this is slightly too easy, and that the state should have to work a bit harder than that to get the press on its team. Do you remember when Ronald Reagan complained so self-pityingly about the eruption of the Iran-contra matter? If it had not been for “that rag in Beirut”— as he said of the Lebanese magazine Al-Shiraa, which first broke the story of Oliver North’s secret cake-and-Bible run with the mullahs—the whole story of hostage trading and illegal arms dealing would have remained a secret. And it was absolutely true that, until the Levantine sheet published the story, knowledge of North’s name and potency was the private property of a few Washington-bureau chiefs who knew the score. How reluctant they were to share, and how well I remember them all. It was in those years, when an overstaffed and overpaid Washington press corps was leading too fat and happy a life, that I first got to know Sidney.

Not only have we often eaten and drunk in each other’s homes, and watched each other’s children grow (it was at the 1991 Bar Mitzvah of Sidney’s firstborn, Max, that I made up with Christopher Buckley, who hadn’t spoken to me for years after something I wrote about his father-in-law during Iran-contra), but we have also done some journalistic and political soldiering together. We jointly inaugurated the Osric Dining Society (Osric is the fawning courtier in Hamlet), an annual anti-awards dinner at which the prize went to the most butt-kissing piece of journalism published that year. When Rushdie came to Washington that time, we helped him meet some useful people. And when the Bosnian prime minister, Haris Silajdzic, came, to appeal for his murdered country and countrymen, we did the same. When Sidney was briefly detained by Secret Service agents for making a joke about Dole’s impending terminal experience at the gruesome Republican National Convention in San Diego in 1996, I stayed by Sidney’s side, leaving it only to bring him what may have been his first vodka and tonic. Not only was it a pleasure to be in his company—he is much more humorous than his TV appearances suggest—but in our limited way, on all of these occasions, we were at least trying to speak truth to power.