The Clinton crazies -- I'd first heard the term used, with tongue only slightly in cheek, by Ambrose Evans-Pritchard, a British journalist who is one of them -- are of different types. There are haters like Nichols and Pat Matrisciana, a film maker, who have developed a monstrous view of Clinton as Satan's nephew. Then there are the professional reporters of a conservative and sometimes conspiratorial bent who tend to portray the President as a figurehead for a corrupt political organization that has its roots in Arkansas. Evans-Pritchard, who writes for The Sunday Telegraph of London, is in this group. Martyrs are in another class: they tend to be Arkansans who feel they have been victimized by what they see as Clinton's political machine, and they have been embraced by anti-Clinton warriors. Finally there are the freelance obsessives, the people for whom the Internet was invented, cerebral hobbyists who have glimpsed in the Clinton scandals a high moral drama that might shake society to its roots. Prominent in this group is Hugh H. Sprunt of Farmers Branch, Tex., who has made himself an expert in the matter of the death of Vincent Foster.

The number of influential Clinton crazies is probably no more than a hundred, but their audience is in the tens of millions. The percolation of questions about the Foster case from Web sites to newsletters to talk radio to newspapers like The New York Post and The Wall Street Journal motivated the White House counsel's office to draft its report on conspiracies just before the Senate Whitewater hearings in the summer of 1995. ''The right wing says we're a shark chasing minnows,'' Christopher S. Lehane, special assistant counsel to the President, who compiled the report, told me early last month. ''But if you work in the White House with some of these stories getting circulation, you often feel like a minnow chased by sharks.''

Those fingered in the report characterize it as a Nixon-style enemies list aimed at delegitimizing Clinton's critics. But on a central point the Administration and its enemies are in perfect agreement: because of new forms of communication -- talk radio, newsletters, the Internet, mail-order videos -- a significant portion of the population has developed an understanding of Bill Clinton as a debased, even criminal politician.

Consider the Helen Dickey phone call, which is cited in the White House report. An Arkansas state trooper says that around 7 P. M. Eastern standard time on the day in 1993 that Vincent Foster died, Helen Dickey, a White House staff assistant, called him at the Governor's mansion in Little Rock and told him of the death. If the trooper is telling the truth, that would contradict the White House's statement on when it learned of Foster's death -- more than an hour later. The story took on a life of its own in right-wing circles; an extra hour would have given the White House time for untold malfeasance. Both Evans-Pritchard and Michael Reagan, a Los Angeles talk show host and a son of the former President, take credit for reporting the story in 1995. Evans-Pritchard's story in The Sunday Telegraph soon made it onto Web sites; Reagan's reports were carried on 150 stations, which he says reach two million listeners. Later, the story was mentioned in The New York Post and on The Wall Street Journal's editorial page. Ultimately, Senator Alfonse D'Amato's Whitewater committee called Dickey to testify in the summer of 1995 -- the committee, among other things, looked into the aftermath of Vincent Foster's death -- and under oath she said she placed the call not around 7 P.M. but later that night. The trooper was not called to testify, and Dickey's denial has done little to dampen interest in the story in the anti-Clinton underground.

According to a time/cnn poll taken during the Senate Whitewater hearings, only 35 percent of the 1,000 adults surveyed were convinced (as the U.S. Park Police, the F.B.I., an independent counsel and Foster's wife were convinced) that he had killed himself in Fort Marcy Park in Virginia.