Just after the Monica Lewinsky story broke in 1998, David Brock says he called a White House aide and spilled his guts on everything he knew about the anti-Clinton movement. The array of forces Brock described to Sidney Blumenthal became forever known as “a vast right-wing conspiracy” when first lady Hillary Rodham Clinton appeared on NBC’s “Today” a few days later.

Brock’s action was surprising considering his pedigree. As the “enfant terrible” of conservative journalism, he wrote the 1993 article on Arkansas state troopers and their stories of Bill Clinton’s alleged sexual exploits that introduced the world to a woman known simply as “Paula.” Paula Jones’ subsequent lawsuit against the president led to, by his own admission, “false” testimony about Lewinsky, which prompted his impeachment and trial by the Senate.

David Brock, author of Blinded

In “Blinded by the Right: The Conscience of an Ex-Conservative” (Crown, 336 pages, $25.95), Brock looks to atone for his involvement in one after another “cruel smear designed as a thorough ‘investigation.'” He breaks some news, settles some scores and leaves partisans on both sides to argue about whether to believe the new “independent” Brock or the former “right-wing hit man,” as he refers to himself.

This inside account of the Clinton scandal industry is fascinating and eminently readable, though it lacks drama. Brock has an uncanny ability to make you feel as if you’re not there. But he dishes dirt on his former friends with often ingenious subtlety.

Brock details House GOP members who don’t practice what they preach, conservative pundits who have no overarching philosophy except for anti-Clintonism, and even a federal judge who he says encouraged him to pursue the trooper story because it might bring Clinton down then later participated in a ruling against the president as part of the independent counsel probe.

He says that as a homosexual he looked past GOP family-values rhetoric to embrace other conservative ideals, including lower taxes, states’ rights and individual freedom. Ultimately, though, Brock became disaffected by what he saw as anti-gay policies and unfair practices in journalism and politics.

The Anita Hill allegation

Long before he fell out of favor, Brock was motivated by success and power. His 1993 book “The Real Anita Hill” was a best seller, though he now says it was full of unsubstantiated personal information to discredit the lawyer who claimed Clarence Thomas harassed her.

Thomas, Brock alleges, later acknowledged through a confidant that he had “habitually” rented pornographic videos during the time Hill worked for him. “Here was the proof that Senate investigators and reporters had been searching for” to discredit the Supreme Court nominee, Brock asserts.

He also contends that Thomas provided, through the confidant, embarrassing information about a woman who alleged that the Supreme Court justice had several Playboy pinups in his apartment during the time he worked with Hill. Brock says he used the information to blackmail the woman and defame a book that called his own account into question.

Brock isn’t completely successful in his bid to discredit his earlier book, especially the theory that Hill complained about being harassed at the office before she ever worked for Thomas. He says it was first advanced by White House sources, but this is all he offers to disqualify the claim.

The Clinton attacks

The cruel irony of the Paula Jones story, at least if you’re Bill Clinton, is that Brock says it should never have appeared in American Spectator magazine. “The allegations couldn’t be verified, the troopers hadn’t been able to affix specific dates or times to any of the events described and I had to make a leap of faith in accepting their word,” he writes.

This journalistic “incompetence … compounded by an uninformed bias,” as well as cash payments he alleges were made to sources, are often-cited reasons why stories he now sees as hatchet jobs ended up in print.

The American Spectator, buoyed by a skyrocketing increase in the number of subscribers after the trooper article, went from being a journal of opinion to the home of the $2.5 million Arkansas Project, which Brock calls a “dirty tricks operation against the Clintons.” Besides the investigative reports it funded, Brock alleges, the Arkansas Project was a means of paying off a witness to incriminate Clinton in the Whitewater investigation.

One notorious probe was that of White House lawyer Vincent Foster’s suicide. While he wanted to play the anti-Clinton game, Brock says he felt allegations that Foster was murdered were unfounded. He asserts that when he complained to Theodore Olson, who had ties to the Spectator and is now the Bush administration’s solicitor general, Olson agreed that Foster committed suicide but he still favored pursuing the probe.

“Raising questions about the death was a way of turning up the heat on the administration until another scandal was shaken loose, which was the Spectator’s mission,” Brock says Olson told him.

Brock suggests in his epilogue that he’s made a clean break with attack journalism and hopes that civility will soon govern political discourse. But this book more personal memoir than serious reporting is not likely to prove he’s reformed.

“The article was a mix of circumstantial observation and rumor and no one would ever be able to tell which parts of it may have been accurate and which parts were not,” Brock says of the Arkansas trooper story.

The same could be said about parts of “Blinded by the Right.”