I spent most of the 1990s heavily involved in politics and political campaigns, often working closely with individuals quite active in conservative and Republican Party circles, and became friendly with many of them. Bill Clinton was President during those years, and I never had strong feelings about him one way or the other, agreeing with some of his policies and disagreeing with many others. But among the conservatives whom I knew, nearly all of them hated him with a passion, sometimes for reasons I endorsed and sometimes not.

Such passionate hatred naturally inspired dark theories of the evil doings of the President and his wife, Hillary Rodham Clinton, and these often merged into a broader current of anti-government sentiments common in conservative circles. Charges regarding such nefarious activities regularly boosted the circulation of leading conservative magazines while they also received much shriller treatment among activists farther to the fringe.

At the time, I never paid much attention to these accusations, except what I read of them in my morning newspapers, and while I never actually considered them debunked, I was still quite skeptical that any of them were likely to be true. Back then, I'd never done any serious reading in American history beyond the level of my introductory textbooks and I flatly doubted whether any of the more famous conspiracies from the JFK Assassination on down had any reality. So if the previous 200-plus years of American history were an open book, it hardly seemed likely that a former governor from tiny Arkansas had suddenly transformed DC into a snake-pit filled with intrigue worthy of Renaissance Italy.