After Watergate, I never expected another impeachment investigation in my lifetime, let alone an actual impeachment and a Senate trial. Nixon's succesesors, I thought, would recognize the price of scandal and learn the two fundamental lessons of Watergate. First, if there is questionable activity, release the facts whatever they are, as early and completely as possible. Second, do not allow outside inquiries, whether conducted by prosecutors, congressmen or reporters, to harden into a permanent state of suspicion and warfare.

"Bennett had tried ... to obtain the details from the statement Jones had made about Clinton allegedly having 'distinguishing characteristics' in his genital area. It hadn't worked, but Bennett wanted to make sure there were no such characteristics.

At first Bennett thought it might be a mole or birthmark. So he started asking longtime male Clinton friends who might have seen him in the shower at one point or another in his life. Had they seen anything? No one had.

Later, Bennett was in the Oval Office with Clinton, and the president had to go to the washroom. For a moment, Bennett thought of following the president into the Oval Office bathroom to see what he might see, but he decided against it. 'We can't have president of the United States' penis on trial,' Bennett finally said to Clinton directly. 'There is an ugh factor in politics.' 'It's an outrage,' Clinton replied. 'It's totally not true. Go to all my doctors. It's just false...[Bennett said]"The only step that was not taken was to ask the doctor to induce an erection to reduplicate the circumstances that Jones had alleged. That was unthinkable."'

Ford is chastised for bringing into the White House ''a Congressional lifestyle, which often included alcohol at lunch.'' Woodward uncovers one scandalous occasion in Denver when the President ''skipped several dozen pages of his remarks because he had what his aides called a few 'marts,' for martinis, before speaking.'' You'd think that Ford's skipping several dozen pages of luncheon remarks would be a blessing for those in attendance, or at least something less than an indictable offense. But in ''Shadow,'' it's another cue for Woodward to seize the moral high ground and condemn a benighted President Who Did Not Escape the Shadow of Watergate.

Similarly, the Carter Administration becomes an excuse for Woodward to rehash ancient charges of cocaine possession against the White House aide Hamilton Jordan. Though Jordan was ultimately cleared, he was not ''totally innocent'' after all -- for he ''liked to drink beer and loved chasing women'' and ''did go to places like . . . Studio 54,'' where other patrons might have behaved naughtily, thereby making Jordan ''a magnet for allegations.'' Jordan, it seems, is guilty by association with nightspots.

Under Woodward's moral tutelage, Jordan recants his past in ''Shadow,'' belatedly seeing the errors of his partying ways of two decades ago. But Jordan's real problem back then, Woodward suggests without irony, may have been partying with noninsiders. ''Shadow'' reports that Jordan ''stiffed the Washington establishment and its dinner-party circuit with particular relish'' -- apparently a hanging offense. The punishment, Woodward reports, was a long 1977 article in The Washington Post Style section ''about the strain between the Carterites and Washington.''