AND I QUOTE / What Political Books Are Saying : Partners in Power: The Clintons and Their America, <i> By Roger Morris (Henry Holt; $27.50; 469 pp)</i>

“On one of the 1983-’84 videotapes filmed by local narcotics officers, Roger Clinton was said to tell a supplier jauntily, ‘Got to get some for my brother. He’s got a nose like a vacuum cleaner.’ Years later, after the suspicious murder of her husband, Jane Parks, the resident manager of an expensive Little Rock apartment complex, would tell Ambrose Evans-Pritchard of the London Sunday Telegraph that during the summer of 1984 Roger Clinton had been a nonpaying guest there for two months. The governor was ‘a frequent visitor,’ the Telegraph reported. ‘There was drug use at those gatherings . . . and [Parks] could clearly distinguish Bill’s voice as he chatted with his brother about the quality of the marijuana they were smoking. She said she could also hear them talking about the cocaine as they passed it back and forth.’ �

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Most everything bad that is known about the Clintons, suspected, alleged or whispered is collected here by former Nixon biographer Morris and cast in relentlessly critical, disdainful light with the distinct bite of the hatchet. Sources are often anonymous, disgruntled or disgraced former Clinton associates. Abused as a boy, a possible CIA informant at Oxford, an accomplice (weirdly enough with George Bush) in permitting drug-running in Arkansas to fund the Contras, Clinton is portrayed as deceitful, feckless, shady--a conspiracy theorist’s dream. Mrs. Clinton is frumpy, profane, corrupt. Even her early work for children’s causes is dismissed as mere ambition. Clinton’s enemies will say--see! His supporters will call it nothing more than garbage.