The man behind the book

What drove an accomplished New York editor to write a salacious new Hillary Clinton bio that has critics calling him a smear artist?

By Rebecca Traister

Jun 21, 2005 | "I'm not being used by anybody," said Edward Klein, author of the book "The Truth About Hillary: What She Knew, When She Knew It, and How Far She'll Go to Become President," published today by Sentinel, a conservative imprint of publishing behemoth Penguin Group. Klein was responding to a question about whether the right wing was using his past work at supposedly liberal institutions like the New York Times and Newsweek to lend authority to his book's assertions about Hillary Clinton, which many are calling shoddily reported and nastily personal.

"I worked for the organizations that I worked for and people can make of that whatever they want," Klein continued evenly. "But it's absurd to suggest that anybody has put me up to this." He went on, with a touch of amusement, "It's that people are confused. They don't know what to make of me. Because what is somebody with my background and reputation doing writing a book like this? Why aren't I writing a book supporting Hillary?"

OK, we'll bite: What is a guy with Klein's background and reputation doing writing a book like this? "The Truth About Hillary" boasts a passel of petty, sexist and plain old "no duh" claims against Hillary: "She shows no wifely instincts," "She isn't maternal," "She's a feminist, but she rode to power on her husband's coattails," "She has abetted decades of chronic infidelity," "Many of her closest friends and aides were lesbians." It claims to shed light on the way that "the culture of lesbianism at Wellesley College shaped Hillary's politics" and that "she set up an elaborate system to monitor her husband's girlfriends." The book opens with a scene in which former White House intern Monica Lewinsky fondles Bill Clinton's penis at Radio City Music Hall.

"Life of Samuel Johnson" it ain't. But the fear of many Democrats is that "The Truth About Hillary" could prove to be a powerful weapon against Clinton as she moves closer to becoming the Democratic candidate for president in 2008. Even if most of the claims in "The Truth About Hillary" turn out to be baseless, there's a palpable fear that it could be a lethal cousin to 2004's campaign killer "Unfit for Command: Swift Boat Veterans Speak Out Against John Kerry." In New York media circles, the discomfort is doubled by the knowledge that this time, the cudgel is being wielded not by some easily dismissed nut-job from a state they fly over, but by a man they know, they've worked with, and whom they may have even created.

If his enemies were writing "The Truth About Edward Klein," we'd learn that the author and editor is an odd duck. While some former colleagues had terrific things to say about Klein, many were eager to turn their backs -- or their hoses -- on him. (Some of the same people who excoriate Klein for using off-the-record information in his Clinton book declined to attach their own names to the comments they made for this story.) Klein's detractors -- happy to hypothesize -- have cooked up several nasty theories about his move from legitimate journalism to increasingly cheesy tabloid tell-alls. One goes that he was never actually a media insider, never liked, and never accepted by New York's media hierarchy. (The not-so-subtle implication being that a book like this is an attempt to break the toys and smash the idols of the playground clique that left him out.) Another insists it's an obsession with powerful women and a desire to destroy them that drives Klein. And, of course, there's a theory that insatiable greed has led him to do anything for a buck.

But all of these narratives rely on a plot that's been somewhat revised with hindsight. The truth is, Klein was something of a macher himself. He didn't just work at the New York Times Magazine, he was its editor from 1977 to 1988, a position that did not exactly send him to journalism Siberia. Under his stewardship, the magazine won its first Pulitzer Prize. He also went to work for Tina Brown at the ultimate in-club, Vanity Fair, in the early 1990s; he remains a contributing editor there today. "The Truth About Hillary" was excerpted in this month's issue, right next to the bombshell story unveiling the identity of Deep Throat. As for how chilly, preening, ambitious, misogynistic or greedy the guy is: Those qualities don't exactly set him apart from a lot of other guys running around the New York Times or Condé Nast buildings at this very moment.

In a world in which our careers and the states we live in can serve as accurate predictors for how we'll cast a ballot, how the hell did Edward Klein evolve, or devolve, depending on your perspective, into Judas Iscariot of the New York press?

Next Page: Hillary Clinton: The new Richard Nixon?

• View blog reactions