The man behind the book

In the lead-up to "The Truth About Hillary," some Clinton defenders have implied a connection between the Khmer Rouge story and Klein's departure from the Times, but Klein remained at the paper for five years after the hoax. However, when Max Frankel succeeded Rosenthal as executive editor of the New York Times in 1986, Klein said he figured his goose was cooked. Frankel kept him on for a year, until, after a disagreement about a Constitution bicentennial cover story -- Klein wanted original art by Robert Rauschenberg and a novella by James Michener; Frankel wanted articles by legal scholars -- Klein resigned. "If I hadn't resigned I probably would have been forced out," said Klein. "It just wasn't working."

After the Times, Klein considered launching his own magazine, but the stock market crashed. He returned to reporting, writing a story for Clay Felker's Manhattan Inc. about Arthur Sulzberger Jr.'s succession to the top of the Times. The piece was spotted by old eagle-eye herself, Tina Brown, then the highflying savior of once-moribund Vanity Fair. She took Klein to lunch at the Four Seasons. "She asked me what I'd like to do and I told her I'd love to do a story about Emperor Hirohito," said Klein. "She said, 'Fine, go ahead and do it.'" Klein did the story, and was soon made a contributing editor at the magazine. In an e-mail, Brown wrote, "I had a great time with Ed at Vanity Fair. He always had fabulous story ideas and had this self-regenerating energy where he would make all his own action."

About this time, Klein was asked by Parade editor Walter Anderson to take over the "Personality Parade" column famously penned by Lloyd Shearer for many years. Klein has been writing the column -- one of the most widely read weekly columns in the country -- ever since. By the early 1990s, Klein was officially starting to color outside of journalism's etiquette lines, beginning with a story he wrote in 1989 about former first lady Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis. The two had met a decade earlier, when Klein published a novel, "Parachutists," with Doubleday, where Kennedy was an editor. They'd struck up a professional friendship and occasionally met for drinks. "I'm not saying I'm the only one who ever hit it off with her," Klein said defensively, conscious perhaps of suggestions that he cannibalized his relationship with Kennedy for what would become four books on her and her family. It began, though, with a Vanity Fair cover story on the occasion of her 60th birthday, with which Kennedy did not cooperate. Klein said when he told Kennedy he was writing the piece, "She was not pleased and our relationship cooled," adding, "It wasn't as though I was stealing secrets she had told me and telling the world." Later, Klein claimed, their phone calls resumed, and Kennedy never brought up the story.

After her death, Klein published "All Too Human: The Love Story of Jack and Jackie Kennedy" with Pocket Books. It didn't make the family happy, but Publishers Weekly was impressed by Klein's 200 attributed sources. "What he has come up with can surely be regarded ... as thoroughly vouched for," read the review. ("The Truth About Hillary" footnotes just 26 original attributed interviews.) "All Too Human" shot high on the bestseller list and showed Klein that he'd tapped a lucrative vein. "The success of 'All Too Human' made me realize I'd only written about half her life," he said. Next came "Just Jackie: Her Private Years," which also sold well. Klein said he "probably wouldn't have done any more Kennedy books except that when John Jr. died in that plane crash ... I started to think to myself, why would one family be subject to so many tragedies?"

The resulting tome, "The Kennedy Curse," was the book that started to get Klein in real trouble with the legitimate press, filled as it was with lurid details of John Kennedy Jr. and Carolyn Bessette's troubled marriage. While interviewing Klein about "The Kennedy Curse" on CBS's "Early Show," host Harry Smith confronted Klein right out of the box, listing the accusations in the book and telling Klein, "When we spoke with another Kennedy biographer, Laurence Leamer, he said none of these things rang true to him ... Respond to that." Smith also said of the book, "It has a kind of a breathless sort of tabloid style to it ... the style of it almost made me question the validity of it." Nevertheless, the book was a bestseller, and Klein defended it. "I was severely criticized for making this stuff up, for exaggerating, for using anonymous sources," said Klein. He theorized that people were too heavily invested in the myth of the glossy Kennedy-Bessette union to hear anything negative about it. "I can understand that," said Klein, "but everything I wrote about them later turned out to be confirmed by other writers and is now accepted as true, and nobody has ever said, 'Sorry we were so critical, because you turned out to be right.'" When asked how it felt to take a beating from his peers, Klein replied, "How could it feel good? It was sort of stunning and surprising, because I had been treated so well up to that point."

Like "The Kennedy Curse," "The Truth About Hillary" relies heavily on anonymous sourcing, and has already drawn criticism for it. This drives Klein crazy. "Why don't people feel that way about Bob Woodward's books in which he doesn't even have any footnotes?" he asked. "I'm not knocking Woodward, but why did Ben Bradlee go with Woodward and Bernstein? Yes, I rely on anonymous sources and I'll tell you why. You cannot write about Hillary Rodham Clinton unless you're willing to let people [speak anonymously]. They're afraid the Clintons will wreak their vengeance on them and they have good reason to believe this."

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