The man behind the book

More than one source mentioned Klein's fascination -- or obsession -- with powerful women, women like Kennedy and Clinton. Is it possible that he had an urge to turn the tables on powerful females, to destroy or dominate or consume them? Klein laughed. "My wife is a strong woman. My mother was a strong woman. I like strong women ... Fascinated, yes; obsessed, no." As for destroying them, Klein said, "I am not threatened by strong women, believe me. That's a piece of intellectual gibberish."

Klein also offered up complicated explanations of how the rest of the early leaks from the book have been misread or misunderstood. He claimed that the Bill-raped-Hillary-to-get-Chelsea scandal fluffed by Matt Drudge last week, was taken out of context; the drunken Clinton was just making a joke about how his wife was frigid. And he stood by his reporting on late Sen. Patrick Moynihan's wife Liz's dislike of Clinton, despite accusations from Moynihan's daughter Maura that he misquoted her mother.

The Moynihan chapter was excerpted in Vanity Fair, and Wayne Lawson, who has edited Klein since he started at the magazine, also backed up Klein, pointing out that "unlike book publishing, everything that we print is very carefully fact-checked and legally vetted." Lawson, who has edited pieces by Klein on Wen Ho Lee and Etan Patz, described his writer as "incredibly professional, a very solid reporter who always comes in with lots and lots and lots of notes meticulously presented."

"I love being a reporter," Klein told me over the phone. "That is the most fun thing in life."

Maybe. But another fun thing is making money. As Klein's old Newsweek boss Ed Kosner said when I'd asked if Klein had been an outsider with his nose to the window, "Oh, I don't think that he burned with a lust to be any kind of a journalistic insider. Sometimes people like to make a living, right?"

So maybe all the pop-psych explanations of how Ed Klein became Ed Klein pale in the light of an old-fashioned desire to get rich. After all, Klein's arc teaches us that it's not impossible for a foreign correspondent to become a retailer of Bill Clinton's tasteless rape jokes. A guy who once steered a Pulitzer Prize-winning weekly magazine can go on to "report" that Hillary Clinton's ass broadened after having Chelsea due to "chronic lymphedema ... [a] disorder that causes gross swelling in the legs and feet." He can also write a passage this vapid, about Clinton's Wellesley classmates: They "refused to wear pretty dresses, style their hair, use coy remarks, or deploy any of the trappings that might make them appear subordinate to men. As a result, they sometimes appeared mannish."

The day before its publication, "The Truth About Hillary" was No. 9 on Amazon's list of bestsellers. And having a book in that slot is an ambition familiar to any New Yorker who has ever climbed a masthead or lunched at the Four Seasons.

"Isn't it Dr. Johnson who said any writer who doesn't write for money is a fool?" said Klein. "What I do for a living is write popular nonfiction and the more popular it is the more books I sell and the more money I make."

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