He's the most talented politician I've ever covered, and I love politics. And I love politicians. I really do. You don't do this for 33 years and want to see them all fuck up. The reason I still do it is I root for the moments when they do something courageous, when they transcend. With Clinton, I mean, the guy was just so damn good at it, so much larger than life. I'm glad you got that out of "Primary Colors," because a lot of people saw it as an attack. The reason I sold the rights to Mike Nichols is that he said it was a book without a villain, and that's the way I saw it.

What you can't do in fiction is a sober assessment of the substance of a presidency. It seemed important to me, once he was out of there, to sum it all up. It had been an important part of my life and the country's life for about 12 years, and I had a personal need to do it. But I also think the impression of Bill Clinton now is a distorted one. It's been really, really interesting going around for the past month since the book was published. The right wing is more vitriolic than ever about Clinton. James Carville said to me, the first week the book was out: [drawls] "Klein, you'll see. You write one nice sentence about Bill Clinton and they'll call you an apologist." And that's what I've been getting from the right. It's interesting because in the '70s and the '80s, I thought the right was far more interesting and subtle and sophisticated than the left. And now they've slipped back to ad hominem attacks. They need to assault Clinton in order to, ooh, here's a line: They need to assault Clinton in order to exalt Bush.

In fact Sept. 11 created a new industry for Clinton bashers, because all these same folks who hated him all along were able to say, Oh, Clinton caused Sept. 11, which I think your book shows isn't true. Yes, he could have done more about terror than he did, but you show the barriers he had to mounting a sustained campaign against Osama bin Laden -- a lack of urgency about it in the American public, the military's squeamishness about casualties. But if Clinton had a galvanizing moment like Sept. 11, don't you think he'd have done as well as Bush or better?

I honestly don't know. There are a couple of things you need to think about here. First of all, when you're looking back on it, I make the argument that it would have been hard to rouse the public, as you say. But on the other hand, he was the president, and the president with the greatest political instincts and communication skills. So if he'd stood up and said in 1998, "We've got to send some troops into Afghanistan before they cause any more damage," it would have been tough because of Lewinsky, but he might have been able to do it. The other thing that would have made it tough: Look, the Lewinsky scandal never should have happened, because there never should have been a Whitewater prosecutor. But when it did happen, it had a profound effect on the country, because it prevented him from doing a number of things, and first and foremost was firing Louis Freeh, which a lot of people in his administration wanted to do. Because the FBI was and probably still remains a total mess

With a lot of responsibility for not detecting what led up to Sept. 11 ...

Right. But he couldn't fire Freeh, because it would then seem a Saturday night massacre, that he was doing it just because of the investigation of the Lewinsky scandal. The other problem, though, when you say he could have done it just as well as Bush, I'm not sure about that for one basic and terrible reason that is at the heart of this book: The Republicans never would have let him.

That was my next question: Would Republicans have ever given him the kind of support that Bush has gotten from Democrats?

No! Of course not! On Sept. 13 Republicans would have been howling, "What are you going to do, Mr. President? Are you gonna chicken out on this like you chickened out in Vietnam?" He would have never had the more than three weeks that Bush got to respond. There would have been calls for re-impeachment and howling all over the place. That would have been true of Gore, by the way; they wouldn't have given him any time either. And it speaks to something really terrible that has happened. An argument could be made that over the last 10 years, the extreme right wing of the Republican party has behaved in a way that approaches a lack of patriotism. They've really done serious damage to democracy. When Bob Dole tells me, as he did in the book, that there was a part of his party that never accepted Clinton's legitimacy as president ...

Well, Dole helped that along himself. You quoted him, after the '96 election, saying he said he would be the president for the 57 percent of the people who hadn't voted for Clinton -- his voters and Ross Perot's. Can you imagine what would have happened if Al Gore said that after Florida? "I'm president of the majority who actually voted for me but got disenfranchised by the Supreme Court?" You let Dole play the statesman in your book, but you capture that amazing assertion, which I think was part of the problem.

I believe he really was a statesman, and he made occasionally really stupid comments when his ambition rather than his common sense was talking. I prefer to judge Dole on the substance of his years in office.

So you want to consider that a symptom of the times, rather than a cause of it?

Yeah, clearly he always had to play to those guys, which was dreadful. What right did they have not to consider Clinton the legitimate president of the United States? You had two elections, and he clearly won both of them. It wasn't even like 2000. But even then, Democrats acted patriotically: They said Bush was the president, and after Sept. 11, they got behind the president.

Yes, look at what happened after the Supreme Court decision in December 2000. I think a lot of liberals and Democrats felt like our system was at risk because of what the court did and because of that, they rushed to defend the system, and even defend Bush, in some cases even the Court, rather than going for the jugular. I mean, the New York Times editorial page had been incredibly pro-Gore during the Florida recount. But after the Supreme Court decision there was a change to the tenor of editorials and a sense that we had to support the outcome and the Supreme Court decision, no matter that we didn't like it. Liberal institutions and politicians would not go to the mat at that point; they pulled back, at a time when if the roles were reversed, the right-wing machine would have been in full throttle.

Yeah, I think that there's a lot to that.

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