The opening scene in Blood Feud, the new book by Ed Klein about the Clintons and the Obamas, is a classic of the 77-year-old author’s scurrilous brand of political non-fiction.
On a sunny afternoon in May last year, we are told, Hillary Clinton gathered six girlfriends from Wellesley's class of 1969 for a boozy lunch at Le Jardin du Roi, a bistro near her home in Chappaqua, New York. Recently liberated from the State Department, Clinton is said to have let loose on her erstwhile boss, accusing President Obama of having “no hand on the fucking tiller”.
Klein discloses breathlessly that “the wines had been carefully chosen by Roi, the owner of the restaurant,” and that “Roi waited on Hillary personally and prepared a special vegan dish for her after the former first lady told him that she was trying to lose weight.”
There is, however, a problem with this centrepiece of Blood Feud’s prologue. Le Jardin du Roi was not named after the backyard of a man called Roi. It means “The Garden of the King”, or “The King’s Garden” in French. “It’s just the name of the restaurant,” a puzzled staff member told the Guardian when reached by telephone. The name of the man who owns the restaurant is Joe.
This is not the first glaring factual error to have made its way into Klein’s reporting. It is not even the first time a mistake has been made in thevery first anecdote of one of his books. Such clangers, along with excruciating claims about his subjects' personal lives, have contributed to the establishment of a diverse anti-Klein caucus, ranging from Media Matters on the left to the conservative columnists John Podhoretz and Peggy Noonan.
People close to Clinton in the past week directly alleged that Klein had made up parts of the book. Theirs were only the heftiest blows in a fresh barrage of criticism delivered even as Blood Feud rose to the top of New York Times bestseller list, selling more than 20,100 copies in a week to oust Clinton’s own memoir Hard Choices, which sold about 16,600, from the No1 slot.
Even Rush Limbaugh, the king of conservative talk radio, told his listeners last week that the purported dialogue in some of Klein’s florid set pieces – “You can’t trust the motherfucker,” Clinton is supposed to have said of Obama over her next glass of wine – does not ring true.
“Some of the quotes strike me as odd,” said Limbaugh. “In the sense that I don’t know people who speak this way.”
Publishing industry sources contacted by the Guardian were privately withering about the veracity of Klein’s reporting, while declining to allow their names to be associated with such allegations in public.
Former colleagues wonder aloud how this one-time editor of the New York Times Magazine, senior Newsweek editor and staff writer for Vanity Fair came to join what might be termed the Fox News Industrial Complex. Yet as Blood Feud scales the same chart-topping heights of The Amateur – his scathing 2012 take on Obama’s presidency, which sold more than 230,000 copies – Klein appears to be laughing off his critics all the way to the bank.
“Attacking the messenger to hide the truth is the first page of the Clinton playbook,” Klein told the Guardian in a statement. “Even in a city completely devoid of accountability, it never ceases to amaze that a Clinton operative could call anyone a ‘liar’. For starters, ask the families of the victims of the Benghazi attacks how far the Clintons and the Obamas are willing to go to hide the truth.”
Klein did not agree to a more extensive interview for this article, and a spokeswoman for his publisher issued a blanket denial to a series of questions put by the Guardian, some of which contained assertions that were demonstrably true.
'The eternal lessons of good and right journalism'
Klein was born in Yonkers in October 1936. His father owned a dress shop, he has said, but he wanted to be a writer from a young age. He states on his personal website that after working as a copyboy for the New York Daily News, he graduated from Columbia University’s journalism school, which awarded him a fellowship to go to Tokyo, where he worked as a correspondent for UPI. It was there that Klein also reportedly befriended Abe Rosenthal, a Pulitzer-winning foreign correspondent and future executive editor of the New York Times.
Around this time, Klein also met his first wife, Emiko, with whom he went on to have two children. Their daughter, Karen Klein Hirsch, floor-managed the Four Seasons restaurant in New York for a decade until 2004, and now has a daughter of her own. Their son, Alec Klein, is a professor at Northwestern University’s Medill journalism school and a former award-winning investigative reporter for the Washington Post and other newspapers. In the acknowledgments to a 2007 book, Alec thanked his father “for teaching me the eternal lessons of good and right journalism”.
After returning to the US, Klein joined Newsweek and climbed the newsroom ladder. He rose to assistant managing editor, before being poached in 1977 by Rosenthal to run the prestigious Sunday magazine. By then, Klein and Emiko had divorced, and fought in the New York courts for custody of their children, in a case that involved the use of a court-appointed psychiatrist and reached the state appeals court. Almost 40 years later, court officials are not authorised to disclose how the case was resolved. Emiko, an artist now living in Westchester, could not be reached for comment.
Klein subsequently married Tessa Namuth, a former colleague at Newsweek, in 1978. But two years later they, too, were divorced. “Tessa says it won’t be amicable from her point of view,” the syndicated gossip columnist Liz Smith wrote, in November 1980. Tessa’s attorney told Smith that Klein “served on us a vicious complaint, alleging misconduct in the marriage”. Klein’s attorney told Smith: “My client made every effort to resolve this fairly.” Tessa, who has since remarried and still lives in Manhattan, did not return a message seeking comment.
Colleagues from the Times said that while Klein was sociable, he was too often cowed during working hours by Rosenthal, the boss who had brought him to the Gray Lady. He failed to fight their corner during inevitable newsroom disagreements, one claimed.
“He had a very good staff, but I don’t think he protected them as well as he could have,” James Greenfield, who eventually took over from Klein as magazine editor, said in an interview. “If you run a magazine, you have to protect your people, both internally and externally, and if he got internal criticism I don’t think he protected them enough.” The magazine team “needed reassurance” after Klein’s departure, said Greenfield.
Nonetheless, it was under Klein’s leadership that the magazine won its first Pulitzer prize. The 1983 award for feature writing went to a cover story by the writer Nan Robertson about her struggle with toxic shock syndrome, which caused her to lose the ends of eight fingers.
Yet by 1987, a pair of embarrassing errors on successive Sundays led to public speculation about Klein’s position. Newsday reported at the time that the magazine was first forced to clarify a not-so-rags-to-riches story about a first-time novelist, and then explain that a photograph of a dramatic drugs bust in Miami had in fact been staged for an advertisement. The errors were only the final straw, said Max Frankel, who succeeded Rosenthal as executive editor in 1986. “He was the first person that I let go when I became editor,” Frankel said in an interview. “He and I just … I just found him … uhh ... unable to work with him, let’s put it that way.”
Frankel explained that he was troubled by Klein's aversion to “straight answers” and “the degree of supervision he was willing to submit to”. He said: “All that he thought he was doing with the magazine just had no relation to what I thought we should be doing, and I suggested we part ways very quickly.”
Klein also found himself lambasted repeatedly in the pages of Spy, a boisterous monthly launched by Condé Nast in 1986 and co-edited by Graydon Carter, the future Vanity Fair supremo. The magazine, which frequently devoted a full-page column to internal machinations at the Times, reported after Rosenthal’s departure that while Klein was “universally despised”, he probably remained “the right man for the job of keeping the magazine stolid and unsurprising”.
Walter Scott and Ed Slime: brainchildren of a distinguished editor
He finally departed the Times in late 1987 just before his third wedding,to Dolores Barrett, a PR consultant, who died in December last year after more than a quarter-century of marriage. “She was everything to him,” said John LeBoutillier, a former Republican congressman and friend of the author, who co-wrote an unsuccessful satirical political novel with him in 2010. “But he’s handling it OK. He was right in the middle of working on [Blood Feud] when it happened, so he had something to do every day.”
Spy magazine celebrated Klein’s fall from the paper by reporting gleefully that he was trying to found a new magazine, Newsplay. Spy said Klein described it in his own pitch document, targeting the big shots of the New York media industry, as “the brainchild of a distinguished editor”. The review was scathing. “Klein refers to himself in the third person no fewer than 20 times in the prospectus’s 30 pages of overwritten yet uninspiring prose,” Spy disclosed, warning would-be investors: “No pushing or shoving, please. One person at a time!”
The new venture did not get off the ground. Instead, as the 1990s dawned, Klein became a contributing editor at Vanity Fair, while also quietly taking on the Personality Parade column, bylined to “Walter Scott”, in Parade magazine and syndicated in hundreds of Sunday newspapers around the US, for which he reportedly received between $300,000 and $350,000 a year.
At Vanity Fair, he specialised in splashy profiles of some of the decade’s biggest names, including Donald Trump, Jackie Kennedy Onassis, Diane Sawyer and Mort Zuckerman. His pieces caused the requisite stir of follow-up in New York’s tabloids. He and Dolores partied with Sally Quinn’s high-society set in Washington. Yet the magazine’s then-editor, Tina Brown, later joined Klein’s detractors, speculating in a 2005 article that a “secret fantasy of girl-on-girl action” had led him to “obsess” in the pages of his first book about Clinton about rumours that she had a “lesbian ethos”. Brown, who lamented that “Klein used to be a workmanlike scribe” and renamed him “Ed Slime”, told the Guardian in an email: “Ed figured out where the big bucks were and tailored his ‘reporting’ accordingly.”
The big bucks were in books, sensational ones, beginning with four in eight years about the dependably chaotic Kennedy clan. Claiming to have been a friend of Jackie Kennedy Onassis, Klein was mocked by more earnest Kennedy historians but made headlines by reporting that Jackie had lost her virginity in a lift in Paris and had an extramarital affair of her own.
'The difference between the truth and a lie'
But it was not until 2005, and The Truth About Hillary, that Klein enraged the present-day powerful, alienated swaths of critics and – according to people who know him – pushed himself firmly to the right. The book notoriously implied, via anonymous sources, that Chelsea Clinton was conceived in 1979 in Bermuda during a rape, and that Hillary Clinton was a closeted lesbian. It was dismissed by some conservatives – “Poorly written, poorly thought, poorly sourced,” wrote Peggy Noonan; “Thirty pages into it, I wanted to take a shower,” pleaded John Podhoretz – but viscerally appalled many critics on the left such as Jamison Foser, a former Democratic operative, who wrote an 11,000-word debunk of it for Media Matters.
It appears to have been a turning point for Klein, who in the past had rarely disclosed any “basic convictions or political agenda”, according to Frankel, the former New York Times editor. “He really got angry over the way he was treated by his then-fellow liberals,” said LeBoutillier. “He was somewhat liberal, but his friends on the left were so horrible to him because he dared to criticise Hillary Clinton. That that was a big moment for him.”
Things might have turned out differently. In the 1990s, Klein had a contract with Little, Brown to write a book about George HW and Barbara Bush. But the project fell apart when Bush’s team withdrew an apparent offer of cooperation, and the New York Observer reported that Klein was ordered by a judge in New York state supreme court to return an advance of more than $165,000.
Instead, he turned his attentions to Clinton before continuing to infuriate Democrats with 2012’s The Amateur, in which he painted a picture of chaos in the White House and claimed that marital relations between the Obamas had plumbed to such depths that Michelle at one stage had divorce papers drawn up. A White House spokesman accused him of having “a proven history of reckless fabrication in order to sell books,” correctly predicting the volume would fly off shelves.
Klein’s friends are quick to defend his integrity. “Ed is a hard-working reporter,” said LeBoutillier. “He’s a professional reporter.” Another complained that Klein is unfairly maligned for blind quoting while other journalists who play the same game, such as Bob Woodward, are hailed as genuine scoop-getters. Yet there is unquestionably something more disconcerting about Klein’s work. Aside from the errors and the miraculous quotes, there are the details reported like exclusive disclosures – such as the names of novels on Obama’s bedside table during his summer vacation, attributed to a housekeeper – that were already in the public domain.
Two publishing industry sources familiar with the situation confirmed a report by BuzzFeed earlier this year that Blood Feud had been dropped by its original publisher, William Morrow, because the content did not pass a vetting by in-house lawyers. “When you’re at an imprint of HarperCollins, which is part of NewsCorp, they take that stuff very seriously, and they check all of your sources and notes and they want to know where you got stuff,” said one. The book has instead been released by Regnery, the Washington-based conservative imprint that has also published Ann Coulter and Newt Gingrich.
Klein does not appear troubled in the slightest. “I just think he has decided he could make a lot of money on that side of the street, so he has gone over there,” said Frankel. But while Klein is wealthier now, friends say that his lifestyle is little changed. He still splits his time between the Upper East Side apartment on Park Avenue where he has lived and worked for decades, and an upstate getaway in Ghent. Klein also fell behind on payment of his taxes several times in recent years, according to state and federal records, owing as much as $218,000 to the IRS between 2009 and 2010. He is now fully paid and up to date.
He remains impeccably turned out – his teeth rows of perfect white, his skin tanned and what is left of his hair neatly cropped in mounds above his ears. It could not be confirmed whether he still practices krava maga, an Israeli hand-to-hand martial art, as was reported in 2002. But Klein can often be found, in one of his double-breasted suits, lunching at Michael’s, the West 55th Street spot long beloved by major players in publishing.
As he approaches his 79th year, Klein shows no sign of mellowing. “Knowing him, he will get right back on to another book,” said LeBoutillier. And as the 2016 presidential primary approaches, he made clear to Sean Hannity on Fox News during the promotional swing for his book last month that he has not stopped thinking about one subject in particular. “You know, Hillary has a very tenuous hold on reality,” he said. “There’s a real characterlogical (sic) problem. I think the problem really is that this is a woman that wants to be president, but I don’t think she knows the difference between the truth and a lie.”
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