Klein’s ‘Truth’ is simply sordid

Every once in a while, something hits your desk and makes you wonder whether there really isn’t an argument to be made for book burning.

Edward Klein’s “The Truth About Hillary” -- a purported biography of the New York senator and former first lady, which arrived this week -- is precisely that sort of something.

Prurient in its focus, shameless in its methodology and vile in execution, this volume is a near-perfect example of what has come to be called “bio-porn,” a particularly noxious subgenre of the polemic literature that nowadays infests our bestseller lists.

A book like this does not have a publisher so much as it does an aider and abettor -- in this case, a person called Adrian Zackheim, who runs Sentinel, an imprint of Penguin U.S.A. established to bring to market the “conservative” titles that lately have been reliable moneymakers. The problem with an enterprise conceived to pick conservative pockets rather than address conservative consciences is that it tends to miss some of the movement’s finer points -- such as self-restraint and civility. With all the rhetorical refuse being flung across the chasm dividing red and blue these days, those virtues are harder and harder to discern. But even now, few serious conservatives are willing to stand by and watch them trampled quite as wantonly as Klein has done.

“Mr. Klein’s problem,” Peggy Noonan wrote this week, “is that he assumes the market is conservative and conservatives are stupid. They’re not, actually.” The former speechwriter for President Reagan went on to call the book “poorly written, poorly thought, poorly sourced and full of the kind of loaded language that is appropriate to a polemic, but not an investigative work.”

The New York Post’s John Podhoretz described Klein’s book as “one of the most sordid volumes I’ve ever waded through.”

Just how sordid?

Well, it even triggered the gag reflex on Fox News, where Bill O’Reilly announced on-air that he would not interview Klein. The New York Times reported Friday that two other Fox personalities had scheduled, then canceled the author. During his lone appearance on the network, even the credulous Sean Hannity treated Klein with what might charitably be described as skepticism.

Klein attributes all this to conservatives’ anxiety that “a strong frontal criticism of Mrs. Clinton will elicit sympathy for her and turn her into a victim.”

No.

The distaste for this volume arises from its sordid obsession with speculation about Hillary and Bill Clinton’s sex lives; its repeated reliance on single, anonymous sources for all of its more scurrilous allegations and the malicious spirit that virtually oozes from each page.

Sentinel’s motives for all this are clear enough. It printed 350,000 copies of “The Truth About Hillary” and has watched it climb toward the top of the major online bestseller lists. Here there’s little to ponder, but a simple vice: greed. The guys who flood half the world with pornographic DVDs from mail drops in Chatsworth operate in pretty much the same manner -- though without the sanctimony.

Mere avarice cannot explain the author’s motives. Usually one would expect to find some lacerating slight or traumatic grievance behind malice of this sort. If not some deep and terrible grudge, then pathology would seem to be the only rational explanation. Klein’s own biography gives little hint of either. He is a former editor of the New York Times’ Sunday Magazine and of Newsweek’s foreign staff. Previously, he dabbled in pieces for Vanity Fair, which has purchased an excerpt of this book, and other magazines, as well as celebrity bios of the annoying but essentially harmless kind -- “The Kennedy Curse” and “Farewell Jackie.”

Writing this week in the Washington Post, his former Vanity Fair editor Tina Brown notes with slight puzzlement that this book “doesn’t seem in character for Klein. In my experience, when he wrote for me at Vanity Fair, he was motivated only by success. In those days, I appreciated his zesty pursuit of headline stories, even when he was totally unqualified to write them. A Klein hazard, however, was a Clouseau-like imperviousness to social temperature. I am afraid it was I who first assigned him to write a cover story about Jackie O in 1989 on the strength of his avowed friendship with the former first lady. Given her closely guarded privacy, it surprised me when Klein reported that Mrs. Onassis was ‘perfectly amenable’ to his writing the piece. ‘What did she say when you called her?’ I asked. ‘She said, “Oh, Ed, give me a break,” ’ he replied.”

In this country, we don’t make bonfires of either the vain or the vile -- at least not yet. But if speech -- no matter how unworthy -- is important enough to protect, it’s also important that those in position to do so oppose speech that is malevolent or willfully and wickedly mistaken.

It would be easy, for example, to vivisect Klein on a factual basis. Even the most casual reading of this book turns up one error after another. For example, the late Sen. Daniel Patrick Moynihan did not endorse Hillary Clinton in the fashion Klein describes nor did the late Ken Kesey reside at the Hog Farm commune. If the span of personalities seems puzzling, suffice to say that the author’s failure to link Sen. Clinton to the depredations of Alaric the Goth probably represents a failure of ingenuity rather than an insufficiency of spleen.

But this sort of analysis won’t do. The problem with the serious news media’s handling of books like this one is that too many organizations and writers allow themselves to be drawn into reporting or analyzing “the controversy.” In the process, all the prurient allegations -- in fact, the more prurient the better -- no matter how preposterous, are dragged into print so they can be denounced.

Whatever the intention, the practice becomes essentially a form of journalistic laundering.

The way to handle “The Truth About Hillary” responsibly is to give it no further notice, no wider discussion.

Silence.

If the serious media can’t draw the line on this one, then there no longer are any lines to draw.