How to kill a book, in 3 easy steps

Here's how you kill a book:

First, see to it that it emerges into the public eye on the Friday of a holiday weekend.


Then, express ostentatious boredom at its contents.

Then, attack.

Clinton spokesman Howard Wolfson declined to comment on the question of whether the campaign leaked to The Washington Post a copy of one of two forthcoming biographies of Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton (D-N.Y.). And though there’s no confirmation that the Clinton campaign leaked either book, there is at least some circumstantial evidence that points that way.

“The only people who have an interest in putting it out on a Friday before Memorial Day are the Clinton folks,” said Chris Lehane, a veteran of Clinton White House damage control.

The use on Clinton’s website of passages from one book also appeared to confirm that the campaign had a copy of the book in its possession.

Meanwhile Philippe Reines, Clinton’s spokesman, drew chuckles inside the Beltway for his canned response to the books: “Is it possible to be quoted yawning?”

But the campaign's precise reaction contradicted its showy lack of interest, particularly in one of the two books: “Her Way,” by former New York Times reporter Jeff Gerth and current Timesman Don Van Natta Jr.

At 8:41 p.m. on Thursday, before The Washington Post story appeared, Media Matters for America, a Democratic-leaning group whose founders are close to the New York Democrat senator's presidential campaign, launched a dense 2,713-word attack on Gerth. The reporter has been loathed by some Clinton supporters since he was the first national journalist to write about the Whitewater affair in 1992, an investigation that unpredictably would lead to Clinton's impeachment six years later. (Media Matters spokesman Karl Frisch didn't respond immediately to the question of whether his group had coordinated with the Clinton campaign.)

At 1:24 p.m. Friday, the campaign went on the attack. Clinton research director Judd Legum posted a blog item on Clinton’s website claiming that “the book's central premise has already been debunked.”

The premise in question: that the Clintons had long plotted a two-decade path for both of them to the White House. A source quoted in The Washington Post, the historian Taylor Branch, disputed Gerth and Van Natta’s report that Branch had told two people about the "plan."

In the Post piece detailing the books’ contents, Reines declared, evidently between yawns, that they are “cash for rehash.”

“I think that was a phrase that they concocted months ago, before they knew the first thing about what was in our book,” Van Natta said Friday in an interview from his New Jersey home. “I wonder if they'll be yawning when they realize more than half our book is about Hillary’s Senate career, and it’s all new material.”

He also criticized the Post’s stress on the early portions of the book and its focus on the notion of a two-decade Clinton “plan.”

“Peter Baker did a terrible job,” he said of the Post's lead reporter on the Friday piece.

Baker declined to respond to Van Natta's criticism.

The Post article reveals details of both the Gerth and Van Natta volume and of Carl Bernstein’s “A Woman in Charge,” though the Clinton campaign’s attack on the former is more intense. It reports that “Her Way” delves into Hillary Clinton’s supervising attacks on an alleged Bill Clinton lover, Gennifer Flowers, and quotes passages from Bernstein’s book on Hillary Clinton’s reaction to her husband’s infidelity. The Post also said that the book dwells on Bill Clinton’s attempts to seize the issue of climate change from his vice president, Al Gore.

The Post piece doesn’t contain any blockbuster new facts, though the return to the sordid Clinton coverage of the 1990s may serve as a reminder of what voters liked least about the Clinton presidency.

The Post reports that the Times reporters’ book “suggests” that Hillary Clinton did not read the National Intelligence Estimate on Iraq in 2002 before voting to authorize the invasion of Iraq. Reines responded Friday that she had been briefed on it.

None of the other senators running for president has claimed to have read the document at the time, and John McCain and Chris Dodd conceded Friday to The Politico that they had not, while spokesmen for the others did not respond immediately to the question. The Washington Post reported in 2004 that only six senators had viewed the classified report.

Any leaks, and the campaign against the book, are not new tactics.

During Clinton’s 2000 Senate campaign, Wolfson directed a fierce campaign at another book, “Hillary's Choice,” by Gail Sheehy. As in this case, the attacks began before the book hit the stands, and focused on — in that case — real inaccuracies. Wolfson went so far as to appear at Sheehy’s book events to discredit the volume.

It was a pattern that repeated Friday.

“Given that the central premise has already been discredited two weeks before its publication date, I can understand why Mr. Van Natta is unhappy,” Wolfson said. Only the Clinton campaign has characterized Branch’s comments that way, and Van Natta denied that the supposed “20-year plan” was the book’s central premise.

The leak seemed calculated to catch the publishers off guard, though people familiar with each book’s publication plans said both are still on schedule. Bernstein’s book is due out from Knopf on June 5.

The Gerth and Van Natta volume is due out from Little, Brown on June 8, and an 8,000-word treatment of the book’s details on the run-up to the Iraq war is still scheduled to run on the cover of The New York Times Magazine on June 3, people familiar with the plans said.

Van Natta said part of its inspiration came from reading Hillary Clinton's own autobiography, “Living History.”

“I read her autobiography, and it was a big incentive for me to take on ‘Her Way,’” he said.

“I thought her book was mainly a platform for her inevitable run for president, and it raised more questions about her than it answered.”

He declined to discuss the substance of “Her Way,” which was not obtained by The Politico. The Clinton campaign didn’t respond to requests from Politico for the book, and the publisher is maintaining its embargo.

Van Natta also engaged the Clinton campaign’s main attack on his book, a dispute over his report that the historian Branch had told two others early in the Clinton presidency that President Clinton “still planned two terms in the White House for Bill and, later, two for Hillary.”

Talking to the Post, Branch dismissed the report as “preposterous” and said he’d never heard talk of a “plan” for both Clintons to be president.

Van Natta responded that “the Post implied we did not contact [Branch], but we did and he declined to comment.”

“He's one of Bill Clinton’s best friends,” Van Natta added.

He also said he had a second source for the supposed plan.

“Leon Panetta is quoted in our book talking about the 20-year project,” he said, referring to the former White House chief of staff for Bill Clinton.

Panetta did not respond immediately to a call seeking his version of events.