New bio reports Clinton told ABC to kill "Path to 9/11"

Carol Felsenthal is a Chicago-based journalist who first contacted me about three years ago, when she was working on a profile of Roger Ebert for Chicago magazine. I was impressed at the resulting piece, which pulled no punches and suggested strongly that the only reason Disney was keeping the Ebert and Roeper show on the air was prestige, not profits. Felsenthal's work would be borne out by later events, as re-up negotiations have gotten bogged down since Ebert took himself off the air, and his partner has had to stop using the famous thumb ratings.

Felsenthal has a new book out this week May 6, Clinton in Exile: A President Out of the White House. I'm about halfway through, but I think that Felsenthal has set the bar high for subsequent biographers/apologists/attack dogs writing about the Clinton post-presidency. Yes, she conducted the requisite supersize number of interviews (165), with enough insiders to the Billary circle to make her reporting credible short of actually getting access to the Clintons. And yes, there's a pile of footnotes, though a separate list of interviews conducted would've been nice, too. But it's her storyline that people are going to find compelling, not to mention timely. She argues that Clinton's bad habits, excess, and lack of focus all cost him dearly as President and now threaten to tarnish his legacy. He is the mirror opposite of his nemesis Jimmy Carter. While Carter has used his inner discipline to rebuild his brand from one-term dud to Nobel laureate, Clinton is spending all the goodwill he built up over two terms like a riverboat gambler. His 2004 memoir My Life, Felsenthal writes, is the embodiment of the ex-President's lack of discipline, a 1,000-page rush job that, she pointedly notes, disappointed Clinton when it didn't win a Pulitzer.

I'll let other reviewers deal with the sauciest revelations from the book, which could be summarized as billionaires, bimbos and Boeings. There's some news in here from the TV front. Felsenthal reviews the inglorious stint of Clinton and Bob Dole doing a point-counterpoint segment on "60 Minutes." Don Hewitt, the show's creator, wanted Bill O'Reilly instead of Dole. But even if Hewitt had found a more acceptable pundit to spar with him, Clinton wouldn't have done anything to hurt Hillary's future ambitions, Felsenthal writes. So a FOB from the GOP was picked instead, with predictable resultzzzzzz.

But the really eyebrow-raising story, and the one that may have legs if the primary battle between his wife and Barack Obama stretches into the summer, is how Team Clinton worked hard to kill off the "Path to 9/11" miniseries on ABC in 2006. Though even close advisors to the Clinton Administration have conceded shortcomings in their response to al-Qaeda — so well laid out in Lawrence Wright's magnificent account The Looming Tower — they all went into attack mode after some FOBs saw a preview of the first night of "Path to 9/11." Even though the script was from a veteran TV docudrama writer who had no real axe to grind, and had been reviewed carefully by 9/11 Commission icon Tom Kean, he was quickly demonized as a right-wing hack by Clintonites and their amen corner in the blogosphere. I remember interviewing Kean and finding him not just to be a celebrity endorser of the miniseries but someone who seemed well acquainted with the accounts and descriptions of the two-night commercial-free program. That, of course, was before Team Clinton went to work. Kean's relationship with Clinton was damaged by the "Path to 9/11" fallout.

Most shameful are the performances of Sandy Berger, who called scenes "defamatory" that reenact accounts he had corroborated elsewhere; and Madeleine Albright, who wanted the movie censored without bothering to watch it. As to the claim that Clinton was less than fully focused on world affairs from 1998 to 2000 because he was being distracted by a certain long-running sex scandal ... does anyone NOT believe that? By recounting the events of "Path to 9/11," Felsenthal tells us a lot about Clinton 42 and how its efforts to protect its legacy may ultimately cripple his wife's chances of being Clinton 44 or 45.

Anyway, it's a great read. Chip Franklin and I talked about the book and other political TV items (Antonin Scalia on "60 Minutes," Craig Ferguson at the White House Correspondents Dinner) today on KOGO. Click the arrow for the player or the link to download: KOGO with Chip Franklin 3-28-2008