Anonymous author of 'Primary Colors' goes on-the-record

and Booyeon Lee Journalist Joe Klein, a 1968 College graduate and New Yorker columnist, spoke at the Annenberg School for Communication Thursday as part of the SAS Alumni Lecture Series. What follows is an excerpt from an interview he gave to The Daily Pennsylvanian. Klein became the focus of intense media scrutiny last August when he was revealed to be the author of Primary Colors, a work of political fiction published anonymously in late Januray. The novel's characters and events closely parallel those of Bill Clinton's 1992 primary campaign. The book was a best-seller, and Klein recently sold the movie rights for $1.5 million. DP: Can you expand on your views on government service? Klein: I think you guys can do it better than the government can, essentially. We should be leveraging the altruism of youth. You know, what I've found time and time again is that everybody who goes into these kind of professions -- teaching, social work, policing -- most of them go in with the best of intentions and in a really idealistic way. And then they burn out. And because of the way civil service works in this society, you find people who are 35 years old and just waiting for their pensions to kick in. And we're paying for those pensions, and they're not giving the service. I mean, child abuse case workers can't [work] for more than a year without burning out. So I think that you'd get much better quality service [with youth. You'd get] a boot camp kind of experience, where you're really trained in the job you're about to hold. And you'd make this into a really rigorous thing. You'd have to be really good to get into it and you'd have to be really good to stay in it. And there'd be a physical component to it as well. DP: Are you talking about military service, like in Asia? Klein: Not military service. It would be combining the military boot camp model with public service. DP: And you'd require it for all-- Klein: No. This is not the kind of country where you require things. But it is the kind of country where, if you're the [admissions] dean of law at the University of Pennsylvania or at Harvard and you see someone [apply] who's had four years experience as a cop, and someone who hasn't had four years experience as a cop, you're going to accept the cop. To my mind the really great model that's emerging is the Police Corps, which is just getting underway. There's going to be a training center outside of Baltimore where college graduates are going to go. I'm sure there'll be recruiters coming to this campus. College graduates are going to go for a two-month boot camp where they [will] learn from Navy Seals 36 different ways to take somebody down without really hurting them -- as opposed to shooting them. The police chief of Charleston once said to me, "You know, I'm 50 years old, and you know what happens when I pursue a fleeing felon? The distance between us increases. So I pull out my gun and I shoot him." So these are going to be really well-trained kids. That's half their training. The other half is they're going to have to mentor inner-city kids and really learn the culture they're going into. DP: Did you ever work on the DP? Klein: No. I was a chicken. I was afraid I wasn't going to be any good. DP: When did you get your first journalism job? Coming out of college? Klein: No. It was 1968, and I got a job writing public relations for the printing industry in New York. And I thought to myself, "I am not going to live the rest of my life doing this." So I took the classic coward's way out and applied for graduate school -- at Columbia and at Boston University. I didn't get into Columbia, but I got into BU. [Then] I got a job at a daily newspaper, quit BU after about two or three weeks and have spent every day since as a journalist. DP: Can you describe your time at Penn? What was it like for you emotionally as a student? Klein: I was not a very good student. It was the Sixties. I was very seriously involved in the "active self-liberation." And my education really began -- with certain exceptions; there are certain courses I could cite -- when I started doing it to myself rather than having other people do it to me. I mean, that's been the great thing about being a journalist -- I get to choose my major every year. And so I've gone through various periods in my life. I learned economics at one point. I learned urban policy at another point. I was into law, I learned some brain chemistry. I've been learning Asia the last four years -- that's been my avocation. And that's one of the glories of this job. [The job] enables me to do that. DP: Has your philosophy as a journalist changed over the years? Klein: The interesting thing is no. You know, I always found that -- and it started when I covered bussing in Boston -- that the ideology I brought into any story was insufficient when I saw what the reality was on the street. And so I went into busing, for example, being a big advocate of busing, and then I couldn't find any black people who were actually in favor. You know, I found a lot of black parents saying, "You want to send our kids into South Boston to civilize the honkies? No way." And ever since then, what I've learned has all come from the experience of reporting. And the best times I've had -- the times when I've felt most worthwhile as a human being -- have been when I was out actually reporting stuff. Because my job has a lot of aspects to it. Part of it is theater criticism, which I do pretty well. You know, I can write a scathing, funny account of any given political speech or meeting or debate or whatever. But that's not nearly as satisfying as the reporting, as the learning. DP: When you were first discovered as "Anonymous," you said that one of the reasons you had used a pseudonym was you wanted to "protect your sources, namely yourself." Klein: That was one of the things that I found myself saying that I didn't believe. The question [from the press] was, "Would you lie to protect a source?" And I said that I would lie to protect a source. And then I started thinking, "Well, have I ever lied to protect a source?" And I realized I hadn't. When people had asked me what my source was, I'd say, "None of your business." But in the defensive crouch [at the press conference] I said that. I believe that I had, as a novelist, an absolute, uncontrovertible, unimpeachable right to deny authorship of that book. I was working within a tradition that's existed since the day after the Day One. And no one's ever going to change my mind about that. It was an incredibly awkward situation. It is the only time in 27 years as a journalist that my integrity has ever been questioned. And on that issue I plead guilty. I lied about writing Primary Colors. But it's completely different. I was working in a completely different tradition. I was a novelist, not a journalist. You find one time I've lied in print with my name on it. I've been wrong a hell of a lot of times, but I've really worked overtime to maintain my integrity. One of the things I like about the New Yorker is that they are fetishists when it comes to accuracy. I mean, I've got to call the fact checker right now. DP: Have you been able to repair relations with friends who felt insulted that you lied to them about the book? Klein: That was the most difficult part of it -- the friends I couldn't tell the truth to. The most difficult part of it were the friends who assumed I didn't write it because I didn't say [so]. They didn't even ask me to lie. They just assumed that if I'd written it they would have known. And keeping the burden of the secret was incredibly difficult. It was really exhausting. But I can say that I haven't lost a single friend over this. And I haven't lost a single source over this. There were going to be people in the business who were going to be pissed off at me no matter what. There were going to be people who were pissed at me well before this happened. But I think the storm over this is an example of what I was saying before. [In his lecture earlier Klein had characterized the media as obsessed with petty political scandal.] And this is part of the reason I think journalists are seen skeptically by the rest of the society. The public, I think, was far more aware of the journalistic storm over [Primary Colors] than of my peccadillo [as an anonymous author]. "There they go again," the public groaned. "The [media's] going berserk again." And we go berserk on a three-day basis. I think that -- like the boy who cried wolf -- the public have come to doubt us when we go berserk, because we go berserk over everything. DP: Before Primary Colors you were a member of an elite journalist class. Now you're a member of the celebrity class and you've made millions of dollars. How has that changed your everyday life? Do people recognize you on the street? Klein: People recognize me. But they recognized me on the street before. I was on CBS every week. When you sit next to Dan Rather in the booth at the convention people do tend to notice a little. There are aspects of this I cannot stand. For example, I was on page 6 today in the New York Post because I had to cancel a lecture I was giving Sunday night at the 92nd Street Y in New York. I canceled it about a month-and-a-half ago because I realized that I would have to close a piece [for the New Yorker] this week and I'm leaving for Asia on Friday. Everything was getting squished together. But it was: "Klein ducks tough questions about Primary Colors." Baloney. I mean, I've given interview after interview about this. You know, cynicism is what passes for inside among the mediocre, and the temptation to be cynical is too great for too many journalists. And I've had to deal with that in terms of my celebrity status. But I hang out with my kids. Thank God. We were so worried things would change, that we would have to hire bodyguards. We actually did there for a while. We had to get a hell of a policeman to guard our house, because there were media mobs the first couple of days. But your life doesn't have to change if you don't want it to change. I wasn't a big materialist before this and I'm not a big materialist now.

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