The Clinton Tapes:
Wrestling History with
the President

By Taylor Branch

(Simon & Schuster, 707 pp., $35)

In her infamous first sentence of The Journalist and the Murderer, Janet Malcolm swings for the fences and proclaims that "every journalist who is not too stupid or too full of himself to notice what is going on knows that what he does is morally indefensible." She means that journalists use their human subjects and then dispose of them; that we con them in person by "preying on people's vanity, ignorance, or loneliness"--it occurs to me to note that however bleak print's future seems, journalism will at least never run out of material--before gutting them in print. This was a provocative thought in 1990, in those years of innocence before the Internet turned the guttings into a spectator sport.

From the Editors: As long as there have been politicians, there have been scandals. And the juiciest political scandals have always revolved around sex. With John Edwards finally admitting that he fathered a child with filmmaker Rielle Hunter, and torrid rumors circulating about an upcoming New York Times profile of New York Governor David Paterson, TNR decided to take a look back at the most famous of all sex scandals: Bill Clinton and Monica Lewinsky.