Yes and no. By the way, that's in part based on personal experience. I felt the same way during the time I spent with Clinton. I was seduced just like...

The punditocracy, which is the main people I write about, actually. It's this group of mainly Washington-based pundits, people who appear on the media...

You start out in the opening introduction saying that you, and this is a disqualifier-- that George Stephanopoulos, the communications spokesman for...

... was in your wedding.

But you did quote him.

Was it hard to get him to talk about -- because in one, in the conclusion, again, you quote him talking about how the punditocracy works and how the...

... And you got him to say that, "Clinton's foreign policy speeches, for instance," explained deputy campaign manager and spokesman George Stephanopoulos,...

Explain that.

Only the people, that the politicians are answerable to.

You said pundits.

Now, in the case of a presidential election, eventually, quite late in the process actually, the American people are actually invited in to have some...

And so before anyone has cast a vote in New Hampshire, you have a front-runner. You have someone who has been "anointed," in the words of Sydney Blumenthal...

Right.

I don't remember if they gave Gelb the speech or not. I ...

Well, what happened was ...

Right. What would happen is the day before the speech, I believe, there was a phone call, but I think -- I don't know for sure whether or not Gelb had...

All right. Is defeated ...

... recently. And these people are the kinds of politicians who the punditocracy respects. And so speaking quite honestly, Les Gelb -- I mean, there's...

Les Gelb found that ...

Right. They picked the person who they thought would have, on these issues, on foreign policy issues, would have the widest resonance within the punditocracy....

Let's try to put somebody in Des Moines, Iowa, for the moment and they just live there, and they read your local newspaper and Jack Kilpatrick's column...

Let's try some of the others. Who ...

Who matters? And who doesn't matter?

He's Washington Post.

But why does he matter? And how did you decide that he matters?

But what -- try to get through the why -- Bill Safire didn't all of a sudden wake up one day and become somebody that matters.

What about his writing?

All right. Now let me ask you, in one of the footnotes, and I'm not sure I can find it quickly enough, you take a little bit of an aside about Evans...

Are they read?

Evans and Novak usually get their facts pretty close to right. They enjoy reporting and they work hard. But what they do is they create this context...

Yeah. They're read because they always get that damn kernel of fact. Can I say damn on C-SPAN? Sorry.

All right. No, they do report. They wear out their shoe leather, particularly Novak. Evans is more of a foreign policy sort of parlor reporter who goes...

I live now in Palo Alto, California. I lived in Washington for most of the '80s, and I moved to Palo Alto when I finished this book, when I turned it...

Because I wanted to complete my doctorate in American history at Stanford University.

I went undergraduate to Cornell University and studied history and government there, and then I got a masters in international relations at Yale University.

I was born in New York.

Yeah, I guess. Flushings, New York City.

Well, I think I wrote this book for -- I mean, I hope I wrote this book for the same reason that people want to read this book, is that I started to...

Well, I wrote a very long article in a journal called the World Policy Journal. I am a senior fellow of a think tank called the World Policy Institute,...

Most people would probably define me as a liberal, but I don't really like the definition. I don't like most labels. I think I'm quite conservative...

Well, I was just talking about this with a friend at lunch before I came over here. I think that the United States would be a lot better off if we gave...

So I think if Bill Clinton is serious and becomes president, if he's serious about fixing this economy and getting our productive resources going, he's...

Okay, that's an interesting story. To me, it's as illustrative as anything of the way the punditocracy influence works.

Well, the punditocracy are the people you see on "The McLaughlin Group," on the "Capital Gang," on the David Brinkley show and in the op-ed pages of...

Mostly conservative, but not exclusively. They're important liberals. But the liberals are usually not anywhere near as influential as the conservatives.

Well, I do consider myself a conservative, as I said, in a lot of ways.

I well, I have very little faith in the government's ability to fix things. I have very little faith, particularly, in our country's ability to go around...

Gulf War.

Punditocracy.

By himself.

Nobody on the day that Saddam Hussein invaded Kuwait -- literally, no one -- was talking about actually fighting to save Kuwait. There was some discussion...

Right.

I think Abe Rosenthal's a parody of William Safire. I think William Safire is a great reporter and an independent thinker and someone you have to read...

Well, this is a sensitive subject, so we have to talk about it ...

... sensitively. But among neo-conservative writers who were once liberals and are now conservatives, an enormous influence on their thinking has been...

But Abe Rosenthal -- he basically uses his column, I believe, as a means of defending Israel whenever possible, even when Israel does things which most...

I went there for a semester in my sophomore year of college. I've been there four times. And my next book is about Israel. I'm about to sign a contract...

It is and it isn't. I mean, emotionally, it's harder because you can be called a traitor to your people, which is a difficult thing to be called. I...

Well, for a long time, this began to change after the invasion of Lebanon in 1982, and it only began to change then. It had changed -- the Intifadah...

You said earlier that you wanted to separate what you feel about this from Pat Buchanan. Explain that further.

I mean, the weapon of accusing someone of being an anti-Semite in this country is a very powerful one, as is accusing people like Tony Lewis, who I...

But I think what happened is that the neo-conservative attack on Pat -- as a result of these issues and the attack of some of the major Jewish organizations...

You're right.

Yeah, although I wanted Jeane Kirkpatrick. But ...

Yeah. But we couldn't get her because the cartoon is by David Levine --David Levine is a famous caricature artist; he writes for the New York Review...

Henry belongs there, actually. Buckley is the one I'm a little nervous about because Buckley is not a member of the Washington punditocracy. Buckley...

Kissinger, by the way, had another one during the Iraq war, during the Gulf War, where a member of his staff had participated in a meeting with Saddam...

Where have you worked?

George Stephanopoulos.

How old are you today?

I left that and I started this period of my life where I went to school at Yale and shuttled back and forth to Paris, and I wrote for Le Monde Diplomatique...

They translate me. I read very well in French, I must say, can translate it. I can read French, but I don't write it. And then after doing that for...

Yeah. We paid for it.

It's a private foundation. It's funded by other foundations. Well, actually, no, now it's funded through the New School for Social Research in New York.

Oh, it's a very famous university that's been around forever. It was particularly famous. It's a great place, actually. They do wonderful adult education...

You say in your book about Mr. Sweninger, "The most thoughtful, knowledgeable and original unsung strategic genius in American political and intellectual...

Can you give us a little more?

It came out a week...

But Shirl was, I think, and certainly in the case of my writing, was the intellectual inspiration and the sort of disciplinary agent for these articles....

Yeah. I asked them for that.

LaFeber.

Is that the correct pronunciation?

LaFeber. Excuse me. Any reason why you chose those folks?

And wha...

Some of the personal stories -- the personal life of George Will and John McLaughlin and the fight between John McLaughlin and ...

... Robert Novak and other things are in here. Why was that necessary for your book? What was the purpose of printing that?

I like to read gossip as much as anyone else, and as long as I think it's

Any new gossip for those who like gossip?

Which one does?

So in the case of John McLaughlin, he can -- let me just give you a quick example. If you, if someone wants to review my book in The New York Times,...

Two women who also worked for him said that they had experienced similar things, in their view -- again, I'm paraphrasing. And then another woman, a...

Why don't we?

By the way, go back to the what you just said about John McLaughlin. Have all those charges, have any of those charges been proven?

Aren't you innocent until proven guilty?

John McLaughlin committed any of these acts. I happen to believe the one -- the fourth woman, who I spoke to at length about it and who was sort of...

He refused to talk to me.

Yeah.

He ran away from me.

Yeah. I asked him. I was writing an article about him for The Washington Post, which formed the basis for this book, and everything I've just told you...

Virtually everyone. George Will and I had sort of a funny experience about not talking, and we ended up not talking, and I'll tell you that in a minute...

Okay. Well, I'm just telling you who else didn't talk to me.

Meg Greenfield of The Washington Post, for some reason, didn't answer any of my queries, either on the phone or in the mail. But virtually everybody...

I mean, the man is completely obsessed with Robert Bork's losing his Supreme Court nomination. And he never says anywhere, as far as I know -- and I...

Let me ask you, though, you say that you're kind of journalistically undesirable in this town now, or you've...

... used the ...

Now the fact that you're on this show, are we now making enemies of the powerful people? Is that the way it works in ...

Well, let me just ask you, if John McLaughlin invited you to be on his CNBC show, would you go on it?

You would not go on it.

What about the "Capital Gang" on CNN?

But where do you draw the line? I mean, what's ...

I don't own this network.

Who owns Harper Collins, the book publisher?

Philip Roth made a wonderful comment about the difference once between Eastern Europe under communism and the West. He said, "There, nothing goes and...

In your introduction, you talk about Ron Steel because you write two chapters -- actually, the first section is all about Walter Lippmann...

... and pre-Walter Lippmann and post-Walter Lippmann. You say that you wanted to thank Ron Steel, who wrote the biography, the long one and "for writing...

And Ron was kind enough -- Ron, who's been a sort of friend of mine and an adviser to me since I went to the Carnegie Endowment 10 years ago, where...

No. Ron, quite correctly -- he's in Berlin now, so he's not going to watch this, which is good. But he quite correctly understood the one thing about...

Right.

The first part or the second part?

Okay. Well, the first part is about Charles. They're actually related. When I began this book I had what I would consider to be a less sophisticated...

So far as the moral and intellectual complications of the task I had undertaken -- well, just to give you an example, Charles is an editor, is now senior...

What's the Will story? Because we're running out of time.

But, anyway, I reminded him of two things after we were done debating. It was very civil and I enjoyed it a great deal, even though I lost and I was...