The Hunting of the President: The Ten-year Campaign to Destroy Bill and Hillary Clinton - Softcover

Unhappy reading for Republicans or political naïfs, The Hunting of the President is the story of a sustained and well-funded effort to discredit and defeat Bill Clinton, dating from his gubernatorial days in Arkansas and eventually leading to his impeachment trial. Award-winning journalists Joe Conason and Gene Lyons have crafted a tale as compulsively readable as a political thriller--paced, and at times worded, like a summer bestseller. Although they provide ample evidence of backstabbing, revenge, deceit, conniving, and "dirty tricks" in the struggle to oust Clinton, arguing that "the better the president and the country did, the more his adversaries appeared willing to endorse almost anything short of assassination to do him in," they also acknowledge that Clinton's reckless behavior, along with the "panicky, defensive, and occasionally less-than-perfectly-honest" responses of the White House press office, didn't hurt his opponents. Investigative journalism at its juiciest, The Hunting of the President is a surprising valediction to a far-from-angelic public leader who often outmaneuvered his enemies with otherworldly skill. --Regina Marler

Joe Conason is the national correspondent for the New York Observer, where he writes a political column that is distrubuted by the United Features Syndicate. He is also a contributing editor for Talk magazine and a contributer to Salon.com. His writing has appeared in The Nation, Harper's, The New Yorker, and many other publications.

Gene Lyons won the National Magazine Award in 1980. He has written extensively for Newsweek, Harper's The Nation, The New Review of Books, Texas Monthly, Entertainment Weekly, and many other magazines. His books include The Higher Illiteracy (University of Arkansas, 1988), Widow's Web (Simon & Schuster, 1993), and Fools for Scandal (Franklin Square, 1996). He writes a political column for the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette.