Excerpt
From the Author's Note
I thought I recognized and knew Bill Clinton and what made him tick. I understood the ambition, the success, the political duplicity, the Hollywood charm. I started reading everything ever written about Bill Clinton . . .
As the impeachment psychodrama began, I watched every minisecond of it . . . learned a lot . . . about myself and Bill Clinton and about America . . .
I wasn't just thinking of Bill Clinton anymore, but about a generation, my generation, which, in some ways, even though it was entrenched in power, creeping up on sixty, was still struggling to find itself.
This book is filled with everything I thought about and learned. Ah, yes, except it's not that simple. If only it were . . . but it never is.
I am loath to confess that I have had a writing partner who has cursed my career from the time I was in the sixth grade . . . "the twisted little man inside me."
And as I wrote this book -- about a cultural shadow war that resulted in the figurative assassination of a president (Bill Clinton) -- I realized that the Twisted Little Man was writing feverishly, too. And hallucinating. Daydreaming. Wet-dreaming. Projecting. . . . If you get angry while you're reading this brazen book, blame it on the crude, insulting little prick -- Lord knows, he's gotten too many people terribly angry through the years.
The little devil and I had a nerve-racking, maddening, revolting, hilarious, and climactic time writing this book. We hope that your time reading it will be similar.
Joe Eszterhas
Point Dume, California,
May 2000