Mr. Brill, Mr. Curry

“There aren’t many dissenters in the room,” said another young man at the party Monday night for Steven Brill’s new book, Class Warfare, about education reform in the United States. The young man, blond, worked with one of the schooling organizations celebrated in the book.

“But, us two,” he continued to The Observer. “We’re certainly in the lowest income percentile in the room -- unless you inherited wealth, unless you come from serious money.”

The Observer said we had not.

We had come to the corner of Fifth Avenue and 63rd Street, a hundred-year-old Upper East Side estate purchased by Leonard Blavatnik in 2005 for $31 million, to discuss Mr. Brill’s problems with the state of the city’s public schools. The townhouse is crusted in ancient stone between the last buildings standing before Central Park starts, a relic with princely marble that leads the eye to a pebbled courtyard, an anteroom, and then several more anterooms.

Copper platters swung around offering steak tartare, truffle grilled cheese mini-sandwiches and goblets full of sloshing red and white wine. Jill Abramson, executive editor of The New York Times, Jeffrey Toobin, staff writer for The New Yorker, and John Hickenlooper, governor of Colorado, chit-chatted with members of education agencies associated with Mr. Brill’s philosophy. Ms. Abramson, newly installed atop The Times’ editorial masthead, had a long conversation with party pic legend Patrick McMullan as one of the paper’s Wall Street staffers stood by blurting off exclamations in the direction of Mr. McMullan’s powerful camera.

“Steve’s taken a lot of hits,” Boykin Curry, a money manager friend of Mr. Brill’s and the man behind the party, as he addressed the crowd atop a podium. “The New York Review of Books hired Diane Ravitch to review the book. That’s like having Richard Nixon review All The President’s Men!”

Mr. Brill took the stand.

“Thank you, thank you,” he said.

He began pointing out the people in the audience mentioned in the book.

“Jessica Reid,” Mr. Brill said. He gestured toward a young blonde woman with a buoyant dress and ample smile.

“If you’ve read it, you’ll know she’s dressed the way she is in the book.”

Talk turned serious. When discussing a teacher, he revealed that she was allowed to keep teaching despite an indiscretion.

“She actually ended up passed out drunk in her Stuyvesant High School classroom.”

A few women in the audience gasped.

The speeches ended, and afterward everyone stuck around for another drink, as Mr. Brill had implored.

“It’s all Steve’s friends, he knows everybody, and they do what he says,” Boykin Curry said. “He commands them.”

We went on, and then Mr. Brill walked up to us as we were talking about the dissenters, the people he couldn’t command.

“Did we invite Diane Ravitch?” Mr. Curry asked.

“It’s improper legal etiquette to invite someone who’s threatening to sue you,” Mr. Brill snapped.

We said thank you, and as we walked toward the door, Mr. Brill stepped forward to grab one of the last pigs-in-a-blanket from the server’s silver tray.

“This is so terribly pretentious,” he sighed.

NOURIEL ROUBINI LIVES 62 BLOCKS SOUTH  and five blocks east of the Blavatnik mansion, and when we arrived by cab at Dr. Doom’s house we entered a door on First Street, took an elevator up six floors and opened the penthouse, where a flock of somewhere-by-way-of-extraction fabulous people were dolled-up and watching a projection of Sean Penn intone goodness on the giant screen. Mr. Roubini was a bit obscured behind the columns, but his atrium said it all -- three levels gripped around a staircase that shared its extra space with a helix of floating orbs linked together by golden strings.

“Where did you get those loafers,” a woman said to my friend who we came to the party with.

He looked at her.

“Stubbs & Wootton, 73rd and Lex,” he responded.

“Don’t tell the downtown crew about Stubbs & Wootton!” an eavesdropping woman yelled.

Mr. Roubini is best-known for his position teaching at the NYU Stern School of Business and his morbid -- but often scarily accurate -- predictions regarding the economic climate, which accounts for his “Dr. Doom” moniker. But, he’s also known for throwing great parties.

Where do these Monday night hosts differ, then? Both Mr. Brill and Mr. Roubini are respected academics, yet we can’t remember the Steve Brill blasting Rihanna’s “Only Girl” as guests commandeered the bar from its tenders.

“Don’t worry, don’t worry” Mr. Roubini said from behind a table with empty bottles of booze splayed about.

This was the place where we had met him, moments earlier.

“We’re getting more liquor,” Mr. Roubini said. “And we’re getting more wine.”

The Observer refilled our vodka as the tenant opened a bottle of red with his fist. We finished it and all of a sudden he was right. There was more liquor. And then we drank it.

And as we left we wondered: Was Roubini predicting his doom there on the chilly patio, there on that glowing yellow bench, his arm around a young woman? Perhaps, the only doom we could predict was a hangover.

The story goes that in 1982, when Mr. Schumer was a state congressman, he and his wife, CUNY vice chancellor Iris Weinshall, spent about $157,000 on an apartment in a prewar doorman building on Prospect Park West. It was a stretch at the time. "Now it's the only major asset we own," Mr. Schumer says in the profile, "but it's worth much more, probably ten times that."

He's quite proud of the appreciation. Back when senior Minnesota Senator Amy Klobuchar was just a candidate, she went on a bike tour of Brooklyn with Mr. Schumer. His antics made her daughter uncomfortable. "Chuck has a bullhorn, and he stops in front of his building and announces that he and Iris bought their apartment for a hundred and fifty thousand dollars and now it's worth ten times that much," she says. "And my twelve-year-old daughter pulled on my jacket and said, 'Mom, if you said that in Minnesota, you'd be in so much trouble.'"

Minnesota children are more discreet than their New York counterparts.

By comparison, Mr. Schumer's Capitol Hill apartment is seedy. "Our rats," says Massachusetts Congressman Bill Delahunt, who shares the place with Mr. Schumer, "scare our cockroaches." Mr. Toobin calls the place "famously unhygienic," noting that Mr. Schumer's clothes "look like they've been stored in tense adjacency to Chinese-food containers." His father, by the way, was an exterminator.

Kagan’s ambition is, of course, one of the few things that is known about her, and the anecdote of her dressing in Supreme Court robes for her high school yearbook has spread wide. She is also known for being efficient, and popular as a dean, but today's story offers some insight into just how efficient and popular she was.

For example, when confronted with an unpopular plan to move the law school across the Charles River:

She hired a consultant, and persuaded the university to foot the bill, producing a 101-page strategic plan that considered everything from future growth to dormitory space to the intellectual benefits of remaining near the arts and sciences buildings.

And when Drew Gilpin Faust edged out Kagan for the Harvard presidency:

...law school students threw Ms. Kagan a party. Several hundred of them turned up in “I ♥ EK” T-shirts; The Harvard Crimson reported that Ms. Kagan teared up at the sight. [emphasis added]

Page Six also looked at Kagan’s time at Harvard today, but as a student rather than as dean. And really, the story is more about New Yorker/CNN contributor and Kagan classmate Jeffrey Toobin.

"They were only in study groups together. They weren't friends. Yet he now goes on TV every night yammering on about her," said one source.

...

"She kept to herself," Toobin said the other night on CNN. "All of her actual friends say the opposite," said our source.

So what kind of development projects does CNN actually have in the works these day?

Here's one....

Recently, according to CNN sources, the network's in-house team shot a pilot for a news show featuring David Shuster of MSNBC and Michel Martin of NPR as co-anchors. The pilot, we're told, also featured medical and opinion segments, and included appearances by several current CNN contributors, including Chrystia Freeland, the U.S. managing editor for the Financial Times and Jeffrey Toobin of The New Yorker. 

Reached on Wednesday night, Ms. Martin declined to comment. Ditto Mr. Shuster. Ditto CNN.

Will the project ever see the light of day?  It's a toss-up. You can bet that the CNN cupboard is well stocked with ideas like the Martin-Shuster pairing that might never make it out of TV purgatory--that well-populated land where ideas exist when they are not quite alive and not quite dead.

More >> CNN Still Very Pro-America in Lou Dobbs' Old Slot

For example, last September, Fishbowl L.A. reported that CNN was casting for a Crossfire-like show, which would feature a conservative pundit dueling with a liberal over the news of the day.

And in March, Dylan Stableford of The Wrap reported that CNN was working on a pilot for a Morning Joe-like morning show.

TV networks are constantly testing out anchors and toying with new show ideas. Most never make it on the air. In the end, despite the best efforts of agents, development executives, and research departments (and despite the friendly speculation from colleagues past and present) most big casting decisions in TV news (see Stephanopoulos, George) still come down to the gut instincts of the network's top boss.

For the last 10 months, Ms. Lafsky has been known to her reading public only as Opinionista; on her blog she published wearied accounts of the punishing culture at big law firms.

She is now, thanks to her fellow bloggers at the media-gossip Web site Gawker, revealed to be a comely 27-year-old Dartmouth and University of Virginia Law School grad with a fondness for the French manicure.

In recent months, Ms. Lafsky has been fluffing the pillows for her landing, a sort of “soft opening” phase for her product launch. Profiled but not named in The New York Times in November, she posed so that her face was obscured; in this month’s The American Lawyer, she hinted that her identity would soon be revealed; and her blog plugged an interview with The Observer minutes after the interview was complete.

Of course, prior to this week’s non-spontaneous self-disclosure, Ms. Lafsky had already procured herself an agent—ICM’s blog-adoring Kate Lee—and worked up 100 pages of a manuscript loosely based on her life as a lawyer-blogger. (“It’s not a roman à clef,” she said. “It’s not The Devil Wears Brooks Brothers!”)

All told, she has taken great care with the calculations for this now-common postmodern butterfly moment: The Reveal, that increasingly strategized full disclosure of a buzzy anonymous blogger’s true identity.

In the best case, this sort of I.P.O. helps publicize a fledgling novel or paid writing gig, or at least helps garner interest that might lead to the above. In the worst case, it engenders coy reprisals or unreadable “go-girl!” enthusiasm from fellow bloggers alternately annoyed or enraptured with the lifestyles of the newly non-anonymous.

“Is there some sort of internerd law that dictates all anonymous bloggers must eventually reveal themselves through a contorted ritual of self-referential blog posts and media publicity?” went the line on Gawker in the post where Ms. Lafsky’s reveal took place. “We thought that crap always came after the book deal.”

Or, on Jolie in NYC, a blog that identifies its writer as a “pop-culture obsessed (former) beauty editor in the big city” (but who was outed as Nadine Haobsh in 2005), moments after the Gawker post:

“I absolutely cannot wait for the book, the TV series, the movie, everything. Unlike some (most? all?), she’s really earned it.”

The buzz lifecycle is depressingly short; anonymous bloggers are many. Pity the unprepared—but not Ms. Lafsky!

Last month, she signed with Ms. Lee and resigned from her law firm. Last week, she posed in a nightgown for a spread on female bloggers for a future issue of Fashion Week Daily. When she’s not working on her novel, she’s been furiously preparing her blog for a relaunch—complete with her name and professionally taken picture.

Earlier this week, she removed some ticking legal time bombs, such as her posts about law-firm characters like the Ogre (a sadistic male partner) and the Queen Bee (a tough female partner who rules with “nasal proclamations”)—undoubtedly litigious folks who might recognize more of themselves in her characters than they like (most recently, Ms. Lafsky worked at the labor and employment firm Littler Mendelson, but she said she was a summer associate at Morgan, Lewis & Bockius and worked as a paralegal at both Cravath, Swaine & Moore and Proskauer Rose). She also contacted a publicist and more than one reporter.

“In five years, I don’t want to be known as a blogger. I’d like to be known as a writer,” said Ms. Lafsky. “A blog is a means to an end.”

"THERE'S A 'LET ME BE ANONYMOUS FOR TWO MONTHS and as soon as someone comes at me with a book contract, yes, I’ll come out’ mentality among bloggers,” said Alex Balk, the blogger behind the formerly anonymous media satire blog The Major Fall, The Minor Lift. His own reveal came quietly, in a tagline attached to an article he wrote in the Arts and Leisure section of The New York Times, a little more than a year after he launched his blog. “It was a lot less strategic than the way people do it nowadays,” he said.

“I’ve thought about it and what it means, but I have no desire to do it anytime soon,” said the still-anonymous author of WaiterRant.net about a reveal of his own. “There are a couple of things to anonymity: Just from a purely mercenary point of view, if you want to pursue this for money—which every blogger wants to do—then you have to consider whether putting yourself out there too early sabotages the mystique that you’ve put out there or the mystique that has grown up around you.”

Timing is everything—just ask David Lat.

Before Ms. Lafsky, the latest big public offering has been Mr. Lat, the former prosecutor who made federal judges seem juicy and scintillating on his Underneath Their Robes blog and scored an unmasking in The New Yorker. Mr. Lat described his unveiling as actually “very messy”: He hadn’t gotten his boss’ approval for the interview, and he didn’t yet have a new job or book proposal to flog. His big new assignment—co-editing Wonkette.com—is somewhat less big and less establishment than some expected. He is working on a book idea.

Mr. Lat is, in fact, the perfect example of the reveal by crisis—rather than quit his job, he chose to have his exposure force himself out of one; a self-engineered “crisitunity,” to use the Homer Simpson portmanteau.

Mr. Lat admitted that before he agreed to go public in the care of Jeffrey Toobin, he had fielded e-mails from reporters for the Associated Press, The Washington Post, The New York Times and The Wall Street Journal.

“Their timing might have been unfortunate for them; I wasn’t ready or willing to reveal myself. Toobin’s timing was very good,” said Mr. Lat. His site had been up for about year and a half when Mr. Toobin came calling. (“I did urge her/him,” said Mr. Toobin of soliciting the would-be femme fatale of legal bloggers, though “at this point I knew it to be ‘him.’”)

“It was a very exciting time, because it was around the time of the Harriet Miers nomination—Harriet Miers was such a fat target for blogosphere commentary,” said Mr. Lat. “I was just a very active blogger. I was getting a lot of buzz. I began to feel more confident in my ability to use it as a calling card for future opportunities.”

Said his agent, David Kuhn, via e-mail: “What will matter most to publishers in terms of any book he writes is the quality of the proposal or manuscript.”

Sure, no doubt.

MUCH LIKE MR. LAT, JEREMY BLACHMAN, WHO WRITES the Anonymous Lawyer blog in the voice of a fictional law-firm partner, also had decided that he wanted to do something besides practice law. So he grabbed for that little brass ring by dropping an e-mail to a Times reporter who had interviewed him on a prior occasion.

“I knew that I wanted to write, but I wasn’t sure how to find those opportunities. I was definitely eager for someone to write a story about me,” he said.

Deciding to take the step to come out from behind the e-mail anonymizer is fraught for at least some bloggers. Mr. Lat recalled meeting Mr. Toobin for a preliminary lunch at the Condé Nast cafeteria. “I was very nervous,” he said, and had insisted that Mr. Toobin not identify him by his blogging name—“Article 3 Groupie”—if they ran into anyone he knew. The alibi was that they were two former Harvard Crimson editors meeting to talk about journalism.

Mr. Lat told Mr. Toobin, “I felt frustrated that I was putting a lot of time into this and was unable to get any credit for it.”

He clarified later: “That quote came off as a little self-aggrandizing, but really what I was trying to say is that anonymous bloggers put in a lot of time and effort into their projects, and they don’t get that very human need for recognition,” he said. “At a certain point, you want to step forward and take a bow.”

“Being anonymous has in a way bothered me for a while,” said Ms. Lafsky. “I want to put my name on what I’m saying. I believe what I’m saying. Anonymity, while it is valuable—and it has allowed me to stay employed—is also very limiting, because there’s so much I can’t say, because then people will figure out who I am. And also, it really limits my credibility.

“For example, there’s a huge contingency on the Internet that insists I’m a man …. In that sense, part of me just wants to be like, ‘Screw you, I’m a 27-year-old girl, and there are plenty of other people just like me—let’s cut the gender-stereotypical bullshit’ …. I stand behind all the things that I’ve written. I’ve written about a lot of women’s issues, and the implication that I’m a man is pretty insulting.

“I’m proud of what I’ve written on this blog,” Ms. Lafsky continued. “I believe in everything I’ve said. Not every post has been War and Peace, but I think I’ve said a lot of things … that resonated with a lot of people, affected some people. I’d like them to know that I’m a real person—that it’s not just some teenage boy in his parents’ basement.

“I don’t see it as a grand debut; I just see it as an announcement. Once I put my name out, I’m really forcing myself to really make a career in writing work.”

Still, Ms. Lafsky acknowledged the useful role that she hoped her outing would play in a future book deal: “Any media mention, any media interest in your blog— anything to set it apart from the nine million other names that come into publishing offices.”

Like everyone else, the anonymous author of WaiterRant.net is also working on a book proposal but hasn’t yet settled on an agent. He also may not—shocker!—make his identity known. “It may not be in the best interest of book sales to let everyone know who I am,” he said.

Still, after the reveal is over, some don’t feel like scaling those bleak literary heights at all. “I haven’t written the $300,000 novel,” said Mr. Balk, of TMFTML, of his post-anonymous existence. “I’ve got a book review in Time Out coming out in a few weeks.”

For the last 10 months, Ms. Lafsky has been known to her reading public only as Opinionista; on her blog she published wearied accounts of the punishing culture at big law firms.

She is now, thanks to her fellow bloggers at the media-gossip Web site Gawker, revealed to be a comely 27-year-old Dartmouth and University of Virginia Law School grad with a fondness for the French manicure.

In recent months, Ms. Lafsky has been fluffing the pillows for her landing, a sort of “soft opening” phase for her product launch. Profiled but not named in The New York Times in November, she posed so that her face was obscured; in this month’s The American Lawyer, she hinted that her identity would soon be revealed; and her blog plugged an interview with The Observer minutes after the interview was complete.

Of course, prior to this week’s non-spontaneous self-disclosure, Ms. Lafsky had already procured herself an agent—ICM’s blog-adoring Kate Lee—and worked up 100 pages of a manuscript loosely based on her life as a lawyer-blogger. (“It’s not a roman à clef,” she said. “It’s not The Devil Wears Brooks Brothers!”)

All told, she has taken great care with the calculations for this now-common postmodern butterfly moment: The Reveal, that increasingly strategized full disclosure of a buzzy anonymous blogger’s true identity.

In the best case, this sort of I.P.O. helps publicize a fledgling novel or paid writing gig, or at least helps garner interest that might lead to the above. In the worst case, it engenders coy reprisals or unreadable “go-girl!” enthusiasm from fellow bloggers alternately annoyed or enraptured with the lifestyles of the newly non-anonymous.

“Is there some sort of internerd law that dictates all anonymous bloggers must eventually reveal themselves through a contorted ritual of self-referential blog posts and media publicity?” went the line on Gawker in the post where Ms. Lafsky’s reveal took place. “We thought that crap always came after the book deal.”

Or, on Jolie in NYC, a blog that identifies its writer as a “pop-culture obsessed (former) beauty editor in the big city” (but who was outed as Nadine Haobsh in 2005), moments after the Gawker post:

“I absolutely cannot wait for the book, the TV series, the movie, everything. Unlike some (most? all?), she’s really earned it.”

The buzz lifecycle is depressingly short; anonymous bloggers are many. Pity the unprepared—but not Ms. Lafsky!

Last month, she signed with Ms. Lee and resigned from her law firm. Last week, she posed in a nightgown for a spread on female bloggers for a future issue of Fashion Week Daily. When she’s not working on her novel, she’s been furiously preparing her blog for a relaunch—complete with her name and professionally taken picture.

Earlier this week, she removed some ticking legal time bombs, such as her posts about law-firm characters like the Ogre (a sadistic male partner) and the Queen Bee (a tough female partner who rules with “nasal proclamations”)—undoubtedly litigious folks who might recognize more of themselves in her characters than they like (most recently, Ms. Lafsky worked at the labor and employment firm Littler Mendelson, but she said she was a summer associate at Morgan, Lewis & Bockius and worked as a paralegal at both Cravath, Swaine & Moore and Proskauer Rose). She also contacted a publicist and more than one reporter.

“In five years, I don’t want to be known as a blogger. I’d like to be known as a writer,” said Ms. Lafsky. “A blog is a means to an end.”

"THERE'S A 'LET ME BE ANONYMOUS FOR TWO MONTHS and as soon as someone comes at me with a book contract, yes, I’ll come out’ mentality among bloggers,” said Alex Balk, the blogger behind the formerly anonymous media satire blog The Major Fall, The Minor Lift. His own reveal came quietly, in a tagline attached to an article he wrote in the Arts and Leisure section of The New York Times, a little more than a year after he launched his blog. “It was a lot less strategic than the way people do it nowadays,” he said.

“I’ve thought about it and what it means, but I have no desire to do it anytime soon,” said the still-anonymous author of WaiterRant.net about a reveal of his own. “There are a couple of things to anonymity: Just from a purely mercenary point of view, if you want to pursue this for money—which every blogger wants to do—then you have to consider whether putting yourself out there too early sabotages the mystique that you’ve put out there or the mystique that has grown up around you.”

Timing is everything—just ask David Lat.

Before Ms. Lafsky, the latest big public offering has been Mr. Lat, the former prosecutor who made federal judges seem juicy and scintillating on his Underneath Their Robes blog and scored an unmasking in The New Yorker. Mr. Lat described his unveiling as actually “very messy”: He hadn’t gotten his boss’ approval for the interview, and he didn’t yet have a new job or book proposal to flog. His big new assignment—co-editing Wonkette.com—is somewhat less big and less establishment than some expected. He is working on a book idea.

Mr. Lat is, in fact, the perfect example of the reveal by crisis—rather than quit his job, he chose to have his exposure force himself out of one; a self-engineered “crisitunity,” to use the Homer Simpson portmanteau.

Mr. Lat admitted that before he agreed to go public in the care of Jeffrey Toobin, he had fielded e-mails from reporters for the Associated Press, The Washington Post, The New York Times and The Wall Street Journal.

“Their timing might have been unfortunate for them; I wasn’t ready or willing to reveal myself. Toobin’s timing was very good,” said Mr. Lat. His site had been up for about year and a half when Mr. Toobin came calling. (“I did urge her/him,” said Mr. Toobin of soliciting the would-be femme fatale of legal bloggers, though “at this point I knew it to be ‘him.’”)

“It was a very exciting time, because it was around the time of the Harriet Miers nomination—Harriet Miers was such a fat target for blogosphere commentary,” said Mr. Lat. “I was just a very active blogger. I was getting a lot of buzz. I began to feel more confident in my ability to use it as a calling card for future opportunities.”

Said his agent, David Kuhn, via e-mail: “What will matter most to publishers in terms of any book he writes is the quality of the proposal or manuscript.”

Sure, no doubt.

MUCH LIKE MR. LAT, JEREMY BLACHMAN, WHO WRITES the Anonymous Lawyer blog in the voice of a fictional law-firm partner, also had decided that he wanted to do something besides practice law. So he grabbed for that little brass ring by dropping an e-mail to a Times reporter who had interviewed him on a prior occasion.

“I knew that I wanted to write, but I wasn’t sure how to find those opportunities. I was definitely eager for someone to write a story about me,” he said.

Deciding to take the step to come out from behind the e-mail anonymizer is fraught for at least some bloggers. Mr. Lat recalled meeting Mr. Toobin for a preliminary lunch at the Condé Nast cafeteria. “I was very nervous,” he said, and had insisted that Mr. Toobin not identify him by his blogging name—“Article 3 Groupie”—if they ran into anyone he knew. The alibi was that they were two former Harvard Crimson editors meeting to talk about journalism.

Mr. Lat told Mr. Toobin, “I felt frustrated that I was putting a lot of time into this and was unable to get any credit for it.”

He clarified later: “That quote came off as a little self-aggrandizing, but really what I was trying to say is that anonymous bloggers put in a lot of time and effort into their projects, and they don’t get that very human need for recognition,” he said. “At a certain point, you want to step forward and take a bow.”

“Being anonymous has in a way bothered me for a while,” said Ms. Lafsky. “I want to put my name on what I’m saying. I believe what I’m saying. Anonymity, while it is valuable—and it has allowed me to stay employed—is also very limiting, because there’s so much I can’t say, because then people will figure out who I am. And also, it really limits my credibility.

“For example, there’s a huge contingency on the Internet that insists I’m a man …. In that sense, part of me just wants to be like, ‘Screw you, I’m a 27-year-old girl, and there are plenty of other people just like me—let’s cut the gender-stereotypical bullshit’ …. I stand behind all the things that I’ve written. I’ve written about a lot of women’s issues, and the implication that I’m a man is pretty insulting.

“I’m proud of what I’ve written on this blog,” Ms. Lafsky continued. “I believe in everything I’ve said. Not every post has been War and Peace, but I think I’ve said a lot of things … that resonated with a lot of people, affected some people. I’d like them to know that I’m a real person—that it’s not just some teenage boy in his parents’ basement.

“I don’t see it as a grand debut; I just see it as an announcement. Once I put my name out, I’m really forcing myself to really make a career in writing work.”

Still, Ms. Lafsky acknowledged the useful role that she hoped her outing would play in a future book deal: “Any media mention, any media interest in your blog—anything to set it apart from the nine million other names that come into publishing offices.”

Like everyone else, the anonymous author of WaiterRant.net is also working on a book proposal but hasn’t yet settled on an agent. He also may not—shocker!—make his identity known. “It may not be in the best interest of book sales to let everyone know who I am,” he said.

Still, after the reveal is over, some don’t feel like scaling those bleak literary heights at all. “I haven’t written the $300,000 novel,” said Mr. Balk, of TMFTML, of his post-anonymous existence. “I’ve got a book review in Time Out coming out in a few weeks.”

Mr. Lat pens the Latin-laced blog under the pseudonym "Article III Groupie" (an homage to the section of the Constitution that established the federal judiciary). In November, in an article by Jeffrey Toobin in The New Yorker, the shoe-loving, diva-esque female narrator was unmasked as the cherubic, cardigan-wearing Filipino-American Mr. Lat, 30, an assistant U.S. attorney in Newark. The blog was immediately placed behind password-protection.

"A3G" reemerged publicly on New Year's Eve, however, a day after Mr. Lat sent an email to colleagues informing them that he was leaving to pursue a job in Washington, D.C.

Mr. Lat was out of the country—in India—and could not be reached for comment.
—Anna Schneider-Mayerson

building in downtown Miami, a gang

of imported Republican operatives tried to shove history toward George W. Bush.

On the day before Thanksgiving 2000, the event described approvingly by the

gentleman who now oversees the editorial page of The Wall Street Journal

as a "bourgeois riot" stopped the recount of disputed ballots in Florida's

biggest county. Organized at the behest of former Secretary of State James

Baker by a consultant whose reputation for dirty tricks dates back to the Nixon

era, the "Brooks Brothers mob" embodied the iron will of the Bush campaign to

win.

As we now know, the 10,750

ballots that the G.O.P. goon squad sought to suppress would probably not have

done damage to their cause. So concluded the newspaper consortium that reported

the results of its lengthy, million-dollar examination of all the Florida Presidential ballots. According to their

analysis, a hand recount by the four counties that were the locus of the Gore

campaign's legal strategy would still have yielded an exceedingly narrow

victory for the Bush-Cheney ticket.

And that is how-amid war in Afghanistan

and overwhelming approval ratings for the Commander in Chief-the media

consortium played their findings. But the National

Opinion Research

Center recount, which proved beyond

any hint of doubt that thousands more Florida

voters intended to elect Al Gore, has meaning only in a context ignored by

those tardy accounting adjustments.

Context is amply provided,

along with clarity and color, by Jeffrey Toobin's Too Close to Call, a book that deserves study by anyone who

professes to care about American democracy. As Mr. Toobin explains, that nasty

fracas on Thanksgiving eve was only the most violent expression of the Bush

campaign's thorough manipulation of the post-election process. Striving for

fairness, Mr. Toobin doesn't hesitate to draw attention to the grievous

shortcomings of the Democratic campaign and its candidate. Mr. Gore comes off

as a sincere but hapless figure, in thrall to the opinions of newspaper editors

who never cared for him.

Yet whenever Mr. Toobin takes his readers inside the back rooms,

it is the ruthless character of modern Republicanism that stands out.

Seizing upon their home-court advantage, the Republicans

controlling the process in the Sunshine

State cheated and lied. As Florida's

Secretary of State, Katherine Harris was required by law to ensure a full

automatic recount of every ballot in every county, because the margin

separating the candidates was less than one-half of 1 percent. Both Mr. Bush

and Mr. Baker continuously pointed to this statutory recount as proof that all

the votes had been "counted and recounted."

In fact, as Mr. Toobin reveals, some 1.58 million votes cast in

18 counties were never recounted as the law prescribed-an extraordinary

violation that Ms. Harris and her aides knew but never mentioned, let alone

remedied. If the mandated recount had been completed in a timely and lawful

fashion, Mr. Gore might well have pulled ahead by a few votes in the first

week, changing the entire complexion of the post-election struggle.

"This subterranean story of the automatic recount," writes Mr.

Toobin, "marked just the first time that Harris's office performed heroic, if

necessarily unsung, service to the Bush campaign."

Sworn to uphold the law and conduct a fair election despite her

allegiance to Mr. Bush and his brother Jeb, the Florida

governor, Ms. Harris did the opposite. According to Mr. Toobin, her strings

were pulled by Mac Stipanovich, the sharp corporate lobbyist placed in her

office by the Bush campaign within two days after the election to be her

"minder." A former Republican staffer and campaign manager, Mr. Stipanovich

personified the formidable forces behind Mr. Bush, which have enjoyed the

spoils of his triumph ever since. Following the 1999 legislative session in Tallahassee,

Mr. Stipanovich told a local reporter, "I got everything. I don't know what the

poor people got, but the rich people are happy, and I'm ready to go home."

There is much more in Too

Close to Call that should embarrass Bush partisans, if they were capable of

that healthy emotion. Indeed, there is much here to embarrass all of us, as our

brave brothers and sisters again venture out under arms in the name of

democracy.

We're apparently beyond such embarrassment now, living in a media

environment where a questionable Presidential election generates about as much

current buzz as the fate of Chandra Levy. The story of the 2000 election

remains as salient today as it was a year ago, however, regardless of what the

conventional idiocy may say. It tells us that our fundamental right to

self-government has been corrupted and still awaits restoration. And it tells

us something we need to remember about a President whose enthusiasm for

government secrecy, military tribunals and other such constitutional affronts

was foreshadowed in his leap to the White House.

Next came Susan Schmidt of The Washington Post , who was quite peeved by Mr. Toobin's criticism of her and her leak-driven reporting during the Monica Lewinsky crisis. She, too, dispatched a letter seeking revisions, but her complaints were rejected by Random House. As co-author with Time reporter Michael Weisskopf of a new book more sympathetic to former independent counsel Kenneth Starr than was Mr. Toobin's, she has powerful motives to discredit A Vast Conspiracy .

Authors make errors. Unlike many, Mr. Toobin was quite good-natured about correcting his mistakes, minor and arguable as they mostly appear to be. We are about to discover whether Ms. Schmidt and Mr. Weisskopf will behave with similar grace in confronting a very serious and damaging inaccuracy in their own book, Truth At Any Cost .

That title implies some deep purity of purpose in Mr. Starr's appallingly partisan conduct as independent counsel, and the authors seem to identify with him in some respects. Rather pompously, they promote themselves as "objective" reporters who-unlike Mr. Starr's "polemical" critics-are qualified to assess the events leading up to impeachment without bias. Actually, they are somewhat less impartial toward the former independent counsel and his aides than Charlie McCarthy would be in writing a biography of Edgar Bergen.

Consistently faithful to the Starr agenda, Truth At Any Cost slants heavily against the Clintons. Still worse, however, is the authors' cavalier trashing of William Watt, a relatively obscure victim of their hero's inquisition.

On page 10, they refer obliquely to a Starr witness who "met with the Clintons' Washington lawyer, David Kendall, who was offering legal assistance and informal advice to witnesses interested in resisting Starr's probe." The explanatory footnote goes on to identify this witness as Mr. Watt, who, despite this supposed intervention by the President's attorney, "ultimately pled guilty and cooperated with Starr's investigation."

That sentence is inexcusably inaccurate. As Mr. Watt himself says, it is "a complete and total falsehood. That is a lie. I didn't plead guilty to anything because I wasn't charged with anything." Although the former Little Rock judge was a target of Mr. Starr's investigation, he was never indicted by the independent counsel or anyone else.

Moreover, neither he nor his attorney ever colluded in any way with Mr. Kendall, since they have had not the slightest contact with him. "That too is inaccurate," said Mr. Watt. "I've never met David Kendall. Mark Hampton, my lawyer, has never met David Kendall." The Clintons' counsel agreed. "That's simply false. I never met or spoke with William Watt or his lawyer."

The real story of Mr. Watt's harsh encounter with the Office of the Independent Counsel is complicated and revealing. When Mr. Starr's deputies found him unwilling to bolster the testimony of David Hale, their chief Whitewater witness against the President, they threatened indictment. "They tried to intimidate me, bankrupt me," he recalled. As the Starr prosecutors knew, however, he was innocent of wrongdoing despite his dealings with Mr. Hale. Indeed, he had tried to expose Mr. Hale's $2 million fraud against the federal government several years before the crooked businessman was finally indicted in 1993. Unable to indict Mr. Watt, the O.I.C. eventually immunized him.

But later the prosecutors found him recalcitrant on the witness stand, and smeared him in open court as an "unindicted co-conspirator." That ridiculous accusation appears nowhere in court papers filed by the O.I.C., says Mr. Watt, but it was sufficiently damaging to force his resignation from the bench and the forfeiture of his pension. Today he suffers the fresh indignity of being depicted as a conniving felon, in a book widely hailed by conservative commentators as the honest corrective to White House spin.

No doubt the O.I.C. would have liked to convict Mr. Watt of some offense. Like so much of Truth At Any Cost , the passage about him may merely reflect the wishful thinking of Mr. Starr and his deputies.

Mr. Watt, who is now practicing law in Little Rock, Ark. is quite angry that the authors didn't bother to contact him or his attorney. He intends to demand a retraction and apology from Ms. Schmidt, Mr. Weisskopf and their publisher, HarperCollins. "We will pursue it," he said.

So before they point to the alleged errors in anybody else's journalism, Ms. Schmidt and Mr. Weisskopf should sit down and compose a suitably abject public apology to Bill Watt. He's got it coming, and so do they.

Where were you when President Clinton was impeached? Or when he was acquitted? Can you believe that you've not only forgotten, but that the whole ugly thing ended just a year ago?

Jeffrey Toobin recalls it all, and in A Vast Conspiracy , a superlatively researched and written book, lays it out. There is only one hero in this book–Judge Susan Webber Wright, the jurist who dismissed the Paula Jones case and later held Mr. Clinton in contempt, stands alone as "an isolated beacon of sanity in the darkness." The remainder of the dramatis personae in the impeachment saga are deliciously skewered by Mr. Toobin.

Before Lucianne Goldberg and Paula Corbin Jones become the stuff of crossword puzzle trivia, remember them as Mr. Toobin does: the former as "Norma Desmond descending the staircase at the end of Sunset Boulevard , with her heart full of murder and longing … ready for her close-up"; the latter, in the midst of an interview with Mr. Toobin, turning to him and asking, "The Republicans? Are they the good 'uns or the bad 'uns?"

Or think of Mr. Toobin's Kenneth Starr, filled with rage that some of his critics in Little Rock, Ark., "were spreading the false rumor that he was having an affair on his visits there." What really angered him, Mr. Toobin says, "was that everyone–everyone!–thought the rumor was inconceivable." These are good one-liners, but the book is better (and only occasionally worse) than that.

Particularly powerful is Mr. Toobin's recitation of the failure of Mr. Starr to reach an agreement with Monica Lewinsky assuring her testimony at a time when it could be most effective. Within a week of Mr. Clinton's flatly false public statement that he had not had a sexual relationship with Ms. Lewinsky, two representatives of the Office of Independent Counsel had reached agreement with Ms. Lewinsky's lawyer, William Ginsburg, on an immunity deal. Ms. Lewinsky promised to testify about her sexual relationship with the President. While she refused to testify (falsely) that Mr. Clinton specifically urged her to lie about the relationship in her testimony in the Paula Jones case, she was prepared to testify (truthfully) that the President had told her generally to deny a relationship, if she was ever asked about it. On that basis, Bruce Udolf and Michael Emmick, on behalf of the Office of the Independent Counsel, agreed to grant immunity to Ms. Lewinsky. The Government attorneys faxed an immunity agreement to Mr. Ginsburg on O.I.C. stationery that would "confirm the agreement reached between Monica Lewinsky and the United States" and asked Ms. Lewinsky's lawyers to sign it.

Mr. Toobin describes in detail the next day's argument between lawyers on Mr. Starr's staff about whether to countermand the agreement that Mr. Emmick and Mr. Udolf had negotiated. Pressed by staff members who were angry at a number of misstatements and–just as bad from their ideologically skewed perspective–pro-Clinton statements made by Mr. Ginsburg on his weekly tour of television news programs, Mr. Starr decided not to approve the immunity agreement his lawyers had negotiated.

It was a virtually unprecedented act. An agreement forwarded by the O.I.C. on its own stationery is one any defense counsel would have every reason to rely on. Mr. Toobin quotes Mr. Udolf's angry response in the staff meeting with Mr. Starr: "I gave my word as a man and as a lawyer."

But it was worse than a betrayal; it was foolish. Mr. Toobin persuasively demonstrates that Mr. Starr's decision not to grant immunity at that time effectively assured that Mr. Clinton would remain in office. By the time Mr. Starr's office agreed to a nearly identical immunity deal half a year later (Ms. Lewinsky by that time had new counsel), the entire legal-political situation had changed in Mr. Clinton's favor.

Mr. Toobin cannot answer some of the still intriguing questions about the events leading to Mr. Clinton's impeachment. I have always wondered about the decision of the three-judge court in Washington to dismiss Robert Fiske as independent counsel and substitute Mr. Starr in his stead. Mr. Fiske is a lawyer of such impeccable distinction and apolitical orientation that any findings he made against Mr. Clinton would have had instant and total credibility with all but the most implacable Clinton supporters. Mr. Starr himself had a fine reputation and had been a distinguished judge as well as Solicitor General. Yet he was anything but apolitical. While he had liberal as well as conservative friends and admirers throughout Washington, Mr. Starr was a committed "movement" conservative who was deeply involved in the Washington legal world of conservative ideologues.

Why then dismiss so superb a choice as Mr. Fiske? And why choose Mr. Starr to replace him? Charges of political motivation have been voiced by pro-Clinton proponents–and just recently by Mr. Clinton himself. What about the lunch that took place shortly before Mr. Fiske's dismissal? In attendance were Judge David Sentelle (one of the three judges who dismissed Mr. Fiske and appointed Mr. Starr), Senator Jesse Helms and Senator Lauch Faircloth, two of Mr. Clinton's severest critics. What was the impact, if any, of the Wall Street Journal editorial campaign against Mr. Fiske (himself a Republican but far too measured for the Whitewater-obsessed Journal )?

Mr. Toobin provides more information than previously published, but far too little upon which to pass judgment. He does reveal that the three-judge panel that selected the independent counsel was divided about replacing Mr. Fiske. Two of the judges, both Republicans, contended that the fact that Attorney General Janet Reno had chosen Mr. Fiske itself fatally compromised him. The third judge, a Democrat, saw no reason to dismiss Mr. Fiske at all and only acceded to the choice of Mr. Starr when another possibility (former Federal Appeals Court Judge John Gibbons) determined that he had a conflict.

Mr. Toobin's portrayal of Monica Lewinsky is his least persuasive effort. His one-line disposition of her is funny–"before she became obsessed with the President of the United States, her only other serious interest in life was dieting"–and his other descriptions of her before her "relationship," as she called it, with the President, are credible. But he gives her no credit at all for refusing, at considerable personal risk, to give Mr. Starr and his legal team the testimony they demanded–testimony that could have doomed the President. Since we have no reason to doubt (and Mr. Toobin himself seems not to doubt) the truth of the testimony she did give, is it not now time to acknowledge that she behaved with a level of probity, even with dignity?

In the end, Mr. Toobin describes what was a sort of vast conspiracy against the President, involving a secret cadre of conservative lawyers who set about surreptitiously to bring the President down; a Republican leadership in the House that was so "obsessed with his humiliation, with his ouster and with his sex life" that they were incapable of even considering any offer of compromise short of removal from office; and an Office of Independent Counsel so filled with venom at the person they were supposed to be dispassionately investigating that it gave him the tools with which to discredit the prosecutorial office itself.

It has always puzzled me what it is about Mr. Clinton that drives his opponents to such distraction. He is often said to be lucky in his enemies. It is truer to say that his dominion over them is such that his every sin disables them the more from defeating him.

Mr. Toobin's portrayal of the President is far more nuanced than what most commentators have offered. He acutely depicts a man of intelligence and ability who was guilty of engaging in a sordid affair and then lying about it; guilty of contemptibly mistreating a loyal aide such as Betty Currie by subjecting her to grave personal risk as he attempted to exculpate himself; guilty of a pervasive moral obtuseness–and nowhere near guilty of anything sufficient to warrant impeachment.

What will history say it was all about? The cover of Mr. Toobin's book sums it up: It was, after all, a "sex scandal that nearly brought down a President." And the book's conclusion asks a question that history is likely to repeat: "He was impeached for what ?"