As Olympians were scoring gold last summer, Newsweek columnist Joe Klein was reaching for a medal of his own - as The Kindest, Warmest, Most Considerate, Reliable, and Blameless Journalist Ever to Falsely Deny Authorship of a
 $6 Million Book. It was a rather audacious bid. The Washington Post had just confirmed suspicions that he was the famously faceless Anonymous, author of Primary Colors, a roman ö clef skewering the Clintons. (The paper had discovered Klein's telltale handwriting on an original manuscript.) The scorps, as Klein calls reporters in the novel, were in a biting mood because of Klein's brazen, on-the-record denials of authorship in such major news outlets as CBS, The Washington Post, and The New York Times. ("For God's sake, definitely, I didn't write it.") Klein tried to make light of the episode in a coming-out press conference in New York, showing up with an impish smile and a Groucho Marx disguise. But when the scorps lashed out with angry questions, Klein immediately transmuted himself from prankster to misunderstood altruist. He argued that he had only told white lies, like those used to shield a news source; that he had lied to protect his family and himself from the fishbowl celebrity life; that he wanted to protect his publisher.
 But Klein's most delicious self-justification came earlier, in the May 19 New York Times Book Review, before he had been unmasked, when he spun anonymously: ". . . I have . . . saved (friends) from . . . the burden of listening to me strut and brag, feigning modesty while citing the latest sales figures. . . . Anonymity imposes a strict discipline and an almost religious humility. I am a better person for having kept my mouth shut . . . ." He was bragging about not bragging! Later, at his press conference, he was able to brag about the book ("It just wrote itself . . . . I was shocked by how easy it was") and to brag again about not having bragged about it! "I enjoyed my humility," he said. "I was protecting the integrity of this project."

 Of course, that "integrity" entailed keeping alive speculation that the book was written by a White House insider - a notion that intensified the guessing game over which fictional salacious incidents involving the Clintons were rooted in reality. Such speculation sold more books. So when Klein fell under suspicion as a possible author, he did his best to quell it, even voicing consternation to colleagues about an unflattering portrait of the Joe Klein-type character in the novel.

 Klein's story unfolded as if he had taken the plot of Robert Louis Stevenson's The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (Victorian scientist is set on fatal course through discovery of magic potion that splits him into two beings, one seemingly upright, seeking truth, the other bent, doing dark midnight deeds) and played it out as farce rather than tragedy.

 Like Dr. Henry Jekyll, Klein tried to divide himself into two beings. He took his compartmentalization effort almost literally, describing in his Book Review essay how he had achieved a kind of spiritual bifurcation: "There are two of us now. There is 'me' and there is 'Anonymous' . . . . A. was funnier than I am. A. was more demure. A. was more dignified. . . ." (Full disclosure: I was obliged to acknowledge to a snoopy gossip columnist in 1981 that I was the pseudonymous cjr writer "William Boot," who, coincidentally enough, was funnier, more demure, and more dignified than I am. Also smarter, and more "together," with a clearer sense of self.)

 Like Jekyll - who described the initial sensation of being Hyde as "incredibly sweet. I felt younger, lighter, happier in body" - Klein found being Anonymous an arousing experience. He reported in the Book Review, under the sheet of anonymity: "As publication approached, and the first, surprisingly favorable reviews began to appear, my spouse nuzzled my ear one evening and asked, 'Can I, y'know, do it with . . . Anonymous tonight?' It proved a distressingly memorable experience, although there was a metaphysical hangover: had I been unfaithful to myself? . . . The answer is no." Thank God.

 Once his Anonymous gambit took shape, Klein's life, like Jekyll's, became dangerously schizophrenic. Outwardly, he was the journalist-pundit, exuding moral rectitude, culling fact from rumor, reporting truth as he saw it - the man who once denounced as "despicable" those who were spreading charges about Clinton's private life "to make money." Yet secretly he worked to breathe life into the most scandalous suspicions about the Clintons in the course of making a pile. (Klein's denial of any connection between the Clintons and his fictional "Stantons" is, of course, transparent nonsense.)

 As the Newsweek pundit, he had written a scathing column ("The Politics of Promiscuity," May 9, 1994) faulting Clinton for having a fragmented identity "composed of all sorts of persons"; for "always living on the edge, as if he were begging to get caught"; for "lawyering the truth . . . petty fudges, retreats, compromises, denials." Sounds like a description of Klein himself.

 He may have thought he could keep his professional duality concealed indefinitely. But ultimately he went the way of Jekyll, who lost control of his experiment and started turning into Hyde spontaneously, without warning, against his will, and was found out by suspicious colleagues. By the same token, Klein began wondering whether he was losing a grip on his original self ("I asked my agent: 'Have I changed . . . ? Am I becoming Anonymous? Am I different now?' " he wrote in the Book Review piece.) Meanwhile, the relentless scorps closed in until, at last, The Washington Post hit pay dirt. The game was up.
 Needless to say, in the frenzy that followed his unmasking (more than 500 articles and editorials, dozens of TV segments), Klein came under intense moralistic assault. The New York Times, for one, stung him in a lead editorial: "People interested in preserving the core of serious journalism have to view his actions and words as corrupt and - if they become an example to others - corrupting." Meanwhile, Newsweek editor Maynard Parker was being lashed as well. He had known all along that Klein was Anonymous but allowed items to appear in the magazine which suggested that writers other than Klein were plausible suspects. The Dallas Morning News called this "a gross violation of journalistic ethics."

 Klein had his defenders, who said too much was being made of a trivial matter, but it was hardly trivial for his Newsweek colleagues. As one put it: "Every day I call somebody and leave my name, Mike Isikoff of Newsweek, and that calling card meant less after this incident."

 The Klein affair pointed up schizoid divisions not only within Klein but within Newsweek. One was between the newsmagazine star system, which showcases hotshots like Klein, and others who toil in relative obscurity. Some Newsweek staffers are convinced Parker played along with Klein's ruse because he was more interested in pampering an in-house celebrity than in putting out the most accurate magazine possible. A related fissure was between those who saw the Klein affair as a major ethical issue (i.e., many of the reporters) and those who viewed it as a p.r. problem to be managed with the right spin. In a memo to staff, Parker appeared to take the latter view, declaring: ". . . in retrospect I misjudged the impact of this story" (emphasis mine).

 Within The Washington Post Company, there were other signs of a multiple-personality disorder. While Newsweek, a Post Company subsidiary, sanctioned Klein's ruse and helped perpetuate it, the Post was playing gotcha. After the Klein expos? hit the paper's front page, Post editors pursued the matter as a major issue while Newsweek's editors belittled it ("This is more a matter of who shot J.R. . . . Everybody should get a life," was Parker's initial reaction). Only on August 12 was the split sutured up, when Newsweek president Richard Smith issued a note to readers: "Newsweek made a serious mistake in going along with the deception. . . . We will never allow ourselves to be put in that situation again."

 The affair also reflects a kind of Jekyll-and-Hyde quality in the news business as a whole. The incident was bizarre enough to be memorable to nonjournalists and confirmed a widespread impression that we play a two-faced ethical game. That's too sweeping, but not entirely off the mark.

 As Jekyll, we decry deception and expose secrets. As Hyde, we thrive on both, protecting secret sources who often have axes to grind. Some of us mislead informants to get information, tape people clandestinely, don disguises, even pose as grieving relatives to get access to plane-crash victims (a New York Post reporter allegedly did this during the aftermath of the TWA Flight 800 explosion). In a recent column on such contradictions, former Washington Post ombudsman Richard Harwood noted that Mike Wallace (who has acknowledged lying when necessary to nail down a story) only got into trouble when he secretly filmed an interview with a journalist after assuring her that she would not be on camera: "Journalists, he learned, were not fair game for lying. But other deceptions by CBS met with the approval of the network."

 When things finally settled, Klein had resigned, under pressure, from a CBS consultancy and been shorn of Newsweek reporting duties. But after a two-week suspension, during which he toned down his self-defense and apologized for causing distress to his colleagues, Klein returned to his column in high dudgeon, blasting Clinton for "monumental callousness" on welfare policy. Klein is back and America's got him. You can't keep a good man down.

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