A MASSIVE CONFLICT OF INTEREST AT THE HEART OF THE NATION’S MOST PRESTIGIOUS NEWSPAPER,
The New York Times….

From The New York Post, Tuesday, October 21, 2003

October 21, 2003 -- THE New York Times had a big conflict of interest on Sunday.

The Gray Lady's review trashing "Bill Clinton: An American Journey. Great Expectations" was written by Todd S. Purdum, the husband of Clinton's first White House press secretary, Dee Dee Myers - though Times readers weren't informed of his connection to Clinton.

"It is the equivalent of allowing the wife of Ari Fleischer to review an anti-Bush book," said one observer.

"That is really pretty unfair," author Nigel Hamilton told PAGE SIX yesterday. "The plot is thickening."

Myers - known in some circles as "the Joseph Goebbels of the first Clinton administration" - married Purdum, who covered the Clinton White House for the Times, in 1997, well after Myers had resigned as press secretary.

The wedding also came after Myers was pulled over by D.C. police the night of June 26, 1995, and arrested for drunken-driving. Purdum was her passenger that night. The charge was eventually dropped.

The couple now has a 3-year-old daughter.

"This is not up to the standards one would expect at the New York Times," Hamilton complained. And the British biographer is accustomed to rough treatment from the broadsheet.

Hamilton's 1992 bestseller, "JFK: Reckless Youth," was savaged by Michiko Kakutani, who normally reviews fiction. And Kakutani also panned his Clinton book two weeks ago in the daily paper.

"I think everybody at Random House was in a state of shock after that," said Hamilton, who interviewed over 100 people. "Obviously I'm hurt."

Purdum wrote that the Clinton book "offers only the faintest pretense of originality. It is almost completely a reheated buffet of previously published material from the already groaning steam table of Clinton scholarship, scandal-mongering and supposition."

But Purdum found a quote from Betsey Wright, Clinton's former chief of staff, worth repeating.

Wright, who coined the term "bimbo eruptions," said Clinton's womanizing had "nothing to do with sex" and everything to do with "this inferiority complex . . . I think he's spent his entire life being scared that he was white trash."

The Times had no comment.