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HERE WE HAVE A FELLOW who has made $ 6 million since January off his first novel — a novel that won nearly unanimous critical acclaim and sold more than one million copies, with another 1.5 million coming out in paperback. His book turned into a pop culture obsession on the order of “Who shot J. R.?” and its movie adaptation is being directed by Mike Nichols, starring Tom Hanks, Emma Thompson, and Jack Nicholson. That it should now be necessary to put in a good word for such a lucky, talented guy as this author, because he is under relentless attack, is astonishing. But here we are.

The author is Newsweek columnist Joe Klein — formerly known as ” Anonymous,” the author of Primary Colors, the stunning portrait of the Clinton-like presidential primary campaign of Jack Stanton, philandering southern governor. The attack is coming from his fellow journalists and it would seem to be a shot aimed at the heart: Klein’s very integrity and credibility as a journalist are in the dock, and he is being found wanting, wanting, wanting.

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A FLURRY OF PUBLICITY about the supposed revelations in Roger Morris’s Partners in Power: The Clintons and Their America has obscured what the book really is. To be sure, Morris gives us some anonymous ex-spooks who claim young Bill Clinton was passing information to the CIA during his notorious trip to Moscow, and still more people who anonymously confirm that Hillary Clinton and Vince Foster were long-time lovers, and others who are certain Gov. Clinton was up to his nostrils in cocaine, as well as in the drug-smuggling and gun-running out of Mena airport in rural Arkansas. But Partners in Power (Holt, 526 pages, $ 27.50) is chiefly and simply a viciously doctrinaire attack on Bill and Hillary Clinton — and the American political system Morris portrays them as exemplifying — from the farther-out provinces of the ideological Left.

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