Conservative columnist and author R. Emmett Tyrrell has not really spent half his career reporting scandals about Bill and Hillary Clinton. It just seems that way. The American Spectator, the conservative monthly magazine he founded in 1967, broke some of the earliest stories about "Troopergate," "Travelgate" and "Filegate" in the early 1990s. And two of his books, 1997's "Boy Clinton" and 2003's "Madam Hillary," were unflattering but best-selling biographies of his favorite Democrat power couple. Now the irrepressibly troublemaking Tyrrell has updated the Bill Clinton saga with "The Clinton Crack-Up: The Boy President's Life After the White House." I talked to him Thursday, April 18, by telephone from his offices in Washington.

Q: Why can't you just leave the poor Clintons alone?
A: Because I read the newspapers! (laughs) And they're in the newspapers -- often the headlines -- every day!

Q: What's a quick synopsis of your book?
A: The book takes up from Clinton's last hours in the White House and is the only book to chronicle his years of retirement, as he raises vast amounts of money for himself, recaptures the Democrat Party, and paves the way for his wife's coronation.

Q: Would you characterize what he's doing as work or play?
A: I characterize it as "obsession," (laughs), which is to say his life. His life, as I say in the book, has been one long itinerary.

Q: Is he still the same old Bill?
A: If that's the way you're going to phrase the question, let me answer it by saying, emphasis on "old." He's really aged. I crashed his birthday party in Toronto and saw for myself what my sources had told me during the 2{1/2} years I spent writing the book -- that Clinton had aged astoundingly. He's not in particularly good health. Why that hasn't made it into the new stories about him, I don't know.

Q: Why did you write this book?
A: I’ve been fascinated with the 1960s generation, and the 1960s generation is now facing its probably great political struggle in ’08. There’s the conservative side, which I have been on all these years, and there’s the left-wing side, which the Clintons and Jean-Francois Kerry and Howard Dean and Al Gore have been on. I’ve followed them from the beginning and I’m convinced that whoever gets the Democrat nomination in ’08 will be giving the left-wing of that generation its last opportunity to lay claim to the identity of the entire generation.

Q: What has Bill Clinton been doing since he left the White House and why is it different or worse than what previous ex-presidents did?
A: Well, just in dollars and cents. I start the book by comparing the retirement of Harry Truman with the retirement of Bill Clinton. The reason you compare the two is that, a) they're both Democrats, but b), they both left office with a very low approval rating. Clinton's went through the floorboards within hours of his leaving the White House because of "Pardongate," the trashing of the White House and the pilfering of the White House. But Harry Truman absolutely refused, as he put it, to "commercialize the presidency." So he lived quietly -- and I might add in dignity -- reading history and writing at his retirement home in Missouri. Clinton went out and commercialized the presidency. He raised over $43 million in the first four years with, let's face it, pretty vacuous speeches.

Q: You always hear that "Clinton is a great speaker." But I've never heard him say anything great.
A: Take a look at the quote that I lift in my prologue from Toronto -- a completely meaningless if not chaotic statement. That night in Toronto the Canadian audience contributed $24 million to the Clinton charity. I quoted from the speech. It was inane. His speeches are inane. He is in retirement a reckless, mercenary and unhappy man.

Q: Have the media done a proper job of covering ex-president Clinton?
A: In the book, I coin a phrase “the episodic apologists.” They dominate the media. They have gone through repeated episodes in the Clinton life of holding great hope for his arrival; being thrown into great indignation -– personal indignation -– at the scandal; and then hope renewed in a matter of months. You never saw it any more dramatically than after Pardongate. They had such hopes for him in retirement. And within hours he had committed the greatest pardon scandal in American political history.

Read “Pardongate” in the book, where I quote Democratic leaders and The New York Times and the New York Observer abominating the Clintons and, in the case of the Observer, calling on Hillary to resign from the Senate. And within a matter of months, The Washington Post, which was just as critical, is booming her as the next president of the United States.

These are the episodic apologists. I’ll tell you there is something deep-rooted in all of this. There is a deep-rooted reason that the Clintons have been accompanied through their scandalous lives by the episodic apologists. And the reason is? The 1960s generation. There has never been a generation like it -– the left’s narcissism, amorality and endless political hustle. These journalists who are episodic apologists and the politicians who are episodic apologists are from that generation.

Q: What new and interesting will aficionados of Bill Clinton’s personal life learn from your book?
A: They’ll learn that his retirement has been a period of emotional turmoil and rejection, first by the American people and his wife, who sent him off traveling the world to raise money on his speaking tours. You learn interesting things like the Secret Service has no respect for him, and in fact served as my sources in numerous occasions. You’ll learn that after telling journalists it was a great mistake for him to give international fugitive Marc Rich a pardon, he actually months later in Switzerland visited with Marc Rich. You’ll learn that in the spring of ’05 he had his political people approach the political advisers of Gov. Schwarzenegger with the proposal that if Schwarzenegger will support Clinton in eliminating the ban against a president running for a third term, his people would support Schwarzenegger in overthrowing the constitutional ban against foreign-born presidential candidates.

There’s a lot more you will learn. The beauty of being an independent critic of the Clintons, as I have been, is that I can actually report that much of the press knows but has never deigned to report to the American people. Continued...