Freedom to DISAGREE

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Ex-Aide's Book Corners Market in Capital Buzz
By RACHEL L. SWARNS

WASHINGTON, March 25 — On the first day, the hottest new book in town sold out in an hour at Politics and Prose and sales clerks turned away dozens of disappointed buyers. On the second day, the store called three national book wholesalers, which announced they did not have a single copy left.

That was when Barbara Meade knew that Richard A. Clarke, the author of "Against All Enemies: Inside America's War on Terror," was the genuine article, an unexpected literary phenomenon whose account of counterterrorism failures within the Bush administration has been flying off the shelves this week.

"It's reached a point now where if you're going to be in the loop in Washington you probably have to say you've read the book," Ms. Meade, co-owner of Politics and Prose, said, adding that she believed she now has enough copies to last through the weekend.

In Washington, Mr. Clarke's book is not just the talk of the town, it is practically the only conversation in town, having — in just four days — hijacked the news agenda and placing him in the ranks of other best-selling Washington authors like Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton of New York. On Amazon.com, it is ranked first, outselling even "The South Beach Diet." And some booksellers around the country are struggling to keep up with demand for the book, which has gone into its fifth printing since it went on sale on Monday.

Mr. Clarke, the Bush administration's former counterterrorism chief, says officials failed to heed warnings about the Sept. 11 attacks and then neglected the threat of Al Qaeda as they turned their attention to Saddam Hussein.

In this city, those incendiary charges are dominating political chatter at breakfast tables, dinner tables and even on the basketball court, where David Sirota, spokesman for the Center for American Progress, discussed it last night after shooting hoops with Congressional workers and former presidential campaign advisers at the Sidwell Friends School.

"It's all that people are talking about," said Jim Jordan, the Democratic strategist, who said he was planning to buy his own copy on Thursday.

There are also signs that the book's appeal is extending beyond the insular world of Washington in a week in which Mr. Clarke's story was splashed across the front pages of national newspapers and featured on televised news broadcasts as he testified on Wednesday before the commission investigating the Sept. 11 attacks.

It took some quick footwork to get the book into the headlines this week, if not into the hands of everyone who wants to buy it. Its publisher, The Free Press, an imprint of Simon & Schuster, managed to get it into stores a week before schedule when it learned that Mr. Clarke was testifying this week before the commission. And Mr. Clarke's publicists got him a prime spot on "60 Minutes" on Sunday, the night before the book went on sale.

Simon & Schuster, which also published Mrs. Clinton's book and the recent best-seller about Paul H. O'Neill, the former Treasury secretary, initially printed about 300,000 copies of Mr. Clarke's book, a very large number for a work of serious nonfiction, and it has since ordered 150,000 more copies. The early pace of sales matches the O'Neill book, which was written by Ron Suskind, but it is nowhere near the national record for early sales set last year by Mrs. Clinton's memoir, said Martha Levin, publisher of The Free Press.

Outside Washington, reports on the book's sales varied.

At the Borders bookstore near the Union Square shopping district in San Francisco, managers said they had sold 200 of the 300 copies available. In Houston, Karl Kilian, the owner of Brazos Bookstore, said he sold all 15 copies he had ordered.

Kathy Morgan, manager of the Borders bookstore in Altamonte Springs, Fla., described demand as brisk, but "not blockbuster." She said more of her customers were snapping up copies of "Deliver Us From Evil," by Sean Hannity, the radio and television personality who says the war on terror must defeat liberalism along with despotism.

But a survey released this week suggests that national awareness of Mr. Clarke's arguments is quite high. The Pew Research Center reported on Thursday that about 42 percent of the 1,065 adults surveyed had heard "a lot" about Mr. Clarke's claims; 47 percent said they had heard "a little" about his charges. Only 10 percent said they had heard nothing about his criticisms.

That is startling news for some publishers and lawyers who specialize in sober political books that often attract flurries of attention in much smaller circles. "Oh, I wish it were mine," said a wistful Peter Osnos, who runs PublicAffairs, the New York publishing company, and hailed Mr. Clarke's text as "the book of the moment."

Ms. Levin declined to comment on Mr. Clarke's advance or royalties. At a typical rate, Mr. Clarke would stand to earn about $4 a copy in royalties.

Here in Washington, the book has been a hot topic of debate. At the hearings on the Sept. 11 attacks, James R. Thompson, a commissioner who is a former Republican governor of Illinois, repeatedly brandished a copy of Mr. Clarke's book this week as he questioned senior officials.

Mr. Clarke's accusations so dominated the hearings even when he was not testifying that some commissioners protested, including John F. Lehman, a Republican commissioner who was Navy secretary under President Ronald Reagan.

"I've published books, and I must say I am green with envy at the promotion department of your publisher," Mr. Lehman said to considerable laughter. "I never got Jim Thompson to stand before 50 photographers reading your book. And I certainly never got `60 Minutes' to coordinate the showing of its interview with you with 15 network news broadcasts, the selling of the movie rights and your appearance here today."

Mr. Lehman followed his lighthearted remarks with a sharp attack on what he and other Republicans have described as inconsistencies and signs of partisanship in Mr. Clarke's arguments. "I'd hate to see you become totally shoved to one side during a presidential campaign as an active partisan selling a book," he said.

But while talk of the book continues to burn on many tongues here, the number of policy makers who have actually read all of its 304 pages remains a subject of some debate. Some prominent Republicans made a point this week of noting that they had not read the book, including Condoleezza Rice, President Bush's national security adviser, and Senator Richard G. Lugar of Indiana, chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, according to their spokesmen.

And several Democrats, some of whom can barely contain their glee at the release of the book in the throes of this election year, admitted they had not yet read it either. "No one's read it," said Mr. Sirota, a former spokesman for the Democrats on the House Appropriations Committee, speaking of his basketball partners. "Can you still get it?"

On Wednesday, Richard L. Armitage, the Bush administration's deputy secretary of state, described himself as "the only honest person in Washington" when he admitted during the hearings that he had given the book what he described as "the Washington read."

"You looked in the index to see if your name was in it," Mr. Thompson said.

"And then what was said about me," Mr. Armitage said as the chamber erupted in laughter.

http://www.nytimes.com/2004/03/26/politics/26BOOK.html?pagewanted=print&position=