Joe Klein

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Joe Klein (b. September 7, 1946) is a longtime Washington, D.C. journalist and moderate columnist, perhaps best known for his novel Primary Colors, an anonymously-written portrayal of Bill Clinton's first presidential campaign.

Klein graduated from the University of Pennsylvania with a degree in American civilization.

In 1969, Klein began reporting for the Essex County Newspapers in Massachusetts. In 1972, he reported for Boston's WGBH and until 1974 he was also the news editor for Boston's The Real Paper. He was a contributing editor for Rolling Stone from 1975 to 1980 and Washington bureau chief from 1975 to 1977.

He published Woodie Guthrie: A Life in 1980 and Payback: Five Marines After Vietnam in 1984.

He was a political columnist for New York from 1987 to 1992 where he won the Peter Kihss Award for reporting on the 1989 race for Mayor of New York. In May 1992 he joined Newsweek and wrote the column "Public Lives", which won a National Headliner Award in 1994. Newsweek also won a National Magazine Award for their coverage of Bill Clinton's 1992 victory. From 1992 to 1996 he was also a consultant for CBS.

In January 1996, he anonymously published the novel Primary Colors: A Novel of Politics, based on the 1992 Democratic presidential primary. It spent 9 weeks as number one on the New York Times bestseller list. When Donald Foster correctly identified Klein as the novel's author, Klein denied it and publicly attacked Foster for publishing untrue and irresponsible speculation -- even going so far as to mislead readers of Newsweek with speculation that another writer wrote it -- before finally admitting that the "speculation" was correct. (The novel's first paragraph contains a sentence spoken by the unnamed narrator "I am small and not so dark", speculated to be a reference to klein (the German word for "small")

In December 1996, he joined The New Yorker to write the "Letter from Washington" column. In 2000 he published The Running Mate, a sequel of sorts to Primary Colors and he published The Natural: Bill Clinton's Misunderstood Presidency in March 2002. In January 2003, he joined Time to write a column called "In the Arena". In April 2006, he published Politics Lost, a book on what he calls the "pollster-consultant industrial complex".

He is a member of the Council on Foreign Relations and is a former Guggenheim Fellow. He lives with his wife and two children in Westchester County, New York, and is also the father of two adult sons.