Hillary Clinton's memoir Living History, which Simon & Schuster published in June 2003, and for which Senator Clinton received a reported $8 million advance, was a much-anticipated publishing event. Hillary, or perhaps more accurately her ghostwriters, didn't let her readers down. They produced what the American Library Association's influential Booklist said showed "her evolution as a wife and mother, as first lady, and as a political lightning rod." All that biographical backdrop "is portrayed in an engaging fashion," the journal said, "and her discussions of political policy, while occasionally dry, are well reasoned and worth reading. The book works especially well when the private and public Mrs. Clintons come together."

The consensus was that Hillary's book was so popular because it gave her take on her husband's various sex scandals, her White House life, and the failed Clinton health-care reform. Yet some biographers were troubled by her tale, including Carol Felsenthal, author of Power, Privilege, and the Post: The Katherine Graham Story, a best-selling portrait of the family that owns the Washington Post.

When asked about the explosion of political books, Felsenthal noted that "there are lots of political books because there's no expectation anymore, as there was in previous administrations, that a fired cabinet secretary—Paul O'Neill, for example—will wait until the administration is out of office. These guys write books to make money, or to settle scores or to polish their own tarnished reputations."

Hillary's book set off a deluge, continuing with the book Felsenthal mentioned, The Price of Loyalty by Treasury Secretary O'Neill, fired by Bush. Paul O'Neill sat for hours with Pulitzer Prize-winning Wall Street Journal reporter Ron Suskind to produce the first detailed, behind the scenes look at life—or the lack thereof—in Bush's cabinet.

Suskind told me that "the Bush administration were masters at manipulating the press, yet when O'Neill's book came out the dike started to burst. It seems people were hungering to discover what was going on at the upper reaches of our federal government."

O'Neill painted a detailed portrait of a detached president and hands-on vice president, who told him that "Reagan proved that deficits don't matter." As soon as Suskind let it be known that O'Neill had given him some 18,000 pages of memos and reports, all cleared by the administration before they were released, the administration announced that it was investigating O'Neill for the unauthorized release of classified information, a move designed to stifle criticism.

After O'Neill's' critique came a highly publicized insider book that managed to live up to its advance hype. It was Against All Enemies: Inside the White House's War on Terror—What Really Happened, by Richard Clarke. His book came out just before the public hearings of the 9/11 Commission. Even after it was vetted by the administration it revealed, again, how detached President Bush was, and is, and how Iraq was the administration's target even though there were absolutely no ties between Saddam Hussein and the 9/11 bombings. The Economist magazine reported that "Mr. Clarke, it seems, knew all about the threat of terrorism but could not get his numbskull bosses in the White House to take his warnings seriously."

National Public Radio reported that people are reading this book because there are so many details about terrorism that you can't find anywhere else.

BOTH SIDES AT BAT—The publishing phenomenon by now well in motion accelerated with polemics from all points on the political spectrum, which hit the best-seller lists in their turn. These included Michael Moore's Dude, Where's My Country? and Al Franken's Lies and the Lying Liars Who Tell Them: A Fair and Balanced Look at the Right. Then there was Ann Coulter's Treason: Liberal Treachery from the Cold War to the War on Terror and Sean Hannity's Deliver Us from Evil: Defeating Terrorism, Despotism, and Liberalism.

Moore's book details his gospel that we've lost track of the working-class principles that made America strong. It takes the Bush administration to task for letting Osama bin Laden slip away unnoticed in the Afghan mountains—a very tall man requiring daily dialysis for kidney failure. Al Franken assembled a group of Harvard researchers to tackle the claims made by right-wing commentators like Bill O'Reilley of Fox News and the vociferous Ann Coulter, pointing out the disingenuous nature of some of their assertions.

Clarke's book was quickly followed by Bob Woodward's Plan of Attack, generally accepted as the Washington Post reporter's best book. When I asked a Washington Spectator contributor and Watergate expert, Professor Stanley Kutler, what he thought of Woodward's book, he railed against Woodward's use of unnamed sources and made up dialogue. Kutler stated: "Woodward's key is that he gets access, because he's Bob Woodward, and wants to keep that access. Everyone he interviews is putting their own spin on the story. And, let's face it, Woodward doesn't write well." In fact, Kutler jested, English "is his second language."

Then former Nixon aide John Dean came out with Worse Than Watergate: The Secret Presidency of George W. Bush. Dean's book points out, in great detail, how Bush II resembles Nixon, yet is not as nice. And in American Dynasty: Aristocracy, Fortune and the Politics of Deceit in the House of Bush, the historian Kevin Phillips, once a Republican, attacks the two Bush generations for "family corruption, the economics of privilege, war-related mismanagement, the stifling of political reform, and pandering to the religious right."