Klein, Edward 1936-

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Klein, Edward 1936-

PERSONAL:

Born October 19, 1936, in Yonkers, NY; son of Meyer (a merchant) and Gertrude (a merchant) Klein; married Emiko Oshikiri, June 25, 1963 (divorced May 1975); married Dolores Barrett (a public relations executive); children: (first marriage) Karen, Alec. Education: Columbia University, B.S., 1960, M.S., 1961.

ADDRESSES:

Agent—c/o Author Mail, Sentinel Publicity, 375 Hudson St., New York, NY 10014.

CAREER:

New York News, New York, NY, copy boy, 1957-60; New York World-Telegram & Sun, New York, NY, reporter, 1960; Japan Times, Tokyo, Japan, reporter and editor, 1961-62; United Press International, Tokyo, correspondent, 1962; Newsweek, New York, NY, associate editor, 1965-69, senior editor for international department, 1969-75, assistant managing editor, 1975- 77; New York Times magazine, New York, NY, editor, 1977-88. Member, Council on Foreign Relation.

AWARDS, HONORS:

Columbia University traveling fellowship, 1961.

WRITINGS:

(With Robert Littell and Richard Chesnoff) If Israel Lost the War (novel), Coward (New York, NY), 1969.

The Parachutists (novel), Doubleday (Garden City, NY), 1981.

(Editor and author of introduction, with Don Erickson) About Men: Reflections on the Male Experience, Poseidon Press (New York, NY), 1987.

All Too Human: The Love Story of Jack and Jackie Kennedy (biography), Pocket Books (New York, NY), 1996.

Just Jackie: Her Private Years (biography), G.K. Hall (Thorndike, ME), 1999.

The Kennedy Curse: Why America's First Family Has Been Haunted by Tragedy for 150 Years (biography), St. Martin's Press (New York, NY), 2003.

Farewell Jackie: A Portrait of Her Final Days (biography), Viking (New York, NY), 2004.

The Truth about Hillary: What She Knew, When She Knew It, and How Far She'll Go to Become President (biography), Sentinel (New York, NY), 2005.

Author of column "Green Eyed in Ginza," Tokyo Shipping & Trade News, Tokyo, Japan, 1963-64; contributing editor to Vanity Fair, beginning 1989; contributor to Parade.

SIDELIGHTS:

Edward Klein has enjoyed a successful career as a reporter, foreign correspondent, and editorin- chief of the New York Times magazine. He is also an author; his first works are fiction, but later volumes are biographies, several of which are about the lives of the Kennedy family. The first of these is All Too Human: The Love Story of Jack and Jackie Kennedy, published two years after Jackie's death. Klein, who was an acquaintance of the former first lady, interviewed family and friends in researching this biography, which focuses on the glamour and politics that encompassed the golden couple. Entertainment Weekly writer Alexandra Jacobs described the book as "the most satiny of reads." Klein goes beyond the romance, however, in describing infidelities, drug and alcohol use, and the loss of their stillborn son while Jack was off partying on the Mediterranean. Klein concludes that the couple did eventually find true happiness before Jack was assassinated in Dallas.

On the tenth anniversary of Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis's death from cancer, Klein published Farewell Jackie: A Portrait of Her Final Days. This remembrance of the six-month struggle that preceded her death and the manner in which Jackie lived her life is a tribute to a woman who valued family and privacy above all else.

In The Kennedy Curse: Why America's First Family Has Been Haunted by Tragedy for 150 Years Klein goes back to the Irish roots of the famous family and ends with the deaths of the well-liked John F. Kennedy, Jr., and his wife, Carolyn Bessette Kennedy, in 1999. In profiling this couple, Klein writes of cocaine abuse by Carolyn and a marriage that had essentially ended before they and Carolyn's sister died in a plane crash.

The subject of Klein's The Truth about Hillary: What She Knew, When She Knew It, and How Far She'll Go to Become President is the former first lady and wife of President William Jefferson Clinton. An Economist contributor, who called Klein "a zealous muckraker," wrote that he "has succeeded in doing the near impossible: he has written a book that will make all but firebreathing conservatives sympathetic to her cause." The writer noted that Klein uses innuendo to suggest that Clinton has engaged in manipulation, lying, and cheating, as well as lesbian relationships dating back to her days at Wellesley, to discredit her. He also speculates on the sexual relationship, or its absence, between the Clintons. New Yorker reviewer David Remnick noted: "The evidence of Senator Clinton's moral turpitude … is girded by a historian's sense of enterprise—interviews with disgruntled West Wing footmen, gratuitous political ‘analysts,’ and the ‘clinical sexologist’ Dr. Claudia Six." Roger Morris commented in Biography that Klein has reduced history to "cliche, innuendo and thinly disguised bigotry." The book, which has had its critics on both the right and left, became a best seller.

BIOGRAPHICAL AND CRITICAL SOURCES:

PERIODICALS

Biography, fall, 2005, Roger Morris, review of The Truth about Hillary: What She Knew, When She Knew It, and How Far She'll Go to Become President, p. 706.

Economist, June 25, 2005, review of The Truth about Hillary, p. 82.

Entertainment Weekly, September 13, 1996, Alexandra Jacobs, review of All Too Human: The Love Story of Jack and Jackie Kennedy, p. 124.

M2 Best Books, July 2, 2003, review of The Kennedy Curse: Why America's First Family Has Been Haunted by Tragedy for 150 Years.

Newsweek, August 19, 1996, Laura Shapiro, review of All Too Human, p. 60.

Publishers Weekly, April 5, 2004, review of Farewell Jackie: A Portrait of Her Final Days, p. 56.

New Yorker, July 4, 2005, David Remnick, review of The Truth about Hillary, p. 29.

Town & Country, July, 2004, Susan Fales-Hill, review of Farewell Jackie, p. 35.

WWD, July 8, 2003, Jacob Bernstein, "Dissecting the ‘Kennedy Curse,’" interview with Klein, p. 28.