The Hunting of the President

BuzzFlash: How did you come to write The Hunting of the President with Gene Lyons?

Joe Conason: I started to become skeptical of Starr not too long after he was appointed, but I didn't start to write about him in any kind of sustained way for a couple of years. A writer named Murray Waas and I did a big piece about Starr in The Nation. Sometime after that, I became intensely interested in Whitewater. I had heard about this guy Gene Lyons in Arkansas, who knew a lot about it. So I started to talk to Gene on the phone, and we became sort of phone-calling pals. Within a year or so it occurred to me that there was a book in this subject, and I think Gene probably had the same thought. We decided that it would be better to do one book together than to do two similar, competing books. This was back in 1997.

BuzzFlash: You and Gene are working on a documentary that covers the same ground as the book. How is that going?

Joe Conason: I was in Arkansas several weeks ago, doing some interviews. I thought they went exceptionally well. We have talked to well over sixty people, and we're near the end of the principal photography phase of the project. In fact, editing has begun already.

BuzzFlash: Is there going to be a narrator? Have you chosen that person?

Joe Conason: There are some very fine candidates for that job -- brilliant actors who have expressed interest in the narration. I think people would be very excited to hear those names, but that's Hollywood. We'll see what happens.

BuzzFlash: Is the film coming out through standard commercial distribution?

Joe Conason: We are fortunate enough to have an agreement with an excellent distributor, Regent Entertainment, so it will be in theatres.

BuzzFlash: When?

Joe Conason: We hope before the end of the year.

BuzzFlash: You wrote The Hunting of the President, in which you argued that there was indeed a vast right-wing conspiracy to bring down President Clinton. Is that vast right-wing conspiracy -- if you'll accept that phrase -- running the government right now?

Joe Conason: I don't really believe there was one big conspiracy. I actually think there were a few tightly knit conspiracies that connected to each other in different ways, and that they took place both consecutively and concurrently over a period of years. We preferred to call this a "network." And there was a network, and it certainly has continuities. One of the continuities is that a lot of the people are involved at various levels of the present Federal government. David Brock, who knew a lot of these people, deals with this in his book Blinded by the Right. One day, he woke up and saw that there was a Bush administration with a lot of the people he had worked with to try to bring down Clinton.