Time's Joe Klein: a Supreme Suck-Up

By Matt Taibbi, RollingStone.com. Posted February 7, 2007.

Joe Klein is the living incarnation of American "conventional wisdom" -- a spineless, slavish watcher of polls who has no problem whatsoever denying today what he said yesterday.

I have a personal connection to Joe Klein, the Time columnist and ex-anonymous author of Primary Colors. His son and I used to share an office at the Moscow Times

about 12 years ago. There were a couple of cute Russian girls in the office who were best friends and Chris and I each dated one of them. Chris ended up marrying his; my relationship with the other one didn't last very long, although she was one of the funniest people I've ever met: Tanya's big thing was crushing beer cans against her head and singing the Soviet national anthem naked. She was like John Belushi with tits.

I lost touch with Chris after I left the Moscow Times in 1996. Like most politics junkies I went on to read Primary Colors, and saw the movie (Emma Thompson's most horrifying role, with her terminal-cancer victim in Wit a distant second) and halfheartedly indulged in the literary whodunit over the author's identity. When Klein was outed as the writer there was a brief flurry of phone calls between Moscow Times vets chuckling over the news; I even seem to remember a couple of us using the occasion as an excuse to get together to get drunk one last time.