It is a not-entirely frivolous question to ask, in the context of this journal’s celebration of the European past, if the affair of Joe Klein, author of Primary Colors, the best-selling novel about the Clinton campaign for president in 1992, has anything to teach us about what the historian Peter Laslett once called “The World We Have Lost.” For it is not only the written (or painted, sculpted, etc.) record of the European past that we ought properly to value, but the largely unwritten traditions—involving honor and propriety, what is worthy of emulation and what is not—out of which these artifacts may be said to have sprung. It is because we have given too little attention to these matters that when Joe Klein was forced, after having been identified by a handwriting expert employed by The Washington Post, to admit to his authorship, there was no generally agreed upon standard of behavior according to which his previous concealment of it could be judged.

The result was the usual comedy that attends the not-infrequent displays of self-righteousness by the “journalistic community.” Greed, envy, and self-importance jostled for the upper hand as the professional wordsmiths sought to find ever more grand-sounding rationales for their indignation at the fact that Klein had lied to them. “No one begrudges him the money,” said Mark Halperin of ABCNews. “No one begrudges him doing it anonymously in the beginning to protect himself. But on a personal level, many of his friends