Carl Bernstein, Back on the Beat

"All I care is that it's done, it's out there," he says, waving his arms at his book as if it were a kid he's shooing off to college. "It'll have its place in the world, people will love it, people will hate it. They'll buy it, they won't buy it. I'd love to see it sell a million copies, but I'm a little different than I was 25 years ago. I have a different approach to life. Same basic beliefs, same nervous energy. But I know there are things that I can't control."

'A Risk-Taker'

Dressed in a dark sport jacket and a white Oxford shirt, Carl Bernstein looks like an aging Italian tycoon. He is 63, white-haired and plump. Despite the years, there remains something boyish and irrepressible in his eyes, which light up like a 15-year-old's after he's swiped the keys to the Chrysler. Which is to say, in one way, he hasn't changed.

"Before he turned 16 he used to take his family's glorious pink DeSoto Firedome and we'd go racing up 16th Street at 100 miles per hour," recalls Ben Stein, the actor and writer who grew up next door to the Bernsteins in Silver Spring. "No seatbelt, no license. He was daring, reckless, imaginative, a risk-taker, a buccaneer, a pool player, a great dancer. Looking back, it's amazing to me how much my early life was formed by Carl."

Bernstein lives in a modest two-bedroom apartment with corner windows and a terrific view of the Upper East Side. There are a couple of oil paintings of Venice on the wall, copies of his books on the shelves and a rough draft of his first newspaper story, written when he was 16, for the Washington Star.

"It was all downhill from there," he says.

He lives here with his third wife, Christine Kuehbeck, an executive assistant at a nonprofit called the International Longevity Center, whom he married in 2003 in Iceland, of all places. ("Always wanted to go," he explains.) The two kids he had with Ephron are grown. Jacob is a writer at Women's Wear Daily, and Max is the lead singer and guitarist of a pop-punk band called the Actual.

"Metal-influenced and punk-influenced," shouts Bernstein, proudly describing the Actuals' music, which is playing on the very expensive stereo system in his office. "With great pop hooks."

Bernstein is expansive, feisty, winningly sarcastic and testy about lines of inquiry he doesn't like. Extracting answers from him feels at times like trying to jack a necklace from the home of a master thief. Ask enough questions about his past and he goes off the record and blusters at uninterruptable length.

"This is ancient history," he says for the record, "which I have little interest in these days, except insofar as it's part of who I am, the good and the bad."

Let's talk about the book, he suggests. That's the news.

Bernstein on this day is in the midst of a publicity push for "A Woman in Charge," and measured simply by TV face time, it's going spectacularly well. He's yakking on every show where an author could hope to yak, easily out-appearing New York Times reporters Don Van Natta Jr. and Jeff Gerth, who rushed their Hillary biography, "Her Way," into bookstores on the same publishing date.

Neither of these biographies seems to have done much to ding Clinton's reputation, though Bernstein clearly wasn't hoping for blood. His book is about as Hillary-neutral as a Hillary book can be. He did dig up what he considers a couple of doozies in the course of 200 interviews, most notably that Bill Clinton fell in love with another woman and wanted to end his marriage, but Hillary wouldn't let him go. A spokesman for the New York senator sounded less than scintillated.