US: Lawyers for the publisher of Bill Clinton's memoirs took action over the weekend to try to stop the printing of details and extracts after a number of news organisations obtained copies in advance of tomorrow's publication date writes Conor O'Clery in New York.
Publishers Alfred A Knopf issued a letter to the Associated Press after it revealed some tid-bits from the 957-page volume at the weekend, arguing that it had violated copyright laws and demanding that it stop.
The publishers are trying to protect an elaborate publicity campaign surrounding the release of My Life, and booksellers have been warned that if they as much as unseal boxes containing advance copies before midnight tonight, they risk having their stock confiscated.
The New York Times also obtained a copy and struck a damaging blow against the publisher's hype, not by publishing extracts, but by judging the book "sloppy, self-indulgent and often eye-crossingly dull".
In a front-page article yesterday the Times dismissed My Life as a "hodgepodge of jottings" hurriedly written and even more hurriedly edited.
The Associated Press reported that in the book Clinton agonises about the act that mystified and infuriated his fans, the sordid Oval Office tryst with an impressionable intern, Monica Lewinsky, at a time when his enemies were out to get him.
The former president writes that when he finally confessed his affair with Lewinsky to Hillary Rodham Clinton after months of public denials, she looked as if she had been punched in the gut.
He was banished to a couch for two months and started going to counselling one day a week for about a year, which he says helped his marriage to emerge stronger in the end.
Advisers who have read the book tell the Washington Post that Clinton believes the affair revealed "the darkest part of my inner life," and that he blames it on his troubled upbringing in a turbulent family prone to violence that left him with feelings of shame and a predilection for secrecy.
Clinton also writes that his biggest presidential mistake was to ask his Attorney General Janet Reno to name a prosecutor to look into his Whitewater land dealings. This led eventually to the excruciating probe of the Lewinsky affair by Kenneth Starr and the attempt at impeachment in the US Congress.
Clinton made the mistake of agreeing to a prosecutor in January 1994, due he says to exhaustion and grief over the death of his mother, Virginia.
He writes that he wishes he had decided to disclose voluntarily to the media his and Mrs Clinton's records on Whitewater on which they were cleared of any wrongdoing.
Republican leaders were not punishing him for dishonesty or immoral conduct in the impeachment process, Clinton concludes, but were trying to stage a "right-wing coup".
Clinton records that he regarded his affair with Monica Lewinsky as "immoral and foolish" and something which he indulged in simply because he could.
He and his wife Hillary Rodham Clinton came together after it through their counselling sessions and a shared determination to fight special prosecutor Ken Starr, chief villain among "this latest incarnation of the forces of reaction and division."
Clinton speaks out about the Lewinsky affair in the carefully chosen interviews in the hope that public attention will focus on other parts of his legacy, such as a booming economy and social advances when it is published tomorrow.
He told CBS's 60 Minutes in an interview broadcast last night that "The whole (impeachment) battle was a badge of honour. I don't see it as a stain, because it was illegitimate."
In another interview, with Time magazine, Clinton said: "I was involved in two great struggles - a great public struggle with the Republican Congress and a private struggle with my old demons. I won the public one and lost the private one."
In this interview he also accuses the Bush administration of making a mistake by invading Iraq before United Nations weapons inspectors finished their work.
However, he said he had repeatedly defended President Bush against the left on Iraq, and he didn't believe it was for oil or imperialist or financial reasons.
"We went in there because he bought the Wolfowitz-Cheney analysis that the Iraqis would be better off, we could shake up the authoritarian Arab regimes in the Middle East, and our leverage to make peace between the Palestinians and Israelis would be increased."
He told 60 Minutes that terrorism in Iraq could make the lives of Iraqis worse than they had been under Saddam Hussein, though "I think the Iraqis are better off with Saddam gone, if they can have a stable government.
"I still believe, as I always have, that the biggest terrorist threat by far is al-Qaeda and the al-Qaeda network." Clinton recalls in the book meeting with President-elect George W Bush and telling him that the biggest threat to the nation's security was Osama bin Laden and al-Qaeda, but that Bush said little in response, and then quickly switched the subject.
The initial print order of 1.5 million copies of My Life makes it the biggest non-fiction publishing sensation ever in the US. Clinton received a reputed $10 million advance for the book which he wrote in longhand. Advance orders exceed two million, making it likely that it will outsell his wife's book Living History which has about 2.3 million copies in print, including hardcover and paperback.