Clinton Memoir Setting Records

Booksellers on Wednesday predicted record nonfiction sales for the debut of Bill Clinton's autobiography as the former president told television interviewers he did not immediately come clean about the Monica Lewinsky affair because he thought he'd lose office.

Mr. Clinton is certainly doing all he can to push for bookseller history, giving and going on to hit the talk show and magazine interview circuit in a big way.

"That was just a simple day when I had to acknowledge to the people I loved most in the world that I had failed," he told Rather about his affair with Lewinsky. "I had done something bad, and I hadn't felt I could tell them about it before."

"I think what I should have said was the truth: I didn't violate the law, I didn't ask anybody else to violate the law, and that's all I should have said," Clinton told ABC's "Good Morning America" in an interview that aired Wednesday. "I should not have said what I did. I frankly was rattled and I'll regret it 'til the day I die."

He expressed concern for Lewinsky in an interview with NBC's "Today."

"She's an intelligent person, a fundamentally good person. What I hope is that she will not be sort of trapped in what Andy Warhol referred to as 'everyone's 15 minutes of fame,"' Clinton said.

"My Life" was released throughout the United States with a first printing of 1.5 million. Barnes & Noble had estimated that between 90,000 and 100,000 copies would sell Tuesday in the United States, a record debut for a nonfiction book. On Wednesday, Borders also reported a record first day for nonfiction, with worldwide sales topping 50,000, more than double the previous high, for Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton's "Living History."

But sales for "My Life" will almost certainly not approach the debut of "Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix," which sold an estimated 5 million copies on its first day.

Clinton was greeted by adoring crowds as he launched the tour for his autobiography on Tuesday in New York, with many readers getting up early or using their lunch breaks to buy it. Fans slipped him notes, pictures and leaned across the desk to say they loved him. One young woman was in tears, speechless, after her book was signed. Another was heard telling her friend, "That was intense! Oh, my God!"

Clinton later signed books at Hue-Man Bookstore near his office in Harlem, saying he was proud to once be described as "our first black president."

"I hope that this book will in some way be a gift to black America, that they'll understand that we can get together. We just have got to keep working at it," Clinton said.

Critics have not been impressed with the book, but that did not deter fans. At the Borders in Hollywood, Calif., Alex Volz made a beeline for the book and promptly walked to the cash register to buy it. Volz dismissed the reviews.

"I'm interested in what he has to say," Volz said, "regardless of how well it's written."

In Clinton's hometown of Little Rock, Ark., boyhood friend Paul Leopoulos was among the early birds who nabbed Clinton's book at midnight Tuesday, though he had received a personal preview from the author months ago.

"Back in February, we were playing hearts and he actually read from his transcript some of the passages that he wrote about some of us," said Leopoulos, who was Clinton's neighborhood pal in Hot Springs.

At Hastings Books, Music & Video in Waco, Texas, near President Bush's adopted hometown of Crawford, manager Steven Kling said he expected to sell out of his store's 100-plus copies by day's end.

"This is Bush Country, but we've had a lot of interest over the last several weeks," Kling said. "With the television going crazy on the coverage, it's a big hit."

The book also went on sale Tuesday in parts of Europe. Translated editions were being readied in France for a Wednesday launch of 150,000 copies.

In Ireland, which the ex-president still visits yearly for golf and lucrative speaking engagements, Dubliners lauded Clinton as a driving force behind the country's 1990s economic boom and the peace process in neighboring Northern Ireland.

"Clinton was a charmer, whereas Bush is just scary," said Pat Huxtable, a psychotherapist thumbing through a copy of "My Life" in a Dublin bookstore.

But in Belgium, the major English-language bookstore in downtown Brussels elicited little interest from its own pile of "My Life."

"I think people want to read the story about Monica Lewinsky, but that is not what I'm interested in," said Katherine Aneye, who instead bought a cookbook.