Scandalous, shocking, cheeky, impudent are words that will be used to describe this account of the hidden side of our glamorous, riotous capital city. For Lait and Mortimer, famous newspapermen, mince no words, pull no punches, tell their story in their own bold way. They have found out the truth and they tell the facts and name the names-which no one dared write or publish before. They deglamorize Washington and reveal it with its spats off and its morning coat unbuttoned. They tear the Velvet Curtain and show the behind-the-scenes intrigue, the sub-rosa night life, the shady side of sex, the sin side, the crime side. The amazing things they report will shock millions, arouse citizens all over the country as their previous book Chicago Confidential did… P-S-S-S-T! Here we go again-Confidential. We turned New York inside out; but we both live there. We turned Chicago upside down; but we were both raised there. We descended on Washington not quite like Stanley invaded Africa, because in our combined 75 years of newspaper work we had been in the capital hundreds of times. It intrigued us because we never could understand it. So we decided brashly to do a Lait-Mortimer operation on it from scratch. Our principal discovery was that nobody understands Washington-the city, not the nation's nerve-center. […] That's why we were born-to tell you what you couldn't find out without us-Confidential! -Jack Lait and Lee Mortimer
