WASHINGTON -- Joining the ranks of presidential aides who leave and tell out-of-school tales, former Treasury Secretary Paul O'Neill yesterday began defending himself against a barrage of attacks from the administration he served.

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A candid book on O'Neill's troubled Treasury tenure, "The Price of Loyalty: George W. Bush, the White House and the Education of Paul O'Neill," by Ron Suskind, was published yesterday with O'Neill's extensive help and input.

Within hours of O'Neill's appearance on CBS' "60 Minutes" on Sunday night promoting the book, reporters were being told that the former Alcoa chairman was under investigation for handing Suskind 19,000 purportedly "classified" documents.

Yesterday, O'Neill said on NBC's "Today Show" that all of the documents in his possession were cleared with the Treasury general counsel's office as not being classified, and he vowed that he had done nothing illegal.

O'Neill said he believed an investigation would show that Treasury employees who collected the documents had acted within the law.

A cover page for the documents might have suggested that they were classified material, O'Neill said, but "I don't think there is anything that is classified in those 19,000 documents."

In the TV interview, O'Neill did not retreat from his harsh assessment of Bush as portrayed in the book. But he did say he regretted describing Bush, during discussions of Vice President Richard Cheney's secret energy task force, as "like a blind man in a roomful of deaf people. There is no discernible connection."

He called that an unfortunate remark amid hundreds of hours of discussion with Suskind, a former Wall Street Journal reporter.

In the book. O'Neill repeatedly portrays Bush in an unflattering light -- as not interested in major issues, unable to clearly spell out his own policies, ineffective at running meetings and caught up in the sway of Cheney and Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld.

At his regular briefing for reporters at the Pentagon yesterday, Rumsfeld struck back, saying books written by public officials are only a small slice of their own perspective. Admitting that he had not read the book, Rumsfeld said what he had read about it was "night and day" different from his own experience with the president "on a daily basis almost."

Rumsfeld said of Bush: "I have just enormous respect for his brain, his engagement, his interest, his probing questions, his constructive and positive approach to issues."

Rumsfeld, a friend of O'Neill's for more than three decades, said he told O'Neill not to write a kiss-and-tell book. He said he has watched many ex-officials write books about processes in which he had been intimately involved and always has been "disappointed" because they represent only a "narrow, little slice of what they saw, not a 360-degree view."

Although former Presidents Ronald Reagan and Bill Clinton were the subject of tell-all books while still in office, this is the first that Bush has confronted.