My Life
By Bill Clinton
Knopf, 957 pages, $35
Midway through “My Life,” I considered calling the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers to halt the unceasing torrent of memories, score settling, self-help jargon and legislative minutiae cascading from the most talented and infuriating politician of his generation.
At times I felt I was in a journalist’s nightmare, stuck inside a 45-hour-long Bill Clinton press conference in which the doors to the room were bolted shut. Or that I was inspecting a 3-inch-thick grocery list meant for a supermarket with 5-mile-long aisles. On a typical page, our most irrepressible policy wonk hopscotches from land mines to the suicide of an admiral, reauthorization of the Ryan White law providing AIDS services, signing the Megan’s Law on sex offenders, campaigning for a Missouri congressman and announcing compensation for Vietnam veterans with certain illnesses–then moves to Israeli elections, black church burnings, tuition tax credits and requiring uniforms for elemen-tary school students in just the next three paragraphs.
He is self-absorbed, disingenuous, self-deceiving, banal (“as long as you don’t quit, you’ve always got a chance”), self-pitying, desperate to be viewed as misunderstood, impervious to embarrassment (even with the Monica Lewinsky escapade), too given to pontificate and not actually persuade and, like a Baby Boomer Don Corleone, intent on keeping his friends close but his enemies closer. He praises to the hilt 1996 Republican presidential candidate Bob Dole, who found him an immoral draft dodger, and even pulls a few punches in discussing former House Speaker Newt Gingrich, the P.T. Barnum of the anti-Clinton crusade that consumed Washington for eight years, inspired a thousand Republican fundraisers and helped innumerable cable-TV hosts, pundits and executives pay their kids’ college tuitions.
And still, any student of the American presidency should read this unavoidably flawed, inescapably engaging take on a most remarkable life.
Do not come to this book as an even vaguely neutral history. It is what it is: a 957-page memoir cum campaign manifesto, one man’s take on his life and his claim to substantial achievement and thwarted grandeur. It is probably way too early for Clinton to have cranked this out, given the unavoidable lack of perspective and the raw emotions he still carries and inspires. Arguably, for every fan lining up blocks outside a Border’s to get his autograph, there is a caller to Rush Limbaugh craving to deride. And there is evidence, too, of Clinton’s succumbing to premature publication, a malady in which an author races a deadline not meant to ensure nuance but, in this case, to avoid upstaging the drowsy early presidential campaign of Democratic Sen. John Kerry. Still, it will serve as a most useful road map for future biographers.
Come to this as two books, the first on a most remarkable childhood and ascent to the White House, the second on eight complicated and exhausting years in which Clinton fought personal demons and a Congress often controlled by the opposition, became the first Democrat since Franklin Roosevelt to win re-election (after being viewed as irrelevant after the GOP’s stunning 1995 takeover of Congress) and morphed into a charismatic international celebrity (see him as a white Muhammad Ali) now commanding $300,000 speaking fees. If Richard Nixon’s thousands of hours of secretly taped recordings constitute our most vivid account of the daily life of a president, this may be our most detailed written inspection of the domestic and international pressures facing a leader of the last superpower.
The first book is a bona fide Abe Lincoln log cabin saga, gussied up slightly and transported into the modern era and the small, struggling state of Arkansas. No private schooling in Switzerland, like Kerry, or summers in Kennebunkport, Maine, like President Bush. It’s about the somewhat fearful child of a man who died in a car accident three months prior to the child’s birth. He was then brought up partly by a horribly abusive, alcoholic stepfather of modest means and even more limited desire to show affection for chubby, ungainly Bill. No surprise, the son aimed to please and to calm the frequent unrest around him, especially in defense of his mother, Virginia.
There was born a mixture of loneliness and anger and what he terms “parallel” worlds in which the activist public persona battled inner furies inspired by a sense of having not been dealt a fair hand. Its manifestations were an astonishing ambition and intellectual yearning; a devouring of every book, movie and TV show he could find (if he’s honest about his reading, he ranks with Teddy Roosevelt and Woodrow Wilson as our most literate commanders in chief). He knew that the high school band in which he played saxophone would not serve as his path to the kudos he desired, though he learned important political skills going to junior high band camps. No, it was public service he relished, even if others had doubts about his toughness.
“I was fascinated by people, politics, and policy, and I thought I could make it without family wealth, or connections, or establishment southern positions on race and other issues.” He made a strategically important decision to go to Georgetown University in the nation’s capital, not the University of Arkansas, also finding work in the office of legendary Sen. J. William Fulbright and making a slew of connections that held him in good stead. He was a party animal who eschewed booze, soberly constructing a prodigious and lifelong Rolodex of connections, later doing same as a Rhodes scholar and Yale University Law School student.
After a variety of failed relationships with impressive women (he writes of his “incapacity for commitment”), he fell for Hillary Rodham of Park Ridge. His unabashed courting included conning a security guard to let them sneak into a New Haven art museum after closing time to see a Mark Rothko exhibit. They sat together reading a biography of Napoleon Bonaparte before a fire in their $75-a-month, law school starter apartment. He then dragged her back to Arkansas, they got married and began raising an apparently wonderful daughter as he proceeded to be elected attorney general, and then governor five times, along the way proving unfaithful via liaisons with the likes of Gennifer Flowers and Paula Jones.
He was a boy wonder politician, chastened and enlightened by electoral defeats in a run for Congress and one gubernatorial re-election, who mastered the mechanics of governing. And if Ronald Reagan loved people but didn’t necessarily need them, Clinton loves and craves them, be they chicken farmers or royalty. Signing books for hours will be reflexive for him, like breathing.
In a downpour once, I went tent to tent with him in a Turkish city devastated by earthquake and saw him win the lifelong adoration of men, women and children who had lost everything, precisely because he did feel their pain. And if there was a single person with whom he didn’t connect, he’d still be there, trying to win him over. His mother detected that impulse at an early age, he writes.
It’s that prowess with process, and unadulterated love of the game, that helped get him to the White House at 46 and that sets up the second book, an untidy but insightful tale of a dramatic conflict over the role of government in our lives.
On one level, these 500 pages are both illuminating and numbing in a virtual cataloging of his White House years. It’s as if he took out his daily planner and regurgitated it, albeit with dutiful context for hundreds of events and characters herein described: Fidel Castro, the tumultuous federal shutdown caused by a budget impasse, NATO meetings, coddling of Russia’s ever-tipsy Boris Yeltsin, trade with China, the V-chip, frequent crisis-filled Middle East negotiations, Al Gore, Madeleine Albright, Slobodan Milosevic, Tony Blair, Nelson Mandela, genocide in Rwanda, a Patients’ Bill of Rights, the Family and Medical Leave Act, Bono, Jimmy Carter, Henry Hyde, King Hussein, Sen. Edward Kennedy and virtually ever other soul to amble into the West Wing other than the night cleaning crew.
One wonders less about whom he slept with than if he ever had much time to sleep. The topics covered are dizzying in number and intricacy, not to mention the many surprises testing a president, like the botched raid on the Branch Davidian compound in Waco, Texas, a Mexican peso crisis, the bombing of the Oklahoma City federal building, terrorist attacks on U.S. Embassies in Africa and endless frictions and bloodshed in the Middle East. The latter seems to have been a paramount area of frustration given the many hours he expended dealing, and making headway, with mutually wary parties, led by the untrustworthy Yasser Arafat.
If Bush’s intellectual curiosity is famously circumscribed, Clinton’s is without bounds and made him delight in constantly juggling issues and people. During the same period in which he was involved with major, unrelated sets of bargaining over incendiary matters, he found himself mediating a dispute between Turkey and Greece over 10 acres of rocky islets inhabited only by animals. “I couldn’t help laughing to myself at the thought that whether or not I succeeded in making peace in the Middle East, Bosnia, or Northern Ireland, at least I had saved some Aegean sheep.”
And, of course, there was Whitewater and Clinton’s two-legged nemesis, Kenneth Starr.
If Clinton is generous to most everyone here, even turncoat acolytes like George Stephanopoulos (“Until I read his memoir, I had no idea how difficult the pressure-packed years had been for him”), he is unbridled in his hatred of Starr and a GOP majority in Congress he believes cynically and illegally sought to undermine him and a raft of legislative accomplishments. They are seen as right-wing zealots by the man who took the Democratic Party into the ideological center, recalibrating its views on economic and social issues, pushing welfare reform but also a raft of ” `small bore’ ” initiatives like school uniforms, curfews and the V-chip as Congress declined to give him any big successes.
Fending off impeachment charges is a badge of honor to Clinton. If historians ultimately view his impeachment trial the same way Clinton does–as a stunningly wasteful exercise in time and resources, and one meant to embarrass rather than prove some horrible wrong–he may get more recognition for those many smaller accomplishments, as well as for a vibrant economy he adroitly managed but also simply rode.
These 500 inartfully edited pages have a thesis lurking beneath, though it’s found deeper than the hole Clinton dug while deceiving his family and nation about “that woman,” Monica Lewinsky:
“Although I would always regret what I had done wrong, I will go to my grave being proud of what I had fought for in the impeachment battle, my last great showdown with the forces I had opposed all of my life–those who had defended the old order of racial discrimination and segregation in the South and played on the insecurities and fears of the white working class in which I grew up; who had opposed the women’s movement, the environmental movement, the gay-rights movement, and other efforts to expand our national community as assaults on the natural order; who believed government should be run for the benefit of powerful entrenched interests and favored tax cuts for the wealthy over health care and better education for children.”
It’s here where the anger hidden so long while growing up comes into full flower. Clinton sees himself as having fended off the “New Right Republicans” who took over Congress in 1995 and claims to understand “why the people who equated political, economic, and social conservatism with God’s will hated me.” It’s because he sought an America of shared benefits and equality and, moreover, “I was an apostate, a white southern Protestant who could appeal to the very people they had always taken for granted.”
From this rage might have come a truly provocative work, more show than tell, more inclined to connect dots and place Clinton’s life and presidency in a far larger context. He might have explained the potency of the issues of guns, gays and abortion, especially among Southern whites who’ve turned from the Democrats. He might have expanded on today’s sharp polarization as a political and social legacy of the tumultuous 1960s. He might have argued that a false confidence in free markets has run amok, with citizens’ belief in government intentionally undermined domestically and a hubris-filled unilateralism muddying the nation’s image abroad. If there ever was a symbol of the opposite, of pride in government’s possibilities and the unifying influence of multilateral institutions, it is Clinton, the steely “Comeback Kid” of 1992 New Hampshire primary fame, who proved more than tough.
But that is not quite what he serves up in “My Life.” Maybe it helps explain the strikingly casual, Lands’ End-like photo on the cover, with the raised head, smile, and upturned collar on his dark gray fleece or wool jacket. Listen and you can probably hear waves hitting the rocks off the Maine coast. No distant, statesmanlike pose here. The most engaging and confounding figure in our public life is running for something.
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A handful of historians pick their favorite presidential memoirs
Richard Reeves: “My favorite is The Diary of John Quincy Adams’ [Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1981; first two of 12 volumes have been published]. Calvin Coolidge’s memoir [‘The Autobiography of Calvin Coolidge,’ Academy Books, 1984] is great, particularly if you happen to be writing a book about Reagan, which I am.”
Richard Reeves’ books include “Richard Nixon: Alone in the White House” and “President Kennedy: Profile of Power.”
William S. McFeely: “Grant’s personal memoirs [‘The Personal Memoirs of U.S. Grant’ (U.S. Grant, 1885)] are a work of genuine literary merit. They’ve been praised by the likes of Gertrude Stein and Edmund Wilson, who are not exactly presidential historians. They say almost nothing about his presidency, partly because he was running out of time to write them, because he was dying of cancer. He wrote the memoir in 10 months, which is absolutely extraordinary.”
William S. McFeely is the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of “Grant: A Biography,” among many other books.
Robert Remini: “The Grant book [‘The Personal Memoirs of U.S. Grant’ (U.S. Grant, 1885)] is my pick. It’s an extraordinary work.”
Robert Remini is professor emeritus of history and humanities at the University of Illinois at Chicago. His three-volume Andrew Jackson biography won the 1984 National Book Award.
Susan Dunn: “I think the best memoirs the ones that were never written: JFK’s and FDR’s. They would have been most interesting. Of those that were written, Jefferson’s stands out [‘Thomas Jefferson: Writings: Autobiography/Notes on the State of Virginia/Public and Private Papers/Addresses/Letters’ Library of America, 1984)].”
Susan Dunn is a professor of humanities at Williams College. Her books include “The Three Roosevelts: Patrician Leaders Who Transformed America.”
