READING BILL CLINTON’S MY LIFE

126 REVIEWS IN AMERICAN HISTORY / MARCH 2005 READING BILL CLINTON’S MY LIFE William C. Berman Bill Clinton. My Life. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2004. 1008 pp. Photographs and index. $35.00 Historians have found the memoirs authored by American presidents after World War II generally mediocre, unlike those, say, of Winston Churchill or Charles de Gaulle. Put simply, they rarely broke new ground and were largely exercises in self-justification for which publishers paid handsomely. It was only after historians began to examine materials in the various presidential libraries that a more complex and factually reliable narrative emerged either to deepen or replace the accounts that figured so prominently in those memoirs. The opening of the Clinton Library in Little Rock, with its seventy-five million or more items, prepares the way for a serious scholarly inquiry into the life and presidency of Bill Clinton. Although it will take decades to fully integrate this massive collection into the historical literature, there are already ample materials in the public record to engage historians. Clinton’s memoir may serve as a necessary and useful point of departure for the purpose of framing questions and seeking answers about his life both before and during his presidential years. Whether Clinton’s memoir—with its 957-pages of often mind-numbing detail, for which he received a staggering ten million dollar advance, that has already sold hundreds of thousands of copies—is a fully reliable and trustworthy guide is another question. Yet Clinton’s intense personal focus and the various stories he tells about himself and others makes his memoir, in its best parts, a different and decidedly more interesting read than those that preceded it. Clinton’s goal, understandably, is to establish the terms by which his legacy is enhanced and viewed in the best possible light. He relishes his role as a story teller, serving up homespun and often engaging accounts of how he initially coped with life in a deeply dysfunctional family, with a loving mother who married five times—twice to the same man—and an often inebriated and violent stepfather. To avoid endless conflict, he developed a strategy of living “parallel lives as a child,” one that was secret, the other public (p. 584). And this dichotomy allowed him to survive in the face of all Reviews in American History 33 (2005) 127–133 © 2005 by The Johns Hopkins University Press BERMAN / Reading Bill Clinton’s My Life 127 that domestic turmoil. Although Clinton admittedly lacked a clear sense of personhood, he was able to nurture a growing capacity for empathy out of the welter of such a painful inner life, which later became his hallmark on the campaign trail and relations with people. For him that empathetic side of his own contradictory personality was expressed throughout his political career as a desire to give people “better stories” than those they had experienced in their own conflicted and harassed lives. Although David Maraniss’s fine biography covers much the same ground as does Clinton before he became president, Clinton’s vivid articulation of his own private and personal feelings about his various experiences as a child and adolescent gives the opening section of the memoir its special flavor and appeal. Especially revealing are Clinton’s stories about growing up in Arkansas, and his keen observations about the state’s politicians and its political culture, which provided the context and setting for his own generally successful quest for public office in his home state. Clinton was a natural campaigner. His charm, coupled with an easy, folksy manner and empathetic outreach, was sufficient to give him the votes he needed in 1978 to win the governorship at the age of thirty two, making him the youngest governor in the nation. Although Clinton’s victory was a successful career move, there was more at stake for him because he viewed politics as a means of improving people’s lives. Thus, he embraced government for the purpose of promoting social and racial progress. For that reason, he admired Robert Kennedy’s passion and “raw energy” (p. 97). Clinton describes Kennedy as the first New Democrat, who “believed in civil rights for all and special privileges for none, in giving poor people a hand up rather than a handout: work was better than welfare. He understood in a visceral way that progressive politics requires the advocacy of both new policies and fundamental values, both far-reaching change and social stability” (p. 122). Here in a nutshell was Clinton’s own political credo, one that he advanced as a founding member of the Democratic Leadership Council and a leading public advocate of a “third way” progressivism once he became president. Clinton was an unusual white southerner, in that he had developed, since his boyhood, warm and easy-going relations with Arkansas blacks, who supported him throughout his many campaigns both in the state and nation. Because he was always sympathetic to the hopes and dreams of black Americans, Clinton appeared with Congressmen John Lewis and Coretta King, among others, at the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma, Alabama, on March 5, 2000 to celebrate the thirty-fifth anniversary of “Bloody Sunday.” Clinton loved that day in Selma, and his participation in the ceremony as president captured, fittingly, the best side of his often dark and tormented personality. As he remarked, “Once again, I was swept back across the years 128 REVIEWS IN AMERICAN HISTORY / MARCH 2005 to my boyhood longing for and belief in an America without a racial divide” (p. 897). Clinton was not always so racially high-minded. The requirement of racial politics sometimes dictated other kinds of action. He attacked Sister Souljah, a black rap singer, for a racial utterance she had made a month earlier, given his need in 1992 to show Reagan Democrats that he was fully independent of Jesse Jackson’s influence and authority. This he did while attending a meeting of the Rainbow Coalition, with Jackson at his side and Souljah on the program. In 1995, he was fearful that Jackson might yet challenge him in the 1996 Democratic primaries if he failed to protect affirmative action programs. Clinton soon moved in such a way that both black and white interest groups were satisfied with his stand. As Clinton well knew, politics helped to drive the policy but he made it appear in the memoir that his motivation for taking action had nothing to do with political self-interest. Clinton’s journey from Arkansas to the White House had many stops along the way, including his marriage to Hillary Rodham, whom he had met when they were fellow students at Yale University Law School. Together, they became partners in power. And Chelsea, their daughter, as the memoir makes clear, is the real joy of his life. But the problem of Clinton’s non-stop lechery hovered over the marriage. Still, Hillary Clinton played her role as a loyal and loving wife to perfection when—during that CBS 60 Minutes interview—she stood by her man in the context of allegations raised about Clinton’s longstanding affair with Gennifer Flowers. In short, she saved Clinton’s political career, helping him to survive and surmount his second-place finish in the 1992 New Hampshire primary. Clinton’s discussion of that interview in the memoir reveals just how deftly he and his wife managed to bury the issue of his philandering without incurring serious political damage. Yet the potential for trouble was always there, given Clinton’s predilection for taking risks with both compliant and not always compliant women. Once Clinton turns to his White House years, his memoir bogs down, becoming in many places a dreary laundry list of people he met, meetings he attended, and the innumerable domestic and foreign trips he took as president. Still, Clinton provides his slant on many issues, including domestic politics and the economy, impeachment, the threat of terrorism, and efforts to resolve ethnic tension in Northern Ireland and the Middle East. Clinton worked hard to find a solution to the agonizing conflict in the Middle East. His account of that undertaking is one of the best sections in the entire memoir. Clinton—using all his wiles and expending a great deal of time and energy and ably assisted by chief American negotiator Dennis Ross— sought to mediate the outstanding differences that separated Israel from the Palestine Liberation Organization. His effort ultimately resulted in failure, as Yasser Arafat steadfastly rejected proposals submitted in the context of BERMAN / Reading Bill Clinton’s My Life 129 Clinton’s “parameters” for peace at Taba, Egypt (p. 936). For Clinton, then, it was close but no cigar. Clinton also tells a lesser-known story that ended in frustration. He sought to arrange a negotiated settlement between Israel and Syria, leading to an Israeli withdrawal from the Golan Heights in exchange for the protection of Israeli security requirements. But Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak’s worry “about giving up Golan without having prepared the Israeli public for it” and the backing away by Hafez al Assad, president of Syria, from earlier and seemingly more hopeful talks between the two sides killed what surely would have been an historic agreement (p. 885). Ironically, Barak’s hesitation to take the next step in negotiations with Syria and Arafat’s refusal to deal at Taba destroyed the momentum Clinton had tried to create with his intervention on behalf of peace. Among Clinton’s other foreign policy failures was his unwillingness after Somalia to move against the genocide in Rwanda for which he later apologized in Kigali (pp. 781–2). And his belated, uneven response to the threat of terrorism surely constitutes a failure of sorts. Although the memoir leaves little doubt about Clinton’s desire to capture or kill Osama bin Laden, the 9/11 Commission Report, which appeared in the summer 2004, cites the delays and caution that prevailed in Clinton’s White House when it confronted the threat bin Laden represented. Although foreign policy issues mattered greatly in his White House, domestic political and economic matters mostly absorbed Clinton himself. He sought to create a “dynamic center” in American politics, which required that the Democratic party endorse tough crime legislation and welfare reform if it were to compete successfully with the Republicans (p. 521). As a New Democrat, Clinton was strongly committed to welfare reform, but had vetoed earlier Republican legislation for being too stringent. Just before the start of the 1996 presidential campaign, Newt Gingrich and his fellow Republicans passed another welfare bill that they hoped would force Clinton’s hand. Although Clinton discusses the content of the bill he did sign, there is no reference to the political motives that drove him to accept it in the first place. Despite Clinton’s often bruising battles with Gingrich over policy matters, he appreciated the Speaker, remarking, “At his best, Newt Gingrich was creative, flexible and brimming over with new ideas” (p. 659). In fact, Clinton liked virtually everybody whose name he mentions in the memoir save Saddam Hussein and Kenneth Starr. One wonders, though, what Clinton really thought of George H. W. Bush whose campaign tactics in 1992 had to rankle him. Clinton knew Bush had lost the election in 1992 because of high unemployment and he was determined to avoid a similar fate in 1996. Much of what Clinton has to say about the economy historians already know. And the same 130 REVIEWS IN AMERICAN HISTORY / MARCH 2005 goes for his discussion of the demise of health care and the story of his reelection in 1996. What he leaves out is more revealing. He neglects to mention that Hillary Clinton and her health care advisers drafted a bill that not only lacked any input from moderate Republicans such as Senator John Chafee but was also to be exempt from disabling amendments. The White House’s failure to consult and compromise at opportune moments in the policy process surely hurt the bill’s chances for passage. So when Clinton holds Bob Dole’s projected filibuster responsible for the final collapse of health care, he skirts the question of shared responsibility for its demise. Clinton does admit that if he had delayed action on the bill when it appeared to be in deep trouble and moved on to welfare reform, the Democrats may have avoided the disaster that befell them in the1994 Congressional races. Clinton’s recapitulation of the results of the 1996 election makes for a good read, but left out of his account are the tactics he and Dick Morris, his political guru, employed for the campaign. Clinton needed a lot of money to pay for the advertising Morris launched in 1995–96 in media centers outside of New York and Washington. That need led directly to the campaign finance scandals of the Clinton campaign. Not surprisingly, the names of James Riady, Johnny Chung, and Charlie Trie, among others, are missing from Clinton’s story. And sadly for the Democrats, their chance to possibly win back the House was lost when Bob Dole and Ross Perot, in the last days of the campaign, focused attention on rumors about the corrupt financing of the Clinton campaign, which may have affected outcomes in several Congressional races. Controversy about matters other than public policy plagued the Clinton presidency, and Clinton devotes many pages to the subject of Whitewater, the Paula Jones case, and, above all, his impeachment. Clinton provides pointed arguments in his defense and also musters moral outrage to condemn his pursuers, especially Kenneth Starr. A key question remains unanswered in his memoir: why didn’t he settle the Paula Jones case very early on and avoid the risk of a serious penalty, which in turn might have allowed him to avoid everything else that followed? Did Hillary Clinton play a role in preventing Clinton from apologizing to Jones because she was unwilling to undergo another round of humiliation after the Gennifer Flower’s affair? Clinton thought that his battle over impeachment was part of an ongoing struggle with New Right Republicans over “power” (p. 862). In his view, they represented the forces of reaction and tradition, which were opposed to racial justice, the gay-rights movement, the women’s movement, and the environmental movement. According to Clinton, the New Right Republicans hated him not only because of his commitment to those movements but also because he was “an apostate, a white southern Protestant who could appeal to the very people they had always taken for granted” (p. 863). In this battle BERMAN / Reading Bill Clinton’s My Life 131 were the opposing sides in a cultural war, with Clinton serving as a focal point for the intensifying conflict. Although Clinton had to cope with the politics of impeachment, his standing with the public was greatly enhanced thanks to a strong and surging economy and a stock market boom, which brought jobs and improved wage benefits to millions of Americans and new forms of paper wealth to shareholders. He pushed hard for increased trade and market opportunities for American business overseas, and advanced a domestic agenda designed to protect the environment and various social programs. As his memoir rightly suggests, Clinton was making progress on all fronts, and his record of achievement, he hoped, would help to elect Vice President Al Gore as his successor in 2000. Clinton played an insignificant role in the election of 2000, though surely not one of his choosing: Gore kept him on a campaign leash as a result of his impeachment, and George W. Bush promised to bring morality back into the Oval Office. As a result of a 5–4 Supreme Court decision that denied Gore an opportunity to pursue a recount in the hotly contested Florida election, Bush was elected president. Hence Clinton’s policy of using a budget surplus to help pay down the federal debt and the extending of his commitment to protect and advance various social programs was lost as a result of Gore’s defeat. As George W. Bush was about to be sworn in as president, Clinton, in his last hours as president, created more controversy over his behavior, by issuing several dubious pardons, smacking of influence, if not bribery. He pardoned Marc Rich, a wealthy fugitive living in Switzerland, whose former wife gave large sums to the Clinton Library Foundation and to Hillary Clinton’s campaign for the Senate in 2000. In his defense, Clinton states in his memoir that his decision to pardon Rich was “based on the merits” of the case (p. 941). Clinton’s commutation of the sentence of Carlos Vignali is left unmentioned in the memoir. Vignali was a cocaine dealer whose father had paid $200,000 to Hugh Rodham, Hillary’s brother, to bring about his release. Although public outrage ostensibly forced Rodham to return the money he had received, Clinton’s action in this case represents a notorious abuse of the presidential pardoning power, which ultimately will do his reputation no good. So why he did do it? Perhaps because he could. In concluding his lengthy, occasionally revealing, and sometimes sad memoir, Clinton takes the long view on his years as president. As he wrote with a sense of history in mind, “I couldn’t control what happened to my policies and programs; few things are permanent in politics. Nor could I affect the early judgments on my so-called legacy. The history of America’s move from the end of the Cold War to the millennium would be written and rewritten over and over” (p. 951). Clinton was right, of course, and the 132 REVIEWS IN AMERICAN HISTORY / MARCH 2005 memoir will usefully serve future biographers and historians in their attempts to better define his place and role in the political, social, and cultural history of late-twentieth-century America. William C. Berman, professor emeritus of history, University of Toronto, is the author of From the Center to the Edge: The Politics and Policies of the Clinton Presidency (2001).