Near the end of his presidency—and of his epic autobiography—Bill Clinton is told by Yasser Arafat that he is a great man. "I am a failure," Clinton replies, "and you have made me one." (Arafat had repeatedly thwarted Clinton's attempts to broker an Israeli-Palestinian peace by being not so much intransigent as simply inert.)
I respectfully disagree: Despite adversities and self-destructive impulses that would have put paid to many of us, the life of Bill Clinton is a success. My Life by Bill Clinton ... well, that's something else again.
To borrow from an old TV commercial, I can't believe I read the whole thing. At 957 pages of frequently mind-blurring, fact-packed narrative, My Life is both too much and not enough. When author Clinton tries to encapsulate the vicissitudes and accomplishments of politician Clinton, he is like the gourmand who studied the menu, turned to the waiter and said, "Yes."
An outsize figure in American politics, Clinton was defined by his excesses—so perhaps destiny decrees that his apologia pro vita sua should suffer from authorial avoirdupois. What could profitably have yielded a series of books, a cottage industry of Clintonia, has been jimmied into one bulging volume.
As if to reassure us he was no slacker, Clinton enumerates policy accomplishments and legislation by the hundred. He worked hard for the money, no question about it. Laws are signed, nominations made, events attended, countries visited and foreign heads of state are feted (or mourned) in such overwhelming profusion that the reader's brain goes into involuntary shutdown from the information overload. Like Clinton, I love ice cream, but not by the gallon!
Instead of force-feeding us his life in one great gulp, Clinton would have been well advised to emulate, say, Nixon's Six Crises and focus on the defining moments of his presidency, which also would have provided a more coherent forum for his political philosophy. The early years, including Clinton's Faulknerian childhood and his internal struggle over Vietnam (where he seems to be torn between a sense of obligation to serve and genuine fear of death; his criticisms of the war itself are rote, passionless), might make an elegant volume. The Whitewater/Monica ordeal is a saga unto itself, and the famous "Friends of Bill" flit but fleetingly through these pages.
Structuring the book in strict chronological order is its downfall. We leapfrog from story line to story line every few paragraphs, especially once Clinton is elected governor of Arkansas. And when he's elected president, it's Katie, bar the door!
The incessant narrative track-jumping makes this a whistle-stop tour of one of the most important political careers of the 20th century. You'll: See Bill bungle his first term as governor, learn from it—then make the same mistakes all over again as newly elected president! Watch Bill expediently cave on important points of principle! Learn how Bill kept Yasser from kissing him! Blink and you'll miss most of Bill and Hillary's marriage! Notice Bill dither and pass the buck on Somalia! Witness Bill later risk political capital for Irish peace and Kosovar autonomy! Thrill to Bill's hair's-breadth escape from impeachment! Admire thrifty Bill, balancing budget upon budget! Cringe as Bill's successor takes over and f--ks it all up!
After the Starr Report—surely the largest government-funded work of erotica ever—there's probably not much left to be known about the former Leader of the Free World's sex life, and don't look for it here. Gennifer Flowers and Monica Lewinsky are coolly dealt with (pages 384 and 773-6, respectively) and—after a pretty unsparing description of his own childhood and his mother's abusive second marriage—Clinton is distinctly clenched about his relationships with Hillary and Chelsea.
Considering how much Kenneth Starr & Co. invaded his privacy, it's not surprising that Clinton would drop the portcullis against further intrusion. But it's disconcerting that a man who writes so fondly of his mother, brother and even his alcohol-tormented stepfather can be so impersonal about his own wife. Those seeking to understand the Bill-Hillary dynamic had best look elsewhere. (Paternal pride and fondness ensure that Chelsea, at least, is limned with more dimension and individuality.)
While Clinton bends over backwards to find merit in even the likes of Newt Gingrich—who he portrays as a sort of prescient but tantrum-prone child prodigy—his empathy fails him when confronted with Starr. The Ned Flanders of American politics, Starr was a nauseatingly sanctimonious sweet-speaker who indiscriminately indicted and imprisoned witnesses in a blatant effort to suborn perjury at taxpayer expense. Clinton is still mighty pissed and I don't blame him.
Clinton's determination to see the good in everyone, Starr excepted, proved anathema to those who divide the world into the blessed (themselves) and the damned (everyone else). Still more galling was the ability of this hymn-singing, Scripture-quoting Southern Baptist to preempt traditional right-wing issues (crime, welfare reform and deficit reduction) and ride them to victory. "Politics to them was simply war by other means ... I was an apostate," he writes, "a white Southern Protestant who could appeal to the very people they had taken for granted," while aligning himself with the marginalized likes of blacks and gays. For the American Right, it was the worst of both worlds.
Unlike the current president, who can't think of a single mistake he's made, Clinton is downright compulsive about admitting his screwups. As masochistic as the mea culpas seem, I could suggest a few more. For instance, there is no mention of Rickey Ray Rector. Remember him? In 1992, Clinton interrupted his campaign to enforce the execution of that mentally crippled man, to prove he was Tough On Crime.
Clinton's saving grace was that, no matter how bad he appeared, his opponents unwittingly, invariably came off worse. Publicly, he strove for magnanimity, unlike the Gingrich-Armey-DeLay-Santorum jihadists, who were wont to gloat openly about giving someone (preferably the disenfranchised) the shaft. He left Republicans fuming with rage and Democrats loved him for it.
The Bubba-in-Chief may have been a rogue and rascal, but he was on the side of the angels more often than not. By going into politics, Clinton writes, "I always felt the main point of my work was to give people a chance to have better stories" and that somebody from the government could actually be here to help you.
His own story is related with frequent recourse to self-deprecation (on alcohol: "I'm relieved I never had a craving for it. I've had enough problems without that one"), along with sly, sidelong shiv-pokes at political nemeses and faltering allies.
In his peroration, Clinton articulates a unifying vision of geopolitics, a culmination of the big-picture thinking and emphasis on interconnectedness that run like veins through the corpus of this memoir. As to his own place in history, Clinton likens his administration to JFK-era America, noting that post-Kennedy, "[w]ithin six years the economy was sagging ... Vietnam had consumed America ... and ushered in a new era of division in our politics." Replace "Vietnam" with "Iraq" and Mr. Clinton's successor only required three years to effect a comparable fracturing of the body politic.
As author and as statesman, Bill Clinton's flaws are writ large. Yet America's fortunes improved during his watch, and he continues to appeal to the better angels in our nature, even if his own have been known to stray. As the saying goes, he may have been an S.O.B., but he was our S.O.B.