One hell of a ride

My Life

by Bill Clinton

(Hutchinson)

Bill Clinton had barely been unleashed upon the United States when the mythology started to grow. In 1992 the Republicans insisted he was nothing more than the ‘failed governor of a small Southern state”, but Americans had a feeling he would soon be running their country so they wanted to know more.

They gobbled up every morsel, from the story of Gennifer with a G to the legend that the young governor could eat an apple in a single bite.

On the press bus we were no different. We heard that the candidate didn’t snooze during the long-haul flights or late-night drives through the rural heartland. We heard he stayed awake, gulping coffee or Diet Coke, playing cards — or simply talking. Talking, talking, talking. We heard that one journalist, a young reporter from Newsweek who had been with the campaign since the very start, had become part of the family: he would sit up at the front of the lead bus, playing hearts with the man who would be president. They may not have admitted it, but every journalist who heard that felt a stab of envy. Everyone wanted to sit, hang out and shoot the breeze with Clinton.

Now comes a surrogate for that experience. My Life is not a great book, in places it’s not even that good — but when you read it, you can’t help but feel you’re in the company, one on one, of the man himself. It’s his voice you hear on the page, for good and sometimes ill. The fact that it’s 957 pages long only adds to the effect: it’s as if you’ve been caught on a train from Boston to San Francisco and ended up sitting opposite the last president of the United States. He’s got all the time in the world and he’s in the mood to talk.

The prologue sets the tone when Clinton reveals that, fresh out of law school, he bought a self-help book that encouraged the reader to list his chief life goals. ‘I wanted to be a good man, have a good marriage and children, have good friends, make a successful political life and write a great book.” Clinton then ticks off how he did and how he ‘kept score”. Finally he writes: ‘As for the great book, who knows? It sure is a good story.”

That’s the style throughout, warm and approachable — just like the Clinton persona itself. And it is true that the book resembles the man and his presidency. There are flashes of brilliance, just as there were some dazzling fireworks in the Clinton years: from the handshake between Yitzhak Rabin and Yasser Arafat on the White House lawn to the beating back and outsmarting of Newt Gingrich’s Republican revolution of 1994. Clinton the author shows off his talent best when he summarises the political dilemmas of rivals, foreign leaders or himself with concise acuity. (This was always a great Clinton skill: low-level congressmen would come away from an encounter with the president impressed and ever so slightly humiliated, as he would rattle off the latest polling data from, or political strife in, their district.)

The narrative is engaging, too, just as the roller-coaster ride of those eight Clinton years in the White House was compelling. The accounts of high-wire diplomacy in the Middle East or Northern Ireland, the eyeball-to-eyeball brinkmanship against Gingrich, the entire Monica Lewinsky episode — they are all riveting.

But there are deep flaws, just as there were in his presidency. The first is common to both — indiscipline. His administration was often faulted for failing to focus on one or two large goals, pursuing them vigorously.

Instead, especially after the congressional defeat of his plan for comprehensive health care in 1994 and the Republican ascendancy, Clinton chased a host of small-bore issues —what one commentator at the time mocked as ‘teeny, tiny politics”.

My Life can be like that, too. It does not structure itself around one or two all-encompassing themes. It is instead doggedly chronological. The US critics who have mocked the book as a ‘diary dump” are right: whole sections seem to have been written by a man flicking through past appointment books. The unhappy results are pages consisting of non sequiturs: I vetoed a Bill on seat belts; later I met the prime minister of Latvia; that evening I apologised to Hillary. I parody, but only slightly.

The other structural problem also mirrors a Clinton trait. This fat tome could easily have been split into two books. The first is a rather charming recollection of an Arkansas boyhood, filled with choice Southern characters such as Vernon the science teacher or Uncle Buddy the storyteller. The quality of the writing is better here.

The second book within is the presidential memoir. It begins late: Clinton is not even elected until page 444. Yet it’s fitting that these two books go together. For one thing, so much of Clinton’s later actions are explained by the nature of his upbringing. (The child in an alcoholic household with an abusive stepfather, constantly playing peacemaker, constantly craving affection. It doesn’t take Freud… ) But housing two radically different lives between one set of covers makes a deeper sense.

For, as Clinton himself writes often, he learned early to lead ‘parallel lives”, one tormented by ‘demons” on the inside, the other marked by great success on the outside. That’s the nature of the man and it was the nature of his presidency.

Where an editor might have helped is in curbing the habits of the politician. Too much space is wasted in tributes to colleagues or thanks to foreign counterparts; at its worst, My Life can read like the longest Oscar speech in history. It’s hardly a surprise: patting backs is a campaigner’s reflex. But there is an interesting explanation.

For My Life is not only a bid to restore Clinton’s own reputation — chiefly by pointing out his achievement in securing a decade of relative peace and prosperity — but also the second wave of a double literary offensive aimed at propelling Hillary Clinton to the White House. The first wave was Hillary’s own memoir, Living History, but this picks up where that left off. The former president exonerates his wife for the health-care debacle, blaming himself, and never misses an opportunity to praise her skills as an advocate for children, a strategist or judge of character. On these pages, she is not the ‘feminazi” imagined by the US right. She is Saint Hillary.

This might be the simple, political calculation that explains why My Life lacks large quantities of the basic staple of most political memoir: revelations of behind-the-scenes power plays. He tells us that his staff were split on the 1994 granting of a US visa to Gerry Adams, for example, but reveals nothing that we didn’t already know. He gives little colour, describes no rows. It’s as if Clinton, a politician to his marrow, just cannot bear to offend anyone. He needs to stay friendly with folks, just in case.

The exception is his excoriation of Kenneth Starr, the witchfinder-general who, Clinton writes, was determined to drive him from office. The case against Starr is powerful — though it may be too complex, too legalistic, to be clear to the non-anorak reader — yet it somehow undermines My Life. The book strives to show how Clinton has battled his demons, learning forgiveness from some of the greatest men in the world (starting with Nelson Mandela). But the Starr passages reveal that Clinton is still angry and determined to get even — via the political career of his wife if necessary.

Once the train has pulled into San Francisco, and the 957th page has been read, what do you think of this man? That he was surely the most intellectually well-equipped occupant of the Oval Office since Thomas Jefferson; that he was a master politician, even if he could not be a great president; and that he had an intense lust for life. And you realise, just from hearing about it afterwards, that it must have been a hell of a ride. —