Tiptoeing through the White House years

Bill CLINTON fulfills most of the demands of the memoir genre in his voluminous, intermittently interesting but ultimately unsatisfying book. The former president produces a few juicy personal revelations. (His alcoholic stepfather once shot at his mother; he slept on the couch after revealing his affair with Monica Lewinsky to his wife.) He settles scores with old adversaries in the political world and the media (especially for the fevered coverage of his investment in the Whitewater land deal). He paints telling portraits of world leaders, offering verdicts both expected (reverence for former South African President Nelson Mandela and assassinated Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin) and surprising (grudging respect for the late Syrian dictator Hafez Assad). He puts himself on the couch for some amateur analysis. (He explores, at times movingly, the strains between a sunny exterior and an internal life of which he chillingly writes: “It was dark down there.”)

But throughout the more than 950 pages of “My Life,” Clinton offers little serious reflection on his successes and failures in eight years as president or what his experience means for the future of center-left politics in America. These omissions mark the book as a missed opportunity. Clinton is not only a skilled politician but also a diligent student of politics. He flashes those skills here with acute analyses of political trends and political leaders in the years leading to his election. But he seems to shut down that part of his brain when he turns to his presidency; the book, as a result, stagnates for most of its final 500 pages.

It’s too bad, because Clinton may be better suited than any recent occupant to explain what the Oval Office feels like from the inside. In conversation while president, he could be captivating on the presidency itself. On how a president builds consensus for change, how he accumulates and leverages influence and how he copes with uncertainty, Clinton had thought seriously about how his strategies compared with his predecessors’. Once during an interview, I read Clinton a quote from “Present at the Creation: My Years in the State Department,” Dean Acheson’s magisterial memoir about his years as one of the architects of America’s post-World War II foreign policy. Of his time in government, Acheson wrote: “Not only was the future clouded, a common enough situation, but the present was equally clouded.... The significance of events was shrouded in ambiguity. We groped after interpretations of them ... and hesitated long before grasping what now seems obvious.”

I asked Clinton if he ever felt that way. “Absolutely,” he answered. “I think this is a time when we have to be highly flexible. We have to be willing to admit when we make a mistake and change course.” Does that mean, I continued, that like Acheson’s generation, he had resigned himself to uncertainty about whether he was pursuing the right course? “Absolutely,” he said again, more insistently. “What I want people in this country to feel about our administration [is] ... not that we have all the answers, not that we can solely foresee the future, not even that we won’t make mistakes, but [that]

Don’t look to “My Life” for many such insights about the nature of leadership. Instead, more like the current president, Clinton rarely acknowledges confusion or doubt. He reflexively defends the vast majority of his decisions. He accepts the unavoidable conclusion that he tried to do too much during his first two years and acknowledges that the 1994 election might have turned out better if he had advanced welfare reform sooner, once his healthcare plan stalled. But for long stretches the book reads as if Clinton were still at the White House podium selling the talking points he or his staff had devised that morning, as if he were still campaigning.

And not only for his place in history. Clinton’s reluctance to candidly explore his own decisions is compounded by a conspicuous refusal to draw conclusions that could hurt any of his political allies. He’s happy to flick at political opponents (like the National Rifle Assn., which reappears throughout the book, like the wolf in some fairy tale, as a source of both fascination and dread). But Clinton doesn’t raise a quibble about the failed healthcare plan Hillary Rodham Clinton produced in 1993 or Al Gore’s decision to bench him during the 2000 campaign. He doesn’t even mention the disastrous demands from complacent congressional Democratic leaders after his 1992 victory to shelve his proposals for campaign finance limits and other political reforms that might have solidified his tenuous standing with independent voters. Nor does he acknowledge the role of the left in sinking his crime bill in 1994, which began the legislative unraveling that culminated in the historic GOP landslide that fall. On all these issues Clinton is so bland and vague that he appears less interested in informing readers than in denying Republicans and conservatives any ammunition they can use in future campaigns.

That calculation cuts to the essence of the book’s failing. In the end, Clinton is defeated by the modern memoirist’s tension between commerce and perspective. Since everything about the book was geared to produce a blockbuster, the publishers had to rush it into stores while his presidency was still fresh in the public’s mind. But it’s clear that not enough time has passed for Clinton to develop much critical distance on his tenure. By contrast, Acheson didn’t publish his brilliant memoir until 20 years after the principal events it covered. Clinton may be rewarded with a financial windfall and a frenzy of renewed public attention, but Acheson won’t have to share any space on the small shelf of the greatest memoirs of government service ever written.

Clinton is too smart and thoughtful to produce an entirely dull book. He is engaging and even poignant as he traces his fingertips over the scars of his early life in a troubled home. He offers some fascinating new details on his career (when he lost his first bid for reelection as Arkansas governor in 1980, both Jerry Brown and Norman Lear offered him jobs). He’s always interesting when analyzing other politicians. His longtime critics haven’t been convinced by his explanation of his personal failings -- his insistence that the tensions of life with an abusive stepfather led him to live “parallel lives” -- but at least it represents a coherent attempt to explain behavior that deteriorated from self-indulgent to self-destructive. He’s also candid about his efforts to avoid service in Vietnam, writing that after all these years he’s uncertain whether his resistance “was rooted in conviction or cowardice.” And although he sometimes gets tangled in the weeds of obscure state legislative fights, he offers a balanced portrayal of his tenure in Arkansas -- suggesting that, with more distance, he can see himself clearly.

But the book sags once he reaches Washington. Surprisingly for a man who came to office with a hefty domestic agenda, Clinton seems much more engaged writing about foreign policy. (He dismisses the welfare reform battle that split his administration and his party in just five unrevealing paragraphs.) The larger problem is that he tells his presidential story chronologically rather than thematically. Somewhere after his inauguration, this becomes a new Book of Lists, tangled in speech excerpts, bill signings and travelogue. There are far too many semicolons -- and far too few insights.

Perhaps inadvertently, organizing the book this way captures the extent to which serving as president is like drinking from an open fire hydrant. “I returned to Washington to a whole series of all those all-too-typical days when everything happens at once,” he writes at one point. In the sheer barrage of daily detail that Clinton hurls at the reader, the relentless pace of the presidency -- and the range of his intellectual curiosity -- does shine through .

But mostly the effect is to atomize the book. Many individual passages (especially his accounts of the Israeli-Palestinian peace talks or his fury at special prosecutor Kenneth Starr) are revealing. Yet it’s dangerous to grow too invested in any story line, because usually within a few paragraphs Clinton is off to something else. As an author, he seems to have taken his inspiration from Monty Python’s old anthem: And now for something completely different. The book would have held together better had it been organized around such subjects as his response to terrorism, the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, the rise and fall of healthcare or his relations with Congress, the media and the Washington establishment.

Critics on the left and right alike may see Clinton’s lack of literary focus as a window into larger personal and political weaknesses. And in some ways this book does betray the same lack of discipline that led him to both the longest State of the Union addresses in recent memory and the Monica Lewinsky scandal that precipitated his impeachment. But it’s too facile to say that “My Life” fails because Clinton lacks any core convictions to guide it. In fact, the book demonstrates that Clinton’s career has been guided by a search for ideas that would expand economic opportunity while broadening the base of support for center-left politics. And after his chaotic first two years as president, he demonstrated formidable political (if not personal) discipline in pursuing those goals, reducing poverty more than any president since Lyndon Johnson while expanding the Democratic Party’s electoral reach up the income ladder.

Clinton’s presidency was a paradox: He polarized the country (largely around his personal behavior) while mostly pursuing centrist policies meant to unify. At home and abroad, his strategy was the antithesis of his successor’s. President Bush governs in black and white; Clinton defined his politics in the space between. Bush tries to roll over opposition; Clinton sought to envelop it. Bush believes he exerts his greatest leverage by creating stark alternatives; Clinton believed he exerted the most influence by bridging differences.

With that contrast so vivid, Clinton might have produced a more interesting (not to mention more valuable) book if he had better explained how he set and pursued his goals, how he weighed ambition and caution and what his eight bruising years taught him about the length and limits of a president’s power. Put another way, less Dr. Phil and more Machiavelli might have made for a more memorable memoir. But that is not a book that could carry the massive marketing campaign surrounding this one. Nor is it the book Clinton appears ready to write. When the frenzied autograph seekers have gone home, perhaps he can sit down and try again. He can do better, much better, than this. *