The character of the presidency

THERE is a kind of epic and particularly American quality to Bill Clinton’s political career, though it hardly accounts for the obsessive, love-hate sort of hold he continues to exert on so many imaginations.

By my informal count, Nigel Hamilton’s “Bill Clinton: Mastering the Presidency” -- the second volume in what appears to be a projected three-part biography -- is the 50th book to take the 42nd president of the United States as its subject. That’s quite a shelf, though it may some day be matched by the one for the former first lady and would-be 44th president, Hillary Rodham Clinton. Five books about her (including two full-dress biographies) have been published in just the last year.

If you type Bill Clinton’s name into the popular Google Internet search engine, it reports 37,100,000 entries. By contrast, the man Clinton first defeated to win the White House, George H.W. Bush, gets just 1,910,000. Moreover, despite Bush’s long and dizzyingly varied public life, despite his heroic military service, successful prosecution of the First Gulf War and adroit management of relations with the dissolving Soviet Union, he has been the subject of just 11 books.

In part, this disparity may spring from the deep ambivalence Americans seem to have felt about Clinton throughout his national political career -- an appreciation of his technical skills and an abiding wariness of the man. This, after all, was a chief executive whose approval rating soared to 73% when he was impeached. The 68% approval rating he enjoyed when he left office was the highest ever measured for a departing president. In that same poll, however, 58% of the respondents answered “no” when asked if they thought Clinton was “honest and trustworthy.” It may be that the key to Clinton’s political success was being a quintessential “public man.” And the essence of a genuinely public person is possession of a transparent persona and an opaque soul.

In fact, nearly 15 years after he first took office, the photo portrait of a meditative Clinton on the cover of this new book still calls to mind Yeats’ famous description of Kevin O’Higgins, whose face, the poet said, wore “a gentle questioning look that cannot hide a soul incapable of remorse or rest.”

To the extent that Hamilton’s latest book sheds any light on all this is inadvertent, his story of Clinton’s first term -- to be fair -- has another purpose. A British-born scholar and biographer, Hamilton has written an award-winning life of Field Marshal Bernard Law Montgomery and less well-received studies of John F. Kennedy (“JFK: Reckless Youth”) and Clinton (“Bill Clinton: An American Journey”). Both were criticized for a fixation on salacious detail and an overreliance on secondary sources. Reaction to the Kennedy book was sufficiently ferocious that Hamilton dropped plans for succeeding volumes.

In his prologue, Hamilton writes that the study of political and military leadership has been his particular scholarly focus and that in this new account of Clinton’s first term -- “Mastering the Presidency” ends with his reelection -- Hamilton “wished to penetrate the fog of political war, and describe this man’s faltering, at first disastrous, but ultimately successful attempt to become a truly modern president, in a modern world. It is, to my mind, one of the epic sagas of the 1990s.”

Aside from casting his narrative in a mysteriously arbitrary Miltonian arc -- the book’s halves are titled “Paradise Lost” and “Paradise Regained” -- with curiously named military-sounding chapters, there’s little new to those who followed Clinton’s presidency in real time. In part, that’s because Hamilton relies extensively on sources that a reasonably interested party probably has read.

In this account, an indecisive young baby boomer of a president, possessed of a promiscuous and undisciplined intelligence, is taken to the verge of disaster by young, inexperienced and inept aides -- notably his first chief of staff, Mack McLarty, and a shrewish and ideologically willful wife. Hillary Clinton, in this account, is invariably long-suffering, bad-tempered and foul-mouthed. In 1995, a chastened Bill Clinton sheds many of his former advisors, stops listening to his wife, brings in the iron-willed former California congressman Leon Panetta to exercise adult supervision as chief of staff and puts himself under the tutelage of the unprincipled but brilliant political Svengali, Dick Morris.

Together, they chart a new “third way” between the disastrous traditional liberalism of Hillary and her circle and the conservative tide ominously gathering strength somewhere out in the red states. “The fact was, as foreign correspondents could see perhaps more clearly than their American colleagues,” Hamilton writes, “the Christian mullahs were massing in the South and Midwest. Secular East and West Coast liberals were left with an unappetizing choice: to go down fighting honorably, or to find a way to disarm the fundamentalists.”

Really? So that’s what we all missed. Thanks, Nigel.

Following this there are successes in the Balkans and Northern Ireland, but -- most of all -- the new and improved Clinton faces down Speaker Newt Gingrich’s congressionally based GOP insurgency through adroit management of the disastrous government shutdown forced by the House Republicans’ intransigence over the budget. (Hamilton actually is pretty good on that incident, decidedly hazy on too many others.)

In matters of broader context, Hamilton’s grasp can be at once oddly didactic and rather shaky. Thus, we are told that “Presidential ‘character’ had become a uniquely American feature in election campaigning, as befitted a nation that had overthrown monarchy, declared its independence, and instituted a system of four-year terms for the chief executive and commander-in-chief.”

OK: All those things are true, but what they have to do with each other is an utter mystery to this reader. Maybe you have to be a foreign correspondent.

When it comes to matters of character and his willingness to engage them, Hamilton’s touch shifts from unsteady to downright prurient. We are told that Hillary is “a pill,” but that her husband -- “though he might be a philanderer in the same mold as his predecessor and hero John F. Kennedy” -- was not a pill. The author’s account of the scandal that forced Morris out of Clinton’s circle all but calls the political operative mad, or at least mentally unstable. Morris certainly is one of those brilliant but deeply unpleasant individuals who are drawn to electoral politics as a profession. However, Hamilton’s assessment of his emotional stability seems entirely drawn from newsmagazine stories.

Something more is required in a biography with these ambitions.

When it comes to the Monica Lewinsky affair, Hamilton’s predilection for the salacious becomes sweatily urgent and graphically explicit in ways neither taste nor responsibility will sustain. For example, we are informed -- without attribution -- that, following his first physical encounter with Lewinsky, Clinton returned to the residence and the first lady “aroused.”

One would have assumed the opposite and there’s nothing on evidence here to prove that assumption wrong, which is a persistent problem in “Mastering the Presidency” -- a very long book, far more often annoying than it is enlightening.

timothy.rutten@latimes.com