From Amazon
Loved and reviled, respected and resented, Bill Clinton is one of the more polarizing and complex politicians of our age. As the 42nd President, he presided over a period of dizzying economic growth and technological progress, and achieved such foreign policy successes as the ratification of NAFTA, helping to bring several former Eastern Bloc nations into NATO, and assisting China's entrance into the World Trade Organization. His time in office was also marked by a string of scandals, most notably the Monica Lewinsky debacle and the subsequent impeachment trial, which largely overshadowed his triumphs.
Just 53 years old when he left office, Clinton continues to keep a high profile, having formed the William J. Clinton Presidential Foundation to focus on the battle against HIV/AIDS around the world; racial, ethnic, and religious reconciliation; economic empowerment of poor people; nd leadership development and citizen service. His memoir, My Life, due out on June 30, 2004, is an opportunity for Clinton to reveal his political philosophy and perspective on past events as well as a chance to influence his own place in history.
From Publishers Weekly
Former President William Jefferson Clinton's hotly anticipated 957-page doorstop of a memoir is much like its author-charismatic, longwinded, and, many might say, deeply flawed. The first Democratic president to be elected to a second term since FDR in 1936, Clinton has lived what is by any account an eventful, inspiring life. As explained in early passages notable for their frankness and humanity, Clinton, born to humble Arkansas roots, never knew his father. William Jefferson Blythe was killed in an automobile accident just months before his son's birth. Clinton adored his mother, Virginia, a nurse with a large, loving family and a harmless penchant for the racetrack. Difficulties began when Virginia married Roger Clinton, who struggled with alcohol and a violent temper. A turbulent home life and the vagaries of a segregated South, however, only pushed the gregarious Clinton to achieve. He became interested in politics at an early age. He wrote, debated, played the saxophone, and eventually made it to Georgetown and Oxford universities, a law practice, then to Little Rock and the governor's mansion, and eventually to the White House. Clinton's administration was equally dramatic. Domestically, he fought to balance the federal budget, presided over a government shutdown, and beat back a conservative cultural backlash. Diplomatically, Clinton skirmished with a bellicose Saddam Hussein, ended a genocidal crisis in Bosnia, accelerated the Mideast peace process until its eventual collapse, and began to deal with the budding threat posed by Osama bin Laden and al Qaeda. To top that off, he left office in 2000 amid the bizarre Bush/Gore electoral crisis. Of course, what Clinton is also remembered for are the scandals that plagued his efforts. Beginning with Gennifer Flowers in the 1992 campaign, to Whitewater, Travelgate, the FBI file scandal, Paula Jones and ultimately the Monica Lewinsky affair that led to his historic impeachment, Clinton endured what then First Lady Hillary Clinton termed a "vast right-wing conspiracy" to push him from office. The most interesting passages of Clinton's memoir reveal a simmering, deep animosity toward special prosecutor Ken Starr. Clinton defiantly blisters Starr as an unethical, overreaching partisan who illegally leaked details of his investigations to the press; exceeded his authority; humiliated, bankrupted and jailed innocent people for not playing ball; and served only to ring up huge legal bills for the Clintons, their staff and supporters. Certainly, Clinton's memoir has the raw material for a blockbuster book. But the sheer deluge of information is mind-numbing. Rather than expose the hurricane's eye of a remarkable life and an eventful presidency, the book instead blurs into an unrelenting blizzard of names, dates, campaigns, speeches, events, handshakes, tangential observations, memories, meetings, cities and towns, and anecdotes. The result is a narrative that obscures any meaningful measure of Clinton's true character and values. Save for his strong feelings about Starr, Clinton offers only brief personal assessments of the colorful personalities with whom he crossed paths, including his wife, Hillary Clinton, Al Gore and James Carville, opponents like George Bush, Bob Dole and Ross Perot, or world leaders such as Boris Yeltsin, and Yasser Arafat. Monica Lewinsky also escapes any meaningful scrutiny. Most frustratingly, Clinton, while admitting mistakes, offers no deep personal introspection. In an excerpt from a high school essay, Clinton wrote that he was a "living paradox," who "detests selfishness but sees it in the mirror everyday." That passage marks the most insightful stroke of self-analysis in the book. Yet while lacking immediacy, the book nevertheless manages a certain gravitas, if only for being a painstakingly thorough act of recollection. Given the fevered "tell-all" anticipation surrounding the book's publication, however, it is certain to disappoint many readers even as it sells an astonishing number of copies. Some of that disappointment, however, was inevitable. After all, My Life is a presidential memoir, a historically self-serving category of autobiography alone unto itself and very much an extension of presidential politics--a profession that is never "tell-all." Even more tricky, Clinton's wife, Hillary, now the junior Senator from New York, is very much still in politics. When matched against other presidential memoirs, though, Clinton's scores favorably, certainly exceeding the flaccid efforts of his most recent predecessors, Ronald Reagan and George H. W. Bush. Still, Clinton, a popular, gifted orator with a clear mastery of public policy, has missed, or, perhaps, passed on, a golden opportunity to offer a truly resonant portrait of his embattled presidency or an enduring political vision.
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
From Booklist
It's clear that Bill Clinton wrote this book himself; his personality shines from every page. Those aspects of his character that people liked during his political career are much in evidence here: his optimism, his inquiring mind, and his prodigious grasp of issues. And all the things that raised the public's ire about him are present, too: his tendency to parse words and situations, his self-serving take on events, the wounded psyche that led to irresponsible behavior. It is also clear that Clinton saw this book as his opportunity to shape the debate about his legacy. At this task, he both succeeds and fails. Certainly, he gives a more complete picture of who he is and the forces that have shaped him. His description of his early years is perhaps the best part of the book. Readers see both the boy and the segregated southern society in which he came of age. Equally intriguing is his description of the tumultuous events during the Lewinsky years: he holds himself accountable for his actions but reserves his venom for Kenneth Starr. In between these compelling parts, however, the reader is confronted with a numbing cavalcade of names and events. Clinton also has the unfortunate habit of describing incidents and almost reflexively linking them to a future legislative effort (a neighbor's illness when he was a child led to health-care reform when he was president). It's also odd how delicately he treats certain people with whom he must have been extremely angry (the prostitute-loving pollster Dick Morris, for example). In the end, Clinton's life story probably will function like a supersized Rorschach test. Most readers will find just what they're looking for. Ilene Cooper
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved
Review
At the launch of his own autobiography Ronald Reagan quipped that he fully intended to read it some day. He was not the exception but the norm among public figures whose life stories are written and researched by a team functioning more as ghost-writers than editors. Bill Clinton’s autobiography, in contrast, is characterized by its authenticity. It is a story told by the man himself in words that are sometimes clumsy, sometimes colourful but always his own.
In describing his undergraduate years at Georgetown University, he recalls his English professor’s comments on his papers (“awk,” “ugh,” “rather dull, pathetic”) and dreads the thought of Dr. Irving reading this book. His dread was apparently not strong enough for him to permit a copy-editor to make the routine changes into formal English of such phrases as “I was lousy at taxation,” “the concert went fine,” and “he was an army brat who had grown up all over.” Thus the immediacy of Clinton’s speaking voice is maintained throughout.
Clinton was a notoriously hands-on president, known for his phenomenal memory and his obsession with detail. He worked on his own speeches, and when the teleprompter failed at the beginning of one state of the union address, he went on unfazed to deliver it from memory. His informal work habits-all-night brainstorming sessions among pizza boxes, and meetings rambling on with no regard for protocol or scheduling-brought charges of lack of discipline. David Gergen reported that Clinton participated in one discussion all the while completing the New York Times crossword puzzle IN INK. New advisors and chiefs of staff were often brought on board in an effort to impose order and restraint on the supposedly unruly process.
The autobiography runs true to Clintonian form-a sprawling, all-inclusive, capacious work, replete with detail, sometimes absurd but always good-humoured, and delivered with the yarning insistence characteristic of Southern story-telling. With its colloquial style, and unapologetic tendency to digression and repetition, it bears more than a little resemblance to the old epics-those long oral narratives extolling the deeds of the legendary hero. One feature of the classical epic-the catalogue or enumeration of names-is much in evidence as Clinton includes endless lists of friends, acquaintances, and teachers, the obscure as well as the famous, for he really did walk with kings without losing the common touch, or valuing them over his old friends. He describes all the family houses and apartments, social events, and has total recall for food eaten-the fried pies of his childhood, the peach pie (“it didn’t last long”) Hillary baked when they were law students, the mango ice cream his campaign team enjoyed at the Menger hotel in San Antonio.
Thus, the education of Bill Clinton is built up through an incremental series of incidents, each one turned into a parable by his almost ludicrous habit of rounding it off with a moral conclusion about the lesson learned. An altercation over a grade in a high school calculus class teaches him a larger lesson in problem-solving; a quarrel overheard in a New York restaurant makes him more sensitive; a visit to Pompeii leaves him more aware of the fragile and fleeting.
The book has been derided for its excessive length and abundance of trivial detail, yet it is in the inconsequential details that clues to character are hidden, and few details here are gratuitous for anyone trying to understand Clinton’s character. It also seems to me pointless to fault the book for a defensive, self-serving stance that is inherent in the genre itself (Clinton commented that while most autobiographies were dull and self-serving, he wanted his to be interesting and self-serving). However, the really weak passages are those in which excessive detail coincides with an exculpatory purpose. Chief among these passages is not the anticipated account of the Lewinsky affair (it is skated over fairly rapidly) but the prolonged account of the rationalization, agonizing, ambivalence, connivance, and guilt involved in his avoidance of the draft for Viet Nam.
Much of the new and personal material is in the early pages which reveal a home life ruined by an alcoholic and violent stepfather, and describe the education that fostered Clinton’s intellectual ability. It included four years of Latin, endless memorization of passages of Latin prose and English verse, and many years of musical training, including summers spent at music camps. Surprisingly, for such a social being, he was in his twenties and on his way to England as a Rhodes Scholar before he tried his first alcoholic beverage; but then as the son of an alcoholic step-father, alcohol never held any charms for him.
The later parts of the book posed more problems for the author since they deal with recent history and have provided the substance of books by others. All the same, Clinton’s detailed memories of familiar incidents often make compelling and entertaining reading. Readers will remember the 1988 democratic convention in which Clinton, as Governor of Arkansas, made a spectacularly dull and windy speech introducing Michael Dukakis. As one commentator said, Jesse Jackson electrified the crowd and Clinton calcified it. After thirty-five minutes of total disaster, his words “in closing” drew enthusiastic applause. The full account is very funny as Clinton describes his humiliation at finding himself a laughing-stock, quotes the journalists who ridiculed it, and tells how he redeemed the disaster with a successful appearance on the Johnny Carson show. The whole is summed up, as usual, with the obligatory lesson learned-“the ordeal taught me” etc…
Some familiar incidents are rendered more vivid by details of behind-the-scenes maneuvering. One of the memorable televisual moments of the century was the famous handshake between Yitzak Rabin and Yasser Arafat. We learn of the problem posed by Rabin’s agreeing to the handshake but rejecting the embrace that is part of the formal Arab greeting. “No kiss,” he insisted. Clinton solution was to shake Arafat’s hand himself first and to forestall the kiss by placing a restraining hand on his arm. The ruse was successful, justifying the many rehearsals of the handshake and the placing of the restraining hand that Clinton practiced with his aides.
One riveting passage describes a phone call from White House official Roger Porter (whom he considered a friend) as Clinton struggled to decide whether or not to run for president. The official tells Clinton that “they” have reviewed all the potential candidates who might run against Bush. “They” felt that Clinton had such a strong record in economics, crime, and education that he was more of a threat than the other candidates. Clinton’s account of the call is chilling; it has an unmistakable resonance and deserves quoting at length:
So if I ran, they would have to destroy me personally. “Here’s how Washington works,” he said. “The press has to have somebody in every election, and we’re going to give them you.” He went on to say that the press were elitists who would believe any tales they were told about backwater Arkansas. “We’ll spend whatever we have to spend to get whoever we have to get to say whatever they have to say to take you out. And we’ll do it early.”
I tried to stay calm, but I was mad. I told Roger that what he had just said showed what was wrong with the administration. They had been in power so long they thought they were entitled to it. I said, “You think those parking spaces off the West Wing are yours, but they belong to the American people, and you have to earn the right to use them.” I told Roger that what he had just said made me more likely to run. Roger said that was a nice sentiment, but he was calling as my friend to give me fair warning. If I waited until 1996, I could win the presidency. If I ran in 1992, they would destroy me, and my political career would be over.
Many accounts of Clinton’s presidential style gain from comparison with that of his successor. A case in point is the preparation for Clinton’s first budget, a process that involved much give and take with a variety of people, ranging from Hillary Clinton, Al Gore, members of his cabinet, to George Mitchell, Dick Gephardt, Lloyd Benson, Robert Byrd and Patrick Moynihan. How different from the account in Ron Suskind’s The Price of Loyalty of Paul O’ Neill’s experience as Treasury Secretary in presenting his budget to an incurious and unquestioning Bush!
At the end of his presidency Clinton made a strenuous effort to end the Middle East conflict; the tragic events that resulted from the failure of those efforts make his version of the Camp David meeting between Ehud Barak and Yasser Arafat one of the most noteworthy passages of the book. Clinton expresses a great deal of admiration for both the Israeli and Palestinian delegations who knew each other well (“the chemistry between the two groups was quite good”) and seemed genuinely to want peace. He describes the efforts to create an informal atmosphere and bridge the culture gap between the two sides. A large contingent of chefs and other help came from the White House to ensure that meals were enjoyable; Chelsea Clinton was on hand to help; Madeleine Albright took Arafat out to her farm, and conducted Barak on a tour of the battlefield at Gettysburg. None of it helped, and Clinton lays the blame squarely on Arafat. He told Arafat that he could get, among other concessions, 91 percent of the West Bank, but Arafat turned it down. Arab leaders, called on for support, held back for fear of undercutting Arafat. And so, all the efforts ended in failure.
This book may not win any literary prizes or provide exemplary models of elegant writing. Presumably, that was not the intention. Its value lies not in its excellence as a literary work, but in the fact that it offers the most complete and revealing self-portrait to date of any American president.
Joan Givner (Books in Canada)
-- Books in Canada
In describing his undergraduate years at Georgetown University, he recalls his English professor’s comments on his papers (“awk,” “ugh,” “rather dull, pathetic”) and dreads the thought of Dr. Irving reading this book. His dread was apparently not strong enough for him to permit a copy-editor to make the routine changes into formal English of such phrases as “I was lousy at taxation,” “the concert went fine,” and “he was an army brat who had grown up all over.” Thus the immediacy of Clinton’s speaking voice is maintained throughout.
Clinton was a notoriously hands-on president, known for his phenomenal memory and his obsession with detail. He worked on his own speeches, and when the teleprompter failed at the beginning of one state of the union address, he went on unfazed to deliver it from memory. His informal work habits-all-night brainstorming sessions among pizza boxes, and meetings rambling on with no regard for protocol or scheduling-brought charges of lack of discipline. David Gergen reported that Clinton participated in one discussion all the while completing the New York Times crossword puzzle IN INK. New advisors and chiefs of staff were often brought on board in an effort to impose order and restraint on the supposedly unruly process.
The autobiography runs true to Clintonian form-a sprawling, all-inclusive, capacious work, replete with detail, sometimes absurd but always good-humoured, and delivered with the yarning insistence characteristic of Southern story-telling. With its colloquial style, and unapologetic tendency to digression and repetition, it bears more than a little resemblance to the old epics-those long oral narratives extolling the deeds of the legendary hero. One feature of the classical epic-the catalogue or enumeration of names-is much in evidence as Clinton includes endless lists of friends, acquaintances, and teachers, the obscure as well as the famous, for he really did walk with kings without losing the common touch, or valuing them over his old friends. He describes all the family houses and apartments, social events, and has total recall for food eaten-the fried pies of his childhood, the peach pie (“it didn’t last long”) Hillary baked when they were law students, the mango ice cream his campaign team enjoyed at the Menger hotel in San Antonio.
Thus, the education of Bill Clinton is built up through an incremental series of incidents, each one turned into a parable by his almost ludicrous habit of rounding it off with a moral conclusion about the lesson learned. An altercation over a grade in a high school calculus class teaches him a larger lesson in problem-solving; a quarrel overheard in a New York restaurant makes him more sensitive; a visit to Pompeii leaves him more aware of the fragile and fleeting.
The book has been derided for its excessive length and abundance of trivial detail, yet it is in the inconsequential details that clues to character are hidden, and few details here are gratuitous for anyone trying to understand Clinton’s character. It also seems to me pointless to fault the book for a defensive, self-serving stance that is inherent in the genre itself (Clinton commented that while most autobiographies were dull and self-serving, he wanted his to be interesting and self-serving). However, the really weak passages are those in which excessive detail coincides with an exculpatory purpose. Chief among these passages is not the anticipated account of the Lewinsky affair (it is skated over fairly rapidly) but the prolonged account of the rationalization, agonizing, ambivalence, connivance, and guilt involved in his avoidance of the draft for Viet Nam.
Much of the new and personal material is in the early pages which reveal a home life ruined by an alcoholic and violent stepfather, and describe the education that fostered Clinton’s intellectual ability. It included four years of Latin, endless memorization of passages of Latin prose and English verse, and many years of musical training, including summers spent at music camps. Surprisingly, for such a social being, he was in his twenties and on his way to England as a Rhodes Scholar before he tried his first alcoholic beverage; but then as the son of an alcoholic step-father, alcohol never held any charms for him.
The later parts of the book posed more problems for the author since they deal with recent history and have provided the substance of books by others. All the same, Clinton’s detailed memories of familiar incidents often make compelling and entertaining reading. Readers will remember the 1988 democratic convention in which Clinton, as Governor of Arkansas, made a spectacularly dull and windy speech introducing Michael Dukakis. As one commentator said, Jesse Jackson electrified the crowd and Clinton calcified it. After thirty-five minutes of total disaster, his words “in closing” drew enthusiastic applause. The full account is very funny as Clinton describes his humiliation at finding himself a laughing-stock, quotes the journalists who ridiculed it, and tells how he redeemed the disaster with a successful appearance on the Johnny Carson show. The whole is summed up, as usual, with the obligatory lesson learned-“the ordeal taught me” etc…
Some familiar incidents are rendered more vivid by details of behind-the-scenes maneuvering. One of the memorable televisual moments of the century was the famous handshake between Yitzak Rabin and Yasser Arafat. We learn of the problem posed by Rabin’s agreeing to the handshake but rejecting the embrace that is part of the formal Arab greeting. “No kiss,” he insisted. Clinton solution was to shake Arafat’s hand himself first and to forestall the kiss by placing a restraining hand on his arm. The ruse was successful, justifying the many rehearsals of the handshake and the placing of the restraining hand that Clinton practiced with his aides.
One riveting passage describes a phone call from White House official Roger Porter (whom he considered a friend) as Clinton struggled to decide whether or not to run for president. The official tells Clinton that “they” have reviewed all the potential candidates who might run against Bush. “They” felt that Clinton had such a strong record in economics, crime, and education that he was more of a threat than the other candidates. Clinton’s account of the call is chilling; it has an unmistakable resonance and deserves quoting at length:
So if I ran, they would have to destroy me personally. “Here’s how Washington works,” he said. “The press has to have somebody in every election, and we’re going to give them you.” He went on to say that the press were elitists who would believe any tales they were told about backwater Arkansas. “We’ll spend whatever we have to spend to get whoever we have to get to say whatever they have to say to take you out. And we’ll do it early.”
I tried to stay calm, but I was mad. I told Roger that what he had just said showed what was wrong with the administration. They had been in power so long they thought they were entitled to it. I said, “You think those parking spaces off the West Wing are yours, but they belong to the American people, and you have to earn the right to use them.” I told Roger that what he had just said made me more likely to run. Roger said that was a nice sentiment, but he was calling as my friend to give me fair warning. If I waited until 1996, I could win the presidency. If I ran in 1992, they would destroy me, and my political career would be over.
Many accounts of Clinton’s presidential style gain from comparison with that of his successor. A case in point is the preparation for Clinton’s first budget, a process that involved much give and take with a variety of people, ranging from Hillary Clinton, Al Gore, members of his cabinet, to George Mitchell, Dick Gephardt, Lloyd Benson, Robert Byrd and Patrick Moynihan. How different from the account in Ron Suskind’s The Price of Loyalty of Paul O’ Neill’s experience as Treasury Secretary in presenting his budget to an incurious and unquestioning Bush!
At the end of his presidency Clinton made a strenuous effort to end the Middle East conflict; the tragic events that resulted from the failure of those efforts make his version of the Camp David meeting between Ehud Barak and Yasser Arafat one of the most noteworthy passages of the book. Clinton expresses a great deal of admiration for both the Israeli and Palestinian delegations who knew each other well (“the chemistry between the two groups was quite good”) and seemed genuinely to want peace. He describes the efforts to create an informal atmosphere and bridge the culture gap between the two sides. A large contingent of chefs and other help came from the White House to ensure that meals were enjoyable; Chelsea Clinton was on hand to help; Madeleine Albright took Arafat out to her farm, and conducted Barak on a tour of the battlefield at Gettysburg. None of it helped, and Clinton lays the blame squarely on Arafat. He told Arafat that he could get, among other concessions, 91 percent of the West Bank, but Arafat turned it down. Arab leaders, called on for support, held back for fear of undercutting Arafat. And so, all the efforts ended in failure.
This book may not win any literary prizes or provide exemplary models of elegant writing. Presumably, that was not the intention. Its value lies not in its excellence as a literary work, but in the fact that it offers the most complete and revealing self-portrait to date of any American president.
Joan Givner (Books in Canada)
-- Books in Canada
Book Description
President Bill Clinton’s My Life is the strikingly candid portrait of a global leader who decided early in life to devote his intellectual and political gifts, and his extraordinary capacity for hard work, to serving the public.
It shows us the progress of a remarkable American, who, through his own enormous energies and efforts, made the unlikely journey from Hope, Arkansas, to the White House—a journey fueled by an impassioned interest in the political process which manifested itself at every stage of his life: in college, working as an intern for Senator William Fulbright; at Oxford, becoming part of the Vietnam War protest movement; at Yale Law School, campaigning on the grassroots level for Democratic candidates; back in Arkansas, running for Congress, attorney general, and governor.
We see his career shaped by his resolute determination to improve the life of his fellow citizens, an unfaltering commitment to civil rights, and an exceptional understanding of the practicalities of political life.
We come to understand the emotional pressures of his youth—born after his father’s death; caught in the dysfunctional relationship between his feisty, nurturing mother and his abusive stepfather, whom he never ceased to love and whose name he took; drawn to the brilliant, compelling Hillary Rodham, whom he was determined to marry; passionately devoted, from her infancy, to their daughter, Chelsea, and to the entire experience of fatherhood; slowly and painfully beginning to comprehend how his early denial of pain led him at times into damaging patterns of behavior.
President Clinton’s book is also the fullest, most concretely detailed, most nuanced account of a presidency ever written—encompassing not only the high points and crises but the way the presidency actually works: the day-to-day bombardment of problems, personalities, conflicts, setbacks, achievements.
It is a testament to the positive impact on America and on the world of his work and his ideals.
It is the gripping account of a president under concerted and unrelenting assault orchestrated by his enemies on the Far Right, and how he survived and prevailed.
It is a treasury of moments caught alive, among them:
• The ten-year-old boy watching the national political conventions on his family’s new (and first) television set.
• The young candidate looking for votes in the Arkansas hills and the local seer who tells him, “Anybody who would campaign at a beer joint in Joiner at midnight on Saturday night deserves to carry one box. . . . You’ll win here. But it’ll be the only damn place you win in this county.” (He was right on both counts.)
• The roller-coaster ride of the 1992 campaign.
• The extraordinarily frank exchanges with Newt Gingrich and Bob Dole.
• The delicate manipulation needed to convince Rabin and Arafat to shake hands for the camera while keeping Arafat from kissing Rabin.
• The cost, both public and private, of the scandal that threatened the presidency.
Here is the life of a great national and international figure, revealed with all his talents and contradictions, told openly, directly, in his own completely recognizable voice. A unique book by a unique American.
It shows us the progress of a remarkable American, who, through his own enormous energies and efforts, made the unlikely journey from Hope, Arkansas, to the White House—a journey fueled by an impassioned interest in the political process which manifested itself at every stage of his life: in college, working as an intern for Senator William Fulbright; at Oxford, becoming part of the Vietnam War protest movement; at Yale Law School, campaigning on the grassroots level for Democratic candidates; back in Arkansas, running for Congress, attorney general, and governor.
We see his career shaped by his resolute determination to improve the life of his fellow citizens, an unfaltering commitment to civil rights, and an exceptional understanding of the practicalities of political life.
We come to understand the emotional pressures of his youth—born after his father’s death; caught in the dysfunctional relationship between his feisty, nurturing mother and his abusive stepfather, whom he never ceased to love and whose name he took; drawn to the brilliant, compelling Hillary Rodham, whom he was determined to marry; passionately devoted, from her infancy, to their daughter, Chelsea, and to the entire experience of fatherhood; slowly and painfully beginning to comprehend how his early denial of pain led him at times into damaging patterns of behavior.
President Clinton’s book is also the fullest, most concretely detailed, most nuanced account of a presidency ever written—encompassing not only the high points and crises but the way the presidency actually works: the day-to-day bombardment of problems, personalities, conflicts, setbacks, achievements.
It is a testament to the positive impact on America and on the world of his work and his ideals.
It is the gripping account of a president under concerted and unrelenting assault orchestrated by his enemies on the Far Right, and how he survived and prevailed.
It is a treasury of moments caught alive, among them:
• The ten-year-old boy watching the national political conventions on his family’s new (and first) television set.
• The young candidate looking for votes in the Arkansas hills and the local seer who tells him, “Anybody who would campaign at a beer joint in Joiner at midnight on Saturday night deserves to carry one box. . . . You’ll win here. But it’ll be the only damn place you win in this county.” (He was right on both counts.)
• The roller-coaster ride of the 1992 campaign.
• The extraordinarily frank exchanges with Newt Gingrich and Bob Dole.
• The delicate manipulation needed to convince Rabin and Arafat to shake hands for the camera while keeping Arafat from kissing Rabin.
• The cost, both public and private, of the scandal that threatened the presidency.
Here is the life of a great national and international figure, revealed with all his talents and contradictions, told openly, directly, in his own completely recognizable voice. A unique book by a unique American.
From the Back Cover
"By a generous measure, the richest American presidential autobiography–no other book tells us as vividly or fully what it is like to be president of the United States.... And he can write.” --Larry McMurtry, The New York Times Book Review
“My Life is, without question, the best written U.S. presidential tome of all time.” --Douglas Brinkley, Financial Times
“A hell of a good story.” --Frank McCourt, Entertainment Weekly
“It’s an almost voluptuous pleasure to read Clinton when he’s recounting and analyzing a political race or a legislative battle, whether it’s one of his own or somebody else’s.” —The New Yorker
“Consistently fascinating.” --The Seattle Times
“Clinton talks with disarming frankness [and] writes with grace and fluidity. . . . He is also a born storyteller.” --The New Republic
“Might just be the perfect representation of the man himself.” --The Plain Dealer
“Clinton has many tales to tell, particularly a rich, sometimes moving account of his years before the public life, fit for future analytical historians and biographers. . . . The personal and the political are intertwined. . . . Clinton’s story very much reflects the man we know.” --The Nation
“He manages to create the distinct impression that he is sitting in the living room talking to the reader. . . . Anyone who is geninely interested in American politics will find his insights and anecdotes fascinating. . . . The book helps to elucidate the question of ‘how he did it.’ ” --Deseret Morning News
“It’s a saga worthy of Cecil B. DeMille, a rags-to-riches tale full of the stuff of human frailty, with a cast of hundreds, complete with low-life villians and high-minded heroes and, as such stories require, an upbeat ending. . . . The 1990s come to life once again as a time of uncommon tumult and riveting personalities. . . . The personalities on parade are as vivid as the events.” --Newark Star-Ledger
“ Tremendously interesting and entertaining. . . . Clinton’s is a truly American story to which the average person can relate. . . . Future politicians will find it a must-read, and average Americans will identify with the highs and lows we all experience as we make our way through life.” --Chattanooga Times Free Press
“Takes readers through a strong account of the achievements and failures of his administrattion. . . . No other presidential memoir is likely to be so lively. . . . Bill Clinton is hard to dismiss, and so is an account of his extraordinary life.” -- The Tennessean
“A reading of MyLife is a necessity for lovers of good autobiograpy. It reads like a down-home history of a life and, thus, anchors Clinton as a superb storyteller. . . . Candid. . . . Honest. . . . Stimulating.” --Huntsville Times --This text refers to the Paperback edition.
“My Life is, without question, the best written U.S. presidential tome of all time.” --Douglas Brinkley, Financial Times
“A hell of a good story.” --Frank McCourt, Entertainment Weekly
“It’s an almost voluptuous pleasure to read Clinton when he’s recounting and analyzing a political race or a legislative battle, whether it’s one of his own or somebody else’s.” —The New Yorker
“Consistently fascinating.” --The Seattle Times
“Clinton talks with disarming frankness [and] writes with grace and fluidity. . . . He is also a born storyteller.” --The New Republic
“Might just be the perfect representation of the man himself.” --The Plain Dealer
“Clinton has many tales to tell, particularly a rich, sometimes moving account of his years before the public life, fit for future analytical historians and biographers. . . . The personal and the political are intertwined. . . . Clinton’s story very much reflects the man we know.” --The Nation
“He manages to create the distinct impression that he is sitting in the living room talking to the reader. . . . Anyone who is geninely interested in American politics will find his insights and anecdotes fascinating. . . . The book helps to elucidate the question of ‘how he did it.’ ” --Deseret Morning News
“It’s a saga worthy of Cecil B. DeMille, a rags-to-riches tale full of the stuff of human frailty, with a cast of hundreds, complete with low-life villians and high-minded heroes and, as such stories require, an upbeat ending. . . . The 1990s come to life once again as a time of uncommon tumult and riveting personalities. . . . The personalities on parade are as vivid as the events.” --Newark Star-Ledger
“ Tremendously interesting and entertaining. . . . Clinton’s is a truly American story to which the average person can relate. . . . Future politicians will find it a must-read, and average Americans will identify with the highs and lows we all experience as we make our way through life.” --Chattanooga Times Free Press
“Takes readers through a strong account of the achievements and failures of his administrattion. . . . No other presidential memoir is likely to be so lively. . . . Bill Clinton is hard to dismiss, and so is an account of his extraordinary life.” -- The Tennessean
“A reading of MyLife is a necessity for lovers of good autobiograpy. It reads like a down-home history of a life and, thus, anchors Clinton as a superb storyteller. . . . Candid. . . . Honest. . . . Stimulating.” --Huntsville Times --This text refers to the Paperback edition.
Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.
Chapter One:
Early on the morning of August 19, 1946, I was born under a clear sky after a violent summer storm to a widowed mother in the Julia
Chester Hospital in Hope, a town of about six thousand in southwest Arkansas, thirty-three miles east of the Texas border at Texarkana. My mother named me William Jefferson Blythe III after my father, William Jefferson Blythe Jr., one of nine children of a poor farmer in Sherman, Texas, who died when my father was seventeen. According to his sisters, my father always tried to take care of them, and he grew up to be a handsome, hardworking, fun-loving man. He met my mother at Tri-State Hospital in Shreveport, Louisiana, in 1943, when she was training to be a nurse. Many times when I was growing up, I asked Mother to tell me the story of their meeting, courting, and marriage. He brought a date with some kind of medical emergency into the ward where she was working, and they talked and flirted while the other woman was being treated. On his way out of the hospital, he touched the finger on which she was wearing her boyfriend’s ring and asked her if she was married. She stammered “no”—she was single. The next day he sent the other woman flowers and her heart sank. Then he called Mother for a date, explaining that he always sent flowers when he ended a relationship.
Two months later, they were married and he was off to war. He served in a motor pool in the invasion of Italy, repairing jeeps and tanks. After the war, he returned to Hope for Mother and they moved to Chicago, where he got back his old job as a salesman for the Manbee Equipment Company. They bought a little house in the suburb of Forest Park but couldn’t move in for a couple of months, and since Mother was pregnant with me, they decided she should go home to Hope until they could get into the new house. On May 17, 1946, after moving their furniture into their new home, my father was driving from Chicago to Hope to fetch his wife. Late at night on Highway 60 outside of Sikeston, Missouri, he lost control of his car, a 1942 Buick, when the right front tire blew out on a wet road. He was thrown clear of the car but landed in, or crawled into, a drainage ditch dug to reclaim swampland. The ditch held three feet of water. When he was found, after a two-hour search, his hand was grasping a branch above the waterline. He had tried but failed to pull himself out. He drowned, only twenty-eight years old, married two years and eight months, only seven months of which he had spent with Mother.
That brief sketch is about all I ever really knew about my father. All my life I have been hungry to fill in the blanks, clinging eagerly to every photo or story or scrap of paper that would tell me more of the man who gave me life.
When I was about twelve, sitting on my uncle Buddy’s porch in Hope, a man walked up the steps, looked at me, and said, “You’re Bill Blythe’s son. You look just like him.” I beamed for days.
In 1974, I was running for Congress. It was my first race and the local paper did a feature story on my mother. She was at her regular coffee shop early in the morning discussing the article with a lawyer friend when one of the breakfast regulars she knew only casually came up to her and said, “I was there, I was the first one at the wreck that night.” He then told Mother what he had seen, including the fact that my father had retained enough consciousness or survival instinct to try to claw himself up and out of the water before he died. Mother thanked him, went out to her car and cried, then dried her tears and went to work.
In 1993, on Father’s Day, my first as President, the Washington Post ran a long investigative story on my father, which was followed over the next two months by other investigative pieces by the Associated Press and many smaller papers. The stories confirmed the things my mother and I knew. They also turned up a lot we didn’t know, including the fact that my father had probably been married three times before he met Mother, and apparently had at least two more children.
My father’s other son was identified as Leon Ritzenthaler, a retired owner of a janitorial service, from northern California. In the article, he said he had written me during the ‘92 campaign but had received no reply. I don’t remember hearing about his letter, and considering all the other bullets we were dodging then, it’s possible that my staff kept it from me. Or maybe the letter was just misplaced in the mountains of mail we were receiving. Anyway, when I read about Leon, I got in touch with him and later met him and his wife, Judy, during one of my stops in northern California. We had a happy visit and since then we’ve corresponded in holiday seasons. He and I look alike, his birth certificate says his father was mine, and I wish I’d known about him a long time ago.
Somewhere around this time, I also received information confirming news stories about a daughter, Sharon Pettijohn, born Sharon Lee Blythe in Kansas City in 1941, to a woman my father later divorced. She sent copies of her birth certificate, her parents’ marriage license, a photo of my father, and a letter to her mother from my father asking about “our baby” to Betsey Wright, my former chief of staff in the governor’s office. I’m sorry to say that, for whatever reason, I’ve never met her.
This news breaking in 1993 came as a shock to Mother, who by then had been battling cancer for some time, but she took it all in stride. She said young people did a lot of things during the Depression and the war that people in another time might disapprove of. What mattered was that my father was the love of her life and she had no doubt of his love for her. Whatever the facts, that’s all she needed to know as her own life moved toward its end. As for me, I wasn’t quite sure what to make of it all, but given the life I’ve led, I could hardly be surprised that my father was more complicated than the idealized pictures I had lived with for nearly half a century.
In 1994, as we headed for the celebration of the fiftieth anniversary of D-day, several newspapers published a story on my father’s war record, with a snapshot of him in uniform. Shortly afterward, I received a letter from Umberto Baron of Netcong, New Jersey, recounting his own experiences during the war and after. He said that he was a young boy in Italy when the Americans arrived, and that he loved to go to their camp, where one soldier in particular befriended him, giving him candy and showing him how engines worked and how to repair them. He knew him only as Bill. After the war, Baron came to the United States, and, inspired by what he had learned from the soldier who called him “Little GI Joe,” he opened his own garage and started a family. He told me he had lived the American dream, with a thriving business and three children. He said he owed so much of his success in life to that young soldier, but hadn’t had the opportunity to say good-bye then, and had often wondered what had happened to him. Then, he said, “On Memorial Day of this year, I was thumbing through a copy of the New York Daily News with my morning coffee when suddenly I felt as if I was struck by lightning. There in the lower left-hand corner of the paper was a photo of Bill. I felt chills to learn that Bill was none other than the father of the President of the United States.”
In 1996, the children of one of my father’s sisters came for the first time to our annual family Christmas party at the White House and brought me a gift: the condolence letter my aunt had received from her congressman, the great Sam Rayburn, after my father died. It’s just a short form letter and appears to have been signed with the autopen of the day, but I hugged that letter with all the glee of a six-year-old boy getting his first train set from Santa Claus. I hung it in my private office on the second floor of the White House, and looked at it every night.
Shortly after I left the White House, I was boarding the USAir shuttle in Washington for New York when an airline employee stopped me to say that his stepfather had just told him he had served in the war with my father and had liked him very much. I asked for the old vet’s phone number and address, and the man said he didn’t have it but would get it to me. I’m still waiting, hoping there will be one more human connection to my father.
At the end of my presidency, I picked a few special places to say goodbye and thanks to the American people. One of them was Chicago, where Hillary was born; where I all but clinched the Democratic nomination on St. Patrick’s Day 1992; where many of my most ardent supporters live and many of my most important domestic initiatives in crime, welfare, and education were proved effective; and, of course, where my parents went to live after the war. I used to joke with Hillary that if my father hadn’t lost his life on that rainy Missouri highway, I would have grown up a few miles from her and we probably never would have met. My last event was in the Palmer House Hotel, scene of the only photo I have of my parents together, taken just before Mother came back to Hope in 1946. After the speech and the good-byes, I went into a small room where I met a woman, Mary Etta Rees, and her two daughters. She told me she had grown up and gone to high school with my mother, then had gone north to Indiana to work in a war industry, married, stayed, and raised her children. Then she gave me another precious gift: the letter my twenty-three-year-old mother had written on her birthday to her friend, three weeks after my father’s death, more than fifty-four years earlier. It was vintage Mother. In her beautiful hand, she wrote of her heartbreak and her determination to carry on: “It seemed almost unbelievable at the time but you see I am six months pregnant and the thought of our...
Early on the morning of August 19, 1946, I was born under a clear sky after a violent summer storm to a widowed mother in the Julia
Chester Hospital in Hope, a town of about six thousand in southwest Arkansas, thirty-three miles east of the Texas border at Texarkana. My mother named me William Jefferson Blythe III after my father, William Jefferson Blythe Jr., one of nine children of a poor farmer in Sherman, Texas, who died when my father was seventeen. According to his sisters, my father always tried to take care of them, and he grew up to be a handsome, hardworking, fun-loving man. He met my mother at Tri-State Hospital in Shreveport, Louisiana, in 1943, when she was training to be a nurse. Many times when I was growing up, I asked Mother to tell me the story of their meeting, courting, and marriage. He brought a date with some kind of medical emergency into the ward where she was working, and they talked and flirted while the other woman was being treated. On his way out of the hospital, he touched the finger on which she was wearing her boyfriend’s ring and asked her if she was married. She stammered “no”—she was single. The next day he sent the other woman flowers and her heart sank. Then he called Mother for a date, explaining that he always sent flowers when he ended a relationship.
Two months later, they were married and he was off to war. He served in a motor pool in the invasion of Italy, repairing jeeps and tanks. After the war, he returned to Hope for Mother and they moved to Chicago, where he got back his old job as a salesman for the Manbee Equipment Company. They bought a little house in the suburb of Forest Park but couldn’t move in for a couple of months, and since Mother was pregnant with me, they decided she should go home to Hope until they could get into the new house. On May 17, 1946, after moving their furniture into their new home, my father was driving from Chicago to Hope to fetch his wife. Late at night on Highway 60 outside of Sikeston, Missouri, he lost control of his car, a 1942 Buick, when the right front tire blew out on a wet road. He was thrown clear of the car but landed in, or crawled into, a drainage ditch dug to reclaim swampland. The ditch held three feet of water. When he was found, after a two-hour search, his hand was grasping a branch above the waterline. He had tried but failed to pull himself out. He drowned, only twenty-eight years old, married two years and eight months, only seven months of which he had spent with Mother.
That brief sketch is about all I ever really knew about my father. All my life I have been hungry to fill in the blanks, clinging eagerly to every photo or story or scrap of paper that would tell me more of the man who gave me life.
When I was about twelve, sitting on my uncle Buddy’s porch in Hope, a man walked up the steps, looked at me, and said, “You’re Bill Blythe’s son. You look just like him.” I beamed for days.
In 1974, I was running for Congress. It was my first race and the local paper did a feature story on my mother. She was at her regular coffee shop early in the morning discussing the article with a lawyer friend when one of the breakfast regulars she knew only casually came up to her and said, “I was there, I was the first one at the wreck that night.” He then told Mother what he had seen, including the fact that my father had retained enough consciousness or survival instinct to try to claw himself up and out of the water before he died. Mother thanked him, went out to her car and cried, then dried her tears and went to work.
In 1993, on Father’s Day, my first as President, the Washington Post ran a long investigative story on my father, which was followed over the next two months by other investigative pieces by the Associated Press and many smaller papers. The stories confirmed the things my mother and I knew. They also turned up a lot we didn’t know, including the fact that my father had probably been married three times before he met Mother, and apparently had at least two more children.
My father’s other son was identified as Leon Ritzenthaler, a retired owner of a janitorial service, from northern California. In the article, he said he had written me during the ‘92 campaign but had received no reply. I don’t remember hearing about his letter, and considering all the other bullets we were dodging then, it’s possible that my staff kept it from me. Or maybe the letter was just misplaced in the mountains of mail we were receiving. Anyway, when I read about Leon, I got in touch with him and later met him and his wife, Judy, during one of my stops in northern California. We had a happy visit and since then we’ve corresponded in holiday seasons. He and I look alike, his birth certificate says his father was mine, and I wish I’d known about him a long time ago.
Somewhere around this time, I also received information confirming news stories about a daughter, Sharon Pettijohn, born Sharon Lee Blythe in Kansas City in 1941, to a woman my father later divorced. She sent copies of her birth certificate, her parents’ marriage license, a photo of my father, and a letter to her mother from my father asking about “our baby” to Betsey Wright, my former chief of staff in the governor’s office. I’m sorry to say that, for whatever reason, I’ve never met her.
This news breaking in 1993 came as a shock to Mother, who by then had been battling cancer for some time, but she took it all in stride. She said young people did a lot of things during the Depression and the war that people in another time might disapprove of. What mattered was that my father was the love of her life and she had no doubt of his love for her. Whatever the facts, that’s all she needed to know as her own life moved toward its end. As for me, I wasn’t quite sure what to make of it all, but given the life I’ve led, I could hardly be surprised that my father was more complicated than the idealized pictures I had lived with for nearly half a century.
In 1994, as we headed for the celebration of the fiftieth anniversary of D-day, several newspapers published a story on my father’s war record, with a snapshot of him in uniform. Shortly afterward, I received a letter from Umberto Baron of Netcong, New Jersey, recounting his own experiences during the war and after. He said that he was a young boy in Italy when the Americans arrived, and that he loved to go to their camp, where one soldier in particular befriended him, giving him candy and showing him how engines worked and how to repair them. He knew him only as Bill. After the war, Baron came to the United States, and, inspired by what he had learned from the soldier who called him “Little GI Joe,” he opened his own garage and started a family. He told me he had lived the American dream, with a thriving business and three children. He said he owed so much of his success in life to that young soldier, but hadn’t had the opportunity to say good-bye then, and had often wondered what had happened to him. Then, he said, “On Memorial Day of this year, I was thumbing through a copy of the New York Daily News with my morning coffee when suddenly I felt as if I was struck by lightning. There in the lower left-hand corner of the paper was a photo of Bill. I felt chills to learn that Bill was none other than the father of the President of the United States.”
In 1996, the children of one of my father’s sisters came for the first time to our annual family Christmas party at the White House and brought me a gift: the condolence letter my aunt had received from her congressman, the great Sam Rayburn, after my father died. It’s just a short form letter and appears to have been signed with the autopen of the day, but I hugged that letter with all the glee of a six-year-old boy getting his first train set from Santa Claus. I hung it in my private office on the second floor of the White House, and looked at it every night.
Shortly after I left the White House, I was boarding the USAir shuttle in Washington for New York when an airline employee stopped me to say that his stepfather had just told him he had served in the war with my father and had liked him very much. I asked for the old vet’s phone number and address, and the man said he didn’t have it but would get it to me. I’m still waiting, hoping there will be one more human connection to my father.
At the end of my presidency, I picked a few special places to say goodbye and thanks to the American people. One of them was Chicago, where Hillary was born; where I all but clinched the Democratic nomination on St. Patrick’s Day 1992; where many of my most ardent supporters live and many of my most important domestic initiatives in crime, welfare, and education were proved effective; and, of course, where my parents went to live after the war. I used to joke with Hillary that if my father hadn’t lost his life on that rainy Missouri highway, I would have grown up a few miles from her and we probably never would have met. My last event was in the Palmer House Hotel, scene of the only photo I have of my parents together, taken just before Mother came back to Hope in 1946. After the speech and the good-byes, I went into a small room where I met a woman, Mary Etta Rees, and her two daughters. She told me she had grown up and gone to high school with my mother, then had gone north to Indiana to work in a war industry, married, stayed, and raised her children. Then she gave me another precious gift: the letter my twenty-three-year-old mother had written on her birthday to her friend, three weeks after my father’s death, more than fifty-four years earlier. It was vintage Mother. In her beautiful hand, she wrote of her heartbreak and her determination to carry on: “It seemed almost unbelievable at the time but you see I am six months pregnant and the thought of our...
From AudioFile
Bill Clinton's reading of MY LIFE is the perfect way to experience the former president's voluminous memoir. In six-and-a-half hours of audio, Clinton takes listeners through a litany of his political and personal life. If you're not a historian who is interested in the minute detail that the full text offers, this excellent abridgment has few gaps. While occasionally short entries must suffice for far more complicated and long-lasting events, the author's voice--both literal and narrative--is clear and fluid. Always a compelling, articulate speaker, Clinton is in his element. The stream of events, dates, and details seems a bit relentless at points, but the account of the early years with his family has more reflective elements. His concluding chapters, too, give listeners an overview that reveals his frustration with the distractions of partisan politics and personal issues throughout the central work of his presidency. R.F.W. © AudioFile 2004, Portland, Maine-- Copyright © AudioFile, Portland, Maine
--This text refers to the
Audio CD
edition.
