The Pastiche of a Presidency, Imitating a Life, in 957 Pages
jose soplar
The Pastiche of a Presidency, Imitating a Life, in 957 Pages
By MICHIKO KAKUTANI
As his celebrated 1993 speech in Memphis to the Church of God in
Christ demonstrated, former President Bill Clinton is capable of
soaring eloquence and visionary thinking. But as those who heard his
deadening speech nominating Michael Dukakis at the 1988 Democratic
National Convention in Atlanta well know, he is also capable of
numbing, self-conscious garrulity.
Unfortunately for the reader, Mr. Clinton's much awaited new
autobiography "My Life" more closely resembles the Atlanta speech,
which was so long-winded and tedious that the crowd cheered when he
finally reached the words "In closing . . ."
The book, which weighs in at more than 950 pages, is sloppy,
self-indulgent and often eye-crossingly dull — the sound of one man
prattling away, not for the reader, but for himself and some distant
recording angel of history.
In many ways, the book is a mirror of Mr. Clinton's presidency: lack
of discipline leading to squandered opportunities; high expectations,
undermined by self-indulgence and scattered concentration. This memoir
underscores many strengths of Mr. Clinton's eight years in the White
House and his understanding that he was governing during a
transitional and highly polarized period. But the very lack of focus
and order that mars these pages also prevented him from summoning his
energies in a sustained manner to bring his insights about the growing
terror threat and an Israeli-Palestinian settlement to fruition.
Certainly it's easy enough to understand the huge advance sales for
the book. Mr. Clinton would seem to have all the gifts for writing a
gripping memoir: gifts of language, erudition and charm, combined with
a policy wonk's perception of a complex world at a hinge moment in
time, teetering on the pivot between Cold War assumptions and a new
era of global interdependence. Add to that his improbable life story —
a harrowing roller-coaster ride of precocious achievements,
self-inflicted slip-ups and even more startling comebacks — and you
have all the ingredients for a compelling book.
But while Dan Rather, who interviewed Mr. Clinton for "60 Minutes,"
has already compared the book to the memoirs of Ulysses S. Grant,
arguably the most richly satisfying autobiography by an American
president, "My Life" has little of that classic's unsparing candor or
historical perspective. Instead, it devolves into a hodgepodge of
jottings: part policy primer, part 12-step confessional, part stump
speech and part presidential archive, all, it seems, hurriedly written
and even more hurriedly edited.
In fact, "My Life" reads like a messy pastiche of everything that Mr.
Clinton ever remembered and wanted to set down in print; he even
describes the time he got up at 4 a.m. to watch the inaugural
ceremonies for Nigeria's new president on TV. There are endless
litanies of meals eaten, speeches delivered, voters greeted and
turkeys pardoned. There are some fascinating sections about Mr.
Clinton's efforts to negotiate a Middle East peace agreement (at one
point, he suggests that Yasir Arafat seemed confused, not fully in
command of the facts and possibly no longer at the top of his game),
but there are also tedious descriptions of long-ago political debates
in Arkansas over utility regulation and car license fees . There are
some revealing complaints about missteps at the FBI under Louis
Freeh's watch , but there are also dozens of pointless digressions
about matters like zombies in Haiti and ruins in Pompeii.
Mr. Clinton confesses that his affair with Monica Lewinsky was
"immoral and foolish," but he spends far more space excoriating his
nemesis, independent counsel Kenneth W. Starr, and the press. He
writes at length about his awareness that terrorism was a growing
threat, but does not grapple with the unintended consequences of his
administration's decisions to pressure Sudan to expel Osama bin Laden
in 1996 (driving sent the al Qaeda leader to Afghanistan, where he was
harder to track) or to launch cruise missile attacks against targets
in Sudan and Afghanistan in retaliation for the embassy bombings in
1998 (an act that some terrorism experts believe fueled terrorists'
conviction that the United States was an ineffectual giant that relied
on low-risk high technology).
Part of the problem, of course, is that Mr. Clinton is concerned,
here, with cementing — or establishing — his legacy, while at the same
time boosting (or at least not undermining) the political career of
his wife, Hillary Rodham Clinton. He does a persuasive job of
explicating his more successful initiatives like welfare reform and
deficit reduction, but the failure of his health care initiative,
overseen by Mrs. Clinton, is quickly glossed over, as is the
subsequent focus of his administration on such small-bore initiatives
as school uniforms and teenage smoking.
Mr. Clinton takes more responsibility in these pages for his affair
with Ms. Lewinsky, his lies about that affair and the damage those
actions inflicted on his family and his presidency than he has in the
past. But he still spends a lot of time — like his wife did in her
book — assailing right-wing enemies for his woes over Whitewater, the
Paula Jones case and impeachment. In the end, he says, what brought
him and his wife back together was weekly counseling sessions and
their shared determination "to fight off the right-wing coup." He
sheds little new light on his relationship with Mrs. Clinton, simply
noting that he always admired her mix of idealism and practicality,
and that she initially hesitated over his marriage proposal, knowing
that "being married to me would be a high-wire operation in more ways
than one." In another passage, Mr. Clinton tries to characterize his
impeachment fight as "my last great showdown with the forces I had
opposed all of my life" - with those who had defended segregation in
the South, opposed the women's and gay rights movements, and who
believed government should be run for the benefit of special
interests. He adds that he was glad that he had had "the good fortune
to stand against this latest incarnation of the forces of reaction and
division."
In comparison to these self-serving, often turgid attempts to defend
his reputation, Mr. Clinton's account of his youth in Arkansas
possesses a pleasing emotional directness. His portraits of life in
the raffish Hot Springs and the more sedate Hope (towns that would
became the polestars of his Janus-faced personality, what political
guru Dick Morris once called "Saturday Night Bill" and "Sunday Morning
Clinton") may lack the raw energy of his mother Virginia Kelley's
reminiscences, set down in her 1994 book "Leading With My Heart," but
he does provide the reader with some telling snapshots of his awkward
childhood: a fat, self-conscious boy dressed in a new Easter outfit
every year — including, one year, pink and black Hush Puppies and a
matching pink suede belt; breaking his leg trying to jump rope wearing
cowboy boots; devouring books about Geronimo and Crazy Horse at the
local library.
Looking back on those days of living with a violent, abusive
stepfather, Mr. Clinton writes like someone familiar with therapeutic
tropes. He writes that seeing his stepfather angry and drunk, he came
to associate anger with being out of control, and determined to keep
his own anger locked away. He writes about experiencing a "major
spiritual crisis" at the age of 13, when he found it difficult to
sustain a belief in God in the face of his family's difficulties. And
he writes about the coping mechanisms he developed — including
learning to live "parallel lives" where he walled off his anger and
grief to get on with his daily life.
Many events recounted in this book have been chronicled before —- not
just by the dozens of reporters and biographers who have swarmed over
Mr. Clinton's life, but by people close to the former president,
including his wife, his mother, his brother Roger, Ms. Lewinsky, and
former members of his administration like George Stephanopoulos and
Robert Reich. For the most part, the self-portrait that emerges from
this book is not all that different a Bill Clinton from the one the
public has already come to know: tireless, driven, boyish,
self-absorbed and optimistic, someone riven by contradictions but
adept at compartmentalizing different parts of his life.
Mr. Clinton once remarked that he saw character as "a journey, not a
destination," and at the end of this book, he cites "becoming a good
person" as one of his life goals. Still, the seeds of his adult self
can be glimpsed in an autobiographical essay he wrote in high school:
"I am a living paradox — deeply religious, yet not as convinced of my
exact beliefs as I ought to be; wanting responsibility yet shirking
it; loving the truth but often times giving way to falsity." It is
only because Mr. Clinton was president of the United States that these
excavations of self — a staple of celebrity and noncelebrity memoirs
these days — are considered newsworthy.
The nation's first baby-boomer president always seemed like an avatar
of his generation, defined by the struggles of the 60's and Vietnam,
comfortable in the use of touchy-feely language, and intent on
demystifying his job. And yet the former president's account of his
life, read in this post-9/11 day, feels strangely like an artifact
from a distant, more innocent era.
Lies about sex and real estate, partisan rancor over "character
issues" (not over weapons of mass destruction or pre-emptive war),
psychobabble mea culpas, and tabloid wrangles over stained dresses all
seem like pressing matters from another galaxy, far, far away.