Later this month, VH1 will take the wrapper off a new series called I Love the 90s. So soon? The 50s, after all, weren’t that big until the 70s. That “70s Show didn’t make it on the air until the 90s were nearly over. Isn’t it a tad early to start feeling nostalgic for a decade that only just ended?
On the other hand, why not? The current decade has brought terrorism, war, and a sputtering economy. It has also brought us a president we didn’t elect, whose arm’s-length relationship with the truth makes him at least an even bet to become the first one-term president since his father.
The man who engineered that defeat, Bill Clinton, presided over a decade of peace, prosperity, and oral sex, three things that are always popular and never go out of style. Which brings me to Clinton’s autobiography, the much-hyped, much-panned My Life (Knopf), all 957 pages of it. The buzz surrounding this cinderblock of a book resembles the Clinton presidency in miniature. Just as his two terms in office were defined by fearsome attacks in the press and high job-approval ratings from the public, so has My Life been received with critical pans and popular acclaim.
No one is likely to top Michiko Kakutani’s front-page review in the New York Times of June 20, in which she called My Life “sloppy, self-indulgent and often eye-crossingly dull.” Within days, almost as an act of atonement, the Times posted on its Web site a reverential review (“the richest American presidential autobiography”) by the novelist Larry McMurtry, which was, finally, published in the Times Book Review on July 4.
Not that any of this matters to the public. Some 400,000 copies flew out the door within one day of its June 22 release, making Clinton’s the fastest-selling nonfiction book in history. It’s hard to imagine that many of those snapping the tome up at stores will read it. Even if they try, they’ll find that My Life really is a bad book — not to mention the length of three or four books to which they could more profitably devote their summer. But it doesn’t matter. They all want a piece of Clinton. They all want a piece of the 90s, when the World Trade Center was still standing (despite an attack early on Clinton’s watch), when Osama bin Laden was just the name of another semi-obscure Middle East terrorist, when the stock market was going to rise forever, and when the biggest ongoing story was whether Clinton would be removed from office because he’d lied about carrying on with Monica Lewinsky in that little room with the sink just outside the Oval Office.
We all loved the 90s. And though our feelings about the president who dominated that decade may be considerably more ambiguous, is there any doubt that a majority of us would take him back tomorrow?
MY LIFE falls into the category of an insta-book. Though there may not be any such thing as a classic presidential memoir (Ulysses Grant’s is often cited, but it’s about the Civil War, not his presidency), Clinton’s is likely to become regarded as more dispensable than most.Clinton has a well-deserved reputation for — to paraphrase Mark Twain — regarding the truth as such a valuable possession that he must be economical in its use. My Life is worthwhile only to the extent that it is true, and on that score, it is impossible to say. Conservative critic Mark Steyn, writing in the Wall Street Journal, observes that Clinton repeats the story about Hillary Clinton’s having been named for Sir Edmund Hillary, the first man to climb Mount Everest, even though that tale had been exposed as almost certainly untrue some years ago. In itself, that’s no big deal. Nor is it of much concern that Clinton says so little about his rich and varied sex life. He essentially admits that, yes, he’s had one, and I noted with amusement as I slogged through the book that he seems to have remembered the name of every attractive woman he’s ever met.
But if Clinton is willing to lie about little things, I can’t imagine he wouldn’t lie about larger things as well. For instance, Clinton is well known for being averse to personal confrontation. Yet on several occasions, he claims to have engaged in some remarkably tough talk with unsavory characters. Naturally, there are no third-party witnesses. For instance, when Clinton was still a student at Georgetown University and working for then-senator William Fulbright, he claims to have attended a rally held by “Justice Jim” Johnson, a racist Arkansas politico who later became one of Clinton’s leading tormenters in the Whitewater affair. “I patiently waited my turn,” Clinton writes. “When he shook my hand, I told him he made me ashamed to be from Arkansas. I think my earnestness amused him. He just smiled, invited me to write him about my feelings, and moved on to the next handshake.”
But that’s mild compared to the whipping Clinton administers to his former aide George Stephanopoulos. After Stephanopoulos left the White House, he wrote a book, All Too Human, that was sharply critical of Clinton. By Clinton’s telling, Stephanopoulos practically suffered a nervous breakdown before the 1992 New Hampshire primary, when Clinton was almost driven out of the race over revelations about his affair with Gennifer Flowers and his slippery maneuvering to avoid being drafted.
“George was curled up on the floor, practically in tears. He asked if it wasn’t time to think about withdrawing,” Clinton writes, adding a few sentences later: “I asked, “George, do you still think I’d be a good President?’ “Yes,’ he said. “Then get up and go back to work. If the voters want to withdraw me, they’ll do it on election day. I’m going to let them decide.'”
This is brutal stuff. Whether true, false, or just plain exaggerated, Clinton obviously put it in there for the sole purpose of exacting some vengeance. Later, Clinton writes about Stephanopoulos’s decision to leave the White House: “Until I read his memoir, I had no idea how difficult the pressure-packed years had been for him, or how hard he had been on himself, and me. George was going on to a career in teaching and television, where I hoped he would be happier.”
Obviously the proper way to read that passage is to place the emphasis on “and me.”
I HAVE PAGES and pages of notes, scribbled on a yellow pad as I read. But My Life is a sprawling mess of a book, and it’s impossible to summarize. Clinton writes about his Aunt Ilaree, who hiked up her skirt and showed Hillary a nine-pound tumor on her leg the very first time they met. (Hillary did not flee screaming, which is pretty good evidence that she truly loved Bill.) He tells us how much he loves Elvis Presley, and proceeds to offer a rather detailed plot synopsis of The King’s first movie, Love Me Tender. (That’s how you wind up with 957 pages.) In one of the most fully developed sections of the book, about his years as governor, he writes about his battles with President Jimmy Carter over Cuban refugees being sent to Arkansas. He tells us that he read Ernest Becker’s The Denial of Death on his and Hillary’s honeymoon. How romantic! He seems to remember every country visited, issue explored, piece of legislation signed, and meeting attended during his entire eight years as president, and he describes them all at great length but with little depth.Thus does Clinton the author reveal himself to be as undisciplined as Clinton the president. There’s not much sex in My Life, but the book is promiscuous. His recitation of college courses and professors all these years later remind us of how awed he — a middle-class Arkansas boy from a chaotic and abusive household — must have been to find himself in the rarified atmosphere of Georgetown, Oxford, and Yale. Yet it shows us, too, that he never really got over that awe; that, as a 58-year-old ex-president, he remains in some ways as unformed today as he was then.
Amid this literary chaos, two narrative strands emerge that are worth reading and pondering. The first is how the “vast right-wing conspiracy,” as Hillary Clinton memorably labeled it, tried to destroy him, and nearly succeeded. The second is about Clinton’s failed attempts to reach a peace settlement between Israel and the Palestinians. The former is a frightening cautionary tale; for all Clinton’s refusal to take full responsibility for his actions, the war that the right waged against him from the moment he began his presidential campaign was relentless, built largely on a pile of lies, and profoundly anti-democratic. The latter is a tragedy. The two sides came so close during Clinton’s presidency, and are so far apart today.
Clinton repeatedly takes us to what he calls “Whitewater World,” and every trip is surreal. Though the term itself pertains only to an Arkansas real-estate investment on which Clinton lost money, Whitewater is also shorthand for the entire scandal machine devoted first to stopping Clinton’s election, in 1992, and then to throwing him out of office.
The list of non-scandalous scandals that the right tried to pin on Clinton was mind-boggling — from an Arkansas bank failure to firings in the White House travel office, from Hillary Clinton’s lost-and-found billing records to the suicide of Clinton’s long-time friend and White House counsel, Vincent Foster, a murder victim in the fevered imaginings of some haters. Lives were ruined; Clinton dwells at length on the fate of his friend and former business partner Susan McDougal, imprisoned for months because of her refusal to tell the lies that special prosecutor Kenneth Starr wanted to hear.
Ever self-pitying, Clinton claims that he fell into Monica Lewinsky’s embrace in reaction to the pressure he’d been put under by Starr, and he offers this psychobabble as yet another instance of the “double life” he’d been leading from the time he was an abused child. I’m not buying it. Far more important, and convincing, is Clinton’s larger point: that a politically motivated prosecutor was allowed nearly to bring down the president because Clinton was less than forthcoming about blowjobs. And Clinton correctly observes that the media went along for almost the entire ride, disembarking only after the pornographic Starr Report revealed its author to be a sex-crazed, out-of-control, power-hungry tool of the extreme right.
CLINTON’S SECTIONS on his negotiations with the Israelis and the Palestinians are heartbreaking. From the hopefulness embodied in the handshake between Rabin and Arafat, Clinton documents a long deterioration. After Rabin’s assassination, Clinton tried to bring Benjamin Netanyahu and Arafat together, and succeeded for a time. Later, as we all know, he worked to broker a final settlement between Arafat and Ehud Barak. They came so close. By Clinton’s telling, in the weeks before his presidency would end, Israel was willing to give the Palestinians 97 percent of the West Bank and substantial control over large swaths of Jerusalem. But Arafat still said no.”Right before I left office,” Clinton writes, “Arafat, in one of our last conversations, thanked me for all my efforts and told me what a great man I was. “Mr. Chairman,’ I replied, “I am not a great man. I am a failure, and you have made me one.'” Arafat, though, was right. Clinton was and is a force of nature, someone who can stay up later, talk longer, and just plain keep at it more persistently than anyone else in the room.
Clinton’s efforts to bring peace to these ancient combatants would have made for a fine book. Unfortunately, there are many books inside My Life, scattered, undeveloped fragments that occasionally entice, often bore, and always frustrate. The 90s were many things, but they were never this dull.
This story originally appeared in the Boston Phoenix.
This article appears in Jul 14-20, 2004.
