Slate’s press critic
Jack Shafer had the same suspicion. He asked early
reviewers, some of whom admitted reading Clinton’s
book selectively. He got
no reply from Michiko Kakutani, the New York
Times critic who famously
pronounced it “eye-crossingly dull.” (In the
same newspaper, novelist Larry
McMurtry, called it “by a generous measure, the
richest American presidential
autobiography.”)
Washington Post columnist
Anne Applebaum told Shafer she’d skipped
Clinton’s Arkansas political career, all 18 years
of it. I’d suggest she wouldn’t
have admitted that had he matured in New York
or California. Also that the
condescension of status-crazed Washington pundits
towards Clinton’s humble
roots has always prevented their crediting the
bone-deep egalitarianism that’s
one of his great virtues as a politician and
a man. See, Arkansans will tolerate
an awful lot from their politicians, but they
will not abide a snob.
Clinton remains
close to many people he’s known since grade school.
He sees them as equals and understands their
lives. How many powerful,
self-made men do that? Several times as president,
Clinton annoyed the
traveling press by dragging them to Arkansas
to attend funerals in remote
locations like Jasper and Birdeye. He interrupted
a trip to China to return to
Little Rock to help a childhood friend bury his
daughter. Had he begged off,
as most of us would have, nobody would have said
a word.
Like most successful
Southern politicians, the boy can tell a funny story.
If you make allowances for his tin ear—at one
point Clinton writes of his need
“to recharge my batteries and water my roots”
(hopefully not simultaneously)
—the Arkansas chapters read like early Twain.
Garrulous, energetic, endlessly
curious, a sharp judge of character, Clinton’s
often the butt of his own humor:
he’s the fat kid who tripped and got butted by
his granddad’s ram while others
skedaddled; the glad-handing pol who fled an
Ozark mountaineer leading a
full-grown bear on a chain, but who told a truckload
of Marion County good old
boys he’d get out and walk back to town before
he’d chew a plug of Red Man,
only to have them crack up. He’d passed the test.
He also knows
his enemies and what makes them tick: “the self-righteous,
con-demning Absolute Truth-claiming dark side
of white southern conservatism…
Since I was a boy, I had watched people assert
their piety and moral superiority
as justifications for claiming an entitlement
to political power, and for demonizing
those who begged to differ with them, usually
over civil rights.”
Thus “Justice
Jim” Johnson, the KKK-endorsed Arkansas gubernatorial
candidate whom Clinton confronted in his student
days, only to see him re-emerge
helping peddle fables of drug-smuggling and murder
on the “Clinton Chronicles,”
writing columns for the Washington Times, advising
Whitewater witnesses, and
accepting emoluments from Richard Mellon Scaife’s
“Arkansas Project.”
Thus too, at a politer remove, Newt Gingrich
and Kenneth Starr.
Clinton’s other
great gift, his enormous, almost insatiable intelligence, is
something he’s understandably reticent about
discussing. That too excites envy
and contempt from rivals. Always has. Doesn’t
seeing so many sides of every
issue render him wishy-washy? No, it often enables
him to understand other
people’s arguments better than they do, while
also grasping how they FEEL
about what they think.
A lifelong student
of power, Clinton’s accounts of his successful negotiations
to end the Irish “Troubles,” and his failed efforts
to solve the Israeli-Palestine crisis
show him at his best: knowing every disputed
checkpoint in Jerusalem, and able to
explain Rabin’s political dilemmas to Arafat
and vice-versa. When the Palestinian
leader called him a great man he answered, “I
am not a great man. I am a failure,
and you have made me one.”
He’s also smart enough
to give simple answers. Why don’t GOP “supply-side
theories work? “Arithmetic.” How would Bush vs.
Gore been decided had the
Democrat been leading? “[T]he same Supreme Court
would have voted 9-0 to
count the votes.”
Clinton’s ideology
is almost pre-Socratic: Politically, you can’t step into the
same river twice. Get what you can today; come
back tomorrow. Here’s what
I’d guess is Clinton’s favorite line about himself:
“Say what you want,” wrote
Newsday’s Jimmy Breslin “but do not say he quits.”
Sure Clinton can
be a narcissist, like every other politician who ever lived.
Anyway, McMurtry’s right; it’s a fascinating
book about an extraordinary man.
As for his sexual sins, I already knew more about
those than I needed to. Didn’t you?