Maraniss’s book, which ends in October of 1991 as his subject announces his campaign for president, captures the overlapping light and darkness in Clinton’s own full life. The author, a Pulitzer Prize-winning Washington Post reporter, resists the impulse to conclude which prevails. After headlines last week highlighted scoops in the book about Clinton’s sexual conquests and draft record, Maraniss refused to go on TV or radio to promote them. “Everybody is always trying to define him as good or bad. In fact, it’s all part of the larger person,” Maraniss said last week. The book details everything in Clinton’s prepresidential life down to the knot speed of the ship he took to England to begin his Rhodes scholarship. But the power of the narrative lies in its spareness. Instead of trying to impose some new thesis, Maraniss largely lets Clinton’s rich complexities speak for themselves, in the words of hundreds of people who knew him.
One of those people is Betsey Wright, Clinton’s volatile chief of staff from Little Rock. For years, political reporters have tried in vain to crack her. Maraniss succeeds. The book reveals that in July of 1987, when Clinton’s friends had assembled in Little Rock to hear him announce for president in 1988, Wright confronted him with a list of women he allegedly had slept with: “For years, she told friends, she had been covering up for him. She was convinced that some state troopers were soliciting women for him, and he for them.” Wright went over the list twice with Clinton, trying to figure out if any one would talk to the press. Finally, she said that running that year would hurt Hillary and Chelsea, and recommended against it. He decided not to run. By 1992, his family was enthusiastic.
Clinton’s past is like an angry razorback, always pushing him back into the mud. Last week the president felt obliged to call Wright, after which she issued a statement saying that Maraniss had misunderstood her: “I do not believe [the troopers] ever solicited women for the governor, certainly not with his knowledge.” These kinds of denials are becoming increasingly implausible. Maraniss points out that last year he read Wright sections of the book pertaining to her, and she confirmed their accuracy. Like many others, she showed Maraniss her letters from Clinton, in-eluding one in 1976 that obliquely refers to the then vice presidential candidate Bob Dole as “the biggest p – k in Congress.”
Even though he was networking practically from the cradle, Clinton comes across as a likable young man. He was proud of his modest roots and was conspicuously unsnobby. At every school he attended, he made black friends. As dumb as it was to say during the campaign, Clinton, who never smoked cigarettes, was indeed comically incapable of inhaling pot. (“We spent enormous amounts of time trying to teach him,” said one friend.) But he did inhale food, and juggled girlfriends constantly, with few granted the courtesy of an honest breakup. He and Hillary (depicted in the book as surprisingly nonideological but oddly blind to appearances) have titanic screaming fights, yet they rightly complain that they have been punished for keeping their family intact. Had they simply gotten divorced, Clinton’s sex life wouldn’t have been an issue.
If his appetites are what get Clinton in trouble, they are also often admirable. “Curiosity about people around him was one of his strongest traits, the main intersection of his gregarious, empathetic personality and his political ambition,” Maraniss writes.
The patterns were set early. Clinton lost for student-council president at Georgetown because students tired of his politicking and he “underestimated the mood of rebellion.” Sound familiar? His first two-year term as governor resembles his first two years as president: unfocused, undisciplined, immature. Yet a closer look suggests that Clinton, in fact, handled the Cuban refugee riot at Fort Chaffee (often blamed for his defeat in 1980) with skill under pressure. By contrast, his later terms – usually viewed as successful – are seen by Maraniss as government by polling, even if Clinton did once slug his pollster, Dick Morris.
Maraniss exhaustively exhumes Clinton’s anguish over draft-dodging and concludes that Clinton unquestionably dissembled about the details during the 1992 campaign. It also turns out that Clinton mistakenly thought his now famous letter thanking Col. Eugene J. Holmes for “saving me from the draft” had been destroyed, though it’s unclear if Clinton himself requested that it be. The book also reveals that Clinton’s nemesis, Cliff Jackson, was himself anxious to avoid the draft.
It would be nice to be definitive about Bill Clinton, but it would be wrong. Maraniss persuasively argues that it is misleading “to say that the part of him that is indecisive, too eager to please and prone to deception, is more revealing of the inner man than the part of him that is indefatigable, intelligent, empathetic and self-deprecating. They coexist. In his worst times, one can see the will to recover and the promise of redemption. In his best times, one can see the seeds of disaster.” One of the many authors Maraniss says Clinton admires is William Faulkner. It’s not hard to see why.
