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Reviews in American History 33.1 (2005) 126-132



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Reading Bill Clinton's My Life

Bill Clinton. My Life. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2004. 1008 pp. Photographs and index. $35.00

Historians have found the memoirs authored by American presidents after World War II generally mediocre, unlike those, say, of Winston Churchill or Charles de Gaulle. Put simply, they rarely broke new ground and were largely exercises in self-justification for which publishers paid handsomely. It was only after historians began to examine materials in the various presidential libraries that a more complex and factually reliable narrative emerged either to deepen or replace the accounts that figured so prominently in those memoirs.

The opening of the Clinton Library in Little Rock, with its seventy-five million or more items, prepares the way for a serious scholarly inquiry into the life and presidency of Bill Clinton. Although it will take decades to fully integrate this massive collection into the historical literature, there are already ample materials in the public record to engage historians.

Clinton's memoir may serve as a necessary and useful point of departure for the purpose of framing questions and seeking answers about his life both before and during his presidential years. Whether Clinton's memoir—with its 957-pages of often mind-numbing detail, for which he received a staggering ten million dollar advance, that has already sold hundreds of thousands of copies—is a fully reliable and trustworthy guide is another question. Yet Clinton's intense personal focus and the various stories he tells about himself and others makes his memoir, in its best parts, a different and decidedly more interesting read than those that preceded it.

Clinton's goal, understandably, is to establish the terms by which his legacy is enhanced and viewed in the best possible light. He relishes his role as a story teller, serving up homespun and often engaging accounts of how he initially coped with life in a deeply dysfunctional family, with a loving mother who married five times—twice to the same man—and an often inebriated and violent stepfather. To avoid endless conflict, he developed a strategy of living "parallel lives as a child," one that was secret, the other public (p. 584). And this dichotomy allowed him to survive in the face of all [End Page 126] that domestic turmoil. Although Clinton admittedly lacked a clear sense of personhood, he was able to nurture a growing capacity for empathy out of the welter of such a painful inner life, which later became his hallmark on the campaign trail and relations with people. For him that empathetic side of his own contradictory personality was expressed throughout his political career as a desire to give people "better stories" than those they had experienced in their own conflicted and harassed lives.

Although David Maraniss's fine biography covers much the same ground as does Clinton before he became president, Clinton's vivid articulation of his own private and personal feelings about his various experiences as a child and adolescent gives the opening section of the memoir its special flavor and appeal. Especially revealing are Clinton's stories about growing up in Arkansas, and his keen observations about the state's politicians and its political culture, which provided the context and setting for his own generally successful quest for public office in his home state.

Clinton was a natural campaigner. His charm, coupled with an easy, folksy manner and empathetic outreach, was sufficient to give him the votes he needed in 1978 to win the governorship at the age of thirty two, making him the youngest governor in the nation. Although Clinton's victory was a successful career move, there was more at stake for him because he viewed politics as a means of improving people's lives. Thus, he embraced government for the purpose of promoting social and racial progress. For that reason, he admired Robert Kennedy's passion and "raw energy" (p. 97).

Clinton describes Kennedy as the first New Democrat, who "believed in civil rights for...

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