A "Long and Winding Road": Bill Clinton and the 1960s

President Clinton's status as "poster child" of the 1960s in the 1990s is examined through autobiographical attempts to preserve or revise the collective memory of the Sixties. The emerging image is then compared to Clinton's own political persona as a candidate, as a president, and finally as an autobiographer himself. His circumstances and reactions bear a remarkable resemblance to another president, Richard Nixon, who also struggled with associations from another decade. This unlikely linkage suggests that similar unstable patterns of pride and resentment emerge when presidential rhetoric is driven by the controversies of past decades.