My Life (original 2004; edition 2005)

Read in 2006

It took me three months to finish My Life...possibly the longest amount of time I've ever spent with one book. But it was worth it! It started out great...loved reading about Clinton's childhood, how he met Hillary...the normal stuff girls want to hear about. And the beginning of this presidency was also interesting - but toward the end, there was too much detail into every little thing and it just dragged. ( )

Political memoirs are notorious for being ponderous exercises in self-gratification. It's hard to find a book that isn't like this - Bill's book is guilty of it - but far less than many others have been.

On the contrary - it is a piercing and interesting book about the nature of the presidency. It has become more interesting with the benefit of hindsight. Having a friendly debate with Newt Gingrich? Trying to pass health care reform? Preventing the stagnation of the economy? All of these issues are too relevant to the modern discourse. The political wranglings then have only become worse now, and many can rightfully yearn for the peaceful days of the 1990s.

I am impressed by his strong memory, attention to detail, his descriptions of events of every nature, his dealings with all characters. Any president has to do some superhuman effort in order to even get elected.

Of course, no president is flawless. He does gloss over some of his most unsavory affairs. But if you can survive these shortcomings, as well as the vast length of the book, you can find a truly interesting portrait of a past era. ( )

-Grew up in a partly quite unstable family environment.
-Vietnam story important to him. Probably even more so because of criticism faced later as a draft dodger.
-the nasty tone of Newt Gingrichs’s Republican party is striking, but maybe above all its certainty. A lengthy quote from Clinton: “Even though I was intrigued by Gingrich and impressed by his political skills, I didn’t think much of his claim that his politics represented America’s best values. I had been raised not to look down on anyone and not to blame others for my own problems or shortcomings. That’s exactly what the “New Right” message did. But it had enormous political appeal because it offered both psychological certainty and escape from responsibility: “they” were always right, “we” were always wrong; “we” were responsible for all the problems, even though “they” had controlled the presidency for all but six of the last twenty-six years. All of us are vulnerable to arguments that let us off the hook, and in the 1994 election, in an America where hardworking middle-class families felt economic anxiety and were upset by the pervasiveness of crime, drugs, and family dysfunction, there was an audience for the Gingrich message, especially when we didn’t offer a competing one.
Gingrich and the Republican right had brought us back to the 1960s again; Newt said that America had been a great country until the sixties, when the Democrats took over and replaced absolute notions of right and wrong with more relativistic values. He pledged to take us back to the morality of the 1950s, in order to “renew American civilization.”
Of course there were political and personal excesses in the 1960s, but the decade and
the movements it spawned also produced advances in civil rights, women’s rights, a clean
environment, workplace safety, and opportunities for the poor. The Democrats believed
in and worked for those things. So did a lot of traditional Republicans, including many of
the governors I’d served with in the late 1970s and 1980s. In focusing only on the
excesses of the 1960s, the New Right reminded me a lot of the carping that white
southerners did against Reconstruction for a century after the Civil War. When I was
growing up, we were still being taught how mean the Northern forces were to us during
Reconstruction, and how noble the South was, even in defeat. There was something to it,
but the loudest complaints always overlooked the good done by Lincoln and the national
Republicans in ending slavery and preserving the Union. On the big issues, slavery and
the Union, the South was wrong.
Now it was happening again, as the right wing used the excesses of the sixties to
obscure the good done in civil rights and other areas.”
This many seem to have retained.
-Clinton offers Republican Senator Alan Simpson’s view of the Whitewater affair and the press generally: “I was genuinely confused by the mainstream press coverage of Whitewater; it seemed inconsistent with the more careful and balanced approach the press had taken on other issues, at least since the Republicans won the Congress in 1994. One day, after one of our budget meetings in October, I asked Senator Alan Simpson of Wyoming to stay a moment to talk. Simpson was a conservative Republican, but we had a pretty good relationship because of the friendship we had in common with his governor, Mike Sullivan. I asked Alan if he thought Hillary and I had done anything wrong in Whitewater. “Of course not,” he said. “That’s not what this is about. This is about making the public think you did something wrong. Anybody who looked at the evidence would see that you did'nt.” Simpson laughed at how willing the “elitist” press was to swallow anything negative about small, rural places like Wyoming or Arkansas and made an interesting observation: “You know, before you were elected, we Republicans believed the press was liberal. Now we have a more sophisticated view. They are liberal in a way. Most of them voted for you, but they think more like your right-wing critics do, and that’s much more important.” When I asked him to explain, he said, “Democrats like you and Sullivan get into government to help people. The right-wing extremists don’t think government can do much to improve on human nature, but they do like power. So does the press. And since you’re President, they both get power the same way, by hurting you.” I appreciated Simpson’s candor and I thought about what he said for months. For a long time, whenever I was angry about the Whitewater press coverage I would tell people about Simpson’s analysis. When I finally just accepted his insight as accurate, it was liberating, and it cleared my head for the fight.”
-It should not be forgotten how scandalous the stealing of the Bush-Gore election was, where the conservative majority in the Supreme Court decided not to recount the votes. ( )

Bill Clinton is impossible not to like. He seems genuinely honored by the support of others and he is always finding ways to be of service. The book is long, but few can tell a story the way Bill can so I finished it and enjoyed it. ( )

I'm glad I have read this, but I would have enjoyed it a lot more if it had not been so long-winded. ( )