June 19, 2004
In a Sprawling Memoir, Clinton Cites Storms and Settles Scores
By JOHN M. BRODER|
|
ormer President Bill Clinton, in a 957-page autobiography that is by turns painfully candid about his personal flaws and gleefully vindictive about what he calls the hypocrisy of his enemies, blamed his affair with Monica Lewinsky on the "old demons" that have haunted him all his life.
He said the affair was personally humiliating and almost cost him his presidency and his marriage. In the end, after months sleeping on the couch, a year of intensive marital counseling and his acquittal on impeachment charges in the Senate, he said he finally felt free.
"In some ways it was liberating," he wrote in the book, "My Life," which is to be released on Monday with an initial printing of 1.5 million copies, adding that he no longer had a secret to hide. A copy was obtained by The New York Times from a bookstore. Mr. Clinton received an advance of more than $10 million for the memoir and is planning an extensive publicity campaign beginning this weekend to sell it.
The book provides an intimate glimpse not only of Mr. Clinton's struggle with the affair and the impeachment battle that followed, but also of eight eventful years in the White House, an improbable childhood and a precocious political career in Arkansas.
The book is sprawling, undisciplined and idiosyncratic in its choice of emphasis. It devotes nearly 100 pages to his childhood but treats large spans of his presidency as a travelogue of campaign cities and foreign capitals. Mr. Clinton wrote his book after the Sept. 11 attacks, and he devotes a good deal of space to his administration's efforts to deal with terrorism, and its growing concern about Osama bin Laden.
The signature events of Mr. Clinton's presidency are largely familiar and many of his former aides as well as his wife, Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton, have written their accounts of them. But this is the first full-length explanation from Mr. Clinton of how it felt to be at the center of so many storms.
The book's length gives the former president plenty of room to settle scores and he does so with his customary élan. He takes the whip to Republicans in Congress; Louis J. Freeh, the former F.B.I. director; the National Rifle Association; and even the Supreme Court, which ruled unanimously in 1997 that Paula Jones's sexual harassment case against him could go forward while he was in office. He called that one of the most politically naïve and damaging court decisions in years.
But he reserved special venom for Kenneth W. Starr, the independent counsel who chased him for years in one of the most expensive government investigations in the nation's history. He writes that Mr. Starr was the tribune of an organized right wing cabal that was determined to destroy his presidency because he was a personal anathema to them and repeatedly defeated them on policy grounds.
He accused Mr. Starr of pulling a "cheap, sleazy publicity stunt" by hauling Mrs. Clinton before a federal grand jury investigating the Whitewater affair. He said Mr. Starr could have come to the White House.
Yet Mr. Clinton also readily acknowledges that his sexual self-indulgence and his carefully crafted evasions gave his foes all the ammunition they needed to derail his presidency at least temporarily and damage his standing with the public.
Mr. Clinton wrote that from a very early age he lived "parallel lives," with a public gregariousness and sunny disposition masking private turmoil and weakness.
He several times witnessed his alcoholic stepfather, Roger Clinton, beating his mother and once firing a gun at her head. But he wrote that he would go to school the next day as if nothing had happened. This pattern was especially evident again in 1998, he said, when the Lewinsky affair was revealed and Mr. Clinton spent months lying to his family, his aides and the nation about it.
He said as a child he learned, too well, how to live with secrets. His family creed, he said, was "don't ask, don't tell."
He called 1998 the strangest year of his presidency, when he was compelled to lead two incongruent lives. The Lewinsky investigation brought what he called the "darkest part" of his personal life into full view.
He said he was disgusted by his sexual encounters with Ms. Lewinsky, which he said ended after several months when he could no longer live with himself. He admits that his actions were immoral and foolish, but repeatedly says that he was determined not to let Mr. Starr drive him from office because of them.
When he belatedly confessed to Mrs. Clinton in August 1998, he wrote, she reacted as if he had punched her in the gut. Telling their daughter, Chelsea, was even worse. He felt for weeks afterward, as he slept on a couch in the White House and a borrowed vacation home on Martha's Vineyard, that his indulgence and mendacity risked not only his marriage but also the love and respect of his only child.
He said he spent the several days immediately after his confession alternately begging for forgiveness and plotting a retaliatory strike against Mr. bin Laden and Al Qaeda for the August 1998 bombings of United States embassies in Tanzania and Kenya. Aides warned him that such a strike might be seen as an effort to change the subject from his personal and legal woes.
He said he forcefully told his aides to stick to national security advice. Mr. Clinton forgives most of his opponents their own foibles, even former Speaker Newt Gingrich who led Republicans into control of Congress in the 1994 elections and into pitched battle with Mr. Clinton. But his judgment of Mr. Freeh, the F.B.I. director he appointed in 1993, is harsh. He said Mr. Freeh, a former federal district court judge, turned on the White House to deflect criticism from serious lapses at the F.B.I., including scandals in its forensic laboratory and its handling of the shootout in Ruby Ridge, Idaho.
The book pulses with Mr. Clinton's own voice and is bursting with a typical profusion of anecdote and detail. Mr. Clinton writes that his father's death at age 28, before he was born, made him conscious of his own mortality and spurred him to live every moment to the fullest. Mr. Clinton writes with rueful candor about his chubby adolescence, confessing that he was once the only child at an Easter egg hunt not to get an egg, not because he could not find them, but because he could not move fast enough to compete with the other children.
He describes his youth as "a fat band boy" and recalls that in junior high school, as he began to learn more about his mind and body, some of it scared him, including his first sexual stirrings. Mr. Clinton also tells about his effort to avoid the Vietnam draft, which later became an issue in his presidential campaign. He details his aversion to going to Vietnam, and writes that he searched his heart at the time, trying to determine whether it was "rooted in conviction or cowardice." He says he is not sure, given how events played out, that he ever answered the question for himself.
He dwells briefly, though, on his confrontation with Mr. Gingrich and the other Republican leaders in Congress over the government shutdown during one of the big budget battles of 1995 and 1996. Mr. Gingrich, then the speaker of the House, told Mr. Clinton that he had thought the president would cave in to Republican demands, and said Republicans underestimated him. There are glimpses of his world view: Mr. Clinton argues that the Middle East conflict and the China-Taiwan conflict were polar opposite problems. The first would worsen with lack of attention, he believed, and the second would get better as long as neither side did anything too aggressive. But he devotes only a sentence to the harrowing moments when he sent a Navy carrier near the Taiwan strait to stop China from missile tests meant to intimidate the island's voters before a crucial election.
Mr. Clinton defends his record on terrorism, arguing that he pressed the allies for more of a focus on counterterrorism and citing speeches in which he called terror "the enemy of our generation.''
He also notes that in 1996 he signed two directives on terrorism and appointed Richard A. Clarke to be the administration's terrorism coordinator.
Mr. Clinton has surprisingly little to say about his opponent in the 1996 election, Bob Dole, but he paces readers through his campaign stops and analyzes the cultural factors that influenced the election in many states. Much as he often did in person, he runs through poll results state-by-state, concluding that over all he was happy with the re-election results, an overwhelming electoral and popular victory.
Mr. Clinton weaves the tale of the Whitewater investigation through the account of his White House years, always with a dismissive tone. He explained the sudden appearance of Mrs. Clinton's legal billing records in the White House residence as the product merely of sloppy record-keeping in Arkansas.
He expressed remorse and gratitude to Susan McDougal, who went to jail rather than testify against the Clintons on Whitewater. He said that she suffered because she refused to lie and tell prosecutors what they wanted to hear.
Mr. Clinton closes the book with a short meditation on the lessons he has learned about accepting personal responsibility, letting go of anger and granting forgiveness. He said that in the many black churches he has visited he has heard funerals referred to as "homegoings."
"We're all going home," he wrote, "and I want to be ready."
Todd S. Purdum and David E. Sanger contributed reporting for this article.