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The Wrong Way to Mount Rushmore
If you must read Bill Clinton's book, skip pages 1 through 869.

BY MARK STEYN
Sunday, June 27, 2004 12:01 a.m.

Is there anything interesting in "My Life" by Bill Clinton? Oh, yes. Page 870.
The Clintons are in New Zealand and finally get to meet "Sir Edmund Hillary, who had explored the South Pole in the 1950s, was the first man to reach the top of Mount Everest and, most important, was the man Chelsea's mother had been named for."

Hmm. Edmund Hillary reached the top of Everest in 1953. Hillary Rodham was born in 1947, when Sir Edmund was an obscure New Zealand beekeeper and an unlikely inspiration for two young parents in the Chicago suburbs. I mentioned this in Britain's Sunday Telegraph eight years ago this very week, after this little story was trotted out the first time, but like so many curious anomalies in the Clinton record, it somehow cruises on indestructibly. By the time Sir Edmund shuffles off this mortal coil, the New York Times headline will read: "Man for Whom President Rodham Named Dies; Climbed Everest in 1947."

"My Life" (Knopf, 957 pages, $35) is a harder slog. The foothills of the vast tome are deceptively easy, when Mr. Clinton is merely telling a heartwarming personal anecdote about every single person listed in the Arkansas telephone directory between 1946 and 1992. But in the higher elevations after page 700, it's heavier going: Up in the clouds, way above the out-of-his-tree line, the president advances the theory that he was obliged to submit to random sexual advances in order to uphold the important constitutional principle that Republicans are uptight about oral sex. I think I've got that right, but by then I was finding it hard to breathe and beginning to see double.

Like Sir Edmund Hillary's apiary back in the 1940s, Mr. Clinton can still generate "buzz," as Tina Brown likes to say. He did a grand job with Oprah and Dan last week. Unfortunately, on the page, without the big smiles for the life-affirming anecdotes and the lip-biting for the setbacks, the Clinton personality shrivels and dies. The clue to where he goes wrong comes in the prologue. "No person I know ever had more or better friends," he writes, "the now legendary FOBs." Granted that a remarkable number of those FOBs wound up dead, in jail or drowning in legal bills, there are still thousands out there, and Bill feels he has to mention them all.
This isn't wholly unreasonable. Many FOBs who got in early and cemented their friendship before Bill was out of kindergarten went on to hold senior positions in his administrations. The little girl who lived next door to him on Scully Street in Hot Springs eventually became head of his adult-literacy program in Arkansas; two boyhood chums from Miss Marie Purkins's School for Little Folks in Hope wound up as White House counsel and chief of staff. No doubt Saddam's having the same problems figuring out which Tikrit grade-school buddies to excise from his own memoirs.

Somewhere along the way, "My Life" morphs seamlessly from Bill's relations to other people's relations. One minute the old schmoozer is in the Ozarks glad-handing a "segregationist optometrist" (they didn't see eye to eye) and a great-aunt who has the biggest melons in Arkansas; the next he's glad-handing the nephew of Sherman Billingsley, owner of the Stork Club. The day after that, he's in ethics class helping out his new buddy, King Faisal's nephew Prince Turki, later the deeply sinister longtime head of Saudi Arabia's intelligence service and now ambassador in London. This is ethics class in Georgetown, I believe, not at Miss Marie Purkins's School for Little Folks. But even so, where's Michael Moore when you need a documentary exposé of the murky decades-old ties between the House of Saud and the House of Bill?

Yet after a while, you begin to notice that one category of FOBs is getting fobbed off. Plenty of Bill's relations, plenty of King Faisal's relations, but if you're one of those with whom he had sexual relations or (for those still following Paula Jones deposition definitions) nonsexual relations, you won't rate a mention unless your nonrelations had the misfortune to end up in the hands of the lawyers. Monica? The president appears to have accidentally modified his story and started his relationship with the comely intern several months earlier than he testified to at the time: "During the government shutdown in late 1995," he writes, "I'd had an inappropriate encounter with Monica Lewinsky and would do so again on other occasions."

Truly, that is one of the saddest sentences ever written. If I were the big spenders at Knopf, I'd have said: "Look, we understand that a politician with legal difficulties has to say things like 'inappropriate encounter.' And, if you want to write a memoir in dead pol-speak, that's OK, we'll pay you 20,000 bucks. But for 10 mil do us a favor and lay off the 'I had an inappropriate encounter' stuff. Shoot for more of 'The shaft of light from the dying sun through the Oval Office window caught the swell of her bosom as she slid the extra-large pepperoni across the desk. I knew it was wrong. I'd penciled in that evening for bringing peace to Northern Ireland, but what the hell, the two sides of that troubled island's sectarian conflict were separated by as deep a divide as the plunging cleavage now beckoning from her low-cut angora sweater. Ulster could wait.' "

We now have three accounts of Mr. Clinton in action. In "Monica's Story," he is blazingly vivid: "He undressed me with his eyes," whimpers the author. "The irony is that I had the first orgasm of the relationship." In "Living History," by Sir Edmund Hillary Rodham Clinton, Mr. Clinton is a tireless wonk far too public-spirited for such things: "While I was challenging discrimination practices," whimpers the author, "Bill was in Miami working to ensure McGovern's nomination."

In his own underpowered telling, Mr. Clinton is an empty shell caught between his bid for posterity and reflexive lawyerly evasion. The only flirting he does here is on page 104: "I briefly flirted," he writes, "with the idea of dropping out of school and enlisting in the military." Really? As brief flirtations go, I'll bet that was briefer than Paula Jones got.

If you read only one book on Mr. Clinton up close and personal, I'd make it Monica's, the only one of the three in which Bill displays any of his much vaunted passion. "He's such a jerk!" rages the leader of the Free World over his rival, California high-school drama teacher Andy Bleiler, Monica's previous adulterer.

Now, I understand that there are those who think Monica, Paula, Gennifer, et al., are peripheral distractions from the Clinton story--that it was one of the most consequential presidencies of the past several millennia and resulted in a lot of landmark legislation such as, um, that federal regulation restricting the size of your toilet cistern. Important stuff you wouldn't get from the likes of James Buchanan or Chester Arthur.
Mr. Clinton is certainly thinking of his legacy. The index lists more pages for "bin Laden, Osama" than "Jones, Paula," which isn't how it seemed at the time. You can't blame the poor fellow. As things stand, you'd be hard put to devise a more apt personal embodiment of the long holiday from history the U.S. took between the fall of the Berlin Wall and the fall of the World Trade Center. If geopolitics is the Super Bowl, Mr. Clinton is Janet Jackson, complete with wardrobe malfunctions.

So Mr. Clinton has to demonstrate that he wasn't beached by the tides of history on Sept. 11, 2001. This isn't impossible. If he wants us to believe he was "focusing like a laser" on Osama for eight years and that Monica was just a front, he should have constructed a narrative to fit: the Scarlet Clinternel, foppish pants-dropper by day, doughty warrior against the forces of darkness by night.

Instead he has devised some psychobabble rendezvous-with-destiny cry-for-help in which every humdrum episode is freighted with a grim sense of foreboding. In grade school, his stepdad sees him carrying a secret letter to the mailbox. "The allure of our secrets can be too strong," writes Mr. Clinton. "I know only that it became a struggle for me to find the right balance between secrets of internal richness and those of hidden fears and shame." The allure of secrets is leading him on remorselessly to his inappropriate encounter!

Even for Bill Clinton, this is unworthy. Internwise, America divides into those who think he's Benny Hill with subpoenas and those who believe it was Richard Mellon Scaife under the Oval Office desk and he later pinned it on Monica. But either way we're interned out. If you can't write an honest autobiography, stick to the big issues.
Instead, Mr. Clinton's book is a double flop: Either stake your claim to join the guys on Mount Rushmore or embrace your destiny as a guy who rushes to mount more. The president does neither and winds up with a book that reads like the world's biggest Rolodex punctuated by self-doubt. He broods on "the difficulty I've had in letting anyone into the deepest recesses of my internal life. It was dark down there. I had been down on my self before," he reveals, "but never like this, for this long."

In the old days, Bill Clinton carried off his peculiar psychoses with dash and élan. They were stirring times: "Ask not what your country can do for you, ask what your country can do for me." (I quote from memory.) But as he burbles on past 800, 900 pages, still unable to reach completion, you realize that Tina Brown was on to something when she cooed that Bill exists "vividly in the present tense and dares you to join him there." In this book, he slides drably into the past, and the stories come up all mildewed: It now depends what the meaning of "was" was. That's a tougher sell.

Mr. Steyn is a columnist for The Atlantic Monthly and The Spectator.

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