Book Review: Reflecting on the Prismatic Presidency of 'The Natural'

If it's true that Bill Clinton is what Joe Klein (quoting George Santayana on William James) says he is, ''so extremely natural that there was no knowing what his nature was, or what came next'' -- and who wouldn't vote for that? -- then this book could hardly be the last word on our immediate ex-president. But Klein's new work stands as a solidly provisional overview of the prismatic Clinton presidency.

The duality, triality, quadrality of Bill Clinton's nature and outlook should by now be a popular topic everywhere for focus groups trying to focus. He has been variously viewed as a poll addict who couldn't make up his mind, ''a creature of his audience,'' a man without core values who compromised on nearly everything, a closet liberal who went to the right whenever it suited him. He was perceived as a faithless husband who loved his wife passionately; a man of cosmic flaws; a sucker for flattery with a compulsion to please; owner of Achilles' heels, elbows and other parts, which all proved impervious to enemy arrows during his eight years as target of the far right's ''pyrotechnic hatred.'' His behavior also brought on what Klein calls ''the most lurid month in the history of the American presidency'' -- the Mostly Monica Month -- after which the electorate would have gleefully voted him a third term if only it had been legal. Loathed, pilloried, impeached, Bill Clinton saw his approval ratings stay illogically lofty, and he turned into ''the most compelling politician of his generation,'' a national anomaly, a charismatic celebrity who, even now, wows the globalists and historians with his knowledge and fills every room he enters.

Photo of Klein by Peter Cove
THE NATURAL
The Misunderstood Presidency of Bill Clinton
By Joe Klein
230 pages. Doubleday. $22.95.

Klein, who has covered the White House for Newsweek and The New Yorker, cloned a serious likeness, President Jack Stanton, in the 1996 ''anonymous'' best-selling novel, ''Primary Colors,'' a book hailed for its language, verve and revelation of the intimacies of a presidential campaign very like Clinton's in 1992. In ''The Natural'' Klein says his novel was wrongly considered ''an attack on the president. . . . I saw it as a defense of larger-than-life politicians -- who, inevitably, have mythic weaknesses entangled with their obvious strengths. . . . It seemed obvious that a larger-than-life leader was preferable to one who was smaller than life.''

Klein begins here with 1992, musing, as he moves forward, on what the president achieved, where he fell short, his mystery marriage to Hillary (maybe the best chapter) and his continuing personality puzzle. Why did he do what he did? Has he no shame? No sense? Klein doesn't stint on caustic appraisals; even so, he emerges as a disappointed, bewildered, but awed Clintonian, for unlike the haters, he sees past the negatives. I've roamed through a score of books about the Clintons, and it's not easy to pinpoint where Klein's information is new; but this book is more readable than the others, dense but tight, funny, adroitly written and, in sum, the first savvy synthesis of the Clinton Age.

One of Klein's points, historically sad, is that ''Clinton had spent most of his life dreaming of a heroic Rooseveltian presidency, of great acts and grand gestures. But that dream ended with health care'' -- the campaign, spearheaded by Mrs. Clinton, for universal coverage. It was early in the first term, the Clintons didn't yet understand Congress or appreciate compromise, the grand dream became a fiasco, and it weakened the president. He had to learn to proceed incrementally; and he did. In his second term, after snookering Newt Gingrich in the budget battle that shut down the government twice, he and the grudging Republicans created a balanced budget with -- among much else -- $30 billion in tax credits to make the first two years of college a middle-class entitlement. One skeptic remarked, ''It ain't the G.I. Bill of Rights,'' but Klein notes that the G.I. Bill applied only to returning World War II veterans, whereas by 1999 an astonishing 10 million, of 14 million Americans eligible, would take advantage of the college tax credit. Clinton had also promised welfare reform and in his second term he got some, plus $24 billion for children's health insurance. In five years $70 billion went to families with less than $30,000 in income.

''Persistence,'' Klein writes, ''was his strongest character trait. In this case . . . in the service of his political beliefs, not his ambition . . . the result was perhaps the most important substantive achievement of his presidency.'' But, Klein adds, these achievements were ignored by the left, which wanted bigger social programs, by the right, which wanted less spending, and by the press, which ''mostly didn't notice. . . . Incrementalism was too subtle a story. . . . There was a news vacuum that needed to be filled. In 1998, it would be.''

James Carville, Clinton's political consultant, asked the president about his tendency to live dangerously, and Klein quotes the answer: ''Well, they haven't caught me yet.'' But in the Monica Lewinsky case they caught him: hard evidence of a sexual liaison with the young intern. Then came his assertions that it hadn't happened, followed by apologies that it had and finally his testimony before Kenneth Starr's grand jury in August 1998. Klein quotes the president on Starr: ''That man is evil. When this thing is over, there's only going to be one of us left standing. And it's going to be me.'' And it was. Sort of.

Within Clinton's circle of friends, Klein writes, ''there had always been a certain exhilaration inherent in watching the president elude the posse.'' But not this time. ''He had lawyered his way through an act of passion . . . had betrayed his wife and staff and given a sword to those who hated what he'd stood for.'' His first press secretary, Dee Dee Myers, wrote that she never believed that he ''would actually risk his presidency . . . for something so frivolous, so reckless, so small.''

The first family was in chaos, the White House in depression, Congressional allies suggesting he resign; and then came the scandal's apogee -- his day before the grand jury. Klein imagines the nation watching, expecting him to ''make a fool of himself, turn purple, scream like a banshee and storm out of the room. But Bill Clinton didn't turn purple. . . . He was the same Bill Clinton we'd always seen in public . . . charming, mesmerizing and wickedly smart. A bit too smart, at times.'' This is where Clinton offered his hilarious argument that oral sex wasn't really sex, and gave his mini-lecture on the ambivalence of intransitive verbs (now a Clinton entry in ''Bartlett's Familiar Quotations''): ''It depends on what the meaning of the word 'is' is. If the -- if he -- if 'is' means is and never has been, that is not -- that is one thing. If it means there is none, that was a completely true statement.''

Clinton, says Klein, ''was at once gallant and brutal about Lewinsky; credibly remorseful . . . appropriately indignant about the motives of the prosecutorial army that had been pursuing him. . . . Indeed, the testimony proved to be a rare and unexpected event. . . . When it was over, the fever had broken.'' Bill Clinton had eluded the posse, and would elude it again three months later with Senate acquittal on his impeachment charges. His job approval rating soared to 62 percent, compared with 48 percent in his first term. Asked how they'd vote today, people said 46 percent Clinton, 36 percent Bob Dole, 11 percent Ross Perot, just like 1996. ''It was as if the name 'Lewinsky' had never been heard in the land,'' Klein writes.

HOW could this be? Editorial writers, pundits, righteous clerics were baffled. Had America lost its morals, its marbles? Klein suggests Clinton was a scapegoat, personifying pathologies of his society to relieve guilt so that change could happen. But he further suggests it was not society but Clinton's accusers who found in him what was ''most embarrassing, troubling and loathsome about themselves.'' Among the accusers, three leaders in the Republican Congress turned out to have had adulterous liaisons, including Gingrich, who, after the loss of five seats in the House through his leadership, quit as speaker, left both the House and his wife and fled politics with his mistress. Meanwhile, the scapegoat escaped.

The public's laissez-faire attitude was, Klein says, unprecedented: people judging the Lewinsky affair as a ''delicious, disgraceful, exploitative and ultimately private act of consensual sex.'' In the 1992 campaign, he says, voters liked Clinton's ''unruly passions,'' his ''vast, messy humanity,'' and didn't deny him the nomination for hanging out with the lounge singer Gennifer Flowers. In 1998 they decided the Lewinsky investigation was political, Starr was ''a charmless fanatic,'' and they held the press in lower esteem than lawyers. Yet the toll was great. Time and opportunity lost to scandal generated disappointment within the White House: talent squandered, grand possibility aborted. Klein suggests Clinton's immense talents might have made him a great president, but ''greatness in politics is rarely self-created; it is a consequence of trouble in the world. A leader without a crisis is usually consigned to the periphery of history.''

But Klein also notes that, against great odds, Clinton's achievements were substantial: ''He had rescued the Democratic Party from irrelevance. . . . He performed the most important service that a leader can provide: he saw the world clearly and reacted prudently to the challenges he faced; he explained a complicated economic transformation to the American people and brought them to the edge of a new era.'' Klein quotes Clinton on his own achievement: ''If you see a turtle sitting on top of a fence post, it didn't get there by accident'' -- meaning, Klein says, that ''the historic prosperity and the global peace that attended his time in office . . . were, at least in part, attributable to thousands of decisions . . . that Clinton and his advisers had made.'' Yet Klein suggests that the Clinton presidency was more about spin than leadership. ''Clinton may have lost a great deal of moral authority well before Lewinsky by snuggling too close to us -- by polling every last public whim, by trying so hard to please. It is entirely possible that the Clinton era will be remembered by historians primarily as the moment when the distance between the president and the public evaporated forever.''

But it can be argued that this closeness to the people was a unique revelation in modern politics: Bill Clinton exposed in a way no other president ever had been (Jack Kennedy's revelations were posthumous); all that confessionalism, that intimate testimony, a man who now wears his flaws on his sleeve, the most human president we've ever had. Do we like him? He's doing a great job. Give him 62 percent. A whirlwind president who led the people out of their innocence as surely as hippiedom and the pill nudged the nation into the age of inhaling and ready-to-wear hedonism. (Warren Harding brought his mistress into the Oval Office, but oral sex hadn't been invented yet.)

A politician I know well but won't name is fond of saying that righteousness doesn't stand a chance against the imagination. Bill Clinton's imagination has rendered null and void the sanctimony that passes for righteousness at election time; and he found a way to survive the harshest truths about himself. Joe Klein takes him to the end of his presidency and stops, but this is an unfinished story. The age of Clinton continues with Senator Hillary, and moving along with her is the maestro of impromptu narrative, whose nature we only think we know. The man is 55, and has moved past political fame into a status not yet defined: superstar, yes, but of what now? To be continued.

William Kennedy was one of 40 Irish-Americans who traveled to Ireland with President Clinton in 1995. His new novel, ''Roscoe,'' is about a Democratic machine politician from Albany.

Any excuse for these dastards at the Times to get x42's face on the cover of whatever they publish (you guessed it: he's on the cover of the Book Review). No responsibility for x42 anywhere for anything...his personality was larger than life, and let's not forget those blue eyes now...

Actually, in some ways the book is not as bad as I imagined it could be based on this review. I will save my money though.

I for the life of me can't understand all these people who are so charmed by this obvious phony. I knew Clinton was a lying piece of Hillary the first time I ever saw him on TV. Yet people still fawn over him after all the damage and trouble he has caused this country. It doesn't bode well for this country if so many people can be duped so easily. I almost think there's some sort of a santanic influence he exudes.

I saw Klein on Tim (potato head) Russert show talking about this book.

As normal Russert did his best impression of a T-ball pitcher.

Didn't ask one decent question, didn't follow up on obvious phony pabulum, didn't object to any thing Klein said.

I gave it a golden kneepad award to both of them, the only thing missing was Whoppie Goldberg to present it.

I know two good Republicans who met x42: one woman (my daughter) and one guy. Both detest him, yet BOTH said that his in-person appearance and his charm were very impressive.

But all that made just made it easier for the demo-libs to forgive him for everything. After all, he supported abortion and affirmative action, and that's what you have to do for the women and the AAs.

Point taken--and don't forget Ted Bundy. They were just reporting, not excusing. They detested even more after the meeting. When introduced to Hillary in a receiving line, my daughter refused to shake hands and just slipped away. That's my girl!

Klein is self-deluded. I read Primary Colors and could NOT believe the ending. After pointing out the obvious deficiencies of his novel's presidental candidate, his "hero," resigns as an aide BUT believes the candidate should be elected because he is "the best there is." Perhaps Clinton was a man for his times since he represented the worst of our cultural shock, but Bush represents stability, honor, decency, and love of country. Bush's moral stance has caught on and his numbers are higher than Clinton's ever were.

"the most compelling politician of his generation"

That says a lot about the generation.

Klein has drunk the Kool Aid. The protagonist in "Primary Colors" was Klein's idealized self-portrait and the ending is his self-justification. If Clinton is guilty of what Stanton is accused of, how could anyone support him? Was the victory of one party over another so important that one will stomach anything?

Accepting liberalism, Klein couldn't do without Clinton. But after all Clinton's compromises, corruptions and manipulations, all Klein's really left with is Clinton. Precisely because of all these corruptions, Joe Klein has to hold onto his idealized view of Clinton all the more tightly. In a sense, it's not just about Clinton, but about the self-image of those 60s types who embraced Clinton. They have to defend the choice, because otherwise, what do they have left?

Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.