Clinton memoir doesn’t go deep

‘My Life’

Bill Clinton

Knopf: 957 pp., $35

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William Jefferson Clinton -- to gloss Lord Marchmain’s wry self-appraisal -- has long been a scandal to his enemies and a stumbling block to his own party.

This week’s publication of the 42nd president’s long-awaited autobiography, “My Life,” is unlikely to change any of that. At 957 pages, this is presidential memoir literally writ large and -- as opposed to most contemporary public figures’ books -- in the author’s own hand. The result is much like the public man, fascinating but ultimately unsatisfying. There are flashes of incisive brilliance and numbing stretches of tedious self-absorption.

The book’s structure is serviceable, if uninspired, the product perhaps of an oncoming deadline. About half the book is devoted to his childhood, education and early political career, the second to his term in the Oval Office. Unfortunately, vast, arid stretches of the latter read as if the former president simply sat with his office diaries and filled in everything he could remember about a particular day.

Clinton was the first baby boomer elected chief executive, and his sensibility is representative of that privileged and indulged generation: Everything that ever happened to me is compelling because

Moreover, whether or not Clinton was a great president, his presidency was a great period for the United States. He was the first Democrat to be re-elected since Franklin D. Roosevelt and, during his eight years in office, the nation enjoyed the greatest peace and prosperity in its history. Unemployment fell to its lowest rate in modern times, while inflation declined to a 30-year low and welfare rolls shrank. Crime fell to levels unmatched in half a century and homeownership increased to historic highs. Clinton submitted the first balanced federal budget in decades and banked a staggering surplus. He failed to reform healthcare but elevated environmental protection to unmatched levels. He insisted that “the era of big government is over” while attempting to steer his party into a new, if ill-defined, “third way.”

He shrewdly, even heroically, brokered peace in Northern Ireland, when no one imagined it was possible. He might have done the same between Israel and the Palestinians had that murderous old crook Yasser Arafat not maintained his storied record of never missing an opportunity to miss an opportunity.

In the minds of the chattering class, however, all these things tend to be obscured by issues arising from Clinton’s affair with White House intern Monica S. Lewinsky, which led to his impeachment by the House. He was acquitted of the charges by the Senate, and the American public handed down its own verdict by giving Clinton unwaveringly high approval ratings throughout.

Perhaps because the facts of Clinton’s presidency cannot be in dispute, much of the frenzy surrounding this book’s publication has come to center on what is called “the character issue,” though in Clinton’s case, character conundrum might be more apt.

The story of the future president’s troubled childhood home life with an alcoholic stepfather who abused his mother and threatened the two sons, is by now well known. But consider the conclusion Bill Clinton the middle-aged man says he drew from that experience:

“The question of secrets is one I’ve thought about a lot over the years. We all have them and I think we’re entitled to them. They make our lives more interesting, and when we decide to share them, our relationships become more meaningful. The place where secrets are kept can also provide a haven, a retreat from the rest of the world, where one’s identity can be shaped and reaffirmed, where being alone can bring security and peace. Still, secrets can be an awful burden to bear, especially if some sense of shame is attached to them, even if the source of the shame is not the secret holder. Or the allure of our secrets can be too strong, strong enough to make us feel we can’t live without them, that we wouldn’t even be who we are without them.”

Note the confusion between privacy, which is an irreducible component of a mature and healthy life, and secrecy, which while sometimes expedient, can be viciously destructive when it involves withholding from others what they are entitled to know. Note further the notion of simultaneous lives -- not private and public, but public and secret. Much that needlessly convulsed this nation and did incalculable harm flowed from the unconsciously revelatory admission in this passage.

It is this duality that makes Clinton seem so dodgy when he comes to issues of responsibility during key moments of his presidency. For example, he attributes the appalling disaster at the Branch Davidian compound near Waco, Texas, to taking bad advice from Atty. Gen. Janet Reno and counselor George Stephanopoulos. “After Waco, I resolved to go with my gut,” Clinton writes.

Similarly, what he describes as “one of the darkest days of my presidency,” the disastrous Somali incursion, began with his approval of a plan by Colin L. Powell, then chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, to arrest warlord Mohammed Farah Aidid. According to Clinton, the whole effort fell apart because of incoherence among the U.S. commanders. And, though the former president accepts responsibility for the 19 American servicemen killed and dozens wounded, it is -- as in the case of Waco -- responsibility without blame.

So, too, with his administration’s halting approach to the crisis in Bosnia. Nothing, however, quite matches his description of his role in what many consider the West’s greatest postwar moral collapse -- failure to halt the Rwandan genocide. Clinton devotes just two paragraphs to that debacle, though he calls the failure “one of the greatest regrets of my presidency.”

In some ways, Clinton is at his most interesting when he lets himself get in touch with his inner political infighter.

As a candidate, he always possessed what campaign professionals refer to as “a high RLC quotient.” (The acronym stands for rat-like cunning, a quality much admired among veteran political handlers.) A poor kid like Clinton has to cultivate his own RLC; inherited money of the Bush sort rents it from guys like Lee Atwater and Karl Rove. Clinton’s book is studded with well-aimed, nicely dismissive digs at right-wing Republicans and rampaging special prosecutors, and then there’s this shot at the press and its treatment of campaign finance reform:

“Fundamentally, the press objected to the influence of money on campaigns, though most of the money was spent on media advertising. Unless we were to legislate free or reduced-cost airtime, which the media generally opposed, or to adopt public financing of campaigns, an option with little public or congressional support, the media would continue to be the largest consumer of campaign dollars, even as they pilloried politicians for raising the funds to pay them.”

Now that’s nifty, especially coming from somebody who practically operated the White House like a bed-and-breakfast for well-heeled contributors. But anybody who likes to mix it up has got to admire the footwork. With a master, which Clinton remains, politics -- like boxing -- is a sweet science.

Still a relatively young man, Clinton has lived a life filled with significant and dramatic events. Yet his thoughts on it are curiously shallow, products of that inner paradox that has rendered so much of the boomer’s inner life impersonal and self-absorbed at the same time. In that, Clinton is emblematic of his generation in a way he never intended. Some of what stood between him and a genuinely and fully personal consideration of his time and his place in it may be a lifetime’s habit of duality and secrecy. At a deep level, he seems to believe that himself. Perhaps when Clinton the candidate -- and, in some sense, he was ever that -- spoke of feeling others’ pain, it sounded so convincing because he actually preferred it to his own.

In “My Life,” there are hints, but no answers to such questions.

Socrates instructed us that the unexamined life is not worth living. As it turns out, the superficially examined life is only fitfully worth reading.