★★★☆☆

• Full Title: My Life
• Author: Bill Clinton (also credited as William Jefferson Clinton)
• Year: 2004
• Genre: Autiobiography
• Publisher: Alfred A. Knopf
• ISBN 0-375-41457-6 (hardcover)
• Wikipedia page
• Author’s Wikipedia page

 

Summary

This is a long book, so my review is longer than I normally write. An autiobiography, Clinton claims he wrote the entire thing in “longhand”, filling “22 big, thick notebooks”. The hardcover text is 957 pages, squeezing it into my list of longest books I’ve ever read (which I thought to created due to reading this book).

He begins exactly at his birth (“Early on the morning of August 19, 1946, I was born under a clear sky after a violent summer storm to a widowed mother...”) and concludes with his exit from the U.S. presidency, having turned over the reins to Bush The Second.

 

Commentary On Style

Clinton’s writing style — and I assume it’s actually him, for a variety of reasons — changes throughout the book. Early on, as he recounts events of his childhood, youth, and young adulthood, I thought it resembled the way my own father writes. Most of the sentences are simple declarations of what the writer believes to be fact. For example:

“Not long after I got back from New York, I left the band to concentrate on my studies and student government. I won the election for freshman class president in one of my better campaigns, waged to an electorate dominated by Irish and Italian Catholics from the East. I don’t remember how I decided to go for it, but I had a lot of help and it was exciting.”

— page 75

It seemed like a regular guy remembering stuff. But the deeper the story went into Clinton’s political career, the less relatable the writing became.

Early, I noticed repeated lame attempts at humor. After relating an event, Clinton often closes with an unnecessary line that I think is supposed to be funny, but which falls flat in print. For example, after relating an actual humorous story about a baptism he witnessed at a Baptist church, Clinton tacks on at the end:

“I couldn’t help thinking that if Jesus had this much of a sense of humor, being a Christian wasn’t going to be so tough.”

— page 31

Sometimes, instead of a joke, he tries to force in a lesson or moral after a particular anecdote: “I learned from this never to...” or “After meeting him, I always remembered that...” Most of these felt awkwardly shoehorned in and overly simplistic. In one spot, he listed several in a row and it wasn’t too bad:

“I learned a lot from the stories my uncle, aunts, and grandparents told me: that no one is perfect but most people are good; that people can’t be judged only by their worst or weakest moments; that harsh judgments can make hypocrites of us all; that a lot of life is just showing up and hanging on; that laughter is often the best, and sometimes the only, response to pain. Perhaps most important, I learned that everyone has a story — of dreams and nightmares, hope and heartache, love and loss, courage and fear, sacrifice and selfishness. All my life I’ve been interested in other people’s stories. I’ve wanted to know them, understand them, feel them. When I grew up and got into politics, I always felt the main point of my work was to give people a chance to have better stories.”

— page 15

As soon as the story moved past childhood, Clinton begins devoting an extraordinary amount of time and space to describing other people and their lives. I speculated that he wanted to “give props” (as the young people used to say) to those who helped him in various stages of his career with these mostly-irrelevant mini-biographies. The real effects for the reader are: (1) swelling the book to nearly 1,000 pages and (2) slowing the narrative. Most of these could have been handled with a simple: “Then I met Betsy Smith, chairman of the local [whatever], who made a lot of calls for the campaign.” But instead there will be three or four paragraphs about the person’s height, background, accent, type of vehicle, spouse, children, health conditions, what business they owned, and so forth. In a few cases, some of the details do turn out to be relevant, but it’s rare.

I like that he (for the most part) presents events as he remembers them (sometimes obviously buttressed with research) whether they make him look good or bad, whether the moments are proud or embarrassing. Many of the anecdotes are clearly just things he remembers, of no real importance to anyone but him — but this is kind of the point of an autobiography: to tell the stories that will otherwise die with you. When he mentions good fortune, he is appropriately grateful for it, rather than entitled. When he mentions poor decisions, he has clearly come to grips with them and rarely tries to justify or explain them away.

 

Did I Learn Anything?

Like most other nonfiction books I read, the thing I liked most was the wealth of information. Clinton’s presidency spanned an odd and tumultuous time in my life — the first decade of my adulthood — so I knew little about him. I never heard of him until he ran for president in 1992 (the first presidential election I was old enough to vote in). Even then, I was at a college that didn’t delve into politics, and during the last five years of Clinton’s presidency I was so poor and working so hard that I didn’t pay much attention — merely occasionally noticed newspaper headlines as I passed the machines that sold newspapers. Until reading this book, most of what I knew about Clinton was from snippets of the evening news in the late 1990s or listening to friends’ or family members’ opinions.

One thing the book drove home, because Clinton began his political career in the 1970s, is how the two major parties in the U.S. were different then. Neither major party had completed its switchover from previous principles, so Clinton dealt with Democrats who were segregationists as well as those who were socially progressive. Republicans also ran the gamut. His political career spanned the years that saw the GOP almost completely engulf the right-wing conservatives and evangelical Christians, while the Democratic Party absorbed most liberals and progressives — resulting in the oft-lamented polarization we see today.

I also found fascinating how political campaigning methods shifted during his career. It’s easy to forget how much the electorate — even into the 1990s — relied on printed newspaper reports; today we are more accustomed to cable news, online news, social media, and other sources.

But maybe the thing I was most floored by was simply how busy he stayed during his two terms as president. The book still would have been long if was simply a list of his activities during those eight years: the 54 overseas trips (to more than 70 countries), the conferences and summits he hosted and attended, the peace accord processes (Israel/Palestine, Ireland/UK, Bosnia, etc.), the hundreds of bills shepherded through Congress, and so on.

 

Did I Change Any Opinions?

I can’t pinpoint any particular opinions of mine that shifted while reading this book.

I know I was struck by Clinton’s lifelong insistence on what could be called “centrist extremism”, his desire to always placate “both sides”. Sometimes this looks ridiculous, as in the abortion debate when he claims to favor a woman’s right to self-determination yet also “understands” those who want women to be controlled against their will. Don’t misunderstand; I realize it’s good political strategy — for winning national elections — but he presents these “both sides are equal” ideas for policy positions. Often it didn’t make sense to me morally. Other times, of course, centrism is the appropriate choice. For example, when conservatives frame the environmental debate as either pro-business or pro-environment, as if there are only two mutually exclusive choices, Clinton’s “why not both?” approach works well.

One thing that worked against my increasing respect for Clinton as I read this book was his sometimes ridiculous references to religion and matters of faith. (I’m certain that most people I know would have the opposite reaction to these same stories.) For example, after he and his wife took a “brief course in voodoo theology” in Haiti, he says (page 237) he personally witnessed a “ceremony, in which spirits are called forth and enter into the bodies of dancing believers”; he even noted “the spirits arrived, seizing a woman and a man”. He could have witnessed similar events in a thousand Pentecostal churches all around the world (like I did, growing up), and he probably would have stated it just as matter-of-factly. I was startled at his ability to take at face value the unsubstantiated claims of one religion after another while still believing that his own religion’s unsubstantiated claimes were the best or truest.

Similarly, when he referred to the RFRA (Religious Freedom Restoration Act), which he signed in 1993, he (on page 558) pretends to “believe strongly in separation of church and state” but then says out of the other side of his mouth that he thinks it’s “an important part of my job” to attend National Prayer Breakfasts and “pray for God’s guidance in our work”. I know he isn’t unusual among U.S. presidents (especially in my lifetime) in proclaiming his faith and trying to combine it with his work, and I give him credit for including multiple faiths (instead of just one), but I’m always going to take points off for governing based on ancient superstitions.

He may have tempered (a bit) my recent hard progressive lean with a couple of astute observations: “be more sensitive to the political problems inherent in progressive politics: the system can absorb only so much change at once; no one can beat all the entrenched interests at the same time...”

 

On A Personal Note

Due to my aforementioned odd/tumultuous life in the 1990s, I’m glad I read this book because it put a lot of things in order and in context. While I remember many of the events of those years, I rarely remember them in order or in relation to the others. Some of them I heard of later, and this book put them in proper perspective. For example, I’ve known many people who took time off work under the Family Medical Leave Act (FMLA), but I didn’t know it was one of the first laws Clinton signed, back in 1993.

Clinton muses in the book that the the national press made some huge mistakes in balancing coverage during his tenure, and I tend to agree. I lived in his home state of Arkansas during the latter half of the ‘90s and I recall seeing tons of headlines about Kenneth Starr’s investigation, but nothing about CHIP or the fact that the only federal budget surpluses in my lifetime occurred just then. (I didn’t learn about the latter until the 2010s, when I was researching something for my blog.)

Also:

• My sister was born on Hillary Rodham Clinton’s 30th birthday.
• My daughter was born on Clinton’s 35th wedding anniversary.

 

Conclusion

I think this is the only autobiography I have read by a former president, so I can’t truly compare it to other books. (I did read The Vantage Point by LBJ several years ago, but it only covered the years of his presidency.) It’s informative. Some parts are easier to read than others. Here’s a quotation from near the end that helps encapsulate some of what was accomplished during the Clinton presidency:

“My last State of the Union address was a joy to deliver. We had more than twenty million new jobs, the lowest unemployment rate and smallest welfare rolls in thirty years, the lowest crime rate in twenty-five years, the lowest poverty rate in twenty years, the smallest federal workforce in forty years, the first back-to-back surpluses in forty-two years, seven years of declining teen pregnancies and a 30 percent increase in adoptions, and 150,000 young people who had served in AmeriCorps. Within a month we would have the longest economic expansion in American history and by the end of the year we would have three consecutive surpluses for the first time in more than fifty years.”

— page 891-2

 

 

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