First in His Class: A Biography of Bill Clinton. - book reviews

National Review, April 17, 1995 by Ann Lloyd Merriman

THREE YEARS AGO, the name Bill Clinton provoked little more than the reaction ``Bill Who?'' from the majority of voters, who thought -- as did most political guessperts -- that President George Bush had the 1992 election sewn up. Yet today Bill Who? occupies the Oval Office, and biographers are hard at work producing life stories and analyses of him.

The best so far is First in His Class, by David Marannis of the Washington Post. It is to biography as saturation bombing is to warfare. Readers should take a deep breath before cracking this 512-page study of the Work-in-Progress from Hope, for Marannis begins at the beginning and along the way covers a cast of thousands. We've heard of the Friends of Bill and the Friends of Hillary; little did we know that in the collective they could fill a Cecil B. De Mille production.

Marannis has done such a thorough deconstruction job that the question naturally occurs: Where was he when the voters needed him? Why, Marannis was right there on the campaign trail, winning a Pulitzer Prize for his coverage of the Clinton campaign. Unfortunately, he must have been moonstruck then, for he saw only Bill Clinton, the carefully contrived New Democrat; Slick Willie never appeared on his radar screen. But that was then.

The facts speak for themselves in Marannis's study, which ends as Clinton announces his presidential candidacy. There is little conjecture -- only a mind-boggling wealth of documentation and testimony gleaned from four hundred interviews. Marannis covers Clinton's origins with a magnifying glass and then carries the reader through young Billy Blythe's childhood, from Hope to Hot Springs, where license (gambling, loose women, high living) constantly warred with propriety (churches, temperance, country clubs). Even in kindergarten, says a classmate, Billy was ``almost obnoxious.''

He legally adopted his stepfather's name, Clinton, in 1962, purportedly so that he and his half-brother would not have different names. Of course the name change had nothing at all to do with the fact that stepfather Roger's brother Raymond owned the local Buick agency and had political connections, or the fact that another of Roger's brothers, Roy, had served two years in the Arkansas legislature. Well, of course it didn't!

Meanwhile, Billy was developing into a glad-handing smooth operator who played tenor sax in his high-school band and attracted girls like flies to a honeypot. He buttered up teachers and classmates alike, with the result that his high-school principal paved the way for him into Boys' State, which took him on the much-ballyhooed trip to Washington, D.C., for a Boys' Nation confab in July 1963. Billy then maneuvered his way into being photographed shaking hands with John F. Kennedy and met Arkansas Senator J. William Fulbright.

Throughout his four years at Georgetown, his stint as a Rhodes Scholar at Oxford, and his years at Yale Law School (including his involvement in antiwar demonstrations and in campaigns for antiwar candidates), Clinton was constantly connecting and networking. From the get-go he calculated and manipulated, filing away each contact that could conceivably be of use in the future. Despite his solidly middle-class background, he never had any money. But, a champion cadger, he always had a friend or a friend of a friend to supply a meal or a spare bed.

Marannis resolves any lingering doubts about Clinton's misrepresentations of his desperate attempts to avoid the draft. Raymond Clinton, with his political and Navy League connections back home, helped, as did Fulbright's office. Marannis also managed to persuade Clinton's longtime assistant, Betsey Wright, to go on the record about Clinton's womanizing; Gennifer Flowers was no one-time fling, and there may have been a serious love affair with an unnamed woman. Marannis shows, too, why Hillary Rodham became the only woman Bill Clinton wanted to marry, and why they stayed together. Bill went for ``brains and ability rather than glamor,'' while Hillary, as a friend put it, was ``absolutely totally crazy about him.'' He needed her sharp focus to keep him on target, and she needed him as a conduit to status and power.

Clinton proved a tireless worker in his campaigns, but once he gained the office he sought, he lost interest in the daily grind of official duties. That was true to form: always a quick study, Clinton did not exert himself in high school, in college, in law school, or in teaching at the University of Arkansas law school -- where, Marannis says, he got a job not by a fluke, as he claimed, but rather through connections. As Arkansas's attorney general and then as governor, he proved, behind the scenes, to be impatient with paperwork and bored with daily routines. Yet his public persona -- equal parts revivalist preacher, snake-oil huckster, and political con artist -- propelled him into the office he had sought all his life.