THE BEST OF TIMES: America in the Clinton Years - Review

Washington Monthly, Oct, 2001 by Jonathan Alter

THE BEST OF TIMES: America in the Clinton Years by Haynes Johnson Harcourt Brace, $27.00

HAYNE JOHNSON'S BASIC approach in his new book, The Best of Times and in a half dozen other books is to pull together a whole bunch of clips and interesting statistics, interview some of the players, and then offer a milewide and inch-deep "social history" of the times. You've got to admire his energy and ambition--it's Frederick Lewis Allen without the wit, but chock-a-block with information. If you were living on Pluto during the 1990s, or like many Americans, so busy at work that you had no time for reading about current events, then this book will be of great value. If, like me, you have paid lots of attention to some categories of news and have given short shrift to others, the book will be of partial value.

For instance, I had heard of Craig Venter of the Human Genome Project but didn't read as much about him in newspapers and news magazines as I should have. So the section about Venter was highly useful--a refresher on important developments for our species. Same goes for the discussion of Monsanto and genetic engineering. In fact, everything in the section called "Technotimes," starting when Johnson has the good sense to revive the importance of Vannevar Bush and the early commitment to basic research, was a kind of Cliffs Notes for critical stuff that would be on any final exam in Educated Person 101.

But who needs a cheat sheet to O.J. or Monica? Broad sections of the book recount hugely familiar events, and although there are a few giblets not widely known, they're of the minor variety--like the fact that Dale Bumpers gave his famous impeachment speech only under intense pressure from Clinton. After a while, you lose faith in Johnson's ability to sort through the mountains of material, much less analyze the era with sufficient freshness. He describes a wrap-up in The Economist after Clinton's impeachment trial as "brilliant" when all of the points in it had become conventional wisdom in the American press months before. The book's bulk makes you think Johnson and his researchers did a thorough scrub. But many important and original articles didn't catch their eye.

That's a shame because I think Doris Kearns Goodwin's blurb on the back of the book is right--historians will turn to Johnson when researching America during the Clinton years. His basic take--that the era was one of great technological advances and squandered political opportunities--is solid enough. But The Best of Times doesn't go deep enough. Future students of the 1990s will need to toss the Cliffs Notes aside and review the original sources themselve.

JONATHAN ALTER is a columnist at Newsweek.