MY AFFAIR WITH CLINTON: An Intellectual Memoir. - Review - book review

MY AFFAIR WITH CLINTON: An Intellectual Memoir by Benjamin R. Barber W.W. Norton, $24.95

BENJAMIN BARBER'S VERY NICE book offers insight into Bill Clinton, the wonk. A Rutgers professor known for smart, interesting policy books like McWorld v. Jihad, a study of globalism, Barber was something of a hanger-on in the Clinton White House. The president's speechwriting team would occasionally tap him for ideas; Clinton had Barber up to Camp David to talk out themes for his State of the Union address, and Barber was briefly under consideration to head the National Endowment for the Humanities.

I didn't keep track, and Barber doesn't spell it out specifically, but it sounds as if he met with Clinton about a dozen times during his eight years in office, almost always in a group setting, only having private words on a couple of occasions. That may not sound like the best fodder for a memoir. But often the best accounts are written by minor characters, less concerned with how history will judge them, than by the principals who write with a hesitant pen.

Barber's a small enough fry that he gleefully notes how he gobbled up souvenirs at the Camp David gift shop. Big shots actually do this too, he notes, since so few outsiders get to visit Camp David. But it's impossible to imagine, say, David Gergen chronicling how he snagged a Camp David Frisbee or going on at length about the White House's chicken with pumpkin gnocchi. Barber's utter lack of pretension leads to some funny moments, like his hysterical account of sitting next to Clinton at a dinner where the two shared a dish of nuts: "Every time ! casually reached out with my hand to take a nut, the president's large left hand shot out like a cobra's head dropping over the mouth of the cup blocking my access."

To Barber's credit, he's self-aware enough to know that he sounds like an academic Sammy Glick sometimes--too ambitious for his own good. After he's turned down for the NEH head--in favor of Bill Ferris, the Mississippi folklorist who, unlike Barber, had the full backing of Trent Lott--Barber painfully begs the First Lady's Chief of Staff Melanne Verveer, one of his champions, to reconsider. As the two meet at the White House, Barber keeps begging. She finally has to declare: "It's over." Defeated, he winds up, by coincidence, sitting next to Ralph Nader on the plane as he leaves Washington. Unable to contain himself, Barber unloads his frustrations on Nader. Even though it's still years away until his 2000 presidential bid, Nader is already foaming with anti-Clinton hatred, telling Barber that he has to go public to denounce the atrocity of his not getting the NEH job.

When Barber gets home, The New York Times is calling for the inside account of what happened. (Nader had already leaked to the Gray Lady.) Sensing that maybe he should stop his whining, Barber declines to lambaste the president in print. It's as nice a little tale as you'll find about the hope and heartbreak surrounding the confirmation process.

The truth, as Barber sees it, is that intellectuals ultimately have little effect on governance, even with a brainiac president like Clinton. For all the advice Clinton got at various dinners and confabs with academics, ultimately he took only snippets of what they said and incorporated it into his agenda. The long dinners with academics like Robert Putnam of Bowling Alone fame or Theda Skocpol, the political theorist, are really just "mental golf" for the president. A useful distraction, but hardly a tutorial. Barber is wise enough to know that this is as it should be. Academics shouldn't mn the White House, he acknowledges; the president should.

Still, he can't help but feel hurt when he would submit entire speeches to the Clinton speech writing team and they'd use barely a sentence or two. (He reprints them here as if to get out his frustration. But, believe me, I think Clinton did the right thing by only taking bits.) This leaves him feeling a somewhat like a rejected lover, giving the word "affair" in the tide a double meaning. Seduced by Clinton, but unsatis -fied, he's sort of like Monica with a doctorate. Some of this, though, sounds like whining.

Take the issue of national service. Barber's a big advocate of national service and indeed Clinton announced his AmeriCorps plan in a speech at Barber's Rutgers. (There's a very funny account of how Barber single-handedly convinced the White House to do the speech at the New Jersey state university by saying he could guarantee a crowd of 10,000. Of course, he had no such ability. But once the White House announced the speech, the crowd took care of itself.)

Barber is upset that Clinton never did enough to shore up the philosophical underpinnings of national service. He felt the president, like Colin Powell with his America's Promise, put too much emphasis on the good works of public service rather than the transformative effects on the service workers themselves. But does that really matter? Regardless of whether Clinton used Barber's preferred philosophical rhetoric, the fact is that national service is alive and thriving even after the Bush takeover.

A few other quibbles: Barber has got a habit of quoting people at length in the book. Unless he was tape-recording conversations, it's hard to imagine how he's doing more than paraphrasing. So why be so sloppy with what were supposed to have been verbatim quotes? Indeed, given other annoying errors in the book--Tom Brokaw's bestseller was The Greatest Generation not The Heroic Generation--you start to wonder about the accuracy of these recollections. (I should add here that my wife once worked for Bill Clinton and that a number of friends of mine are mentioned in the book.)

But these are quibbles. This is a smart book about Clinton and the presidency in general. It gets at that perennial question of who makes a good president. Is it intellectuals like Wilson or Clinton or Jefferson or less academic types like, say, Truman or Reagan? Ultimately, I found myself liking Clinton more after the book not because he was so bookish--often he had less toleration for the talkathons than you'd imagine--but because he had the good sense to know when to blow off the academics and follow his political gut.

Barber seems torn about this. On one hand, he's glad that intellectuals don't rule the roost, but he's also a little remorseful that he didn't have more clout and that Clinton wasn't more philosophical. Fortunately for the rest of us, we don't have to have that kind of ambivalence. There are upsides to having a bookish president, but it hardly seems a prerequisite of effective leadership.

MATTHEW COOPER, a contributing editor of The Washington Monthly, is deputy Washington bureau chief for Time magazine.

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