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

Washington Monthly, March, 1995 by Jonathan Alter

The best of Clinton, the worst of Clinton: A new biography carefully traces both back to their roots

This is a first-rate political biography by The Washington Post reporter who won a well-deserved Pulitzer two years ago for his reporting on Bill Clinton's presidential campaign. While the book contains no shocking revelations, it is full of small truths about Clinton's background and character. The book may not change any minds about Clinton, but it should contribute to a more complex understanding of a complex man. "The contradictions co-exist in Clinton," Maraniss writes. "Considerate and calculating, easy-going and ambitious, mediator and predator."

Clinton's paradoxes stem from those of his life. Ultimately, he is the product of several distinct and contradictory worlds. There is the Clinton from Hope, Arkansas: religious and unceasingly loyal to his family; the Hot Springs Clinton: often vulgar, and given to infidelity; and the Yale Clinton: polished and feverishly ambitious, yet genuine.

What has remained consistent throughout his life, though, has been Clinton's enormous gift for politics. Indeed, what is most puzzling about Clinton is why such a naturally talented politician should have so many problems managing the political dimensions of the presidency. Maraniss's book is not particularly analytical and it ends on the day Clinton announces his candidacy for president in 1991, so there are no direct answers. There are, however, little hints throughout.

Clinton's God-given political skills are clear almost from infancy. The key is in his ability to listen to other people, a surprisingly rare quality in politicians. Most politicians know that they must pretend to listen but are usually so interested in themselves that the pretense eventually shows through. Clinton is tremendously, even obsessively, interested in his own advancement, but his curiosity about other people's lives is evident throughout the book. Almost every one of Clinton's friends comments about it in some form. "Clinton was the master of the soft sell," Maraniss writes. "He remembered the smallest details of people's lives, and his deftness at personalizing the [thank-you] notes tended to overcome whatever unseemliness might otherwise have tainted a blatantly political contact."

At every school, he was the one white guy who was willing to sit occasionally at the black table. True, this was often an attempt to get votes in elections. When he was teaching at the University of Arkansas Law School and preparing for his race for Congress in 1974, it was said that he was an easy grader (especially for blacks struggling not to flunk out) because he didn't have a vote to spare in his race for Congress. But he befriended blacks and everyone else who crossed his path even when he wasn't running for anything (at Yale, for instance). The impulse was big-hearted and born of a real interest in how other people live. An example of the overlapping Clintons:

After riots devastated large sections of Washington, D.C., in the wake of Martin Luther King's assassination in 1968, Clinton's old Hot Springs girlfriend and next-door neighbor Carolyn Staley visited him at Georgetown. Clinton was in the process of breaking up with Staley--one of several girlfriends he had at the time--and he characteristically didn't have the "honesty," as Staley put it, to break up with her directly. But at the same time Clinton signed up with a relief agency to deliver supplies to dangerous sections of the city and took Staley on a mission the two of them would never forget.

This interest and energy is the essence of what makes Clinton likeable to most people he meets and loathsome to a minority who feel threatened by his personable nature. Throughout Clinton's life, a certain kind of person has simply detested him. There's even a scene where a dog can't stand to be near him. But no one can deny Clinton's thirst for life experience--his own, and that of others. It is his most appetizing appetite.

Bad Attitude

At first, this trait makes Clinton indiscriminate in his assessment of other people. At Georgetown, after winning a couple of elections, he loses the big one for student government president because his 19-point plan is too moderate and out of touch with the growing sense of ironic rebellion among students. (Sort of like 1994.) But the deeper reason is that Clinton lacked attitude. As one friend put it, "Bill never wanted to say, `That guy [his opponent] is an asshole!' He would say, `That's an interesting guy,' or whatever. We used to kid him about that--`Come on, Bill,' we'd say, `Form the mouth, ass ... hole'--but his basic instinct was to find, even with the most obvious asshole, something good. We wanted him to get angry in that campaign and he would not do it."

By the time he got to Yale Law School--after his Rhodes Scholarship--Clinton had acquired a savvy that grew out of intense study of older politicians. In a letter to Cliff Jackson--a friend at Oxford who 25 years later leaked the news about Clinton's draft status to the press (and who is himself revealed in the book to have been a draft dodger)--clinton provides advice on how to win a White House Fellowship: