June 28 issue - If Bill Clinton had to pick a defining moment that says more about him than any other, it probably wouldn't be the afternoon he was sworn in as president after a long, uphill campaign. Or even the morning when he finally confessed to his wife and daughter that he had been lying all along about his affair with Monica Lewinsky. Instead, it might be the night young Clinton brandished a golf club at his drunken stepfather, who was beating Clinton's mother. "Daddy," as Clinton called him, was an alcoholic given to rages.
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Ashamed, Clinton writes in "My Life," his new memoir that officially goes on sale Tuesday, he resolved to keep the troubled reality of his home life secret from his friends and neighbors. As a boy, he was known for his good humor and his enthusiasm for everything—movies, books, music, sports, school, girls—bottomless appetites that would only grow as he matured. But unknown to anyone, Clinton writes, he learned to live "parallel" lives: outwardly sunny and confident, inwardly pained and insecure. It was only years later, with therapy, he writes, that he realized his stepfather had instilled in him a need for secrets—a need that possibly led to behavior that he would have to keep secret.
It isn't difficult to see where he's going with this. Clinton doesn't directly blame unresolved feelings about his troubled childhood for his marital infidelities and other lapses, but he comes pretty close. In the book, which NEWSWEEK obtained from a bookstore last week, he writes that Hillary and Chelsea barely spoke to him after he came clean about Lewinsky, and that the president wound up sleeping on the couch for two months. But during the year of marriage counseling that followed, Clinton says he learned that when he was angry or tired, the painful secrets of his childhood would bubble forth, making him prone to self-destructive behavior. During the 1995 government shutdown (when he first met Lewinsky), he writes, "I was engaged in two titanic struggles: a public one with Congress over the future of our country, and a private one to hold the old demons at bay."
Political memoirs tend to be dry affairs, and Knopf, which reportedly paid Clinton $10 million for the book, has been promoting it with a wall-to-wall media campaign. He granted an interview to Dan Rather on "60 Minutes," and had AOL dole out audio clips. The rollout of the book has been vintage Clinton—charming, down home and completely calculated. In speeches and interviews, the former president has coyly hinted at the great revelations to be found within the book. In truth, it is hardly an edge-of-your-seat experience. Throughout its leisurely 957 pages, however, every facet of Clinton's complex, nuanced and sometimes maddening personality is on display. He is by turns introspective and willfully obtuse, expansive and curt. One moment, he forces the reader on a joyless march through an arid policy debate. The next, he offers up a raw, confessional moment that almost makes the book seem worth the $35 price of admission.
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As ever, Clinton is generous to his friends and ruthless toward his enemies. Former FBI director Louis Freeh is portrayed as an incompetent who turned on him in order to curry favor with Republicans and the press. Clinton also settles scores with right-wingers who had concocted absurd accusations—that he was a drug smuggler, or that Vince Foster, the Clintons' longtime friend who committed suicide, had actually been murdered.
It comes as no surprise that the former president saves his most bitter venom for Ken Starr. The book's index contains no fewer than 41 entries for the independent counsel, who worked tirelessly to bring him down. Clinton accuses Starr of breaking the law by leaking grand-jury testimony to the news media, and says Starr shouldn't have been allowed to pursue the Paula Jones case in the first place, because he had once publicly claimed she had a constitutional right to sue a sitting president.
Yet Clinton shows no remorse for the shameless legal dodges he used to avoid being pinned down by prosecutors. During his 1998 deposition in the Paula Jones case, in which he denied having "sexual relations" with Monica Lewinsky, Clinton writes, "I would have answered ... truthfully" if Jones's lawyers had asked the right questions. He was, of course, later found in contempt by the judge in the case, who said Clinton gave "false, misleading and evasive answers that were designed to obstruct the judicial process." Clinton writes that he strongly disagreed with the ruling.
For such a big book, there are a lot of things curiously missing. Clinton denies sexually harassing Paula Jones, but doesn't give his account of what did, and didn't, happen during that infamous hotel encounter. He goes on at length about the enemies who whipped the Whitewater flap into a major scandal, but doesn't explain his and Hillary's role in the mess. He is silent about Johnny Chung and Indonesian billionaire James Riady, who funneled vast sums in questionable contributions to Clinton's campaigns.
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And though he says more than once in the book that he knows he let people down, he never seems to grasp just how much anger and disappointment he caused—not just among his enemies, but among those who believed in him most. But then, did anyone really expect Clinton to make himself the villain of his own book? In a speech promoting the volume, he jokingly remarked that, as opposed to other memoirs, which are boring and self-serving, he hoped his would be "interesting and self-serving."
Clinton's selective memory about unflattering episodes in his life is indeed interesting, considering his ability to recall the minutest details of his childhood. In what may be the best part of the book, he lovingly re-creates his boyhood in Arkansas, remembering the names of every teacher, neighbor and shopkeeper. Politics thrills him, segregation appalls him. Everything fascinates him. He poignantly recalls his struggles with weight. But by the time Clinton finally becomes president on page 476, a little of the steam has gone out of the telling. Chapters often pass in a blur of policies, people and trips abroad, making the rare moments of candor leap out. At one point, Clinton ruefully recalls a debate inside the White House over whether he should give in to demands for an independent counsel to investigate Whitewater. Hillary urged him not to, saying it would set a terrible precedent. But Clinton didn't listen. "I had nothing to hide," the lifelong keeper of secrets amazingly concluded. At the time, he was exhausted and grieving over his mother's recent death. Clinton gave the go-ahead for the investigation. Looking back now, knowing what he knows, he writes, "It was the worst presidential decision I ever made."
