First in His Class
Maraniss, David
closely over the years," Maraniss reported at the time, "say [his apparent malleability] is not so much a need to straddle the fence, as skeptics presume, as a sincere empathy." From his failure to...
...Whether he was doing something admirable or questionable, I would say the same thing to myself: Well, that's Clinton...
...His letters to girlfriends from this period (much of the book is strung together with private letters) are painfully self-aware...
...So Hillary arrived in Fayetteville during his 1974 congressional campaign...
...An air of light scorn runs through the author's account of how Clinton—and apparently most of his fellow Rhodes Scholars—avoided Vietnam...
...Whatever the meaning of this shaded compliment—always nice to be liked as "a character"—we can safely assume the glow of their first encounter has worn off...
...He was totally absorbed," the teacher said, "in the theme within the book: power, how one gains and holds power...
...We all know he thought it was an unjust war...
...Like a thousand former future presidents in student government, he led an autobiographical life, always asking how posterity might interpret his actions...
...For years, [Betsey Wright] told friends later, she had been covering up for him...
...His character, as drawn by Maraniss, is not torn or complex at all, but in its own way quite consistent...
...Maraniss tells us that Clinton took to wearing a "grubby U.S...
...Bill, writes Maraniss, borrowing an AA term, was the "Family Hero" who served as "protector of the family or as its redeemer to the outside world," which does help us see the man more sympathetically...
...0 The American Spectator April 1995 71...
...Instead we get a bit of inverted moralizing about those other journalists "preoccupied" with Clinton's personal life, meaning apparently Brock and The American Spectator...
...On the matter of infidelity, Maraniss claimed the skeptics were presuming things...
...Midway through the writing process, I began to frame the question differently...
...Big character" is the author's kind way of saying there is more to this fellow...
...From his failure to win re-election in the 1980 Arkansas governor's race, wrote Maraniss, Clinton emerged "with an intense desire to listen to people...
...They shared," says a friend who knew Bill and Hillary back then, "a passion for the dream—the dream of being in politics, of sharing the business of politics...
...The draft experience had "ravaged my image of myself, taken my mind off the higher things," Clinton wrote to a friend...
...But without passing too lightly over a man's life and conscience, the fact is there were earlier and better moments to ask himself the same question...
...Clinton became not a politician but a character...
...Both Maraniss and Clinton are approaching 50...
...The qualities Maraniss finds "questionable" in both Bill and Hillary—sanctimony, self-absorption, grand public endeavor masking private squalor—are generational traits...
...There was great alarm among campaign workers who knew "The Boy," as he was called, was seeing one of the volunteers...
...Complicated" is their generation's ready alm of pardon...
...At times he may have been guided by virtue...
...Holmes waiting for him at ROTC, files vanishing, Uncle Ray on the phone doing his part, the whole psychodrama...
...Maraniss won a Pulitzer for these insights, which may explain the tortured soliloquy that introduces this biography, in which he "confronts" the question of whether today he even "likes" Bill Clinton: As a newspaperman for the last twenty years, I had trained myself to avoid answering that sort of bias-establishing inquiry...
...We all know it was a difficult situation...
...Maraniss's account of the Arkansas period pretty much confirms—but does not acknowledge—David Brock's portrait of an unbridled voluptuary...
...If she comes to Arkansas, she'll be on my turf...
...She could go to any state and be elected to the Senate...
...Army coat," and that "he found more time to cultivate young women who would listen patiently and with grave concern as he struggled with his conscience...
...Maraniss wisely draws back from final verdicts...
...Another point that could have been easily enough established in 1992...
...In First in His Class, we have one sixties liberal who grew up and became a Washington Post reporter laboring to explain another sixties liberal who didn't grow up and became president...
...But most of the story is familiar...
...Always "an accumulator of friends," he began in college to gather his network of political pilot fish...
...She was convinced that some state troopers were soliciting women for him, and he for them...
...There must be, because if there isn't, what would that say about the entire class...
...But Maraniss's owft account—nightclub forays, temper tantrums, endless bickering between the future First Couple, suspicions, lies, money grubbing, all as they prepare their campaign to restore the politics of hope and call forth the best in us—is depressing enough...
...High school junior class presidency, Boys Nation, JFK and the coveted picture (and image of Bill moments before the picture, clawing his way to the front row...
...It begins in Hope and leaves off on the day Clinton announced for the presidency...
...There's the story of Bill coming to the defense of his mother, cowing Roger Clinton, Sr...
...No one faults young Clinton for failing to throw himself over the top...
...What grates is the self-portrayal, then as now, of a young idealist merely wanting "to serve in other ways...
...As a biographer, I realized that I had to confront it, if only in my own mind...
...He is a big character, whether he is acting big-hearted or small...
...A civil war raged inside him," writes Maraniss, "between his conscience and his political will to survive...
...Although romanticized accounts of his childhood in Hope and Hot Springs would sometimes make it seem that Bill Clinton rose from poverty," he didn't, Maraniss writes...
...He resolved to be an early riser...
...Two quotes will suffice to give us the flavor of their early years together...
...We're told Clinton was just about to announce for the presidency in 1988 until the moment of truth when, wary of Gary Hart's fate, "he looked into Chelsea's eyes" and asked, "Can I do this to her...
...At Georgetown, however, Clinton realized he was not just a man but a man of destiny...
...She could be President someday...
...This is surprising...
...If she comes to Arkansas," a friend recalls Bill saying, "it's going to be my state, my future...
...Vietnam gave us case study number one in how national crises are to be managed in a Bill-centered universe, where "political viability" is all...
...A s it is, Cinton comes off as a mostly amiable chameleon, a strong will harnessed to no discernible principles, a person ambitious for credentials without the attendant virtues, in private life a man mediocre even in his vices...
...A high-school teacher recalls that when he assigned outside readings, Clinton chose Orwell's Animal Farm...
...Here one has always tried to make allowances for Clinton...
...In that sense, I came to like him even when I disliked him and dislike him even when I liked him...
...Nobody has ever quite captured the moral atmosphere of the mansion better than the trooper who complained to Brock, "We lied for him and helped him cheat on his wife, and he treated us like dogs...
...She hated that part of him, but felt that other sides of him overshadowed his personal weaknesses...
...S truggling to emerge from Maraniss's equivocation is an important work of investigative journalism...
...A t Yale, he met just the woman to patch his psyche up again...
...It makes a touching story...
...We could write off these rumors, he wrote, citing Betsey Wright, to "a lot of wishful thinking on the part of some women...
...in the end, we all have our own moral lives to sort out, and the path from Family Hero to frenzied adulterer is one best left for Clinton himself to retrace...
...Right here would have been a good place for Maraniss to concede his own earlier misjudgments...
...Other times he deceived the world, if not himself...
...We get the agonizing chronology: frantic lobbying for special favors, deferments, forgotten orders of induction, the protest in London, unsent letters asking to be drafted, Col...
...Get lost.'" In the tradition of the great men, Clinton as governor took to getting up even earlier for appointments, often in the middle of the night...
...One chapter is titled "The Great Escape...
...One would not have thought that a reporter who won a Pulitzer serving Bill and Betsey as courier to Washington is in any position to lecture a reporter who took the trouble to get things straight, however unsavory the whole subject might be to all...
...In a history lecture Clinton learned that the "great men never needed more than FIRST IN HIS CLASS: A BIOGRAPHY OF BILL CLINTON David Maraniss Simon & Schuster/512 pages / $25 reviewed by MATTHEW SCULLY 70 The American Spectator April 1995 five hours of sleep...
...Recalled one to Maraniss: "Bill would say, 'Go take her [Hillary] somewhere...
...In the way of hardships, there was his father's death three months before Clinton was born and the violent alcoholism of his stepfather...
Vol. 28 • April 1995 • No. 4
