Asking the Wrong Questions

...He supplements this body of information with reminiscences gathered in interviews with 32 friends, neighbors, rivals, and political associates...

...Pushing all the scandal buttons and invoking the future specter of Monica Lewinsky as often as possible, Hamilton stands a chance of joining Senator Hillary on the bestseller lists...

...an alcoholic, abusive stepfather for 17 years, from the age of five...

...Hamilton dismisses that side of the campaign as a deceitful populist ploy...

...To be sure, the script is sentimental, but the mythical small town Clinton conjured up from his youth was an image that resonated across the country: "How far I am from that little town in Arkansas...

...a supposed father dead before the boy is born...

...A more disciplined critique to the contrast between Clinton's humble beginnings and the ethical ambiguities of his adulthood might yield a useful examination of his political persona...

...Meanwhile, he fails to answer questions that are central to Bill's political success...

...I still believe in the promise of America...

...And in that arena Bill Clinton would be a survivor without parallel...

...A prayer Clinton prepared for his high school graduation (but, because of a rainout, never delivered) could have grounded the biography and provided a starting point for a serious examination of his political development: "Leave within us the youthful idealism and moralism which have made our people strong...

...Hamilton relies on books published by Clinton's mother, his mistress Gennifer Flowers, and a dozen other show-and-tell authors in his relentless attempts to penetrate his subject's private life...

...Other handicaps included his not having access to official documents and a lack of perspective, since the work was begun while Clinton was still in office...

...And I still believe in a place called Hope...

...His phrase "schlock, yet stirring" might as easily describe his book...

...Skirting these topics, Hamilton provides his own conception of American politics' decline to the level of "a performance art...

...From the start the question of power hovered over and between them...

...a boy who by talent and determination wins a scholarship to Oxford, then to Yale Law—where he meets a woman with an ice-cold brain, and beneath the off-putting gogglelike glasses, a pretty face and petite figure: a little princess...

...Hamilton's effort to understand this extraordinary pair of human beings is hung up by an excessive preoccupation with their sexual adventures...

...life was becoming a matter of survival of the fittest...

...A little further on he tells us, somewhat contradictorily: "In the great postmodern melting pot offhe late '80s and dawning '90s in America...

...Thus he professes a belief in "men's genetically determined promiscuity,"—a dubious notion, given that throughout recorded history the marriage rules of all agrarian populations have prohibited adultery...

...Not the fittest moderns...

...Gossip, hearsay and speculation abound...

...Labeling theirs a "European-style marriage," he likens the Clintons' domestic secrets to another "conundrum" that would complicate Bill's White House bid, his "seeking to avoid service in Vietnam, like so many millions of his contemporaries...

...Longtime chum Jim Blair, and Betsey Wright, who served as the Governor's chief of staff in Arkansas until she was forced to resign in 1989, have the most to say and are quoted extensively...

...But a serious Bill Clinton biography this is not...

...By any standard, the couple's rise to the White House is a compelling story, and Hamilton emphasizes its dramatic qualities by considering the young Clinton in the same mock epic light he viewed himself: "It was as if Lady Macbeth had set her cap for him and there was no escape...

...As a description of the country's mood during Clinton's public career "a bout of Puritanism" is simply implausible...

...a surreal yet endlessly entertaining new soap opera...

...What Hillary wanted, she tended to get...

...A promised second volume will cover the years in Washington...

...In short, when analyzing the times, Hamilton regularly exaggerates, especially in matters sexual...

...For all its affected yearning, this slick piece of self-advertising possessed a core of truth about Bill Clinton that mattered to American voters...

...A place and a time when nobody locked their doors at night, everybody showed up for a parade on Main Street, and kids like me could dream of being part of something bigger than themselves...

...Nor did traditional morality, as he contends, suffer a sudden defenestration during this era...

...What made him such a good campaigner, and so effective at raising money...

...A documentary prepared for the '92 Democratic National Convention, The Man from Hope, he claims, was cribbed from Leni Riefenstahl's Nazi propaganda film Triumph of the Will...

...Ideas and policies fade from sight, crowded out by the personal and sexual encounters he dwells on...

...Taking the national stage, the Clintons seemed larger than life: smarter, more ambitious, driven—yet reckless...

...But Hamilton opts for the bedroom...

...Foremost among them was his subject's refusal to submit to an interview...

...Nonetheless, many will find Hamilton's tale of Bill and Hillary, and the circles they moved in prior to the 1992 balloting a real page-turner...

...The new prohibition, requiring politicians to have sexually blameless private lives, would last just as long—with President William Jefferson Clinton its star victim and hero...

...If not a great novel, then at least we get a readable potboiler...

...In his account of Clinton's years at Georgetown, Oxford and Yale, Hamilton spends time contextualizing the Vietnam issue, but the balance too often tips in favor of the future President's robust dance card...

...With another incumbent Bush looking vulnerable after a "victory" in Iraq, and a governor from a small state surging ahead in polls, similarities between 1992 and 2004 seem uncanny...

...To be sure, those rules probably grew out of a concern for property rights, and in reality have been widely disregarded...

...That proscription had lasted 13 years, until repealed under the Presidency of Franklin D. Roosevelt...

...Reviewed by William H. McNeill Professor of History Emeritus, University of Chicago Nigel Hamilton's formidable ambition, "to recount Bill Clinton's life not only as an individual's...

...Here he is, for instance, waxing revolutionary on the nation's values: "America was clearly in the grip of one of its periodic bouts of Puritanism, just as it had been in 1920, when Prohibition had ended the legal sale of alcohol in the United States...

...but the fittest postmodems, individuals living in the '90s world where traditional morality had, essentially, gone out the academic, social, religious, economic, financial, and political window...

...What the 18-year-old future President intended to say to his classmates in 1964 anticipates the rhetoric ofhope that played no small part in his 1992 victory...

...An emphasis on "cultural history," rather than fact, is the result, and the author's assertions about shifts in American mores, though always arresting, are seldom convincing...

...was afraid of us,' Bill confessed frankly later, thinking of Shakespeare's dark Scottish fiction...

...To the public, though, the Clintons still hold more allure than any of the Democrats in Bill's wake...

...A star-struck Hamilton met the President only once, briefly, at a fundraiser in Arkansas...

...But it is impossible to believe they never did, and do not now, affect personal behavior— even Bill Clinton's...

...a feisty, determined proto feminist mother...

...Both presented "threats to his chances of contributing to modern American society as a politician...

...Why did he enjoy the sort of ease and popularity with blacks that eludes most white politicians...

...Was this his Jackie, his passport to the White House...

...How did he form his vision for Arkansas and the nation...

...saga but as a mirror to the many changes that have taken place in our own generation's cultural history since World War II," faced significant obstacles...

...He'd told his housemate Donald Pogue that he had two ambitions: 'one was run for President and the other was write a great novel.' But what if the great novel wasn't a tale he would write but a saga he would live: a Steinbeckian story of a boy from rural poverty in darkest white supremacist Arkansas with an unknown father...

...Sicken us at the sight of apathy, ignorance and rejection so that our generation will remove complacency, poverty and prejudice from the hearts of free men...