Adaptable Man

...Within hours the computer would generate a "Wonderful to meet you" letter or an "I've been thinking of what you told me" letter or a "Please feel free to call on my office" letter...

...Is that all...

...The result is an immensely readable account of the President's first half-century, but it is also the story of his generation...

...He interviewed Joycelyn Elders in the March issue of The Progressive...

...The errors are trivial: Richard Nixon's valet was Manolo, not "Manuel," Sanchez, and the largest church in Arkansas is no longer Mr...

...We could say we were patriotic, responsible young men...

...The book is a fine work of journalism by a careful reporter...

...She had arrived at a reality most Arkansans (and much of the nation's political establishment, Democrat and Republican) had accepted for almost a decade, but only after being introduced to Clinton's office computer system...

...He's running for President," she confided...

...I'm serious...

...Life began for Clinton under less than excellent circumstances, and the subsequent adventures of his childhood and adolescence were frequently harrowing...

...Despite having known and covered him since the late 1960s, there is much I did not know, or fully appreciate, about Clinton...

...I asked, amused...

...There were literally thousands of others who lived in every state of the union—an oddly disproportionate number of them in New Hampshire, of all places...

...What did he tell them, and they, him...

...Their spouses, children, parents...

...A woman named Harriman and another named Bruce...

...With each of his dozen years in the statehouse, Clinton became less a governor than an omnipresence...

...She thought it would be interesting...

...That's bullshit...

...What did they do together...

...Here, Maraniss is the thorough reporter, honoring his stated (in the foreword to this work) determination to produce "neither pathogra-phy nor hagiography...

...They would get enormous approval from peers to be against it," Schlieve tells Maraniss...

...A few weeks later, when our paths crossed on a downtown Little Rock sidewalk, she pulled me beneath a restaurant eave and swore me to secrecy...

...But I speak only for myself...

...Clinton was the thread that, in the scope of this book, made them a fabric, a generation—Clinton and, of course, the war...

...25.00 In the mid-1980s, an acquaintance of mine with sharply honed secretarial skills but no particular interest in politics went to work in the executive office of Bill Clinton, then in his third term as governor of Arkansas...

...Is, then, Clinton's dissembling on his draft history intended to fool us, or himself...

...the book concludes on the evening of the day of Bill's Excellent Adventure...

...Maraniss found Clinton's relationship with his Little Rock pastor, the late Reverend W.O...

...There were Normans Lear and Mailer, 100 addresses with 90210 zip codes, members of Congress from faraway states, captains of industry in Grosse Pointe and the Upper East Side and Newport and Nob Hill and the Gold Coast and the Gulf Coast...

...It had started long before there was any sense to it, back when Clinton's mother boasted that a second-grade teacher had told her that her boy could be President...

...What did he read...

...his myriad travels and public-policy programs preoccupied reporters here and seemed to preclude, by their very quantity, a searching examination of his past...

...But not Clinton's ambition...

...Contributors, potential contributors...

...Some of these people Clinton had met only once, and scarcely...

...Much like a computer address file...

...The adaptations of Bill Clinton (who would probably approve of, even applaud, the term) are the stuff of David Maraniss's fine study, First in His Class: A Biography of Bill Clinton...

...He would, she said, stop at her desk every morning when he arrived at the state capitol and seine his jacket pockets of a half-dozen or more scraps of paper— business cards, paper napkins, airline ticket stubs all with new names and addresses on them...

...No," she replied...

...His Rhodes shipmates...

...To some he was "a glad-handing phony," and though he would win many of them over, a few— Oxford classmate cum draft counselor Cliff Jackson, in particular—would become visceral enemies...

...Specifically, its address file...

...Almost all of them speak for the record...

...You can't believe it," she whispered...

...High-school and college classmates and faculty, his and Hillary's (and even Chelsea's) contacts...

...No kidding...

...We all had our reasons for taking up our battle cries, and I believe our battle cries very cleverly fooled us all...

...What did he say in his many letters...

...Even as a youngster Clinton was determined to build a weapons-grade Rolodex, and his incessant socializing wove him into the lives of the poor as well as the privileged...

...Vaught Jr., to be rather more influential than I had believed, and makes a convincing case that Clinton's positions on capital punishment and abortion (though not abortion rights) were far less reflexive than widely perceived...

...All of them cross-indexed...

...Maraniss, who won a Pulitzer Prize for his Washington Post coverage of Clinton's successful 1992 campaign, limits his inquiry to the first forty-six years of the forty-second President...

...The trials presented by a drunken, abusive stepfather have since become political boilerplate, however, and the author, while neither ignoring nor discounting them, is focused elsewhere, on how young Bill adjusted, adapted...

...Like the man for whom it had been especially written, the program could adapt...

...And some of them, such as Greg Schlieve, who watched a Clinton high-school classmate be blown to bits by a Viet Cong mortar round, have achieved an uneasy, ambivalent peace...

...And vets had their own smokescreens...

...Clinton's old Baptist basilica at Little Rock, but a Vatican City-sized complex in rapidly Republicanizing northwest Arkansas...

...Maraniss generously—too generously, I think—dismisses the "presumptuous canard" that the Arkansas press failed to examine Clinton carefully...

...If Clinton had scrawled some guidance— "mention his daughter's school play," for example—the software would allow it...

...The expectation was always there," Maraniss found...

...Steve Barnes (Steve Barnes is a journalist with KARK television in Little Rock...

...there are examples of a conscience in turmoil, and of what comes across as cynical arrogance...

...Wherever it came from, it was always there, not a matter of predestination but of expectation and will, and it had built up year by year, decade by decade...

...A remarkable number of Clinton's allies and adversaries opened their files (like Jackson, many of them seem to have kept every letter ever sent them by anybody) and, as importantly, their emotional archives to Maraniss, who says he interviewed almost 400 people...

...Maraniss presents both possibilities, fairly but unsparingly...

...Who were his friends...

...Antiwar protesters had smokescreens...