Unrequited Love. - The Natural: The Misunderstood Presidency of Bill Clinton - book review

The Natural: The Misunderstood Presidency of Bill Clinton, by Joe Klein (Doubleday, 230 pp., $22.95)

Joe Klein's latest book is wrong from the very beginning. Usually a title page does not trigger an argument, but who can agree even with the title of this maudlin and boring memoir of the Clinton years? There was nothing remotely natural about Clinton and his presidency, nor was he misunderstood. In fact, with the possible exception of Klein himself, Americans quite clearly understood his lack of character by the end of his torrid terms in office.

How can Klein call this politician -- who cost his party control of Congress for at least eight years, led it to innumerable defeats in gubernatorial and state legislative races, and cost it the presidency in 2000 -- a "natural"? If by "natural" he means that Clinton survived his 1996 reelection campaign, he seems to ignore the fact that the retroactive slogan of that victory might well be Apres ceci, le deluge.

Bill Clinton was not natural at anything. He was the exact opposite: a contrived, artificial, highly scripted, poll-driven politician whose warm empathy with strangers in public was in stark contrast to his moody, self-involved crankiness in private. He is a man of abysmally low personal character who regards the truth -- with splendid impartiality -- as merely one of several options to consider before he speaks.

Klein does not add anything new or interesting to the public debate about the Clinton presidency. For the most part, his book is a hodgepodge of stories from earlier books and articles. Also included -- as if it mistakenly landed here -- is a disconnected 20-page analysis of the effects of Watergate.

The writing is uninspiring, lacking in new insights, and -- too often - - skewed to favor the agendas and reputations of his self-aggrandizing sosources. Hence we are subjected to pages of fluff about Ira Magaziner and Sandy Berger; these encomiums to the author's sources are littered throughout the book like ads in a dinner program.

The book also suffers from a disproportionate focus on the first two years of the Clinton administration: By the time Klein reaches the end of 1994 the book is more than half finished. He devotes barely a paragraph to impeachment amid an almost cursory glance at the second Clinton term. Perhaps Klein started to write a book three or four times its length but, in anticipation of the reader, lost interest midway.

For Joe Klein, Clinton is still the young man who burst into our consciousness, full of potential, in 1992: He holds, forever, the promise of that moment. Like the figures on Keats's Grecian Urn, he never ages. But, he has, in fact, aged: For most Americans that admirable young man has been tarnished beyond recognition by his immature sexuality and criminal cover-up in the Oval Office. His reputation for idealism has been besmirched by the blatant selling of pardons and commutations to the likes of Marc Rich and convicted drug dealer Carlos Vignali in return for contributions to his slush-fund library. Klein skips over all of this.

He blandly quotes Clinton as saying, about a month before he left office, "You know I'm not about money." How then to account for Clinton's appropriation of furniture from the White House? The his-and- hers gift solicitations of hundreds of thousands of dollars' worth of furniture, china, and silver? The fabulously lucrative book deals?

Every time Klein writes about Clinton, there is the subtext of the unrequited lover. Like Robert Reich, he is forever feeling spurned because his adoration was not returned: "Alas, my Love! ye do me wrong / To cast me off discourteously." To maintain his dignity, he disguises his emotions by speaking about Clinton's failure to live up to his potential; what he really means is Clinton's refusal to do what Joe Klein wanted.

But Klein's book does, in its way, make a real contribution to an understanding of the Clinton record. Taking the former president at his word, Klein faithfully recounts the bite-sized achievements of Clinton's presidency. The list grows more trivial by the day as we see it framed by the events of 9/11 and the truly dangerous world Clinton left behind for us to cope with. Somehow, reading about educational standards and balanced budgets with eyes that have seen corporate executives jumping from a burning Trade Center tower no longer impresses. Even the most formidable achievement of Clinton's tenure, his signing of welfare reform, seems a bit dated as we contemplate the new world into which we have been plunged.

After all is said, Bill Clinton may not go down in history as immoral or evil or idealistic or constructive. He may neither justify the praise nor the epithets with which he has been showered. Perhaps he will just be seen as last century's president. We may come to view him as a latter-day Cleveland or McKinley: a man who led us in quieter times, when issues mattered less and threats were more remote. Just as Cleveland and McKinley focused on quaint little issues like the tariff, currency inflation, and imperialism before Theodore Roosevelt emerged to address the economic exploitation and class inequality that were to engage the attention of 20th-century presidents, Clinton too may come to be seen merely as a man from a simpler time. He was the last president before we realized the global threat posed by terrorism, and before we got serious about the dangers posed by climate change and the species-altering challenge of genetic engineering. His may be seen as a presidency of a time when presidents didn't much matter.

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