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[Prospero]

And I say this as someone who liked Clinton and the Clinton presidency--the book could have been much better.

The first half, up until he becomes President, is good writing--there are interesting characters, he does a really good job of describing his childhood (parts of that are really moving, actually), and all the stuff about quirky local politics is material you wouldn't find anywhere else. The story of how he managed to become governor of Arkansas reads almost like a political thriller, albeit the kind of weirdly funny thriller that the Coen Brothers would come up with.

Once he becomes President, the book kind of goes downhill. In a lot of parts it reads like a diary, and in the last 400 pages there are probably about 15 that aren't already a matter of public record--the rest you'll already know if you read the morning paper regularly. (Most of those 15 pages have to do with Clinton's attempts to broker peace in Northern Ireland and the Middle East.) In the acknowledgments he gives effusive credit to "Justin Cooper," who helped him out a lot over the writing process--it seemed to be tacit admission that Clinton had used a ghostwriter at least some of the time. Near the end it gets really self-serving, too, as if Clinton had started to believe his own hype and was trying to enshrine his own political legacy before historians could get to it.

Though I wouldn't say it isn't worth reading, I would say that Sidney Blumenthal's The Clinton Wars is a far better book--if you're interested in a good political history of that period, get that instead.

 

[Dan]

as if Clinton had started to believe his own hype and was trying to enshrine his own political legacy before historians could get to it.

Is this even debatable? Isn't this exactly the reason that politicians 'write' their own memoirs as fast as possible after leaving office?

 

[pollo]

And I say this as someone who liked Clinton and the Clinton presidency--the book could have been much better.

The first half, up until he becomes President, is good writing--there are interesting characters, he does a really good job of describing his childhood (parts of that are really moving, actually), and all the stuff about quirky local politics is material you wouldn't find anywhere else. The story of how he managed to become governor of Arkansas reads almost like a political thriller, albeit the kind of weirdly funny thriller that the Coen Brothers would come up with.

I agree dude. The first part was well written and was really interesting - the part with the cubans did read like a thriller, but now he just laundry lists his accomplishments instead of bringing out any interesting characteristics of senators and lacks those amusing anecdotes the first half had. Im literally a 100 pages until its done and its all boiled down to writing like this "on February i did this, on mid march i did this..., on june i did this.." It's still quite interesting, but he kinda lost the soul he had going in the first half of the book.

 

[Prospero]

Is this even debatable? Isn't this exactly the reason that politicians 'write' their own memoirs as fast as possible after leaving office?

One thing that made the first half of the book so enjoyable is that it was the kind of thing you always wish politicians would write, in which they talk about times when they screwed up as well as times when they did something good for their constituency. There are places when he outright admits that he wasn't the best governor he could have been (regarding one particular incident he ends with saying, "I just blew it"). It seemed on the whole like he was really shooting for an honest appraisal of his political life.

After a while, though, that changes, and becomes more like the stereotypical political memoir. Like pollo said, the final pages are a little more than a laundry list of positive things he did. He talks for a little while about the Whitewater business and his impeachment, but there's nothing there that isn't common knowledge (except that Hillary made him sleep on a couch for a while). And he totally skips over events in his administration that are controversial--for example, there's nothing about the way he was supposedly tricked by the Pentagon into removing Wesley Clark from his position as SACEUR during the Bosnia business (even though Clark has a lot to say about that in his own book) and nothing about his signing of the Defense of Marriage Act (which he supposedly did against his will, and which Blumenthal discusses in his book). If you had only Clinton's book to go on, you would think those things never even happened. On the other hand, he lists every single little bill he ever pushed through Congress that contributed to welfare reform or environmental policy. Given how willing he was to tell the whole story and admit any mistakes he made in the first half of the book, it's kind of bizarre--the most forgiving explanation I can come up with is that the last few hundred pages had to be written in a hurry to meet a deadline.

 

[Bizarro Sun Yat-sen]

I haven't read any of it yet myself, but a lot of reports I've seen agree with you about the first half being much better than the second. Some figured he must have been treading more carefully as the book moves on to national politics and closer to present day, so as not to risk damaging relationships with still-powerful politicians or hurting his wife's continuing political career.