Man of the World: The Further Endeavors of Bill Clinton (29 page)

Laura Bush concluded the ceremony with gushing congratulations. Gesturing to the paintings, the first lady said, “All who see them will be reminded of your dedication and all that you’ve done to strengthen our nation.” Then she invited everyone to lunch in the State Dining Room.

The media barrage surrounding publication of
My Life
—a formidable 1,000-page-plus, three-and-a-quarter-pound tome—launched on the evening of Sunday, June 20, with a special episode of CBS’s
60 Minutes
, an elaborate interview-travelogue taped by Dan Rather on location with Clinton at his boyhood home in Hope, Arkansas, at the site of the still unfinished Clinton Presidential Center and Library in Little Rock, and at his post-presidential residence in Chappaqua.

It took up the show’s entire hour.

Making the most of the exclusive pre-publication access awarded by Clinton and his advisers, Rather led with probing questions about his childhood, his marriage, the Whitewater investigation, the Lewinsky affair, the Mideast peace negotiations, the Iraq War, and the Bush administration.

Aired on the eve of the release of the report of the National Commission on Terrorist Attacks Upon the United States, usually called the 9/11 Commission, the
60 Minutes
interview explored Clinton’s failure to apprehend or kill Osama bin Laden at length. Explaining how he had tried to respond to terror threats during his presidency, Clinton told
Rather there was “not a shred of evidence” that Sudan had offered to turn over the al Qaeda leader. He refused to speculate on whether he or Bush could have prevented the 9/11 attack, preferring to leave that judgment to the commission.

The
60 Minutes
broadcast also featured a snippet of archived footage of Virginia Kelley, talking about her son not long before her death from cancer in 1994. “We had alcoholism in our family,” she said. “And I think that Bill, in his mind, thought that I hadn’t been dealt the best hand in the world. And he was determined to make up for that. Determined. He’s just been a wonderful son, just a wonderful son.” Clinton told Rather he had never seen that clip of his mother, and was visibly moved.

While hardly a puff piece, the cool and equable Rather interview could scarcely have prepared Clinton for what appeared the next morning on the front page of the
New York Times
—a long, scornful indictment of his book by Michiko Kakutani, the paper’s lead reviewer.
My Life
was “sloppy, self-indulgent, and often eye-crossingly dull,” she charged, “a hodgepodge of jottings” and “a messy pastiche of everything Mr. Clinton ever remembered and wanted to set down in print.” She mocked him, “prattling away not for the reader, but for himself and some distant recording angel of history.”

The result was an endless, stupefying sound as dull as his infamous 1988 Democratic convention speech, according to Kakutani, which had won applause only when he uttered the phrase “In closing . . .” Finally, she accused him of “lying” not only about the Lewinsky dalliance but about “real estate,” a blunt allusion to the sore subject of the Whitewater land deal investigated by the
Times
.

Predictably, Kakutani’s appraisal enraged Clinton and—although he later persuaded himself that the majority of reviews were positive—her harshly negative assessment seemed to influence the tenor of important reviews that followed. The
Washington Post
found the book “disappointing, even bizarre.” The
Los Angeles Times
complained about “numbing stretches of tedious self-absorption.”
USA Today
derided it as “more exhausting than exhaustive.” The Associated Press review compared the experience of reading Clinton’s memoir to “being locked in a small room with a very gregarious man who insists on reading his entire appointment book, day by day, beginning in 1946.”

That summer and for years after, Clinton would seize any chance to rebut and criticize Kakutani in turn. “She couldn’t have read the whole book,” he would say. “Her attack on it said practically phrase for phrase the same thing she said about Hillary’s book”—
Living History
, a major bestseller published exactly a year earlier by Simon & Schuster. “It was obvious to me [Kakutani] didn’t care about people or politics or policy.”

He also believed that her review was only the latest episode in a long history of caustic coverage of him and his wife in the paper of record, whose enmity he simply took for granted. “The people at the
Times
just wanted to make sure [the book] couldn’t win any prizes,” he said. “That was the only horrible review, which was because I pointed out the level of dishonesty in their coverage of Whitewater. And I was still quite complimentary, I said the
Times
was the best newspaper in America.”

It was true that Kakutani’s reviews of the two Clinton memoirs were similar, and that both echoed the rancor so often voiced over the years on the paper’s op-ed pages by the likes of Maureen Dowd and William Safire. It was also true that Kakutani had simply failed to mention Clinton’s criticism of the paper itself.

A week later, on the front page of the
New York Times Book Review
, Larry McMurtry’s byline appeared over the most favorable review that
My Life
was to receive anywhere. To the great Western novelist, Clinton’s book was a “big puffy plumcake of an autobiography.”

According to McMurtry, “I happen to like long, smart, dense narratives and read
My Life
straight through, happily. I may not know Bill Clinton any better than I did when I started, but I know recent history better, which surely can’t hurt.”

Seeking to understand why Knopf had paid upward of $10 million for a heavy, concentrated narrative by “the world’s premier policy wonk,” McMurtry made a penetrating observation about the impact of “Clinton’s long coyote-and-roadrunner race with the press.”

Ironically, his memoir had commanded that huge advance because “the very press that wanted to discredit him and perhaps even run him out of town instead made him a celebrity, a far more expensive thing than a mere president. Clinton’s now up there with Madonna, in the highlands that are even above talent. . . . And somehow, vaguely, it
all has to do with sex—not necessarily sex performed, just sex in the world’s head.”

Much to Clinton’s satisfaction, McMurtry concluded with a few sentences lightly ridiculing his fellow Texan, former independent counsel Kenneth Starr, who is depicted as a charlatan and criminal in
My Life
.

Dueling reviews aside, Clinton knew that the book had suffered from rushed writing and editing, especially the latter half about his presidency. He knew, too, that page after page of names, moments, scenes, and analyses had left everything somehow undifferentiated, of equal weight and thus little weight, despite the book’s engaging prose and often inspiring story. He regretted that sections of the text that he considered important and revealing—such as his inside account of the disastrous 1993 Somalia intervention portrayed in the movie
Black Hawk Down—
had gotten lost within the book’s massive bulk.

But so far as commercial success was concerned, none of that mattered at all—not the rush to publish, not the length, not the verbosity, not the negative reviews, and certainly not the sniping of Clinton’s old antagonists in the conservative media, who instantly commenced a steady bombardment of abuse. (“It should be called
My Lie
!” bellowed Rush Limbaugh.) Even before its official publication date, the book ranked number one on Amazon.com’s bestseller list.

On June 22, its first day in bookstores,
My Life
sold more than 400,000 copies, triggering an instant second printing of another 725,000, although initial orders were well over 1.5 million. The first-day sales broke the previous nonfiction record set by Hillary Clinton the year before with
Living History
, and the publisher announced on July 2 that his book had already sold over a million copies, with a third printing ordered.

Ultimate domestic sales in hardcover and trade paperback would exceed two million, pushed along by a wave of media coverage that stretched from
Oprah
,
Today
, and
Good Morning America
, whose producers surrendered their usual insistence on exclusivity, to nearly every little newspaper and radio station in the country.

Riding that wave, Clinton would spend the next four weeks promoting the book on a tour that took him from New York City—where he signed more than two thousand books at the first stop, a Barnes &
Noble store in Rockefeller Center, and another two thousand at a small Harlem shop near his office called Hue-man Books—to Los Angeles, San Francisco, Berkeley, San Jose, and Seattle on the West Coast, as well as Denver, Chicago, Philadelphia, Washington, Atlanta, Miami, and several stops in Arkansas.

The first man in line at the first Barnes & Noble had camped out all night on the concrete sidewalk outside the store, along with dozens more fans, some in sleeping bags. That night, feeling sore in the shoulders, Clinton greeted more than a thousand invited guests at a lavish book party hosted by his publishers at the Metropolitan Museum of Art.

The only obvious stop left off the book tour was Boston, where Clinton was scheduled to appear July 26 to deliver the opening speech at the Democratic National Convention. Determined to avoid drawing attention from Senator John Kerry, he had instructed the Knopf publicists that he would do no signings or other events there to avoid any risk of upstaging his party’s nominee.

Clinton had always liked Kerry, and he deeply appreciated the nominee’s decision to feature him on opening night in prime time—a clear break from the Gore campaign’s decision to shun him four years earlier.

Unlike Al Gore, the Massachusetts senator sought Clinton’s advice regularly. The former president had declined to endorse any candidate in the primaries, as an old friend of both former Vermont governor Howard Dean (“quite a good governor and a really able guy”) and retired General Wesley Clark (“enormous regard for his intelligence and ability”), another son of Arkansas whom he had known since the 1960s.

But by late spring Clinton had known that Kerry would win the nomination. He had given the senator an impassioned earful about the campaign’s halting response to the “Swift Boat” smears of Kerry’s record as a Navy captain in Vietnam by an “independent” right-wing group.

Launched just as Kerry clinched the nomination, those attacks had been traced to political operatives and major donors from Texas, including several close associates of Karl Rove, chief political adviser to George W. Bush. Clinton had no doubt that the disgusting aspersions on Kerry’s service—
based on false claims that he had not earned his numerous medals and decorations—were directed from the White House.

“I was so angry at those Swift Boat people, I may even have called him [before he called me],” recalled Clinton. “I said ‘John, I don’t like the way this is being handled. You waited three weeks to answer!’ ” Clinton felt that the campaign’s response had “legitimized the attack by being too detailed.”

Naturally Clinton had his own ideas about the proper way to answer the media onslaught, as he told Kerry. “You should invite the president and the vice president to join you at a national press conference to talk about what you all did in the Vietnam War—and then smile.”

Like Clinton himself, the hawkish president and vice president had both avoided serving in Vietnam—Bush by using his father’s political connections to get a safe berth in the Texas Air National Guard, Clinton and Cheney with student deferments.

“If you do that, John, this thing will die,” Clinton urged. “These people are
not nice
. You’ve got to hit ’em a gut shot.” When he hung up the phone, Clinton believed that Kerry just might take his advice.

But by late July, when the Boston convention opened, the Kerry campaign had failed to mount an effective response. The Swift Boat campaign had inflicted real damage, shaping perceptions of the Democratic nominee while distracting public attention from both Bush’s dubious National Guard service and rising doubts about the disastrous American occupation of Iraq.

In his convention speech, Clinton delivered a stinging rebuttal of the assault on Kerry, and a tough assessment of Bush’s presidency, wrapped in a testimonial to his candidate’s courage and constancy.

With Hillary standing beside him onstage, he looked out at the darkened auditorium. Beginning with gracious remarks about Gore and former president Jimmy Carter, who had preceded him at the podium, he lauded the record of his own presidency and Democratic policy in general, lambasted Bush’s foreign and domestic failures, and concluded succinctly: “We tried it their way for twelve years, then our way for eight years, then we tried it their way for four more.” He grinned broadly. ‘’By the only test that matters—whether people were better off when we were finished than when we started—our way worked better.’’

Then he turned to the question of character.

“
Now, let me tell you know what I know about John Kerry. I’ve been seeing all of the Republican ads about him. Let me tell you what I know about him.

“During the Vietnam War, many young men, including the current president, the vice president, and me, could have gone to Vietnam and didn’t. John Kerry came from a privileged background. He could have avoided going too, but instead, he said: Send me.

“When they sent those swift boats up the river in Vietnam, and they told them their job was to draw hostile fire, to wave the American flag and bait the enemy to come out and fight, John Kerry said: Send me.”

And he went on as the thousands in Boston’s Convention Center picked up his refrain, rising from their seats, waving signs, shouting: “Send me!”

Journalists covering the convention seemed less impressed by the speech’s impact on his fellow Democrats than the mundane fact that he had actually ended on time. As the
New York Times
reported the following day, “Mr. Clinton’s prime-time speech instantly dominated a convention that featured two ex-presidents and an almost-president. . . . For nearly 30 minutes, Mr. Clinton held command over an arena packed with Democratic delegates, prompting laughter, cheers and finally roars of approval.”