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Cracking the Clinton Code

A riddle wrapped in a mystery inside an enigma": Sir Winston Churchill's famous phrase has become familiar shorthand for almost anything we cannot easily understand. And in modern politics no figure embodies this phenomenon better than our forty-second president, William Jefferson Clinton. So much about him is still a puzzle. Even after eight years of watching his extraordinarily visible presidency and twelve years of listening to the endless scrutiny of his personality by pundits from every segment of the political spectrum, we still can't really say that we truly understand this complex, contradictory man.

Bill Clinton is a study in opposites. Consider the facts: He was one of the most popular and successful presidents in modern history. At the same time, he was disgraced by his transgressions in office, becoming only the second president to be impeached by the House of Representatives since the creation of our republic. As the first postmodern president, he was revered as a cultural icon by his supporters, while at the same time loathed and reviled by his opponents as "illegitimate." His charisma, intellect, and charm are the core of his attractiveness, and captivate even the most skeptical observers. But his dark side—his moodiness, temper, self-absorption, and lack of discipline—are unappealing and make him an easy target for his critics. Even reaction to the story of his life, as he has now told it in book form, has been widely split. When he appears on television to hype its publication, the ratings go through the roof. And yet, when reviewed in print, the book has been panned, even ridiculed. This polarity itself—in his personality and in his image—only adds to his mystery and his celebrity. Whether they love him or hate him, the public wants to know all they can about him.

So curious are Americans about who Bill Clinton really is that his memoir, My Life, sold more than a million copies in its first weeks. In fact, among politicians, Clinton's only serious rival in the nonfiction best-seller lists has been his equally opaque wife, Hillary Rodham Clinton, and her autobiography, Living History.

But the two memoirs are as different as Bill and Hillary themselves. In Living History, a thoroughly self-disciplined woman carefully masks who she really is. In My Life, a very complicated and sometimes dysfunctional man inadvertently and unwittingly reveals his actual character—at least to readers diligent enough to find him in its almost one thousand pages.

My Life is a metaphor for Bill Clinton himself. Like him, it is sometimes interesting, sometimes refreshingly open, sometimes fascinating. Just as often, however, it is incomplete, misleading, chaotic, overly detailed, superficial, and inconsistent. Still, hidden among the disorder is the remarkable story of who Bill Clinton is. And that story is very different from the one he tries to tell, and to sell. Despite the 957 pages he has exhaustively written about himself, the Bill Clinton in My Life, remains impenetrable, lurking somewhere behind the mind-numbing litany of trips, meetings, campaign stops, meals, and scandals. At first glance, his book seems to reveal little about his thinking, his motivations, or his emotions. He even manages to avoid telling us about the obvious pain and humiliation he must have suffered when he was impeached; instead he merely expresses contempt and rage.

Yet, once we begin judging the text of My Life against the available evidence—by piecing together what he says, what he doesn't say, what others have said, and what the public record shows actually happened—a clearer, more accurate picture of the man emerges. In fact, in order to find the real Bill Clinton within the pages of My Life, it's important to understand what I think of as the Clinton Code—correlating what Clinton says (or doesn't say) with other data and experience, and reconciling the obvious differences. Without that Code, we cannot grasp all of the former president's assets and failings, his unique abilities, and his countervailing limitations, as they are exposed in the book.

As a twenty-year veteran of Bill Clinton's campaigns and administrations, I have long and rich experience with his politics, his thinking, and his personality. For years I observed him at close range; I watched him think and act, make decisions, delay decisions, and avoid decisions. Eventually I grew confident that I understood his mind and motivations. And yet, despite all my experience with Clinton, not until I read My Life did I fully crack the Clinton Code. There, like a patient who has spent too long talking on his psychiatrist's couch, Clinton provided the missing pieces that permitted me—for the first time since we met in 1977—to understand this man fully.

Once decoded, despite its obvious omissions and limitations, My Life offers a guided tour through the labyrinths of the brilliant but cluttered, disorganized, and often raging mind of Bill Clinton. As a historical guide to the Clinton presidency, My Life is disappointing. There are no surprises, no nuances, and no compelling lessons. Page after page provide a diary-style summary of notable events, without any organized or logical theme. State dinners, foreign trips, and meetings with cabinet members are given the same weight as golf outings, appearances before the grand jury, and letters from children of friends. We learn what he ate for lunch every day in college, but not why he pardoned the drug dealer client of Hillary's brother. He describes in detail the floor plan of the small apartment he and Hillary shared in New Haven, but is silent about their solicitation of expensive Spode china, silver, and other gifts from donors while still in the White House. Did he really think readers would care that the bedroom in New Haven was between the dining room and the kitchen? Did he think we wouldn't notice his decision to ignore the gift fiasco?

For centuries, Egyptian hieroglyphics remained mere inscrutable markings to scholars and archaeologists—until finally a soldier in Napoleon's army happened upon the Rosetta stone, where the same text was written in hieroglyphics, Egyptian, and Greek. Comparing the three texts allowed scholars to decode the hieroglyphics and make them comprehensible for all to read. Deciphering My Life is a similar exercise in cryptography. Just as the translation of the Rosetta stone led to an understanding of the history and culture of the ancient Egyptians, the unraveling we'll undertake here offers a new way of looking at and comprehending the convoluted world of Bill Clinton. By comparing Clinton's version of reality with what actually happened, we'll be able to understand not only the gaps and errors in his account—but the broader reasons behind the disparity.

But this book has a larger mission. My Life, after all, is no ordinary volume, but the memoirs of a controversial and highly image-conscious president. Because He Could offers a needed corrective: an attempt to correct, explain, elaborate upon, contextualize, and rebut the spin in the former president's memoirs. This mission is compelling, even urgent, lest Clinton's sometimes distorted and always self-indulgent version of events harden into accepted historical "fact." The telling of stories has always been important to both Hillary and Bill Clinton. Together, they have cleverly used such tales as a tool to establish their brand, convey their message, and shape their public image. Only days after the first Clinton inauguration, Hillary told the president's top aides that one of the reasons for her husband's failure in his first term as governor of Arkansas was that they did not have a "clear story line." Both Clintons were determined that would never happen again. From then on, the stories were always complete. Not always true, but always clear. Bill Clinton's memoirs are just another installment in their continuing efforts to mold their images and rewrite their histories.

In its bid to persuade posterity to view his administration through the same lens as its author, My Life has its heroes: Hillary, Boris Yeltsin, Al Gore, the Democratic Party, and, mainly, Clinton himself. It also, of course, has its villains: Newt Gingrich, Kenneth Starr, and the right wing. And it has its missing persons—those who played key roles (even if they were cameos) in his life or administration, yet who simply go unmentioned, like the inconvenient figures airbrushed out of a Stalinist propaganda photo. These ghosts may not exist in Bill Clinton's world anymore, yet their stories remain on the historical record, and they give us important clues about Clinton himself. Why did he choose to obliterate certain people? Why make them disappear?

Because he could.

Not surprisingly, throughout the book Bill Clinton bends and twists the facts to suit his uniquely personal version of events. On nearly every page, we can almost see him straining to create the illusions he wants us to share, to accept his justifications and rationalizations. My Life represents Clinton's last stab at making things come out right.

To aid his reelection in 1996, Clinton—with great assistance from his speechwriter Don Baer—wrote a book he entitled Between Hope and History. In Because He Could, we probe the gap between Clinton's hopes of how history will remember his presidency… and what its history actually was.

Why should we bother? Why is it important to revisit the tortured paths of Clinton's story, to parse out the slender threads of reality from the wishful worldview expressed in My Life? Is it really worth the effort, merely to correct the former president's latest batch of tall tales?

The demands of history, on their own, make this journey necessary. However, the spectacle of My Life also provides an intrinsically fascinating window into how one man has accessed, altered, and articulated his own reality. Like a latter-day Alice, we enter into the Clintonian world on the other side of the looking glass, always comparing and contrasting it with what really happened.

What do we see through that looking glass? For one thing, we see a president who was buffeted constantly by other people—who was seemingly paralyzed by contradictory advice, yet hypnotized by consensus. Time and again, Clinton contends that the actions he took in a given situation were against his better judgment, as though he had no choice in the matter. Yet, of course, he had options. He could have led. He needn't have taken the path of least resistance.

Those who know Clinton and worked for him find an eerie echo of his real character in the pages of My Life. While historians traditionally see activist presidents as initiators—men who grab history by the horns and wrestle it to the ground, twisting it to their own purposes—Bill Clinton was, above all else, responsive and passive, guided and goaded by the stimuli around him. Rapid response, Clinton's enduring contribution to the lexicon of political tactics, emerges from the pages of his memoir as a metaphor for his entire incumbency.

This was not always a liability. When motivated by the pain he saw in the world around him, Clinton was at his empathetic best, grasping the emotions of others and internalizing them, making them his own. His universe is populated by the stories of other people, anecdotes that impel him to act—in his words, to "give people a chance to have better stories." Over and over again, the book describes how one needy person or another motivated Bill Clinton to try to change government programs to protect the disadvantaged.

When he was vexed by political opposition, however, Clinton would lash out in self-protective rages and slashing attempts to apportion blame to others—revealing, in the process, his own essential weakness and curious passivity. In My Life, Bill Clinton depicts himself as the victimized president, pushed and pulled by events he cannot control, advised by inept aides, and swept along by the frothing white water of partisan scandal.

Despite its Herculean efforts at self-justification, My Life actually provides a wealth of evidence to explain both how he achieved his successes, and how his failures came to bedevil us.

Copyright © 2004 by Eileen McGann