Bill Clinton was a defining president in American history, the first of his generation to reach the White House. His journey through the social, personal and political mores of our time makes him an icon for that great mass of Americans known as Baby Boomers. Many books about the Clinton presidency have been written by participants, observers and journalists, but there has not yet been a biography of the president as an historical figure, in the context of his times. Now, a decade and a half since President Clinton first took the oath of office, prominent biographer Nigel Hamilton tells the story of the first Clinton term with the benefit of distance.

In riveting prose, Hamilton charts what was possibly the greatest re-reinvention of a president in office in modern times. The Clinton presidency began disastrously – kicking off with the worst Transition in living memory. It then deteriorated through a series of missteps and fiascos at every level, from domestic policy and congressional relations to international failures such as Somalia, Haiti, Rwanda and the failure to act over Bosnia. The disaster over health care reform capped the litany of errors; when the Democrats lost the majority in both houses of Congress in 1994 it looked as if the President’s days in office were numbered. How Bill Clinton faced up to his failures, and refashioned himself in the White House thereafter, from Oklahoma to the peace established in Bosnia and the trouncing of Newt Gingrich over the shutdown of the U.S. Government is thus an epic one—— a story that climaxes with the trouncing of his Republican opponent in the landslide presidential election in 1996. Clinton would begin his second term as the undisputed and tremendously popular leader of the Western world.

At a time when the Bush Administration has lost its way—internationally and domestically—it is all the more important to look afresh at the experience of Bill Clinton in his first term of office, before another Democrat is elected president. The world has changed a great deal since November 1992, when Governor Bill Clinton triumphed over President George H.W. Bush at the polls. Yet the challenges of presidential leadership remain the same, from the importance of the Transition to the staffing and running of the White House in the first months of a new administration. This book charts the vicissitudes and disasters of Clinton’s early presidency, followed by his belated epiphany when all seemed lost and he was widely seen as a lame duck and his ultimate triumph over himself – and his foes. Insightful, balanced, prodigiously researched, and wonderfully readable, Bill Clinton Bio (title TK) is the story of Clinton’s extraordinary effort to be a modern president, in a modern world—and one of the most extraordinary reversals of fortune in modern American biography.

Release date: July 9, 2007
Publisher: PublicAffairs, ISBN 13: 978-1-58648

Excerpts

Excerpt: On Clinton finally finding his feet as Commander-in-Chief:

“The military targets for Operation Deliberate Force had been drawn up, the coordinates prepared. The three and a half years of fiddling while Sarajevo burned were over.
In Jackson Hole, Wyoming, the President had already given his prior approval to retaliatory military action in such a circumstance; nevertheless it was imperative to ensure that other contributing NATO nations back the mission, without alienating the Russian Federation, which for historical reasons for the most part backed the Serbs.
When the news reached the mobile communications center in Jackson Hole on August 30 that the first wave of some sixty NATO warplanes – American, British, French, Dutch and Spanish – were in flight from military airbases in Italy, from the flight deck of HMS Glasgow in the Adriatic, and from the decks of the U.S. aircraft carrier Theodore Roosevelt as it steamed back from Rhodes, the President closed his eyes and whispered “Whooopppeee!” Nothing could bring back the three American peacemakers, or the 10,000 dead in Sarajevo, or the nearly 8,000 Muslim men and boys murdered in cold blood in Srebrenica, or the hundreds of thousands of other Muslims the Serbs had “cleansed” in Bosnia over the past three years, but a line had at last been drawn in the sand – and the United States military was in action. At 2:00 a.m. U.S. Navy F-18 and F-14 fighters roared over Sarajevo, all but the last several U.N. peacekeepers having this time been withdrawn from behind the Bosnian Serb lines lest they be taken hostage in retaliation.
“A Joyous Cry of ‘At Last’” was the Washington Post headline given to Stacy Sullivan’s report from inside the besieged city of Sarajevo on August 31, 1995. ‘We were so sure NATO wasn't going to do anything,’ said Nermina Hajric, a 33-year-old mother of two who works just 50 yards from the site of Monday's market carnage. ‘When I heard the explosions, I thought, “My God, the Serbs are bombing us.” When I realized it was NATO, I was literally jumping through my flat with joy.’”
While NATO planes took out Serbian air defense sites, missile sites, radar sites and communications facilities, French medium and heavy artillery of the new Rapid Reaction Force pounded the Serb guns still deliberately firing into the civilian quarters of Sarajevo. Refuelling and re-arming their aircraft, NATO’s commanders sent in more and more waves of NATO bombers, in what became the largest military combat operation ever undertaken in NATO history.
After three years of wrangling impotence, the European nations had swung behind American leadership. Within twelve hours some two hundred NATO sorties had been flown – and by September 1, 1995, some five hundred.
“Transatlantic squabbling had given way,” the Financial Times noted, to “rock-solid unity.” Bosnian Prime Minister Haris Silajdzic called the NATO airstrikes an “operation that restored credibility to the world.” Vice President Edhem Bicakcic said simply, ‘The West has found its soul.” ”

Excerpt 2: On Clinton as scapegoat of right-wing extremism:

“Oklahoma City had thus marked the pivotal point in Bill Clinton’s presidential fortunes. The turnaround in public support had, via Gingrich’s disastrous government shutdown, led to an unassailable lead over potential rivals for the presidential crown in 1996 – Republican, Democrat or Independent. As a political leader the President had come to tower, literally, over his opposition, and he seemed likely to be remembered, not only for winning a second presidential term as a Democrat, but for the very success he had brought to America, globally and domestically in the mid-1990s.
Yet for all this he had still not stilled the relentless number of religiously-backed extremists baying for the President’s scalp as a 60s-era scapegoat. His poor choice of senior colleagues and his narcissistic tendency to personalize his own Administration, indeed to use the first person singular whenever talking about his team, might reflect the “I” era of his boomer generation, but while charming many by its personalization, it also drew onto him further envy, dislike, spite and even hatred, as even his most supportive observers noted.
“A certain grandiosity creeps into his speeches at times,” Maureen Dowd noted,” so that he “sometimes comes across as a combination of Albert Schweitzer, Bill Gates and Donald Trump,” traveling the country “on an absorbing odyssey of self-discovery.” The question was: what would the mullahs of Republicanism do next, in their attempt to unseat him as President of the United States? This irony was, in its way, the most extraordinary feature of the mid-Nineties: that the more the President learned to do better as Chief Executive, after his early tribulations and the loss of Congress, and the more respected he became throughout the world, the more shrill and hateful had become the tone of his conservative enemies, and the more poisonous their personal allegations – as if desperate that he not become the president of their country he aspired to be. ”

[Previous volume]

Bill Clinton: An American Journey (New York: Random House, 2003)
By Nigel Hamilton

Bill Clinton, forty-second president of the United States, is the quintessential baby boomer: on the one hand blessed with a near-genius IQ, on the other, beset by character flaws that made his presidency a veritable soap opera of high ideals, distressing incompetence, model financial stewardship, and domestic misbehavior. In an era of cultural civil war, the Clinton administration fed the public an almost daily diet of scandal and misfortune.
Who is Bill Clinton, though, and how did this baby-boom saga begin? Clinton’s upbringing in Arkansas and his student years at Georgetown, Oxford, and Yale universities help us to see his life not only as a personal story but as the story of modern America.
Behind the closed doors of the house on the hill above Park Avenue in Hot Springs, the struggle between Clinton’s stepfather and mother became ultimately unbearable, causing Virginia to move out and divorce Roger Clinton. Dreading confrontation, Bill Clinton excelled in almost every field save athletics. But the fabled success of the scholarship boy would be marred by the decisions he came to make regarding Vietnam and military service—choices that haunt him to this day.
We watch with a mixture of alarm, fascination, and awe as Bill Clinton does so much that is right—and so much that is wrong. He sets his cap for the star student at Yale, young Hillary Rodham, seducing her with his dreams of a better America and an aw-shucks grin. Wherever he goes, he charms and disarms—young and old, men and women...and more women. He becomes a law professor straight out of college; he contests a congressional election in his twenties—and almost wins it. He becomes attorney general of his state and within two years is set to become the youngest-ever governor of Arkansas, at only thirty-two.
Yet, always, there is a curse, a drive toward personal self-destruction—and with that the destruction of all those who are helping him on his legendary path. His affair with Gennifer Flowers strains his marriage and later nearly scuttles his bid for the presidency. He is thrown out of the governor’s office after only one term and suffers a life-shaking crisis of confidence. Though with the stalwart help of a female chief of staff he regains his crown, it is clear that Bill Clinton’s charismatic career is a ceaseless tightrope walk above the forces that threaten to pull him down—the most potent of them residing in his own being.
Imbued with sympathy, deep intelligence, and the storyteller’s art, this extraordinary biography helps us, at last, to understand the real Bill Clinton as he stumbles and withdraws from the 1988 presidential nomination race but enters it four years later, to make one of the most astonishing bids for the presidency in the twentieth century: the climax of this gripping political, social, and scandalous journey.
Review Quotes
A Selection of review quotes, illustrating the range and passionate views held of Bill Clinton in 2003:

Douglas Brinkley (Boston Sunday Globe)
“[D]istinguished biographer Nigel Hamilton is the first to probe the inner self of Clinton in a sustained and unflinching narrative. It’s a dangerous high-wire act. But, for the most part, Hamilton succeeds… No matter what one’s taste biography might be, there is no mistaking that “Bill Clinton” is a bold, highly readable interpretive study of the man from Hope in which no aspect of his inner or external life is off-limits.”

Michael Portillo (The Sunday Telegraph): “I was gripped by this biography of Clinton, which traces his life until his election as President…. Another recent book, The Clinton Wars by Sydney Blumenthal, entirely failed to explain the origin of the President’s legendary charm. Now Nigel Hamilton traces the threads of Clinton’s personality to their origins, in this superbly researched work…. Americans may or may not be proud of Bill Clinton, but I applaud a society in which a talented man from the humblest origins can journey to the summit of political office.”

Scott Jaschik (Newsday): ‘I was intrigued by the prospect of learning more about the former president's early career and his character… Some of the best parts of the book explore how Clinton learned politics growing up… It's quite a tale, mixing youthful ambition and small-town, personal politics…. No biography of Clinton could ignore the former president's zipper problem. It speaks to his character and it had a significant impact on his ability to carry out his political goals.’

Anthony Howard (The Sunday Times): “Bill Clinton has managed to remain just about the most intriguing public figure of our time…. Hamilton has brought it off with some success. He has done a prodigious amount of research… He certainly presents the most complete portrait yet of the formative years that led to the creation of perhaps the most gifted, if also flawed individual ever to occupy the Oval Office.

Maxim magazine, November 2003: Chosen as BOOK OF THE MONTH - “We know, we know: A 700-page book about Bill Clinton that ends before he becomes president is like a porn movie that ends right when the pizza guy arrives. But don’t worry – this is only part one of a planned two-part megabiography. This volume covers Bubba’s white-trash roots and pays special attention to his rampant sex addiction. Although the frequent (and frequently dry) historical digressions are enough to try most readers’ patience, the tale of William IV – a chubby and socially awkward boy of questionable paternity who, against all odds, charms his way to the top while simultaneously bagging a ridiculous amount of tail – is truly an inspiring American success story.” (Maxim rating: Four-stars)

Larry McMurtry (The New York Review of Books): “The question of sexually charged (or, it may be, uncharged) speech in our political culture is a delicate one, especially so in the matter of the F-word – fuck – long since ubiquitous in private discourse but rarely employed publicly by American politicians, not even by the easily unbuttoned Bill Clinton… If Clinton had just put his faith in the F-word he could have retained his ascendancy over the press, who would have had to beep him, or else resort to dashes…etc, etc… It’s interesting to consider what President Clinton’s two most famously dick-driven predecessors, JFK and LBJ, would have thought of this timidity…. I doubt they would have been such clucks as to deny that oral sex or manual sex were sex; rather, they might suggested that these things added up to an excellent salad bar… etc, etc. It’s of some interest, of course, to learn how Bill grew up, how the two married, and how Bill won the presidency (which is where this volume ends, with a promised second volume due to take us through the Clinton presidency); but it’s surely more interesting to watch … Bill… will he actually fly out to California again and involve himself in the bizarre gubernatorial recall circus? Will he help Gray Davis or perhaps Cruz Bustamente trounce the Austrian claimant, Arnold Schwarzenegger…? Etc etc.”

Michael Pye (Scotsman): “[T]he notion is fascinating enough: to explore what made Bill Clinton the designated target for America’s culture wars, why Americans polarised between a generous inclusiveness and a desperate desire to exclude, and what this one man’s life might say about the history of America’s morals since, however much the Right hates the fact, he did get elected to be President, twice… The purpose is … to give Clinton a context: the wartime rise of independent women and the peacetime fight to keep them in their pre-war place, the shifts in how Americans defined masculinity, the loosening of rigid social standards, the Reaganite reaction to all that, and then the steady, deafening gunfire of the culture wars: Sixties babes versus Fifties and Seventies straight arrows.”

David L. Beck (Mercury News, Bay Area): “Nigel Hamilton's Bill Clinton is going to be the guilty pleasure of the season among members of the great right-wing conspiracy and anyone else who for eight years frothed and steamed at the very idea of Bill Clinton.
‘I kind of like it myself. It's a real page-turner, hard to put down. Hamilton's ``Clinton'' is the most relentlessly human portrait of a living statesman that I have ever read… [Y]ou will find many appalling, fascinating anecdotes told by former friends, longtime enemies and sometime lovers of Clinton… Hamilton is brutal in his description of the young Hillary: ill-dressed, unkempt, unlikable, smelly, angry, impatient and loud, but also brilliant. She was decisive and focused where her friend, lover and husband was neither. His decision to stand by her is the moral high point of a book filled with low points. Hamilton believes that the Billary combination was formidable… It is difficult to judge the quality of such sources. But given the sheer number of them, it is equally difficult to dismiss them entirely.’

Mandy Merck (Independent): ‘Clinton's sexual success at Oxford is wildly exaggerated. More amusingly, Hamilton inflates the significance of such details with faux-learned references - to Lady Chatterley's Lover (when Clinton has sex with British women) or Kaiser Wilhelm's dismissal of Bismarck (when Clinton sacks an Arkansas aide). [The book] is unified by a central theme: that Clinton is the personification of Christopher Lasch's culture of narcissism, a self-gratifying sex addict in an era of unrivalled permissiveness. Fascinated by the seductive power of JFK, the chubby mama's boy becomes Reckless Youth II, the anointed leader of the sex-obsessed Western world…. Hamilton's biography becomes a striking example of the late 20th-century phenomenon it describes - making sex what Foucault called "the explanation for everything". And that's before volume two, with the stained dress, the cigar and the vast proliferation of sexual discourse which accompanied the president into notoriety.’

Michiko Kakutani (NYT): “A pasted-together compendium of recycled news, familiar observations and base gossip”

Ann Wroe (Daily Telegraph): “Nigel Hamilton, an applauded biographer of Kennedy and Montgomery, takes us through the first part of Clinton’s extraordinary career… He was a natural politician; indeed, he was probably the most instinctive politician of the 20th century. LBJ may have outskilled him in dealing with Congress, and Kennedy may have outshone him as the beacon for a new generation; but no one else had Clinton’s talent for empathy and sympathy, especially with blacks, or his dogged delight in campaigning… Hamilton traces this with delight… All the way, women followed him and he them… Clinton was addicted to sex with as many women as possible… knowing how sex undid him, Hamilton gradually comes to write about little else. In some ways he has little choice. He is not Clinton’s official biographer; the ex-President … he has released no papers from his governorship of Arkansas or from his presidency… John F. Kennedy, his hero, leaped unscathed through a welter of sexual scandal. Bill Clinton, immensely clever but no sportsman, simply could not follow his nimble path.”

Los Angeles Times: “Hamilton has set the standard for clear, cold-eyed appraisal. His effort will make readers hope he is planning a similar examination of Bill Clinton.”

Jeff Guinn (Star-Telegram, Dallas): ‘the combination of writer Nigel Hamilton and former President Bill Clinton is a match made in historical hell, and why a very bad book is going to sell far too well…. Hamilton doesn't confine his peeping to Bill Clinton's bedroom. He gabs about Hillary Rodham's collegiate lover and even takes readers into the back seats of cars in the 1930s with Clinton's mother, Virginia…. An American Journey takes readers up to 1992 and Clinton's election as president. Hamilton must now be hard on the trail of secondary sources to tell about Clinton-related sex from 1993-2000. Inquiring minds, unfortunately, want to know.

Steve Weinberg (Baltimore Sun): “Nigel Hamilton's biography of Bill Clinton from birth to 1992 contains more discussion of sex than any life study I can recall… Biographers usually find it difficult to learn much meaningful detail about a subject's parents, childhood and adolescence. By conducting large numbers of interviews and locating documents in unlikely places, Hamilton has overcome the hurdle impressively. He supplements the facts, rumors and gossip with frequent psychological analysis. Hamilton is especially strong when reporting and ruminating about the role of social class in Clinton's rise from small-town Arkansas to the White House. It has not been the norm in U.S. history that a president began his life in a "white trash" setting. Hamilton is fascinating as he recounts how Clinton's mother refused to be put down by the white trash label applied to her, broke the rules for women of her low social standing, and got away with breaking the rules, thus helping destroy the structure that might have held her son down forever…. At times, the psychological insights seem downright brilliant. At other times, they seem plausible. Sometimes, they seem farfetched. Rarely, however, are they boring. Hamilton's take on Clinton's life - as well as the Arkansas, national and international milieus shaping the life - are too tantalizing to be left unread.
“The best advice a practiced biographer can give a non-practitioner of the craft is to feast at Hamilton's table, but think deeply about each bite before swallowing.”

Peter McKay (Evening Standard): “timely as well as exhaustive. From Arkansas beginnings to the Gates of Rome – winning the presidency – he tries to explain how a half orphan from the backwoods who couldn’t keep his trousers zipped mounted the Amercian electorate. Even-handedly, he records Clinton’s magnetism, charm and ability as well as his deviousness, self-pity and tendency to blame anyone other than himself.”

Christopher Hitchens (The Times): “No, I did not look only myself up in the index… I don’t particularly mind that Hamilton invariably gives Clinton the benefit of any doubt. I do mind that he often doesn’t even cite the evidence for the doubt, or rather, doubts… Clinton didn’t just “lie about sex”. He lied about the women… That a greedy, needy, Bible-toting crowd-pleaser should become a hero to so many self-proclaimed swingers is a minor irony… this history doesn’t even rise to the journalistic level.”

Graham Stewart (The Spectator): “Nigel Hamilton’s study is written on the grand scale… a gripping account of the rise of one of the most charismatic politicians of our age… With Clinton, there is hardly even the need to look for salacious material. It is everywhere. He appears to have had a sex life so active that one wonders how he found time to be a committed Baptist… This first volume of Nigel Hamilton’s fascinating and fluidly-written biography, written at times like a modern morality play, just as Clinton realizes his dream of entering the White House.”

Myron Marty (STLtoday): “Hamilton writes engagingly, and parts of the book provide delightful reading… unfortunately the author seems to be obsessed with Clinton’s sex life… He treats the Bill Clinton with reproachful bemusement… [in a] breezy, self-assured and occasionally compelling writing style… a biased, unbalanced account of two notable Americans who deserve better.”

Todd Purdum (New York Times Book Review): “Hamilton, the author of trans-Atlantically acclaimed biographies of Field Marshal Bernard Montgomery and Thomas and Heinrich Mann… is back, with the first of a projected two-volume life of Kennedy's spiritual and sexual heir, Bill Clinton, which he seems to have subconsciously subtitled ''Reckless Adult''…

“For all its seamier revelations and arguable analyses, ''JFK: Reckless Youth'' was informed by extensive and incontrovertible original research, including letters from the young Jack Kennedy to his lifelong intimate, K. LeMoyne Billings, that painted a sometimes disturbing but not unsympathetic portrait of the sickly, charming, libidinous young man who would eventually do for sex in the White House what Eisenhower did for golf, as one Kennedy aide once put it. Hamilton's digging, and his better nuggets of biographical gold, have influenced Kennedy scholars since his book appeared, and seem destined to do so for years to come….

“Clinton's hovering presence in this political season is such that a fresh account of his early life and career might well be welcome as an exploration of the skills and appetites that produced the only Democratic president since Franklin D. Roosevelt to win two terms….

“The story of Bill Clinton's rise to power is one of the great narratives of modern American life, and in the handful of moments when Hamilton gets out of his own way, it is still possible to sense the inherent drama and tension of the tale…. There is doubtless a sizable audience of the already converted who will embrace Hamilton's screed, in an era whose remaining shreds of grace and decorum Clinton sometimes seemed to do his best to fray… In his interviews with Watkins, and a handful of other longtime Clinton aides or friends (mostly those now in disfavor with the Big Guy), Hamilton does produce some amusing and revealing insights into Clinton's character and psyche…. Hamilton feels oddly compelled to offer up crude, potted history and pseudosociology on subjects from Arkansas poverty to civil rights, sexual mores, Vietnam, feminism, campaign finance, televangelism and the mass media…

In ''Reckless Youth,'' when Hamilton mentioned Kennedy's visit to a Mexican ''hoar-housse'' in 1936, the account was from a letter to Lem Billings by Kennedy's own hand. Here, Hamilton merely asserts, with no cited evidence, that Clinton's mother indulged in premarital oral sex that somehow presaged her son's fondness for same, or that ''jogging downtown in his running shorts in Little Rock on the morning of Oct. 3, 1991, 'Jell-O' Bill Clinton thought of the many times he'd nipped in to see Gennifer Flowers in the Quawpaw Towers.'' How does Hamilton know? He doesn't tell us….
As Truman Capote once said of Jack Kerouac, this ''isn't writing at all -- it's typing.''…”

John Cruickshank (Chicago Sun-Times): “Toilet-wall biography - Kinder and more insightful biographies have been written about Stalin, Hitler and Jack the Ripper. Nigel Hamilton's Bill Clinton is a sleazy, snide, cynical and very dirty book, contemptuous of its subject and its readers. It should be wrapped in dark plastic and shelved at the back of the bookstore with 1001 Nights in a Sheik's Harem and The Cruel Lessons of Miss Harriet Birch, Governess….”