ELVIS
06-22-2004, 08:16 AM
June 22, 2004
BY TOM MCNAMEE AND JIM RITTER (http://www.suntimes.com/output/news/cst-nws-clinton22.html)
http://www.zpub.com/un/bill-3b.jpg
"I never had sex with that woman"
You've got your Friends of Bill. Those would include his mother and daughter and wife (let us hope) and Al Gore and Vince Foster and Bill Daley, among many others.
Then you've got your Enemies of Bill, such as Ken Starr and Newt Gingrich and the editorial writers of the Wall Street Journal, among many others.
And it's hard to know, even from the perspective of three years after the Bill Clinton presidency, which army -- the FOBs or the EOBs -- is bigger.
American politics, especially in Washington, grew uncommonly ugly and polarized during the eight years William Jefferson Clinton was in the White House, a divide that has continued in the presidency of George W. Bush.
In his 957-page new book, My Life, which the Sun-Times obtained before it went on sale today, Clinton offers at least a cameo appearance to seemingly every friend or enemy he ever made, including a few schoolyard bullies. He reflects deeply about a few, such as White House counsel Vince Foster, an old and dear friend who committed suicide. But he blows right past -- just a pat on the back or a kick in the pants -- many others, such as Saddam Hussein and Rush Limbaugh.
My Life, which Clinton wrote in long-hand, has the exhaustive blow-by-blow chronological structure of an extremely detailed diary -- no surprise, perhaps, given the famously talkative ways of its author. It is also, at turns, eloquent, touching, evasive, calculating and tedious -- again, like the author.
ON STANDING UP TO HIS STEPFATHER
Bill Clinton grew up hard, making his achievements later in life all the more remarkable. Even the birth of his brother Roger, on July 25, 1956, was a day that ended in heartache. His mother, Virginia, and stepfather, Roger Clinton Sr., had longed for a son of their own. Bill was Virginia's son from her first marriage to William Jefferson Blythe. But what Clinton recalls in his book is how his stepfather picked him up from his grandparents' house that day, brought him to the hospital to see his mother, brought him back home -- and left. "The birth of his only son," Clinton writes, "prompted him to run back to the bottle."
Years later, when Clinton was 14, the violence at home finally became too much to bear. He could no longer do nothing. When he heard his father screaming at his mother in their bedroom and then begin to hit her -- as he had done before -- young Bill grabbed a golf club and threw open the bedroom door. "I couldn't bear the thought of Mother being hurt and Roger being frightened anymore," he writes.
Clinton warned his stepfather that he would "beat the hell" out of him if he did not stop.
At that moment, Clinton recalls, his stepfather "just caved" and slumped in a chair.
As for Clinton's own feelings: "It made me sick."
ON TAKING A PUNCH AND MAKING A FRIEND
As a teenager, Clinton was overweight and, coming from a poor home, didn't dress especially well. He wore the wrong shoes, the wrong shirts and the wrong jeans. He became a target for bullies, he says, but learned from the experience -- and learned you could make a friend if you could take a hit.
At a local pool hall one night, an older and physically much bigger teen, Henry Hill, started mocking the way Clinton was dressed. Clinton, not so wisely, "sassed" Hill back.
Hill slugged Clinton in the jaw.
"To my amazement, it didn't hurt too badly, so I just stood my ground and stared at him. . . . We were always friends after that."
ON THE FIRST PRESIDENT BUSH
In 1983, when Bush was vice president, Clinton and other governors attended a cookout at Bush's seaside house in Kennebunkport, Maine. Clinton recalled how Bush took Clinton's 3-year-old daughter, Chelsea, by the hand and led her to the bathroom. "Hillary and I were impressed by George Bush's kindness," Clinton writes. "It wouldn't be the last time."
After defeating Bush in 1992, Clinton met with the president during the transition. The meeting was supposed to last one hour, but went on twice as long. It was a cordial meeting, and Bush's foreign policy insights were "particularly insightful."
ON MONICA
It was during the government shutdown of 1995, when fewer people were working in the White House, that Clinton first had an "inappropriate encounter" with Monica Lewinsky. In the spring of 1997, Clinton says, he told Lewinsky that it was "wrong for me, wrong for my family and wrong for her, and I couldn't do it anymore."
And that, he says, was the end of it. While Lewinsky continued to visit the White House, nothing more improper occurred.
"What I had done with Monica Lewinsky was immoral and foolish. I was deeply ashamed of it and I didn't want it to come out."
ON LETTING DOWN HILLARY AND CHELSEA
With special prosecutor Kenneth Starr's grand jury looming, Clinton finally knew he had to tell his family the truth about his relationship with Lewinsky. It was a Saturday morning and he hadn't slept. He woke up Hillary, confessed what he had done and tried to explain how ashamed he felt. "She looked at me as if I had punched her in the gut."
Clinton does not describe how he told Chelsea about the affair. Instead, he writes only in a general way that he feared he had let his daughter down. All children must eventually learn that their parents are human and make mistakes, "but this went far beyond the normal."
On a family vacation to Martha's Vineyard two days later, the president was reduced to fighting the cold war in his bedroom while fighting the war on terror abroad.
"I spent the first couple of days alternating between begging for forgiveness and planning strikes on al Qaida," he writes. "At night Hillary would go up to bed and I slept on the couch."
ON KEN STARR'S BAD BEHAVIOR
A judicial panel appointed Starr to investigate the White House after the panel fired the previous independent counsel. Clinton writes that Starr was conservative and partisan, with no experience as a prosecutor. Starr also had a "blatant" conflict of interest because he had made the TV rounds talking up the Paula Jones sexual harassment lawsuit against Clinton. Starr's "bias against me was the very reason he was chosen and why he took the job."
Clinton later accuses Starr of another conflict for representing four tobacco companies in their various fights with the Clinton administration. Starr saw no conflict, Clinton writes, "in keeping up a lucrative law practice in which he was paid large sums by my adversaries."
There's more. Starr violated grand jury rules by talking to the press on background, and lied to Congress when he denied under oath that he had tried to get Lewinsky to wear a wire.
These ethical lapses didn't seem to faze Starr or the Republicans. "They thought different rules applied to the home team."
Clinton accuses Starr of using the Lewinsky affair to create a firestorm to drive him from office. When the news broke, "the hysteria was overwhelming." Clinton thought -- wrongly, it turned out -- that the whole thing would blow over in two weeks.
Clinton said he lied about his affair with Lewinsky, in part because he did not want Starr to drive him from office or to "criminalize my personal life."
ON THE GENNIFER FLOWERS AFFAIR
They met in 1977, when Clinton was Arkansas attorney general and Flowers was a TV reporter. She "struck me as a tough survivor who'd had a less-than-ideal childhood."
Allegations that Clinton had a 12-year affair with Flowers nearly derailed his 1992 presidential campaign. In what he called a risky move, Clinton decided to go on ''60 Minutes'' with Hillary to deny the charges. They wanted to defend themselves, at the risk of adding "fuel to the fire."
The interview began badly. Correspondent Steve Kroft asked whether Clinton had had an affair with Flowers. Clinton denied it. When Kroft asked if there were any other women, Clinton admitted he had caused pain in his marriage. And when Kroft referred to his marriage as an "arrangement," Clinton recalled, "I wanted to slug him."
During the interview, a hot overhead light fell, and was about to hit Hillary when Clinton jerked her onto his lap. "She was scared, and rightly so. I just stroked her hair and told her that it was all right and that I loved her."
Six years later, Clinton admitted under oath that he indeed had had an improper "relationship" with Flowers. But he insists "there was no 12-year affair."
ON THE TWO SIDES OF FIREBRAND NEWT GINGRICH
At his best, the Republican House Speaker was "creative, flexible and brimming over with new ideas." But Gingrich didn't become powerful by being a nice guy. Clinton recalls that Rush Limbaugh once took Gingrich to task for being too cordial to Clinton during a town meeting. "It was a mistake he wouldn't often repeat in the future, at least not in public."
The good Gingrich was a "committed internationalist" with interesting ideas in science, technology and other areas. The bad Gingrich represented the "self-righteous, condemning, Absolute Truth-claiming dark side of white southern conservatism."
ON FINDING A FRIEND IN AL GORE
Clinton praises his vice president, Al Gore, for giving him a "crash course" on the ways of Washington. A key to their strong friendship, he writes, were weekly lunches they shared for eight years. "We took turns saying grace, then proceeded to talk about everything from our families to sports, books, and movies to the latest items on his agenda or mine," Clinton writes. "We were very different, and the lunches kept us closer than we otherwise would have been in the Washington pressure cooker."
ON THE DEATH OF VINCE FOSTER
When White House counsel Vince Foster committed suicide, Clinton blamed his right-wing critics and, specifically, the conservative editorial writers of the Wall Street Journal, for pushing the emotionally exhausted Foster over the edge.
Just the night before the suicide, Clinton writes, he had tried to bolster Foster's spirits. Very few people read the Wall Street Journal's editorials, Clinton remembers telling Foster during a phone call, and those who did were conservatives "who were lost to us anyway."
Foster was overwhelmed by the attacks of "people who didn't play by the same rules he did," Clinton writes. "He was rooted in the values of honor and respect, and uprooted by those who valued power and personal assault more."
ON AIDE-TURNED-PUNDIT GEORGE STEPHANOPOULOS
When he first met Stephanopoulos, a fellow Rhodes scholar, Clinton said he liked him "immediately." Among Stephanopoulos' greatest assets, Clinton writes, was a keen understanding of the 24-hour news cycle. Stephanopoulos was a master at touting the good news and warding off the bad.
Before the 1996 election, Stephanopoulos told Clinton he was "burned out" and wanted to resign. But Clinton writes that it wasn't until he read Stephanopoulos' critical memoir that he realized the toll Stephanopoulos' pressure-cooker job had taken, and how hard "he had been on himself, and me." Stephanopoulos went on to teaching and television, "where I hoped he would be happier."
ON CLINTON'S 1996 OPPONENT BOB DOLE
Clinton respected Dole for his "courageous recovery" from World War II wounds, and for his willingness to work with Democrats on such issues as food stamps and disability rights.
Clinton was pulling for Dole to win the Republican nomination, even though the more conservative Sen. Phil Gramm of Texas would have been easier to beat. Clinton figured that if he lost to Dole, "the country would be in more solid and more moderate hands with him."
ON WILLIAM DALEY
Clinton named the mayor's brother to spearhead the campaign for the North American Free Trade Agreement. Daley was the perfect man for the job because he was a Democratic lawyer who had good relations with labor unions and belonged to "Chicago's most famous political family." Clinton later named Daley Commerce secretary.
ON THE SECOND PRESIDENT BUSH
Clinton expresses admiration for President George W. Bush as a politician and says he knew Bush had a chance to win in 2000 after hearing his "compassionate conservative" speech in Iowa. With that speech, Clinton says, Bush adroitly moved from the political right to the center, making himself palatable to moderate swing votes.
Soon after the election, Clinton writes, he met with President-elect Bush at the White House and warned him that his "biggest security problems" would be Osama bin laden and al Qaida.
"I said that my biggest disappointment was not getting bin Laden," Clinton writes, and "that we still might achieve an agreement in the Middle East, and that we had almost tied up a deal with North Korea to end its missile program."
Bush listened to Clinton without comment, then asked for tips on the job itself. Clinton says he advised the new president to "put together a good team" and "try to do what he thought was right for the country."
http://www.zpub.com/un/bill-pants.gif
:elvis:
BY TOM MCNAMEE AND JIM RITTER (http://www.suntimes.com/output/news/cst-nws-clinton22.html)
http://www.zpub.com/un/bill-3b.jpg
"I never had sex with that woman"
You've got your Friends of Bill. Those would include his mother and daughter and wife (let us hope) and Al Gore and Vince Foster and Bill Daley, among many others.
Then you've got your Enemies of Bill, such as Ken Starr and Newt Gingrich and the editorial writers of the Wall Street Journal, among many others.
And it's hard to know, even from the perspective of three years after the Bill Clinton presidency, which army -- the FOBs or the EOBs -- is bigger.
American politics, especially in Washington, grew uncommonly ugly and polarized during the eight years William Jefferson Clinton was in the White House, a divide that has continued in the presidency of George W. Bush.
In his 957-page new book, My Life, which the Sun-Times obtained before it went on sale today, Clinton offers at least a cameo appearance to seemingly every friend or enemy he ever made, including a few schoolyard bullies. He reflects deeply about a few, such as White House counsel Vince Foster, an old and dear friend who committed suicide. But he blows right past -- just a pat on the back or a kick in the pants -- many others, such as Saddam Hussein and Rush Limbaugh.
My Life, which Clinton wrote in long-hand, has the exhaustive blow-by-blow chronological structure of an extremely detailed diary -- no surprise, perhaps, given the famously talkative ways of its author. It is also, at turns, eloquent, touching, evasive, calculating and tedious -- again, like the author.
ON STANDING UP TO HIS STEPFATHER
Bill Clinton grew up hard, making his achievements later in life all the more remarkable. Even the birth of his brother Roger, on July 25, 1956, was a day that ended in heartache. His mother, Virginia, and stepfather, Roger Clinton Sr., had longed for a son of their own. Bill was Virginia's son from her first marriage to William Jefferson Blythe. But what Clinton recalls in his book is how his stepfather picked him up from his grandparents' house that day, brought him to the hospital to see his mother, brought him back home -- and left. "The birth of his only son," Clinton writes, "prompted him to run back to the bottle."
Years later, when Clinton was 14, the violence at home finally became too much to bear. He could no longer do nothing. When he heard his father screaming at his mother in their bedroom and then begin to hit her -- as he had done before -- young Bill grabbed a golf club and threw open the bedroom door. "I couldn't bear the thought of Mother being hurt and Roger being frightened anymore," he writes.
Clinton warned his stepfather that he would "beat the hell" out of him if he did not stop.
At that moment, Clinton recalls, his stepfather "just caved" and slumped in a chair.
As for Clinton's own feelings: "It made me sick."
ON TAKING A PUNCH AND MAKING A FRIEND
As a teenager, Clinton was overweight and, coming from a poor home, didn't dress especially well. He wore the wrong shoes, the wrong shirts and the wrong jeans. He became a target for bullies, he says, but learned from the experience -- and learned you could make a friend if you could take a hit.
At a local pool hall one night, an older and physically much bigger teen, Henry Hill, started mocking the way Clinton was dressed. Clinton, not so wisely, "sassed" Hill back.
Hill slugged Clinton in the jaw.
"To my amazement, it didn't hurt too badly, so I just stood my ground and stared at him. . . . We were always friends after that."
ON THE FIRST PRESIDENT BUSH
In 1983, when Bush was vice president, Clinton and other governors attended a cookout at Bush's seaside house in Kennebunkport, Maine. Clinton recalled how Bush took Clinton's 3-year-old daughter, Chelsea, by the hand and led her to the bathroom. "Hillary and I were impressed by George Bush's kindness," Clinton writes. "It wouldn't be the last time."
After defeating Bush in 1992, Clinton met with the president during the transition. The meeting was supposed to last one hour, but went on twice as long. It was a cordial meeting, and Bush's foreign policy insights were "particularly insightful."
ON MONICA
It was during the government shutdown of 1995, when fewer people were working in the White House, that Clinton first had an "inappropriate encounter" with Monica Lewinsky. In the spring of 1997, Clinton says, he told Lewinsky that it was "wrong for me, wrong for my family and wrong for her, and I couldn't do it anymore."
And that, he says, was the end of it. While Lewinsky continued to visit the White House, nothing more improper occurred.
"What I had done with Monica Lewinsky was immoral and foolish. I was deeply ashamed of it and I didn't want it to come out."
ON LETTING DOWN HILLARY AND CHELSEA
With special prosecutor Kenneth Starr's grand jury looming, Clinton finally knew he had to tell his family the truth about his relationship with Lewinsky. It was a Saturday morning and he hadn't slept. He woke up Hillary, confessed what he had done and tried to explain how ashamed he felt. "She looked at me as if I had punched her in the gut."
Clinton does not describe how he told Chelsea about the affair. Instead, he writes only in a general way that he feared he had let his daughter down. All children must eventually learn that their parents are human and make mistakes, "but this went far beyond the normal."
On a family vacation to Martha's Vineyard two days later, the president was reduced to fighting the cold war in his bedroom while fighting the war on terror abroad.
"I spent the first couple of days alternating between begging for forgiveness and planning strikes on al Qaida," he writes. "At night Hillary would go up to bed and I slept on the couch."
ON KEN STARR'S BAD BEHAVIOR
A judicial panel appointed Starr to investigate the White House after the panel fired the previous independent counsel. Clinton writes that Starr was conservative and partisan, with no experience as a prosecutor. Starr also had a "blatant" conflict of interest because he had made the TV rounds talking up the Paula Jones sexual harassment lawsuit against Clinton. Starr's "bias against me was the very reason he was chosen and why he took the job."
Clinton later accuses Starr of another conflict for representing four tobacco companies in their various fights with the Clinton administration. Starr saw no conflict, Clinton writes, "in keeping up a lucrative law practice in which he was paid large sums by my adversaries."
There's more. Starr violated grand jury rules by talking to the press on background, and lied to Congress when he denied under oath that he had tried to get Lewinsky to wear a wire.
These ethical lapses didn't seem to faze Starr or the Republicans. "They thought different rules applied to the home team."
Clinton accuses Starr of using the Lewinsky affair to create a firestorm to drive him from office. When the news broke, "the hysteria was overwhelming." Clinton thought -- wrongly, it turned out -- that the whole thing would blow over in two weeks.
Clinton said he lied about his affair with Lewinsky, in part because he did not want Starr to drive him from office or to "criminalize my personal life."
ON THE GENNIFER FLOWERS AFFAIR
They met in 1977, when Clinton was Arkansas attorney general and Flowers was a TV reporter. She "struck me as a tough survivor who'd had a less-than-ideal childhood."
Allegations that Clinton had a 12-year affair with Flowers nearly derailed his 1992 presidential campaign. In what he called a risky move, Clinton decided to go on ''60 Minutes'' with Hillary to deny the charges. They wanted to defend themselves, at the risk of adding "fuel to the fire."
The interview began badly. Correspondent Steve Kroft asked whether Clinton had had an affair with Flowers. Clinton denied it. When Kroft asked if there were any other women, Clinton admitted he had caused pain in his marriage. And when Kroft referred to his marriage as an "arrangement," Clinton recalled, "I wanted to slug him."
During the interview, a hot overhead light fell, and was about to hit Hillary when Clinton jerked her onto his lap. "She was scared, and rightly so. I just stroked her hair and told her that it was all right and that I loved her."
Six years later, Clinton admitted under oath that he indeed had had an improper "relationship" with Flowers. But he insists "there was no 12-year affair."
ON THE TWO SIDES OF FIREBRAND NEWT GINGRICH
At his best, the Republican House Speaker was "creative, flexible and brimming over with new ideas." But Gingrich didn't become powerful by being a nice guy. Clinton recalls that Rush Limbaugh once took Gingrich to task for being too cordial to Clinton during a town meeting. "It was a mistake he wouldn't often repeat in the future, at least not in public."
The good Gingrich was a "committed internationalist" with interesting ideas in science, technology and other areas. The bad Gingrich represented the "self-righteous, condemning, Absolute Truth-claiming dark side of white southern conservatism."
ON FINDING A FRIEND IN AL GORE
Clinton praises his vice president, Al Gore, for giving him a "crash course" on the ways of Washington. A key to their strong friendship, he writes, were weekly lunches they shared for eight years. "We took turns saying grace, then proceeded to talk about everything from our families to sports, books, and movies to the latest items on his agenda or mine," Clinton writes. "We were very different, and the lunches kept us closer than we otherwise would have been in the Washington pressure cooker."
ON THE DEATH OF VINCE FOSTER
When White House counsel Vince Foster committed suicide, Clinton blamed his right-wing critics and, specifically, the conservative editorial writers of the Wall Street Journal, for pushing the emotionally exhausted Foster over the edge.
Just the night before the suicide, Clinton writes, he had tried to bolster Foster's spirits. Very few people read the Wall Street Journal's editorials, Clinton remembers telling Foster during a phone call, and those who did were conservatives "who were lost to us anyway."
Foster was overwhelmed by the attacks of "people who didn't play by the same rules he did," Clinton writes. "He was rooted in the values of honor and respect, and uprooted by those who valued power and personal assault more."
ON AIDE-TURNED-PUNDIT GEORGE STEPHANOPOULOS
When he first met Stephanopoulos, a fellow Rhodes scholar, Clinton said he liked him "immediately." Among Stephanopoulos' greatest assets, Clinton writes, was a keen understanding of the 24-hour news cycle. Stephanopoulos was a master at touting the good news and warding off the bad.
Before the 1996 election, Stephanopoulos told Clinton he was "burned out" and wanted to resign. But Clinton writes that it wasn't until he read Stephanopoulos' critical memoir that he realized the toll Stephanopoulos' pressure-cooker job had taken, and how hard "he had been on himself, and me." Stephanopoulos went on to teaching and television, "where I hoped he would be happier."
ON CLINTON'S 1996 OPPONENT BOB DOLE
Clinton respected Dole for his "courageous recovery" from World War II wounds, and for his willingness to work with Democrats on such issues as food stamps and disability rights.
Clinton was pulling for Dole to win the Republican nomination, even though the more conservative Sen. Phil Gramm of Texas would have been easier to beat. Clinton figured that if he lost to Dole, "the country would be in more solid and more moderate hands with him."
ON WILLIAM DALEY
Clinton named the mayor's brother to spearhead the campaign for the North American Free Trade Agreement. Daley was the perfect man for the job because he was a Democratic lawyer who had good relations with labor unions and belonged to "Chicago's most famous political family." Clinton later named Daley Commerce secretary.
ON THE SECOND PRESIDENT BUSH
Clinton expresses admiration for President George W. Bush as a politician and says he knew Bush had a chance to win in 2000 after hearing his "compassionate conservative" speech in Iowa. With that speech, Clinton says, Bush adroitly moved from the political right to the center, making himself palatable to moderate swing votes.
Soon after the election, Clinton writes, he met with President-elect Bush at the White House and warned him that his "biggest security problems" would be Osama bin laden and al Qaida.
"I said that my biggest disappointment was not getting bin Laden," Clinton writes, and "that we still might achieve an agreement in the Middle East, and that we had almost tied up a deal with North Korea to end its missile program."
Bush listened to Clinton without comment, then asked for tips on the job itself. Clinton says he advised the new president to "put together a good team" and "try to do what he thought was right for the country."
http://www.zpub.com/un/bill-pants.gif
:elvis: