Chapter 1 : Part 1

The Natural: The Misunderstood Presidency of Bill Clinton
by Joe Klein

Joe Klein, best-selling author of Primary Colors and one of our most brilliant political analysts, now tackles the subject he knows best: Bill Clinton. Astute, even-handed, and keenly intelligent, The Natural is the only book to read if you want to understand exactly what happened-to the military, to the economy, to the American people, to the country-during Bill Clinton's presidency, and how the decisions made during his tenure affect all of us today.

Much has been written about Clinton, but The Natural is the first work to cut through the gossip, scandals, media hype, and emotional turbulence that Clinton always engendered, to step back and rationally analyze the eight years of his tenure, a period during which America rose to unprecedented levels of prosperity. Joe Klein puts that record into perspective, showing us what worked and what didn't, exactly what was accomplished and why, and who was responsible for the successes and the failures.

We see how the Clinton White House functioned on the inside, how it dealt with the maneuvers of Congress and the Gingrich revolution, and who held power and made the decisions during the endless crises that beset the administration. Klein's access to the White House over the years as a journalist gave him a prime spot from which to view every crucial event-both political and personal-and he sets them forth in an insightful, readable, and completely engrossing manner.

The Natural is stern in its criticism and convincing with its praise. It will cause endless debate amongst friends and foes of the Clinton administration. It is a book that anyone interested in contemporary politics, in American history, or in the functioning of our democracy, should read.

Chapter 1

Beneath a khaki sky on a brisk, desolate weekday morning just after Christmas 1991, Bill Clinton's mother gave me a tour of Hot Springs, Arkansas, the town where she had raised her two boys through a succession of family melodramas. Virginia Kelley was an unlikely, but wonderfully American, candidate to be the mother of a President. She was the sort of woman whom proper folks tend to scorn, particularly in the South: a ton of makeup, almost comically applied; a white streak down the middle of her dyed black hair (some of the locals called her "skunk woman"); a passion for the racetrack, for nightlife - Hot Springs had been a notorious Bible Belt Gomorrah - and for the wrong sort of men. And yet, Mrs. Kelley was not at all pathetic; she was canny and formidable and charming; an entertaining guide who, in the course of our day together, managed to ask all the right political questions and also to make some very astute predictions. "I think the press is going to give Bill a lot of trouble." She sighed. "Don't you?"

At one point she startled me. "That's the church where I go to my A.A. meetings," she said, nodding toward a prim Protestant outpost of recent vintage.

"Are you - "

"An alcoholic?" she interrupted me. "No, but I had one for a husband and a drug addict for a son - and I get a certain amount of comfort from the meetings."

This was not entirely convincing. She had the leathery look of a woman who knew her way around a cocktail lounge. But the attempted subterfuge wasn't nearly as important as the door opened by her admission: Mrs. Kelley lived in the twelve-step world. She was practiced in a stylized, jargon-buffered sort of candor. She proceeded to tell me horrific stories, all of which she had undoubtedly rehearsed sitting with her fellow fallen in a circle of metal folding chairs in the linoleum-and-cinderblock church basement (most of the stories had not been divulged to the press before, though). She told me about guns brandished about the house and accidentally fired by her alcoholic husband, Roger, who was Bill's stepfather. She told me about the time Bill had smashed through the bedroom door and stopped her drunken husband from abusing her. She told me that she and Bill and her younger son, Roger, had gone into family therapy together after Roger was busted for cocaine (while Bill was governor; the surveillance and arrest took place with Bill's prior approval).

The last was an admission that I didn't appreciate sufficiently at the time: Bill Clinton was the first American President to admit that he had participated in a form of psychotherapy. One imagines him totally cooperative, wildly eloquent, emotionally accessible, flagrantly remorseful . . . and completely in control of the situation, three steps ahead of the therapist - the analysand from hell.

Several days later, as I traveled with Clinton through New Hampshire - he was in the process of taking that first primary state by storm (a process snuffed a few weeks later by the twin revelations that he'd had an extramarital affair with a lounge singer and that he'd not quite told the truth about his efforts to avoid military service in Vietnam) - I asked Clinton what he'd learned in family therapy, and whether it had been odd growing up in a family where the two career paths turned out to be getting elected governor and becoming a cocaine addict.

"Well," he said without hesitation, "there are different sorts of addictions."

By which I assumed he meant - I was, quite frankly, too embarrassed to pursue this very aggressively - that his addiction was to fame and success and glory. Of course, even if I had pursued it, Clinton undoubtedly would have used some brilliant tactic to skitter away (at least, that's how I now rationalize my journalistic incompetence). But the conversation did establish an important subtext for Clinton's success as a politician in the 1990s: his thorough mastery of the therapeutic vocabulary and the trompe l'oeil sense of intimacy it provided. Certainly, I'd never met a politician like him before. I barely knew the man and we were talking, or seeming to talk, about the most ridiculously intimate things. This set a certain tone, and some rather strange parameters, for the relationship that evolved between us. I probably should say a few words about that.

We had met a few years earlier. He was immediately impressive. He seemed to know everything there was to know about domestic social policy. "Just remarkable," David Osborne, the author of Laboratories of Democracy, a book about some of the more successful state governors in the 1980s, once told me. "You call him up and ask, 'Who's doing interesting things in housing?' And he can tell you what everyone is doing - every last housing experiment in every state."

I had similar conversations with Clinton early on - about education and welfare reform and the impact of globalization on the national economy. As a result, our relationship was quite good at first. It turned chillier during the course of his campaign for the presidency in 1992, and then it became very cold indeed during his first two years as President, as he appeared to abandon the moderate path he had set for himself in the campaign; finally, toward the end of his years in office, we had a rapprochement. Our differences - or rather, my criticisms (he never complained directly to me about anything I said or wrote) - were often harsh and sometimes inappropriate, but almost always over matters of substance.

We were, in fact, from the same part of the ideological jungle: a rather obscure, eclectic tribe known as the "New Democrats" - the vagueness of that designation made my attempts to enforce a philosophical rigor on him all the more ridiculous - but neither of us was very comfortable there. The conventions of journalism prevented me from ever fitting too neatly into any political niche (although, as a columnist for New York magazine, Newsweek, and The New Yorker, my predilections were obvious to most readers). As for Clinton, he was too good a politician to be confined: He expanded the definition of a New Democrat to include anyone who might at some point vote for him. Over time, this infuriated almost everyone involved in the Democratic Party's perpetual internecine wars.

So I'd written favorably about him, with a few notable exceptions - most involving his shameless fudging and jiving on the campaign trail - when he'd run for President in 1992. I was more critical when he seemed to slouch leftward during the first few years of his presidency: away from welfare reform and education reform, toward a clumsy, anachronistic health insurance scheme and, not least, by surrounding himself with some very high-profile Old Democrats in both the cabinet and the West Wing - during the first few years of his presidency. And then, in 1996, my anonymous novel called Primary Colors was published. It caused something of a sensation and was considered, incorrectly to my mind, an attack on the President. Actually, I had come to a more benign point of view while writing the book: I saw it as a defense of larger-than-life politicians - who, inevitably, have mythic weaknesses entangled with their obvious strengths. In the end, it seemed obvious that a larger-than-life leader was preferable to one who was smaller than life. It also was becoming clear - sadly so, I thought - that "larger than life" was a difficult personality type for a politician in the Information Age: The media's perpetual, uninflected and cynical puritanism exaggerated the flaws and neutered the strengths. (Primary Colors was intended to be as much about the witless intensity of life in the spotlight, and the velocity of modern politics, as it was about the nature of the people who succeed in the arena.)

Copyright © 2002 by Joe Klein.

About the Author

Joe Klein, a journalist for nearly three decades, is currently Washington correspondent for The New Yorker. In addition to Primary Colors, his previous books include Payback: Five Marines After Vietnam and Woody Guthrie: A Life.