Bill Clinton's My Life

Like his presidency, the memoir alternates lawyerly evasion with uplifting intelligence: especially in accounts of the peace processes in Ireland and the Middle East.

(Edited highlights of the panel's review taken from the teletext subtitles that are generated live for Newsnight Review.)

ELAINE SHOWALTER:
I think this book is very mixed and I went up and down with it constantly. It certainly is dodgy, and there are places where I think, although the book is very sprawling, that it's also very artful and calculated. It's chronologically arranged, so he doesn't tell until he is legally required to. He doesn't mention Monica Lewinsky or Jennifer Flowers. Then he says, "Oh, and three years ago, in 1997, I had inappropriate relations," and you are thumbing back in the book. Although there are a million dates in the book, you can't tell when it was happening. On the other hand, every now and then, there is this Freudian zinger that slips through. When he is talking about Monica and the Starr Commission. He says, "Finally, after years of dry holes, I had given them something to work with." You think, "My God! Who was asleep?" Who is on watch there? That's very frustrating, I thought. I also thought that the first part of the book, which a lot of critics really liked, which was the childhood...

MARK LAWSON:
Which is an astonishing story.

ELAINE SHOWALTER:
It is, with lots of drama, and he is less constrained. I didn't like it as much because it's very moralistic and every episode is flagged, and so from this he learned to be more compassionate or whatever. But I think, when he gets into politics, the true policy walk comes through and in the end he gives a good sense of what it's like to be President.

MARK LAWSON:
Tom Paulin, probably no president has written his memoirs with so many limitations. It's clear he daren't go deeper than he said in earlier depositions. It's also clear he doesn't want to do anything to embarrass Hillary's political ambitions. Within those limitations has he achieved anything?

TOM PAULIN:
What worried me was the economy obviously was great under Clinton, and he doesn't describe how he came to the central idea of how you re-energise the economy, how actually you adapt the policies of the Democratic Party to bring in Republicans and make people vote who never voted before. That's the really interesting thing about his politics, but there isn't that kind of stillness and authority and detachment by which he describes that kind of idea. It's very interesting to read about the north of Ireland, because he was central to the northern Irish peace process and is greatly celebrated in Ireland for that. That's fascinating. When he gets on to Ross Perot, he says maybe he lost maybe a few per cent to him, but the fact is he wouldn't have won the election had there not been this maverick third candidate.

MARK LAWSON:
His first election, and perhaps he is reluctant to give credit to others?

TOM PAULIN:
He won't give it to Perot. Of course, we have all forgotten about Perot and he has completely disappeared. I was worried about that. At the same time, I thought there is a great story here if it had started off being written by William Faulkner and then taken over by Norman Mailer. There is a great novel screaming to get out here. On the other hand, I thought at the beginning, "My Life." I have read that before. There is a great autobiography by Leon Trotsky with the same title - he has nicked it!

MARK LAWSON:
John Harris, it is a fantastically evasive book at times?

JOHN HARRIS:
Yeah, that's the least of his sins really. The problem is, they seem very mundane criticisms, but he doesn't order his thoughts. He hasn't sat down and thought what are the themes of his life and what should the rhythm of this book be. So that all the supporting characters, most of whom are fascinating, particularly when we get to the political part of the book. Yitzhak Rabin appears and the Pope appears; George Bush Senior appears and they creep in. He just says, "I met the Pope, he seemed quite nice," and we are off again. It reads like a cuttings book written by the person in the cuttings. There is no sense of his interior universe. It's really disappointing, and to go on at such length makes it crushingly boring.

ELAINE SHOWALTER:
I think that chronology is deliberate. I think that is the structure.

JOHN HARRIS:
But it gives no idea what he was thinking when he met the Pope.

MARK LAWSON:
We have the moment where McGovern drops his vice-president and Bill Clinton lists every other person who McGovern asked to take over, including the one who got it. You think who could want that level of detail at this distance?

ELAINE SHOWALTER:
Other policy wonks would want that level of detail. I think the chronology is both obfuscating and it serves as a structure. It's the simplest kind of narrative is chronology. I think he thought about it really hard because it makes it possible to go through this and you don't have a retrospect. You don't have, "Had I but known..."

JOHN HARRIS:
I disagree though; this is what lets down the early section about his childhood. He keeps in this awful Forrest Gump kind of way - he keeps saying, you know, "When my friend Stan fell over, years later I would always think of my friend Stan when I was seeing to healthcare policy".

ELAINE SHOWALTER:
But that drops out when it gets interesting.

MARK LAWSON:
He is clearly a very intelligent man which came through in the interviews this week. I thought we were going to get details what it's like to be President, to be on Air Force One, and what it's like from day to day. There are occasional flashes; we discover that Prime Minister Barak of Israel almost choked on a peanut during the peace talks. There is a moment he's waiting to discover if Rabin is alive or dead and he goes to play golf alone in the White House. But very little of that kind of detail and that's his weakness, isn't it?

ELAINE SHOWALTER:
I don't know if it's a weakness, it's a mindset. That's what made him a good politician.

TOM PAULIN:
It's all superficial though isn't it?

ELAINE SHOWALTER:
I don't know. I think that he really is fascinated with that kind of detail, and that's what it was about with Clinton. Anybody who ever saw him in person, or heard him speak, or whatever, this is the way he comes across in person.

MARK LAWSON:
But John, the central problem is, it may be in 20 years he might do a totally honest memoir, but at the moment he is running for his place in history and he is helping Hillary out?

JOHN HARRIS:
He still has a political career by association and you can tell so... I mean the reason that a figure like Berlusconi or anyone who claims to be a liberal should have all kinds of things to say, is again just creeps into the text and creeps back out again, is I suppose, he envisages his wife having to deal with Silvio Berlusconi a few years down the line.

MARK LAWSON:
Every meeting with John Kerry in his life he says how brilliant he is - constantly there is a political campaign going on.

ELAINE SHOWALTER:
What do you expect?

JOHN HARRIS:
My major criticism is the flakiness implied by his failure to give any order to his thoughts. And this "aw shucks" everything turns out for the best tone. I mean, the summation of the Lewinsky thing he writes, "what did I have to complain about? I would never be a perfect person but Hillary was laughing again, Chelsea was still doing well at school, I was doing a job I loved and spring was on the way."