But the marketing begs the big unanswered question, which is, how will he avoid the dreaded Curse of the Deadly Presidential Memoir? I actually pulled a dozen or so of them out of the library when I needed a few winks. They weren’t all quite as bad as I remember. Reagan admits in “An American Life” that he was “frightened and started to panic” after John Hinckley shot him in 1981. Gerald Ford, in “A Time to Heal,” says he abolished White House prayer services as “inappropriate.” (George W. Bush has the opposite view.) Harry Truman actually ends his tome by dissing the “frozen grimness” of his successor, Dwight D. Eisenhower, who, Truman says, swallowed a “badly distorted version of the facts.” But those are rare giblets. Mostly you feel sorry for the dead trees.
But how? Will he wreak vengeance on Kenneth Starr and Newt Gingrich? Clinton’s not giving formal interviews, but he’s a talker, and here’s what he’s saying privately around New York: “It may not be as mean as some people want it to be,” he told one curious caller. “This shouldn’t be about settling scores but setting the record straight.” But how straight? “I’m going to let a lot of stuff go. You can’t spend 650 pages saying things just aren’t so.”
Hmm… too bad. Does that mean no Monica, no Paula, no juice? Hardly. Clinton isn’t getting specific yet about content–he probably hasn’t figured it out himself–but he’s telling people the tone he’s after: “I don’t want a book that’s either turgid and boring or unduly defensive. I want to explain to people who I am and what I tried to do in public life–the good things we did and the mistakes I made. And I want to make it come alive.”
To do that–to break the memoir curse–a full treatment of those mistakes should include at least: 1) His failure to learn from earlier embarrassments and control his sexual appetites. 2) His failure to use the Democratic Congress to push through campaign-finance reform in 1993, when it might have helped him fight the special interests stifling the rest of his agenda. 3) His failure to compromise on Hillary’s health-care plan in the summer of 1994, when Senate Minority Leader Bob Dole was willing to support universal coverage. 4) His failure to settle the Paula Jones case, which will require him to criticize his own lawyers. 5) His failure in using preposterous circumlocutions and flimsy legalisms to try to escape the consequences of his affair with Monica Lewinsky. 6) His failure to understand why pardoning a fugitive from justice, Marc Rich, was simply wrong.
If he can bite those bullets, I’ll take as much crowing about his genuine accomplishments as he wants to put in the book. The way he negotiated with colorful foreign leaders (I hope he describes those legendary pigouts with Helmut Kohl), moved the Democratic Party to the center and worked with Alan Greenspan to help keep the economy humming can make for a good story, especially if he talks his narrative informally into a tape recorder rather than trying to write it out longhand, where he is less vivid. He is apparently conscious of that and will do some of both, though he has no diaries to draw on, since they would have been subpoenaed by the independent counsel.
One of Clinton’s models, I’m told, is Ulysses S. Grant, the only former president to write a monster best-selling memoir, though it’s all about the Civil War. (He died before writing about his presidency.) Besides having Mark Twain as an editor, Grant apparently possessed a candor gene missing among his successors. He opens the book by admitting that he wrote it because he went broke.
Among the other memoirs Clinton admires are Katharine Graham’s (“Honest without being self-flagellating,” he told one source), a forthcoming book by Quincy Jones, who lets it all hang out (“He even includes chapters by his ex-wives!”), and his mother’s astonishing autobiography: “She wouldn’t let me tone it down. She said, ‘Don’t you go rewriting it and saying what you think.’ Her only requirement was that she not say anything mean about someone still alive.”
There’s one president whom Clinton should keep in mind throughout–Lyndon Johnson. If you hear him on the tapes he made in the Oval Office, LBJ is earthy and brilliant. But his memoirs, “The Vantage Point,” while touching every important issue, are lifeless. Odds are Clinton’s book will be some combination of disappointing and delectable, just like the man himself.
