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Product Description
Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist David Maraniss, regarded by his peers as the nation's leading expert on Bill Clinton, sat in a darkened television studio in New York on the night of August 17 and watched the president deliver his curious apologia confessing that he had misled the nation about his relationship with Monica Lewinsky. As Maraniss, the author of "First in His Class", the highly acclaimed Clinton biography, listened to the president's words that night, it struck him that he had heard them all before, though never in one speech, and that in those four and a half minutes Clinton had revealed all the contradictory qualities of his tumultuous life and political career. In this insightful new book, drawing from the biography and his writings for "The Washington Post", Maraniss dissects the speech as a revelation of the president's entire life. Alternately reckless and cautious, righteous and repentant, evasive and forgetful, relying on family and friends to protect him, affirming his faith in God and then turning to polls to tell him what the public would tolerate, communicating with the public over the heads of pundits and professionals, transforming his personal trauma into a political cause by attacking his and his wife's enemies, asking us all to put his troubles behind us, Clinton combined all his weaknesses and strengths in that one brief address. In the first section of "The Clinton Enigma", Maraniss reflects as a biographer on his curious but revealing dealings with Clinton over the years. Then, after Clinton has spoken, Maraniss dissects the words and interprets the deeper meaning paragraph by paragraph, to show the roots and echoes from the president's past and to explain why Clinton acts and speaks as he does. With Bill Clinton, Maraniss writes, past is always prologue.
Amazon.com Review
On August 17, 1998, after testifying to a grand jury put together by independent prosecutor Kenneth Starr about the nature of his relationship with a young woman named Monica Lewinsky, President Bill Clinton addressed the United States in a four-and-a-half-minute televised speech. One of the people watching was Clinton biographer and NBC commentator David Maraniss. In The Clinton Enigma, Maraniss uses the rhetorical device of "dissecting" the speech to rehash many of the usual negativities attached to Clinton: the lying, the quibbling over legal definitions, the extramarital affairs, the dysfunctional childhood (including some admittedly unconfirmed, but apparently still worth mentioning, rumors of illegitimacy in the circumstances of his birth).
Maraniss does include some remarks that serve to disassociate himself from what First Lady Hillary Rodham Clinton once called "a vast right-wing conspiracy" out to smear the president's reputation, but The Clinton Enigma is ultimately cut from the same cloth as such other instant commentaries as Jerome Levin's The Clinton Syndrome and William J. Bennett's The Death of Outrage (and, to be ideologically balanced, James Carville's attack on Starr, And the Horse He Rode in On). The book is far more revealing about its author than its purported subject. --Ron Hogan
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