Clinton pressed to deliver on book hype

AS FORMER US President Bill Clinton rushes to finish his memoirs, he faces the more pressing task of writing a book deemed worthy of all the attention, an accomplishment no president has pulled off since Ulysses S Grant.

Some leading historians have ideas on how Mr Clinton could do it.

“He’s an intelligent fellow and if he writes as well as he talks, he could make an interesting contribution to history,” says Arthur M Schlesinger Jr, author of Pulitzer-Prize-winning books on the administrations of John F Kennedy and Andrew Jackson.

“I’d like to see him do two things,” says David Herbert Donald, author of several acclaimed books on Abraham Lincoln.

“First of all, I’d like to see him write a personal story on how he grew up and how he became who he was. Second, I’d like to see him write about how he shaped the politics of the White House, how a man of such great accomplishments also hurt himself by his foolishness.”

Booksellers expect huge sales for Clinton’s book, My Life, for which he received a reported $10 million to $12m and which has a first printing of 1.5 million copies. But historians hope he will offer more than platitudes about his public life or a token reference to his affair with White House intern Monica Lewinsky. The book is due out in late June.

Countless memoirs have been dulled by the impersonal touch of a ghostwriter and by a president’s unwillingness to tell all he knows. Ronald Reagan, for example, had little to say about the Iran-Contra scandal and devoted a single paragraph to his first marriage, to actress Jane Wyman. Even Grant, whose memoirs were edited by Mark Twain, did not mention his famous drinking problem and wrote virtually nothing about his marriage or his presidency.

Historians have high hopes for the literary quality of My Life.

“There are only three presidents in the 20th century who really had a deep sense of American history: Theodore Roosevelt, Woodrow Wilson and Bill Clinton,” according to Pulitzer-Prize-winning author Joseph Ellis.

“So I’m interested in how he brings a truly sophisticated sense of history to his book. I’d like to see him bring that to how he thinks his judgments affected the direction of both domestic and foreign policy.”

But historians wonder how much Mr Clinton will, or can, reveal.

His wife, Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton, is considered a likely presidential candidate and the former president will almost surely avoid any undue controversy.

“Presidents in their memoirs try to be above the fray, but what makes a book interesting is the fray,” says Douglas Brinkley, author of Tour of Duty, about Democratic presidential candidate John Kerry. “The problem now is you get these big advances and are expected to have the book out in two years,” Mr Brinkley says.

“Clinton hasn’t had time to think about how his administration fits into history. I fear his book will be aimed more for Vanity Fair than for the historical community.”