Customer Reviews

Blood Sport: The President and His Adversaries

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If anyone is still interested in what the fuss was all about, they should read this. Blood Sport is written totally objectively and deals with all the players involved in every Clinton scandal except for Monica, which broke after publication.

The book details the business partnerships the Clintons had with the McDougals from the 1970's on the 1990's and its fall out. The story stretches from Arkansas to the White House and even goes a bit into the suicide of Vince Foster.

Stewart makes no judgments as to whether any impropriety occurred in any business dealings, so this is a good place to start for an objective reader who wants to make up his own mind about the whole sordid mess.

I read this book in 1997 when the paperback came out. I approached this book as a moderate GOP much in love with Reagan and Bush 41. I never voted for Clinton, but was intrigued by him for several reasons:

1) He was executing wonderfully in '97 (see Morris' "Behind the Oval Office" for this period), even though the GOP-dominated house had elevated partisan politics to the art form it is today.
2) The Press was crucifying him over Whitewater and I did not understand why, it all seemed so trivial.

My conclusions:
There is a case to be that Hillary Clinton may have evaded taxes and obstructed justice - while criminal and deserving of law enforcement investigation, no reason for an investigation against the President instigated by the DoJ.

Stewart confirms that the investigation of Whitewater was pure politics of personal destruction. Bill Clinton did nothing wrong, certainly nothing that demanded any sort of investigation and obstructed his ability to preside over our nation.

There were trivial matters that make President Clinton less than perfect, but you can find dirt on any ambituous person. The question is, did his actions have a negative impact on our country? This book presents no evidence of that, the only negativity emanating out of this was the ammunition it provided to the GOP and the media to divert our attention from matters of State.

One somewhat comic note was the number of idiots that were part of the Clinton circle. While Clinton was a master at bringing together extremely bright and powerful moderates and attempting to pull the Dems out of the socialistic FDR era, the people he associated with more regularly are a hoot!

James B. Stewart is a very rare writer, indeed -- especially in regards to the Clintons. He's a genuine reporter looking for the facts and he appears to have no agenda (meaning he's not the apologist Gail Sheehy is, nor is he the demonizer Anne Coulter is). He presents the failed land deal of Whitewater for what it was -- a bad and perhaps even improper investment that was made to look illegal by the stumbling, bumbling and arrogance of the Clintons. Ditto for Hillary's commodities trading. There are no high crimes here, and if the First Lady hadn't been so determined to protect her privacy it may have just evaporated. If only Bill and Hillary had listened to lawyer (and Watergate veteran) Nussbaum and made their records/returns available in the first place, taxpayers would have been spared millions of dollars in investigations and the President would have been better able to concentrate on health care, education, foreign policy and all the other issues he discussed in the campaign. And if a special prosecutor hadn't already been in place, it's possible none of us would even know the name "Monica Lewinsky." It almost made me ache for what might have been.

Stewart makes the complicated accessible and breathes life into Little Rock and White House denizens. Jim MacDougall, Nussbaum and especially Vince Foster are more sympathetic, human and ultimately tragic than ever before. And I wonder how new This Week commentator George Stephanopolous feels about this book ... This book does not depict him in his finest hour.

This is the "Absolutely, positively, without a doubt everything you want to know about Whitewater" book. I really do not think there is one shred of info left out, the Independent Prosecutor would be hard pressed to put together such a detailed and complete history. I doubt even the combined recollection of all the people involved know as much about Whitewater as what is in this book. That should give you a pretty good idea of what the book is about, the author does through in a little about the campaign, travel gate, Vince Foster and a few other early Clinton scandals, but the true heart of the book is the Whitewater investigation.

The book does not flow as quickly as his last book "Den of Thieves" nor is it as gripping. It is, however, a very well constructed and researched book. If you are interested in this particular issue then I have not come across a book with a better non-partisan telling of this story. If you are looking for an overall detailed account of the election or the first four years in the Clinton White House I would suggest the Woodward books "The Agenda" and "The Choice" and the Elizabeth Drew book "Showdown: The Struggle between the Gingrich Congress and the Clinton White House".

I understand there is no intelligence requirement prior to voting, but at the very least this book should be mandatory reading before the upcoming election.
People should know that James Stewart was actually invited by Hillary Clinton to write this expose. When the truth became far less flattering than she would have scripted she attempted to control the author's work.
Mr. Stewart refused any intervention and went on to publish the book with out the blessing of the wicked witch of the east.
The attention to detail is flawless. The accuracy is frightening and the truth is impossible to ignore.

Blood Sport, The President & His Adversaries, James B. Stewart; Simon & Schuster (1996)

Having read this a decade ago, what I do remember clearly was that this time around, Stewart's heart just wasn't in it.

His "Den of Thieves" (1991) having been such a remarkable success, he was hopelessly up against it. BS would have had to have been "Seabiscuit" for Stewart to have heard the same praise again.

I also remember the disappointment created by Stewart's drifting narrative; worse, the editing of the story's chronology was just short of a disaster. I tried to create my own time-line chronology. But too many event dates ended up as guesses. Others were lost forever. The project was abandoned.

For a major book @ the first two years of a presidency, involving multiple complex stories (some of which involved the Clinton years in Arkansas, etc.) - for which the hardcover reader was charged $25.00 - this was inexcusable.

Stewart rebounded brilliantly with "Heart of A Soldier," in 2002 (He may have rebounded sooner than that, but my patience is limited & my interest in the subject had been further diminished by the list of "Also by James B. Stewart" in "Heart of A Soldier," which contains six titles - "Blind Eye," etc. - without the respective years of publication in parenthesis. Editor Alice Mayhew received the usual fawning accolade in the acknowledgement).

But that wasn't good enough to save "Blood Sport" from the Pulpmobile.

*****

Bernie Nussbaum - like countless others - was enticed, seduced, & then burned by his attraction to the flame & fumes of Bill Clinton's tumultuous political career (the latest is the former Bear Stearns financier Jeff Epstein). Nussbaum's doomed stint as the Clinton's 1st chief WH legal counsel ended with a public circus of his messy, involuntary resignation.

Later, he had one last contact with his former boss. The record of it fortuitously tumbled out of the book as the pages were being disassembled (in order to salvage the political cartoons & articles taped inside).

For some opaque reason, the president had called him.

"I know..." Clinton mused. "You're a good guy, Bernie. Your advice was good advice."

Clinton sounded like he wanted to keep talking, but Nussbaum felt like an old romance had ended.

"It was nice of you to call," he said.

"Yeah, let's talk some more," Clinton said.

"Maybe another time."

Although Stewart is a reputable author, and in fact a Pulitzer Prize winner, this book is a remarkable farrago of fact and fantasy. It is written as a "docudrama," featuring numerous "recreated" dialogues between characters, and indeed even internal narratives and the innermost thoughts of people whom Stewart never interviewed, and in some cases never even met. It's impossible to tell what is factual, what is embellished from others' memories, and what is merely invention by Stewart himself.

It's also notable that everyone who agreed to serve as a source for Stewart is treated far better than those who refused -- and that includes both Clintons and many of their closest friends and associates.

The book is filled with easily correctable inaccuracies, such as when the book gives us a scene showing Hillary Clinton receiving the news of Vince Foster's death while at "the Rodham home in Little Rock, where Hillary was visiting her mother and father, who was ill." Hillary's father Hugh Rodham had died three months earlier. Another scene shows a young Bill Clinton visiting "kingmaker" Jim McDougal in 1975, hoping for McDougal's help in running for Pryor's Senate seat. Not bad, except Pryor was Governor, not Senator, in 1975, and McDougal was hardly powerful enough to be any sort of "kingmaker." White supremacist Jim Johnson, a virulent Clinton-hater who accused Clinton of being, among other things, a "n*gger-lover," and served as one of Stewart's sources, is portrayed as a genial "Democrat-turned-Republican" whose racial hatreds are never mentioned. Other errors abound. Judge David Hale, a businessman and convicted embezzler, is said to have been appointed to the bench by Clinton, when in fact it was Frank White, Clinton's predecessor, who appointed Hale. Hale is also portrayed as breaking the law by loaning money to his "Democrat friends," when in fact Hale made far more loans to Republicans than Democrats, and he broke the law by embezzling over $2 million from the federal government.

Stewart's primary source is Jim McDougal. The real estate wheeler-dealer, who suffered from manic-depression and was convicted of multiple felonies and died in prison, is a notorious liar who lied under oath to more than one court and federal investigator. Stewart also seems completely unaware of the Pillsbury Report, the RTC investigation that completely exonerated the Clintons of any wrongdoing in 1995, and instead relied completely on the then-ongoing Kenneth Starr investigation, which was proven to be full of sensationalistic lies and never returned a single indictment against either of the Clintons for anything. He ignores completely the well-documented body of evidence proving that McDougal committed a raft of financial crimes, and tries to pin the criminal wrongdoings on the Clintons without citing any evidence.

Perhaps worst of all, he tries to link the Vince Foster suicide to Whitewater. This was disproven time and time again -- by the Park Police investigation, by the FBI, by Robert Fiske's independent counsel, and by Kenneth Starr himself.

Stewart made at least one more egregrious error. Shortly after the book's publication he went on "Nightline" to accuse Hillary Clinton of submitting a false loan report relating to Whitewater. He says she submitted the loan report without filling out key sections. Yet in his own appendix, Stewart reprints the loan document, which, if you bother to turn it over and read the back, shows that Hillary did indeed complete the loan document properly. Stewart never bothered to flip the document over and read the back.

The book is worthless, yet another in the seemingly endless parade of baseless, easily disprovable Clinton smears that filled the bookshelves at the time. I see that Amazon currently has used copies for sale for 1 cent. Save your money; this book isn't worth that bent piece of copper.

When I opened this book I was hoping for all the juicy details on the Presidents dirty deeds in Ark. In some ways I got what I wanted and I didn't. The book has a ring of truth and fairness about it. On the one hand Stewart lets the President off on the Whitewater charges but spills the beans on all the other dirty little secrets. Those who want to see Mr Clinton fall will be disappointed with this writing and those want to see the President exeronated will also be disappointed. But then again the truth is usually disappointing. Read the book, it's a good read. But be prepared to wade through a lot of detail to get to the truth.

For those of you who thought the people on Survivor II were a nasty lot, look back a few years to the presidency of Bill Clinton and the wicked group of enemies he managed to amass. James B. Stewart in Blood Sport, the President and his Adversaries, presents a wonderfully detailed look at the people and issues behind the trouble during Bill Clinton's presidency. It is now a little dated but still as important and relevant as the people may changed but politics remains the same. The author attacks in a very clear fashion the main problems bedeviling the Clintons, including often their own arrogance. This book names names and gives a perceptive look the people behind the scenes in politics who spend their time turning politics into the blood sport it has become, and probably always has been. An interesting read.

BLOOD SPORT is an extremely well written book that turns a compicated subject and series of events into an easily understandable history. The book is clearly non-biased and points to the real reasons for the Clinton Scandals