My Life: The Early Years [Mass Market Paperback]

Bill Clinton (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: May 31, 2005

President Bill Clinton’s My Life is the strikingly candid portrait of a global leader who decided early in life to devote his intellectual and political gifts, and his extraordinary capacity for hard work, to serving the public.

It shows us the progress of a remarkable American, who, through his own enormous energies and efforts, made the unlikely journey from Hope, Arkansas, to the White House—a journey fueled by an impassioned interest in the political process which manifested itself at every stage of his life: in college, working as an intern for Senator William Fulbright; at Oxford, becoming part of the Vietnam War protest movement; at Yale Law School, campaigning on the grassroots level for Democratic candidates; back in Arkansas, running for Congress, attorney general, and governor.

We see his career shaped by his resolute determination to improve the life of his fellow citizens, an unfaltering commitment to civil rights, and an exceptional understanding of the practicalities of political life.

We come to understand the emotional pressures of his youth—born after his father’s death; caught in the dysfunctional relationship between his feisty, nurturing mother and his abusive stepfather, whom he never ceased to love and whose name he took; drawn to the brilliant, compelling Hillary Rodham, whom he was determined to marry; passionately devoted, from her infancy, to their daughter, Chelsea, and to the entire experience of fatherhood; slowly and painfully beginning to comprehend how his early denial of pain led him at times into damaging patterns of behavior.

President Clinton’s book is also the fullest, most concretely detailed, most nuanced account of a presidency ever written—encompassing not only the high points and crises but the way the presidency actually works: the day-to-day bombardment of problems, personalities, conflicts, setbacks, achievements.

It is a testament to the positive impact on America and on the world of his work and his ideals.

It is the gripping account of a president under concerted and unrelenting assault orchestrated by his enemies on the Far Right, and how he survived and prevailed.

It is a treasury of moments caught alive, among them:

• The ten-year-old boy watching the national political conventions on his family’s new (and first) television set.

• The young candidate looking for votes in the Arkansas hills and the local seer who tells him, “Anybody who would campaign at a beer joint in Joiner at midnight on Saturday night deserves to carry one box. . . . You’ll win here. But it’ll be the only damn place you win in this county.” (He was right on both counts.)

• The roller-coaster ride of the 1992 campaign.

• The extraordinarily frank exchanges with Newt Gingrich and Bob Dole.

• The delicate manipulation needed to convince Rabin and Arafat to shake hands for the camera while keeping Arafat from kissing Rabin.

• The cost, both public and private, of the scandal that threatened the presidency.

Here is the life of a great national and international figure, revealed with all his talents and contradictions, told openly, directly, in his own completely recognizable voice. A unique book by a unique American.


From the Hardcover edition.

Editorial Reviews

Review

"By a generous measure, the richest American presidential autobiography–no other book tells us as vividly or fully what it is like to be president of the United States.... And he can write.” --Larry McMurtry, The New York Times Book Review

“My Life is, without question, the best written U.S. presidential tome of all time.”  --Douglas Brinkley, Financial Times

“A hell of a good story.” --Frank McCourt, Entertainment Weekly

“It’s an almost voluptuous pleasure to read Clinton when he’s recounting and analyzing a political race or a legislative battle, whether it’s one of his own or somebody else’s.” —The New Yorker

“Consistently fascinating.” --The Seattle Times

“Clinton talks with disarming frankness [and] writes with grace and fluidity. . . . He is also a born storyteller.” --The New Republic

“Might just be the perfect representation of the man himself.” --The Plain Dealer

“Clinton has many tales to tell, particularly a rich, sometimes moving account of his years before the public life, fit for future analytical historians and biographers. . . . The personal and the political are intertwined. . . . Clinton’s story very much reflects the man we know.” --The Nation

“He manages to create the distinct impression that he is sitting in the living room talking to the reader. . . . Anyone who is geninely interested in American politics will find his insights and anecdotes fascinating. . . . The book helps to elucidate the question of ‘how he did it.’ ” --Deseret Morning News

“It’s a saga worthy of Cecil B. DeMille, a rags-to-riches tale full of the stuff of human frailty, with a cast of hundreds, complete with low-life villians and high-minded heroes and, as such stories require, an upbeat ending. . . . The 1990s come to life once again as a time of uncommon tumult and riveting personalities. . . . The personalities on parade are as vivid as the events.” --Newark Star-Ledger

“ Tremendously interesting and entertaining. . . . Clinton’s is a truly American story to which the average person can relate. . . . Future politicians will find it a must-read, and average Americans will identify with the highs and lows we all experience as we make our way through life.” --Chattanooga Times Free Press

“Takes readers through a strong account of the achievements and failures of his administrattion. . . . No other presidential memoir is likely to be so lively. . . . Bill Clinton is hard to dismiss, and so is an account of his extraordinary life.” -- The Tennessean

“A reading of MyLife is a necessity for lovers of good autobiograpy. It reads like a down-home history of a life and, thus, anchors Clinton as a superb storyteller. . . . Candid. . . . Honest. . . . Stimulating.” --Huntsville Times


From the Trade Paperback edition.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

Chapter 1

PROLOGUE

When i was a young man just out of law school and eager to get on with my life, on a whim I briefly put aside my reading preference for fiction and history and bought one of those how-to books: How to Get Control of Your Time and Your Life, by Alan Lakein. The book’s main point was the necessity of listing short-, medium-, and long-term life goals, then categorizing them in order of their importance, with the A group being the most important, the B group next, and the C the last, then listing under each goal specific activities designed to achieve them. I still have that paperback book, now almost thirty years old. And I’m sure I have that old list somewhere buried in my papers, though I can’t find it. However, I do remember the A list. I wanted to be a good man, have a good marriage and children, have good friends, make a successful political life, and write a great book.

Whether I’m a good man is, of course, for God to judge. I know that I am not as good as my strongest supporters believe or as I hope to become, nor as bad as my harshest critics assert. I have been graced beyond measure by my family life with Hillary and Chelsea. Like all families’ lives, ours is not perfect, but it has been wonderful. Its flaws, as all the world knows, are mostly mine, and its continuing promise is grounded in their love. No person I know ever had more or better friends. Indeed, a strong case can be made that I rose to the presidency on the shoulders of my personal friends, the now legendary FOBs.

My life in politics was a joy. I loved campaigns and I loved governing. I always tried to keep things moving in the right direction, to give more people a chance to live their dreams, to lift people’s spirits, and to bring them together. That’s the way I kept score.

As for the great book, who knows? It sure is a good story.

ONE

Early on the morning of August 19, 1946, I was born under a clear sky after a violent summer storm to a widowed mother in the Julia Chester Hospital in Hope, a town of about six thousand in southwest Arkansas, thirty-three miles east of the Texas border at Texarkana. My mother named me William Jefferson Blythe III after my father, William Jefferson Blythe Jr., one of nine children of a poor farmer in Sherman, Texas, who died when my father was seventeen. According to his sisters, my father always tried to take care of them, and he grew up to be a handsome, hardworking, fun-loving man. He met my mother at Tri-State Hospital in Shreveport, Louisiana, in 1943, when she was training to be a nurse. Many times when I was growing up, I asked Mother to tell me the story of their meeting, courting, and marriage. He brought a date with some kind of medical emergency into the ward where she was working, and they talked and flirted while the other woman was being treated. On his way out of the hospital, he touched the finger on which she was wearing her boyfriend’s ring and asked her if she was married. She stammered “no”—she was single. The next day he sent the other woman flowers and her heart sank. Then he called Mother for a date, explaining that he always sent flowers when he ended a relationship.

Two months later, they were married and he was off to war. He served in a motor pool in the invasion of Italy, repairing jeeps and tanks. After the war, he returned to Hope for Mother and they moved to Chicago, where he got back his old job as a salesman for the Manbee Equipment Company. They bought a little house in the suburb of Forest Park but couldn’t move in for a couple of months, and since Mother was pregnant with me, they decided she should go home to Hope until they could get into the new house. On May 17, 1946, after moving their furniture into their new home, my father was driving from Chicago to Hope to fetch his wife. Late at night on Highway 60 outside of Sikeston, Missouri, he lost control of his car, a 1942 Buick, when the right front tire blew out on a wet road. He was thrown clear of the car but landed in, or crawled into, a drainage ditch dug to reclaim swampland. The ditch held three feet of water. When he was found, after a two-hour search, his hand was grasping a branch above the waterline. He had tried but failed to pull himself out. He drowned, only twenty-eight years old, married two years and eight months, only seven months of which he had spent with Mother.

That brief sketch is about all I ever really knew about my father. All my life I have been hungry to fill in the blanks, clinging eagerly to every photo or story or scrap of paper that would tell me more of the man who gave me life.

When I was about twelve, sitting on my uncle Buddy’s porch in Hope, a man walked up the steps, looked at me, and said, “You’re Bill Blythe’s son. You look just like him.” I beamed for days.

In 1974, I was running for Congress. It was my first race and the local paper did a feature story on my mother. She was at her regular coffee shop early in the morning discussing the article with a lawyer friend when one of the breakfast regulars she knew only casually came up to her and said, “I was there, I was the first one at the wreck that night.” He then told Mother what he had seen, including the fact that my father had retained enough consciousness or survival instinct to try to claw himself up and out of the water before he died. Mother thanked him, went out to her car and cried, then dried her tears and went to work.

In 1993, on Father’s Day, my first as President, the Washington Post ran a long investigative story on my father, which was followed over the next two months by other investigative pieces by the Associated Press and many smaller papers. The stories confirmed the things my mother and I knew. They also turned up a lot we didn’t know, including the fact that my father had probably been married three times before he met Mother, and apparently had at least two more children.

My father’s other son was identified as Leon Ritzenthaler, a retired owner of a janitorial service, from northern California. In the article, he said he had written me during the ’92 campaign but had received no reply. I don’t remember hearing about his letter, and considering all the other bullets we were dodging then, it’s possible that my staff kept it from me. Or maybe the letter was just misplaced in the mountains of mail we were receiving. Anyway, when I read about Leon, I got in touch with him and later met him and his wife, Judy, during one of my stops in northern California. We had a happy visit and since then we’ve corresponded in holiday seasons. He and I look alike, his birth certificate says his father was mine, and I wish I’d known about him a long time ago.

Somewhere around this time, I also received information confirming news stories about a daughter, Sharon Pettijohn, born Sharon Lee Blythe in Kansas City in 1941, to a woman my father later divorced. She sent copies of her birth certificate, her parents’ marriage license, a photo of my father, and a letter to her mother from my father asking about “our baby” to Betsey Wright, my former chief of staff in the governor’s office. I’m sorry to say that, for whatever reason, I’ve never met her.

This news breaking in 1993 came as a shock to Mother, who by then had been battling cancer for some time, but she took it all in stride. She said young people did a lot of things during the Depression and the war that people in another time might disapprove of. What mattered was that my father was the love of her life and she had no doubt of his love for her. Whatever the facts, that’s all she needed to know as her own life moved toward its end. As for me, I wasn’t quite sure what to make of it all, but given the life I’ve led, I could hardly be surprised that my father was more complicated than the idealized pictures I had lived with for nearly half a century.

In 1994, as we headed for the celebration of the fiftieth anniversary of D-day, several newspapers published a story on my father’s war record, with a snapshot of him in uniform. Shortly afterward, I received a letter from Umberto Baron of Netcong, New Jersey, recounting his own experiences during the war and after. He said that he was a young boy in Italy when the Americans arrived, and that he loved to go to their camp, where one soldier in particular befriended him, giving him candy and showing him how engines worked and how to repair them. He knew him only as Bill. After the war, Baron came to the United States, and, inspired by what he had learned from the soldier who called him “Little GI Joe,” he opened his own garage and started a family. He told me he had lived the American dream, with a thriving business and three children. He said he owed so much of his success in life to that young soldier, but hadn’t had the opportunity to say good-bye then, and had often wondered what had happened to him. Then, he said, “On Memorial Day of this year, I was thumbing through a copy of the New York Daily News with my morning coffee when suddenly I felt as if I was struck by lightning. There in the lower left-hand corner of the paper was a photo of Bill. I felt chills to learn that Bill was none other than the father of the President of the United States.”

In 1996, the children of one of my father’s sisters came for the first time to our annual family Christmas party at the White House and brought me a gift: the condolence letter my aunt had received from her congressman, the great Sam Rayburn, after my father died. It’s just a short form letter and appears to have been signed with the autopen of the day, but I hugged that letter with all the glee of a six-year-old boy getting his first train set from Santa Claus. I hung it in my private office on ...

Product Details

• Mass Market Paperback: 656 pages
• Publisher: Vintage; 1ST edition (May 31, 2005)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1400096715
• ISBN-13: 978-1400096718
• Product Dimensions: 6.9 x 4.2 x 1.2 inches
• Shipping Weight: 12 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 3.3 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (13 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #125,622 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
  • #6 in Books > 4-for-3 Books > Biographies & Memoirs > Leaders & Notable People > Presidents & Heads of State
  • #8 in Books > Biographies & Memoirs > People, A-Z > ( C ) > Clinton, Bill
  • #9 in Books > 4-for-3 Books > Biographies & Memoirs > Leaders & Notable People > Political

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

4 of 4 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A Boon for Historians, August 3, 2005

By 

B. Sinnott - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: My Life: The Early Years (Mass Market Paperback)

Presidents write for history. When having to produce dozens of papers on political figures, one comes to treasure those apparently trivial incidents that seem to so annoy some of your reviewers. Biographies are judged according to their richness of detail, and this one deserves its excellent professional literary reviews. An easy story-telling style is frosting-on-the-cake of this presidential account that will be highly valued by history, if not by contemporary political opponents.

12 of 17 people found the following review helpful:

2.0 out of 5 stars Not well-done at all, June 13, 2005

By 

Jim (Northern Virginia) - See all my reviews

This review is from: My Life: The Early Years (Mass Market Paperback)

This book is titled "The Early Years" and stops just before the inaugural festivities in 1993. Having skimmed that later material in the full-length edition of this book, I would describe that as "Here's my story and I'm sticking to it." But the half in this book has less need for Clinton to cling to his usual talking points about his innocence, since it covers his growing up, schooling, and gubernatorial career. Unfortunately, instead of being sunk by Clinton's avoidance of responsibility, this part is sunk by another fault of his: cheap talk with little payout.

By that, I mean that Clinton takes his sweet time going over every little item in his life, but often with no real reason to. Here's an example: he says, "First I went to x. It was great. I got lost on the subway but a nice man helped me find the way. He said something I'll always remember: watch the signs. What earthy wisdom." Obviously this is made up for effect, but it is like that: Clinton has no editing ability to tell him when to expound upon a subject and when to cut to the chase and get to the point. If he did, he'd find there often is little or no point. Many of the asides he takes are 1. about other people and of no significance (apparently Clinton just wanted to give all his buddies some face time) and 2. not even very funny or interesting. But they come at a relentless pace: not very good stories about people you don't know or care about. So it is that Clinton must relate something bad that happened to his Boys State friend, or repeat some complaint one of his professors once shared, and so on.

The book is padded out with this kind of material. And when there's an important event, like the RFK killing, does Clinton only go on if he has something to add? Nope. He'll say, "My friend woke me and told me." Thanks for that scintillating story. It would have been ok if he'd actually had something to relate, but instead he only recites the details of the funeral (and the circumstances of the shooting - "A disgruntled Palestinian named Sirhan Sirhan shot him as he was walking through the kitchen") as if we never heard of it. So it is that he tells us about the bombing halt, and a whole slew of other events as they occur, in much greater detail than is necessary, as if we all live in caves. My point is that instead of saying how these events impacted him personally and are relevant to the story (and if they aren't, passing them over), Clinton just works his way through describing everything that happened between 1948 and 1993, without regard to any larger theme or connection with his subject (himself).

Even when he is governor and there is more substance to pass on, Clinton still can't resist telling us that thing that once happened to a friend of his while they were out in some rural county getting ready to start campaigning. And trust me, the thing that happened is never very funny or insightful. This helps explain why Clinton's presidential jokes were so bad: he doesn't know a good story from a bad one, but talks anyway because hell, that's what you do in Arkansas. Sadly, this makes his book pretty annoying.

All this could have been cut to bring out the real story. Doing it could have reduced this portion of the book by 200 pages. But instead you have to wade through a lot to get to it.

One other flaw: the power of biography is starting with a simple story of grandparents or something and ending up with someone who, for example, won WWII. But there is no building upsweep here, because Clinton keeps cutting in to say things like, "When I was president, I went to his funeral. I'll always remember how he loaned me 25 cents that day" or some other pointless thing that ruins the flow. Either that, or he disposes of people in one fell swoop: Jocelyn Elders gets introduced as an Arkansas health appointee, then Bill tells us why he let her go in 1994, then it's back to the rest of 1989. Proper storytelling structure it's not.

The best presidential memoir I've read is Nixon's (I've read LBJ's, Ford's, Carter's, and what Bush has written). Nixon knew how to be relevant. Clinton doesn't.

3 of 4 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars My Life -- Bill Clinton, July 26, 2005

By 

PL (Los Angeles, CA) - See all my reviews

This review is from: My Life: The Early Years (Mass Market Paperback)

It was an insightful, warm, down-to-earth, and honest telling of the story of the life (so far) of one of the most intelligent and human of all of our Presidents. It was also a wonderful political history of the times in which he lived.