First drafts of history are only as good as their informants; those interviewed here are thoughtfully candid and often anonymous. ("The closer people were to Clinton," Harris claims, "the more voluble they were as sources.") The product is neither a redemption nor a denunciation but a more measured portrait, and one that complicates the popular narrative of squandered opportunity. Clinton emerges as a gifted President, but one whose tendencies toward passivity and procrastination meant that he maneuvered best from an adversarial crouch. "One irony of this tension, as it played out over eight years, is that Clinton in the end proved to be a more effective and more consequential president during those times when he was disciplined by political caution," Harris concludes. "Many of his largest achievements," from balancing the budget to overhauling welfare, "had a defensive character."
Copyright © 2005 The New Yorker Harris admirably supports his contentions with evidence and shows readers the tension between Bill Clintons light and dark sides. His treatment of Hillary Rodham Clinton, from her imperious role as "Deputy President" to her rivalry with Al Gore to her beleaguered marriage, is especially revelatory in light of her reputed 2008 presidential ambitions. In its evenhanded approach, The Survivor is like a Rorschach inkblot that elicits each reviewers individual opinion of Clinton and his presidency. Whatever the reviewers own biases, President Clinton emerges as a complex, almost tragic figure, constantly battling his own worst impulsesand above all, as a resilient survivor who is at his best when under siege.Copyright © 2004 Phillips & Nelson Media, Inc.
Harris, a veteran reporter with the Washington Post, offers a comprehensive look at the first president of the baby boom generation, a man who embodies many of that generation's weaknesses and ideals. Clinton was part of a new breed of Democrats who sought to move the party toward the center in recognition of the changes in political sentiment, particularly in the South. Harris describes Bill and Hillary Clinton as important political figures, smart and ambitious but lacking the political acumen needed to advance their issues and misreading the temperament of the times. Harris explores Clinton's leadership style and how it served him well in some arenas and doomed him to failure in others, as this man of progressive impulses struggled with the limitations of his power and the incredible animus he and his wife provoked in conservatives. He details the pitched battles within the White House as varying factions fought for the upper hand in influencing a president who liked to hear differing opinions. Through two terms in office and a host of scandals, Harris notes that Clinton has managed to survive with high regard among the public because of his "authentically populist spirit" and a genuine connection to the American people. Readers of whatever political posture should enjoy this absorbing look at a compelling political figure. Vanessa Bush
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved
Review
"Vivid and enlightening….John F. Harris has done the impossible. He's written a book about Bill Clinton that is insightful, comprehensive and above all reasonable in measuring the former president's strengths and weaknesses, achievements and failure."
--Ronald Brownstein, The Los Angeles Times
"A responsible, honest, tough, and -- best of all -- considered assessment of Clinton's presidency."
-- The Atlantic
"Revealing….a sober, fair-minded and highly readable account of Mr. Clinton's tenure in the White House…."
--Michiko Kakutani, The New York Times
"John Harris' important new book is without doubt a sign that history, with all its plodding seriousness, is catching up to the go-go 90's. That's good news. For too long, since Mr. Clinton began his improbable run, this super-sized American story has been distorted by extremist views….[The Survivor is] a smart reflection on those mercurial years from one of Washington's best reporters. It's scrupulously researched; it's well-written; and, to a surprising degree, it's calm -- not an adjective we usually find in Clintonland."
--Ted Widmer, The New York Observer
"Washington Post reporter John F. Harris, who covered the White House during Clinton's last six years, has made the most ambitious effort thus far: to chronicle the Clinton years in the context of the era's political trends and to connect the successes and failures of his presidency back to his character. It is a scrupulously fair-minded book, with plenty of ammunition for both Clinton's admirers and detractors."
--Jeff Greenfield, Washington Monthly
“John F. Harris is the most lucid writer in American political journalism today. One reads his work and knows that he has it exactly right, like a fine tailor producing well-fitted suits. I love reading Harris for his deep and rewarding insights, especially when he writes about Bill Clinton. In The Survivor, he shows once again that he has the perfect measure of a very contradictory man.”
–David Maraniss, author of First in His Class: A Biography of Bill Clinton
“John Harris has written a fascinating account of the downs and ups of the Clinton presidency. The Survivor is fair-minded, well informed, absorbing in narration, mature in judgment."
–Arthur Schlesinger, Jr.
“John Harris has an unmatched eye for detail, and it’s all here in a way no one else has chronicled the Clinton years. This is the work of a superb reporter who was an eyewitness to an entire presidency (and I should know–I had to compete against him covering the Clinton White House). Of all the correspondents I remember from the blur of our lives together covering President Clinton (the sometimes chaotic West Wing, the dizzying around-the-world travel on Air Force One), John Harris is the one I would have chosen to leave behind the benchmark piece of work on what those eight years meant to the nation.”
–Brian Williams, anchor and managing editor, NBC Nightly News
“John Harris reaches a generally favorable verdict on Bill Clinton, but there is no lack of evidence that could lead to a different conclusion. It’s all here, with fascinating fresh detail. A good book and a good read.”
–Brit Hume, Washington managing editor, Fox News Channel; anchor, Special Report with Brit Hume
“John Harris tells the real story of the West Wing during the Clinton years, with the clear-eyed insight, humor, and verve of one of the nation’s top political reporters. Thankfully, he leaves all political spin at the door.”
–Gwen Ifill, moderator and managing editor, PBS’s Washington Week
About the Author
John F. Harris is a veteran political reporter for The Washington Post who covered the Clinton presidency from 1995 through its conclusion in 2001. His work during these years earned several prestigious awards, including the White House Correspondents’ Association’s Aldo Beckman Award and the Prize for Distinguished Reporting on the Presidency from the Gerald R. Ford Library. Additionally, Harris is a panelist on PBS-TV’s Washington Week and appears on numerous other television and radio programs.
Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.
Chapter One
Bells OF Hope
Gong! Gong! Gong! From coast to coast, and even in outer space, bells would ring for America’s new leader. That was the plan. As Bill Clinton finished the grinding work of his transition in Little Rock, the impresarios of his inaugural festivities were in Washington dreaming of grand ways to launch the celebration. The result was an idea of breathtaking presumption: the “Bells of Hope.” Clinton thought it was splendid.
At 6 p.m. on January 17, 1993, just after the president-elect crossed Memorial Bridge over the Potomac and into Washington, citizens of the Republic were invited to let loose with chimes. Orbiting above the earth, astronauts on the space shuttle Endeavour were encouraged to do the same.
The president-elect and his wife devoutly believed that the results of the 1992 election had been a cleansing event in national life, well worthy of bells. Except there was a problem. Nearly 60 percent of the American electorate had voted for someone other than Bill Clinton. Many in the 43 percent who backed him did so only after swallowing doubts. That left few who regarded Clinton’s ascension to power as an occasion for a clanging continental catharsis. The Bells of Hope rang in less celebration than the Clintons had hoped. Loyal Democrats joined in, and the National Park Service dutifully struck the Liberty Bell in Philadelphia. NASA, though, informed the inaugural planners that the astronauts would be asleep at the assigned hour. A compromise allowed them to record their bell-ringing in advance, with the video played on large screens in front of the Lincoln Memorial. Mainly, echoing gongs announced the illusions of Washington’s new team. “The bell-ringing seemed a little pretentious to hail great change—when the evidence mounts that there will be precious little,” wrote Mary McGrory, grande dame of liberal commentators, in her column in the Washington Post the next day.
McGrory’s sour review reflected the oddly conflicted mood of Washington that January. The capital was charged with excitement and anticipation on the eve of the inauguration, awaiting the fresh flow of energy and ideas that inevitably accompanies a new administration. Even in a city of cynics, the formal transfer of power, democracy’s most sacred ritual, commands a measure of reverence. Yet the news from recent days had made plain that Clinton was bleeding power even before he assumed it. Instead of having the clean start customarily afforded new presidents, Clinton arrived in Washington deeply stained by wounds taken during his departure from Little Rock, wounds that caused new doubts about whether the president-elect was a man of his word. This credibility crisis was not about extramarital affairs or a draft history; it was about the foundations of the agenda on which Clinton had run.
The closing days in Little Rock opened a conflict that defined Clinton’s presidency for the next two years. It was a collision between the expansive promises he made in his dream days as candidate and the cramped possibilities that awaited him as president. The days before Clinton’s inaugural were accompanied by an abrupt downward adjustment in popular expectations for his presidency and the changes it was supposed to herald. No one found this reappraisal more jarring than Clinton himself.
On January 7, just under two weeks before inaugural day, Clinton had sat down with his new economic team in his Little Rock living room for a budget tutorial. The meeting lasted six hours—long enough for Clinton to confront the contradictions in his own program. For all the president’s reputation as a “policy wonk,” his knowledge on the most pressing domestic matter confronting him was rudimentary. Most of the dozen people before him were not people Clinton knew well. They included Lloyd Bentsen, the seventy-one-year-old Texas senator Clinton had selected as Treasury secretary; Robert Rubin, who had made a fortune on Wall Street and was joining the Clinton team to coordinate economic policy at the White House; and Leon Panetta, the California congressman whom Clinton had tapped to be federal budget director. Panetta had been startled in his job interview to discover the gaps in Clinton’s understanding.
The mood in the room that day was subdued, even academic, during much of the discussion. But this was broken when Clinton suddenly flushed with a rude epiphany: “You mean to tell me that the success of my program and my re-election hinges on the Federal Reserve and a bunch of fucking bond traders?”
The president-elect’s outburst captured an essential truth that he had not yet seized upon. The consuming task of his presidency would be to stanch a flow of budgetary red ink that had grown to some $290 billion a year. And these daunting numbers were growing larger still. Just the day before, the outgoing Bush administration, in a cruel welcoming gift to Clinton, announced that the projected deficit for 1997—the year by which Clinton had pledged to cut the deficit in half—was going to be nearly a third larger than earlier forecasts. Deficit reduction, as part of an appeal to common sacrifice, had been one note in Clinton’s campaign message, but far from the major key. The candidate came to life talking about other things: his proposal to cut middle-class taxes, or his plan to jolt the economy with a burst of public works spending in the name of fiscal stimulus. Dearest to his heart was some $60 billion annually in education, child care subsidies, and other planned domestic programs that Clinton called his “investments”—so named because Clinton believed they were not mere spending, but catalysts for future prosperity. During the campaign it had been easy to be for it all. Now Clinton was learning that he had scarcely any choices. Lowering long-term interest rates was the key to priming the anemic economy for new growth, Clinton’s tutors told him. But a president had no direct control over interest rates. They were controlled by two factors. One was the Federal Reserve, led by its mumbling, enigmatic chairman, Alan Greenspan. The other was the capital markets, the actions of which determined the long-term interest rates on the bonds the government sold to finance its debt. Interest rates would come down only if Greenspan and the markets concluded the new president was serious enough about raising taxes and cutting spending to bring the budget deficit to heel. Clinton’s future indeed hinged on the Federal Reserve and a bunch of bond traders.
One casualty of this meeting was the middle-class tax cut, the status of which had already been precarious. Days later, Panetta told a congressional committee that the proposal was no longer a priority. The reversal won praise as a responsible concession to fiscal reality. But it became the most visible—and perhaps the most politically damaging—of Clinton’s campaign promises to not survive in the presidency.
Just as the budget was frustrating his promises at home, another rapidly building crisis was frustrating a promise Clinton had made about a problem just off America’s shore. The problem was Haiti, a brutally poor island nation in the Caribbean populated largely by people of African descent. Haiti had traditions of violence and voodoo, but it also had a history as the second independent nation to take root in the Western Hemisphere. A fledgling Haitian democracy had been defied in 1991, when elected president Jean-Bertrand Aristide—leftist former priest and tribune of impoverished masses—was ousted in a military coup supported by the nation’s wealthy elite. As a candidate, Clinton had attacked the Bush policy of refusing to allow refugees from the island to enter the United States. There was undoubtedly a measure of politics in his position: Because Haitians were black, their plight was an important issue to the Democratic Party’s most faithful constituency. Yet Clinton’s position was also sincere. Refusing passage to people who risked all by setting sail in barely seaworthy vessels to reach U.S. shores seemed a humanitarian outrage, and hardly in keeping with America’s history as a refuge from tyranny.
But in early January, officers from the Central Intelligence Agency visited Clinton in Little Rock with satellite photographs showing tens of thousands of Haitians busy at work, hacking down trees and, in some cases, their own homes, to construct makeshift boats. The Haitians knew all about Clinton’s campaign promise. And come his swearing-in on January 20, some 100,000 or more of them were heading for America. As many as 10,000 would likely drown at sea, Clinton was told. Those who made it would swamp the Gulf Coast with a wave of people desperately in need of food, shelter, and medical attention. In his living room, Clinton sat grimly through the briefing. Vice President–elect Gore broke the silence with his dry humor after the agency briefers departed. “Well,” he said. “That’s a worthy problem.”
Indeed it was. And the only solution was obvious: Clinton would have to revoke his campaign promise before he was inaugurated. Sullenly, he agreed to do just that.
The equivocation on taxes and reversal on Haiti hung heavily in the air as Clinton met with news reporters on January 14, two days before he was to leave Arkansas for Washington. But the item that had people buzzing was a remarkable story on the front page of that morning’s New York Times: On the same day that President Bush ordered missile strikes against Iraq to punish Saddam Hussein’s latest defiance of United Nations sanctions, the incoming president said he would entertain normal relations with Iraq if the dictator mended his ways. “I’m a Baptist. I believe in deathbed conversions,” Clinton told the Times’s Tom Friedman. Was he trying to send words of comfort to one of the planet’s most ...
