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II. The Obligatory Early Years

The early years of any memoir are typically fodder for the armchair psychotherapists. They're also typically the more agonizing chapters of any life story, unless perhaps, one is a child TV star, I suppose. Clinton's childhood has not only been fodder for the plethora of amateur psychoanalysts in the world, but also among Bill Clinton himself. Its perhaps that last point that's most annoying. Clinton writes at once about the benefits of being a secret-keeper, it making one's life more interesting ... and then sharing with the reader such secrets as how being in an alcoholic family has made him what he is.

From page 46, the reader takes in one of the more poignant insights provided by the author on the topic of secrets:

The question of secrets is one I've thought about a lot over the years. We all have them and I think we're entitled to them. The make our lives more interesting, and when we decide to share them, our relationships become more meaningful. The place where secrets are kept can also provide a haven, a retreat from the rest of the world, where one's identity can be shaped and reaffirmed, where being alone can bring security and peace. Still, secrets can be an awful burden to bear, especially if some sense of shame is attached to them, even if the source of the shame is not the secret holder. Or the allure of our secrets can be too strong, strong enough to make us feel we can't live without them, that we wouldn't even be who we are without them.

Of course, I didn't begin to understand all this back when I became a secret-keeper. I didn't even give it much thought then. I have a good memory of so much of my childhood, but I don't trust my memory to tell me exactly what I knew about all this and when I knew it. I know only that it became a struggle for me to find the right balance between secrets of internal richness and those of hidden fears and shame, and that I was always reluctant to discuss with anyone the most difficult parts of my personal life, including major spiritual crisis I had at the age of thirteen, when my faith was too weak to sustain a certain belief in God in the face of what I was witnessing and going through. I now know this struggle is at least partly the result of growing up in an alcoholic home and the mechanisms I developed to cope with it. It took me a long time just to figure that out. It was even harder to learn which secrets to keep, which to let go of, which to avoid in the first place. I am still not sure I understand that completely. It looks as if its going to be a lifetime project.

It is perhaps this point that I suspect Clinton followers (both devoted and critical) begin to splinter or harden in their views of Clinton, the man. Clinton does not address the mechanics of secret-keeping, for instance. Are Clinton's secrets those actively withheld from others, or merely those not brought up in the midst of conversation? The difference perhaps suggesting what separates Clinton, the intense secret-keeper who might, for example, try to keep Whitewater documents from the press from Clinton, the story-teller who might, for example, save a story about Hope watermelons for the most opportune time. Clinton does a decent job of self-discovery in retelling his life story, but the gaps in points such as that above are what drive many nuts.

As stated earlier, one of the oddities of the south is that to be successful, one must typically leave one's home. Clinton comes close to touching on this point on page 15:

Buddy was the best storyteller. Like both of his sisters, he was very bright. I often wondered what he and they would have made of their lives if they had been born into my generation or my daughter's/ But there were lots of people like them back then. The guy pumping your gas might have had an IQ as high as the guy taking your tonsils out. There are still people like the Grishams in america, many of them new immigrants, which is why I tries as President to open the doors of college to all comers.

Putting this into context of his own worldview, he picks up a few paragraphs later:

I learned a lot from the stories my uncle, aunts, and grandparents told me: that no one is perfect but most people are good; that people can't be judged only by their worst or weakest moments; that harsh judgements make hypocrites of us all; that a lot of life is just showing up and hanging on; that laughter is often the best, and sometimes the only, response to pain. Perhaps most important, I learned that everyone has a story - of dreams and nightmares, hope and heartache, love and loss, courage and fear, sacrifice and selfishness. All my life I've been interested in other people's stories. I've wanted to know them, understand them, feel them. When I grew up and got into politics, I always felt the main point of my work was to give people a chance to have better stories.

I'll admit for the record that I normally despise the first portion of most biographies in which I have to sit through the oh-so-exciting tales from the subject's childhood, how much they loved their parents, how a few key early memories shaped them through the rest of their lives, and so forth. Maybe it was reading Fawn Brodie's over-analysis of Thomas Jefferson that burned me on this. But Clinton's early years were a much more entertaining and insightful read for my taste.

One of the knocks on Clinton has been that his pragmatic need to split differences leads to or eminates from an inherent dishonesty and/or lack of convictions. I've never been sold on Clinton-as-lacking-convictions. I've followed him too long to know otherwise. The dishonesty charge, however, is one that is indemic to many moderate politicians. The presumption is that since there's a lack of devotion to either of the purer classical definitions of liberal or conservative, that anyone who ventures away from them does so out of a need to appease others, rather than out of a conviction of one's own beliefs.

Reading Bill Clinton discuss his own upbringing shows someone not exactly trying to hide behind a veil. While the charge of Clinton's need for acceptance might still be valid from a reading of the author trying to bring the reader to a closer understanding of Clinton's life, its less easy to suggest he's trying to cover up. Take this on Clinton's draft dilemna:

My struggles with the draft rekindles my long-standing doubts about whether I was, or could become, a really good person. Apparently, a lot of people who grow up in difficult circumstances subconsciously blame themselves and feel unworthy of a better fate. I think this problem arises from leading parallel lives, an external life that takes its natural course and an internal life where the secrets are hidden. When I was a child, my outside life was filled with friends and fun, learning and doing. My internal life was full of uncertainty, anger, and a dread of ever-looming violence. No one can live parallel lives with complete success; the two have to intersect. At Georgetown, as the threat of Daddy's violence dissipated, then disappeared, I had been more able to live one coherent life. Now the draft dilemna brought back my internal life with a vengeance. Beneath my new and exciting external life, the old demons of self-doubt and impending destruction reared their ugly heads again.

Those aren't the words of one trying to keep his cards held close to his vest.

The sense that one gets in reading the first two-hundred or so pages is of a Bill Clinton who is quick and easy to make friends. His ability to make enemies is usually analyzed in hindsight, but his ability to make friends is analyzed in realtime. Even in his trips overseas, Clinton regales the reader with friends met during his trips to Europe while at Oxford, even conducting constituent service for strangers, putting them into contact with other friends to help out wayward foreigners in need of assistance. In short, not your everyday fellow traveller.

Through the early years, Clinton's tale is one hounded by mortality, with the death of his father and his father-in-law central to the theme. It provides a bit of meaning to the traditional charge of Clinton as a "young man in a hurry" as if anything he didn't accomplish by the age of 40 might go undone. In its brighter moments, Clinton is, at heart, a storyteller. Among the best laughs is this Oxford tale, from page 111:

The European history colloquium was essentialy a survey of European intellectual history. The professor was Hisham Sharabi, a brilliant, erudite Lebanese who was passionately committed to the Paletinian cause. There were, as I recall, fourteen students in a course that ran fourteen weeks each semester and met for two hours once a week. We read all the books, but each week a student would lead off the discussion with a ten-minute presentation about the book of the week. You could do what you wanted with the ten minutes - summarize the book, talk about its central idea, or discuss an aspect of particular interest - but you had to do it in these ten minutes. Sharabi believed taht if you couldn't you didn't understand the book, and he strictly enforced the limit. He did make one exception, for a philosophy major, the first person I ever heard use the word "ontological" - for all I knew, it was a medical specialty. He ran on well past the ten-minute limit, and when he finally ran out of gas, Sharabi stared at his with his big, expressive eyes and said, "If I had a gun, I would shoot you."

Not bad.

The early going of the book is a plethora of book titles, stories, names and dates that sometimes makes it a rollercoaster of a read. In turning an eye to the next section, the early political years, one point that seems to be a disappointment of some amount, is that the pages devoted to Clinton's run of statewide office (covering the years from his 1974 run for Congress through the 1990 campaign) in Arkansas is briefer than that of the early years. Look for part three this week. This section of the book is designed as a foundation for understanding Clinton, the person, and its a hefty dose of reading. But the real value of it is in helping make more sense of the pages that follow.