Whitewater and the Clintons

Book Reviews of

Roger Clinton with Jim Moore, Growing Up Clinton: The Lives, Times and Tragedies of America’s Presidential Family. Arlington, TX: The Summit Publishing Group, 1995. 195 pages, $19.95.

Paul Greenberg, No Surprises: Twenty Years of Clinton-Watching. Washington: Brassey’s, 1996. 256 pages, $23.95.

Gene Lyons and the editors of Harper’s,

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Fools For Scandals: How the Media Invented Whitewater. New York: Franklin Square Press, 1996. 224 pages, $9.95.

Stanley A. Renshon, ed., The Clinton Presidency: Campaigning, Governing, and the Psychology of Leadership. Boulder: Westview Press, 1995. 261 pages, $19.95.

James B. Stewart, Blood Sport: The President and His Adversaries. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1996. 479 pages, $25.00.

Bob Woodward, The Choice. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1996. 462 pages, $26.00.

Whitewater is a lucrative industry with investigations costing well over $30 million. There has been more time and money spent on hearings on Whitewater, as Bill Clinton recently complained, than time devoted to hearings on health care, immigration reform, Social Security, and welfare. Stewart’s Blood Sport takes its name from the words in Vince Foster’s suicide note declaring that in Washington ruining people is a game. The author, winner of a Pulitzer Prize, gives the reader a “you are there” feeling but no footnotes. There are some valuable materials on Vince Foster and, especially, on Bernie Nussbaum’s warning to not try to appease the media. Clinton wished he had followed the advice of the Presidential Counsel who he threw to the media sharks. My pleasure in reading this well-written book was lessened by the sense that content was sacrificed for dramatic effect. In the end, when all is said and done, this reader feels that if Stewart were Whitewater prosecutor, rather than Kenneth Starr, Clinton would be home free.

When researching Jimmy Carter before his election to the Presidency, I paid little attention to his critics of him as governor and only realized my error at a later date. Determined not to make the same mistake with Clinton, in April of 1992 I spoke to Paul Greenberg who branded the Governor “Slick Willie.” Greenberg had won a Pulitzer Prize for his reporting of the Arkansas desegregation crisis and is well-respected. He is a conservative Southerner who did most of the work for a doctoral degree in history at Columbia University. In No Surprises he has collected his columns of 20 years into a book that says lots about Clinton’s character or lack thereof. While it will not be a best seller, it does provide much insight for those who have an historical sense, even if there is little psychological awareness.

On now to the last of the Whitewater books, Fools for Scandals. I had seen Gene Lyons interviewed and found his attack on the Whitewater industry to be refreshing, if not totally convincing. His argument that the media, especially the New York Times, invented Whitewater has some merit. But just as others are too quick to find the Clintons guilty of any and all unsubstantiated charges, he is too quick to exonerate them in defense of Arkansas.

Stanley Renshon, editor of Political Psychology and a professor in the Graduate School of the City University of New York, has been extremely prolific as of late. This year he released books on assessing presidential candidates and on Clinton’s personality, and last year he edited one on campaigning, governing, and the psychology of leadership in the Clinton administration, The Clinton Presidency. The 1995 book contains interesting articles by twelve authors, including well-respected members of the International Society of Political Psychology which sponsors the publication Renshon edits. It provides a useful, initial, and academic appraisal of the Clinton Presidency.

On the Clintons there have been an enormous spate of books, which helps to compensate for the fact that Bill Clinton is the first President to get to the White House since Gerald Ford without having written an autobiography. The President’s half brother, Roger Clinton, writes about “Bubba” (brother); Virginia Kelley (their mother); and his own cocaine addiction, prison time, and entry into fatherhood. Though this thin volume is of far less value for understanding Bill than Virginia’s posthumously published autobiography, Leading With Your Heart, it has some value. This, however, is mitigated by idealization of Bill the big brother who is depicted as saving their mother from being choked and stabbed with a scissors by her drunken husband. Though Bill’s stepfather’s abuse of Virginia and her youngest son and namesake was quite real, the danger of being choked or stabbed seems greater to the six-year-old running next door to fetch his big brother than to this reader. Little Roger Clinton feared and hated the father who died of cancer when this younger Roger was only 11 years old.

Bill Clinton fulfilled an almost maternal role, taking his baby brother on dates and looking out for him at every opportunity. He comes across most admirably in the crisis of Roger’s arrest as a

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cocaine dealer. Feeling quite sorry for himself, Roger threatened suicide and the Governor literally shook him out of it, declaring, “How dare you be so selfish! You’re the most precious thing in the world to your mother and me, and you’d dare to think about taking that away from us?” The rage in Bill’s eyes shocked Roger and he writes that his big brother “saved my life that day.”

Roger seems extremely self-involved and oblivious to most of his own character faults. His prison diaries reveal a most immature, needy, and spoiled young man who gained some self-discipline while being incarcerated in a prison in Fort Worth. At times he seems to think his “jail house journal” showed how tough he had it, while this reader sees it as an account of special treatment in a country club type of prison and of a young man’s emotional life: like his brother he desperately seems to need the acclaim of others. He also confirms that he was spanked by both his mother and teachers. While I would recommend that those interested in the Clintons read this book, I would recommend you put it lower on your list than Leading With Your Heart.

Finally, Bob Woodward’s The Choice: is about both Clinton and Dole. It has already created a stir because it released information on Hillary’s being encouraged by Jean Houston, a mass market New Age motivational speaker and therapist, to have imaginary talks with Eleanor Roosevelt. (Rita Ransohoff, a Roosevelt expert, will be writing about these conversations for our next issue.) Woodward is remarkable for the number of Washington insiders he is able to get to speak on or off the record. As usual, he is far more interested in Washington influence than in the personalities of his subjects, yet some of his materials are of considerable interest to psychohistorians.

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