First In His Class by David Maraniss Read Free Book Online

PREFACE

    T HE TITLE OF this book is meant to evoke its central theme: how Bill Clinton, out of the thousands of bright, ambitious people from the postwar baby boom generation, became the first to reach the White House. He never was first in his class except in the broadest sense of the phrase, though he finished near the top in high school and college. The title also embraces the school years that were so pivotal in the lives of our generation, a period loosely known as the sixties, which in this book runs from the summer day in 1963 when Clinton shook President Kennedy’s hand to the fall day in 1971 when one of his best friends, a former Vietnam war resister, killed himself.
    Time and again as I worked on this book, people asked me a simple question: Do you like Bill Clinton? As a newspaperman for the last twenty years, I had trained myself to avoid answering that sort of bias-establishing inquiry. As a biographer, I realized that I had to confront it, if only in my own mind. Yet I also saw the paradox: the very reason I wanted to write the book was to get beyond the narrow dimensions of a political world in which, increasingly, superficial judgments are being made about people. My natural inclination goes the other way, toward trying to understand people’s actions within the circumstances of their time and place. That is what I sought to do with Bill Clinton. Midway through the writing process, I began to frame the question differently. Clinton became not a politician but a character. Whether he was doing something admirable or questionable, I would say the same thing to myself: Well, that’s Clinton. In that sense, I came to like him even when I disliked him and dislike him even when I liked him. Perhaps that is another way of avoiding the question, but it is the only honest answer I can give. He is a big character, whether he is acting big-hearted or small.
    Any book inevitably defines itself, but I feel compelled to alert the reader to what this book is not. It is not intended to be a book preoccupied with Clinton’s sex life, nor is it an investigation of the Whitewater controversy. Both subjects appear in modest proportions. Those hungering for more of either will have to do their dining elsewhere. My goal was for this book to be neither pathography nor hagiography, but a fair-minded examination of a complicated human being and the forces that shaped him and his generation. It is not an authorized biography. Clinton and his wife, Hillary Rodham Clinton, declined to be interviewed for this book. Some White House aides, especially those attached to Hillary Clinton, were unhelpful. I did interview Bill Clinton five times, and Hillary Clinton once, during the presidential campaign. The White House in any case was not an essential place to find sources for a biography that ends on the night Clinton announced for president. Nearly four hundred people were interviewed for this book. Among them were scores of Clinton’s closest friends, colleagues, and relatives, who eagerly shared recollections and documents.
    There is, of course, always room for dispute about anyone’s life, especially the interpretation of events in a life as full and complex as Clinton’s. To fortify the narrative, I have relied on documents whenever possible. Virtually every interview for the book was on the record, and every event and quotation is sourced and cited in the chapter notes at the end.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

    Ali, Tariq.
Street Fighting Years: An Autobiography of the Sixties
. Citadel Underground, 1991.
    Allen, Charles Flynn.
Governor William Jefferson Clinton: A Biography with a Special Focus on His Educational Contributions.
University of Mississippi doctoral dissertation, 1991.
    Becker, Ernest.
The Denial of Death.
Free Press, 1973.
    Blair, Diane.
Arkansas Politics and Government.
University of Nebraska Press, 1988.
    Breslin, Jimmy.
How the Good Guys Finally Won.
Viking, 1975.
    Cash, W. J.
The Mind of the