The Survivor: Bill Clinton in the White House
It is the last Sunday of January 2025 meaning its time for our next President, making this weeks book The Survivor: Bill Clinton in the White House by John F. Harris.
Full disclosure here, this is the book I had purchased to read for Clinton but while previewing it last month realized it ONLY covers the White House years so it’s not a full biography. I did purchase another Clinton book, First in his Class: The Biography of Bill Clinton by David Maraniss. But that book only covered his pre-presidency. No joke, one covered birth to inauguration, the other covered the White House years only. So I went with my first pick since largely it’s the time in the White House I’ve been interested in. All of that is to say the basic biographical information that I’m about to throw at you comes from Wikipedia. So…for whatever that’s worth.
William Jefferson Clinton was born William Jefferson Blythe III on August 19, 1946 in Hope, Arkansas. His father, William Jefferson Blythe Jr died in a car accident three months before he was born and his mother Virginia Dell Cassidy, later married Roger Clinton Sr and Clinton took his name. Do note the different last names of his parents. This is not his mothers fault, her marriage to Blythe Jr was illegal as Blythe Jr. was still legally married to his third wife at the time he “married” Cassidy.
Clinton would go on the attend Georgetown University where he received a Bachelor of Science in foreign service in 1968 before becoming a Rhodes Scholar to University College, Oxford. He switched majors a few times, ultimately returning to the United States without receiving a degree from Oxford. Once back in the states he studied at Yale Law. He did receive educational deferments on his own draft service to Vietnam. He ultimately did sign up VERY late for the draft, receiving draft number 311. The highest draft number called was 195.
All of this cost him some political clout as Clinton had variously considered Reserve service, National Guard service, and ROTC service before finally registering to the draft, all of which would have precluded him being deployed to Vietnam, and is where the political hit of being a draft dodger came from.
It was at Yale that he met his future wife, Hilary Rodham, and they would marry on October 11, 1975, with Chelsea joining the family on February 27, 1980.
Clinton ran for congress in 1974 and lost, and would become Attorney General of Arkansas in 1976, before becoming governor in 1979. He would lose his reelection bid the first time, before being elected again in 1983 and would remain governor of Arkansas until he won the presidency in 1992, being sworn in as the nations 42nd president on January 20, 1993.
Now, onto the book.
Peripherally mentioned at the beginning, in the prologue, is the allegation of draft dodging, as well as Clinton’s alleged affair with Gennifer Flowers, and that he had had Don Henry and Kevin Ives killed in 1987 to cover up other alleged misconduct of the Governor. So, the Clinton Kill Machine conspiracy is at least as old as 1987. Which is among the many reasons this conspiracy refuses to die.
Clinton’s presidency was beset with scandal almost from the very beginning, as he went into the White House with the Whitewater scandal still percolating back in Arkansas. As this would be the investigation that Kenneth Starr used to propel himself up the political food chain and acted as a basis for the later Paula Jones investigation, it bears a quick recap.
Whitewater was a real estate investment that the Clinton’s were involved in back in 1979 in Arkansas to build vacation properties along the White River in Arkansas. This was a failed business venture that never came to anything and would have been a whole lot of nothing but financial disappointment to the Clinton’s except that their business partners in the venture were Jim and Susan McDougal, who also owned Madison Guaranty Savings and Loan, which went defunct in 1989. An investigator for the Resolution Trust Corporation, L. Jean Lewis was alerted to the connection between Presidential nominee Clinton and Madison Guaranty when the New York Times published an article on the connection in 1992 and a few months later, Lewis submitted a criminal referral to the FBI naming the Clinton’s as witnesses in the Madison Guaranty case. This was initially found to have no merit, but Lewis persisted, and scandal followed.
And to be fair….this really was nothing. It was made something because the Clinton’s dug their heels in and refused to cooperate with investigators by not handing over documents relating to Whitewater. But why would they? The investments, near as I can tell, were made with their own money, not money from the coffers of Arkansas, which means this was a private financial loss, not a public one. But during their first year in the White House, the Clinton’s had not yet embraced the power of optics, and how bad those optics looked for them, which kept Whitewater relevant far longer than it should have been.
That relevancy, however, became bigger as Kenneth Starr, sure there was something there, kept digging and looking. And it got more legs with the entrance of Paula Jones. Jones had met Clinton prior to her marriage when she was Paula Corbin. Jones alleged that Clinton had sexually harassed her in 1991 and filed her suit in 1994. This would be big news as eventually this suit would appear before the Supreme Court where all 9 justices, including 2 who were Clinton Appointees, decided that holding public office did not preclude you from being sued civilly for private actions. This decision allowed Jones’s suit to proceed through the courts, and would ultimately lead to Clinton’s impeachment in 1999. Sounds far fetched, but Harris does an amazing job laying out the course of events that would lead to this impeachment.
Fun fact, an alarming number of people assume Clinton was impeached for something like conduct unbecoming, because sexual harassment and extramarital affairs are extremely unbecoming in a President. This is not what he was impeached for. He was impeached for lying about his affair with Monica Lewinsky. Which began in November 1995. So during his first term. Now, Clinton would eventually make the argument that they never had penetration sex, and oral sex did not count. Only extreme loyalists would agree with him on that, trying to give him an out as a decent human being and not a sexual predator who was willing to engage in an extramarital affair with someone young enough to be his daughter. A fact that did not go unnoticed by Chelsea, as she would ask her father not to visit her at college when the affair came to light, as she did not want to see him.
Incidentally, it was the fact that Starr’s prosecuting team provided an extremely narrow definition of what they thought went on that allowed Clinton to receive not guilty verdicts on his impeachment for perjury. If the prosecutors had asked if there had been any kind of sexual contact, it would have been harder for Clinton to wiggle out of it. Instead, during deposition, they asked if there had been “contact with the genitalia, anus, groin, breast, inner thigh, or buttocks of any person with an intent to arouse or gratify the sexual desire of any person.” They forgot to ask about mouth. I guess Republicans didn’t get a lot of blow jobs back in the day….
And since Clinton famously used a cigar on Ms. Lewinsky, he could technically respond with no. That technicality was not enough for him to not become the second president ever impeached, but it was enough for the Senate to return no verdict.
Harris paints a picture of a man who is indecisive and easily swayed by those around him. Like Carter, Clinton wanted an open door policy with all of his staff. Unlike Carter, Clinton could be not a little bit of a jackass, and was known to scream at subordinates and the descriptions provided make me think he’s lucky hostile work environment was not really a big thing in the 1990’s, or the sexual harassment charge would have been the least of his worries as he might have faced a class action from ALL the White House staffer’s…including a double whammy of one from White House volunteer Kathleen Willey, who accused Clinton of “suddenly thrusting himself on her during a personal conversation in his study adjacent to the Oval Office. Clinton vehemently denied her claim. There were several women who had worked around Clinton who were shaken by the allegation and had trouble believing the denial.” (emphasis mine). They had trouble believing the denial because this is not the only such report from female staffers.
An exception to those who were screamed at was chief of staff during the start of his second term, Erskine Bowles. Bowles had heard rumor of Clinton’s temper tantrums but had no seen them himself until one day he did, as he saw Clinton dress down two of Bowles’s deputies. “Taken aback, Bowles asked his aides to leave the Oval Office, then served notice to the president: If you ever do that again, I’ll leave.”
Now what’s interesting about that, is that Clinton never yelled at anyone again in Bowle’s presence. Which tells me he’s basically just a bully, and one who could absolutely control himself. He just saw no reason why he had to because most people backed down to his tantrums. Bowle’s did leave the chief of staff position before the second term was up, and he left on ethical and moral grounds. He absolutely believed the allegations against Clinton in the Jones and Lewinsky matter, and was sickened by them.
There have been a lot of questions as to why Hillary stayed with Bill in light of everything, and the author believes it’s because they genuinely love each other. And sure, lacking anything else to fall back on, I can only assume that this champion of women’s rights would stay with such a blatant misogynist only out of love. Because…wow. So initially, she stayed because she believed him. It was only when his back was against the wall and he knew he had to acknowledge the…um…oral composition of his Lewinsky affair that Bill came clean and told her the truth of what had happened. And it’s harder to say if she was more hurt by the affair or that he lied about it. And it makes you wonder a bit more about Gennifer Flowers, which was only briefly mentioned in the prologue, but I know from the Bush 41 book last month that the allegation of an affair was part of the 1992 campaign. Did Hillary revisit whatever Bill told her about Flowers during the time she was coming to grips with his infidelity?
On the other hand, as Harris points out, by the time Hillary was set to run for Senate in New York, Bill owed her big time, so he really had no option but to support his spouse on her Senate Bid, and leave Arkansas behind for good when she won.
Now, from an international perspective, Clinton wanted to do something about Bosnia and Rwanda as they happened. But he waffled too long as those crises emerged and was only able to come in as peace keeper after genocide had happened in both countries. Little harder to judge him on that, since America had only been the world police since Wilson forced us into that role following WWI. He was, however, Billy on the Spot with NATO enforcements in 1999 as Slobodon Milosevic invaded Kosovo and enforced a bombing campaign against Yugoslavia until Milosevic backed down.
He was aware of Osama bin Laden as bin Laden had been responsible for embassy attacks in Nairobi Kenya and Dar es Salaam Tanzania. Clinton did authorize bombing against bin Laden in retaliation, but never pushed tracking him down. Reasons for it are outlined in the book and from a national stand point his logic was sound. But as 9/11 unfolded a few months after he stepped down from the top job, he had to wonder if he’d tried harder to stop bin Laden, would the world now be a different place?
Clinton’s White House career was accurately described by Clinton himself, although he was not speaking in terms of his time as President but more as his own general zeitgeist, when he said something like he was that big rubber clown doll you hit as hard as you could when you were a kid and it would just bounce right back up again. And that is reflected in this book as the author runs us through the massive roller coaster that was the 8 years of the Clinton presidency.
And as I read this, I became more convinced that people didn’t actually vote for Clinton…they were just that unimpressed with who the Republican’s were running in 1992 and 1996. Hell, the one scandal that should absolutely have had legs and wrecked both Clinton’s political aspirations was the Lippo Group, which allegedly funneled money from China to assist Clinton’s re-election bid in 1996. But as so frequently happens with politics, it’s not the politician who benefited who gets in trouble, it’s the middle man who facilitated the action. And on January 11, 2001, James Tjahaja Riady was sentenced to pay $8.6 million in criminal fines and pled guilty to felony conspiring to defraud the United States by unlawfully reimbursing campaign donors with foreign corporate funds in violation of federal election law. You can google Bill Clinton Lippo Group if you want more details, that is public record.
It was interesting to see that Bush 41 was not the only president who experienced problems with Carter butting in on foreign policy. It’s just that Clinton didn’t feel he could say much about it, as Carter was the only living former president who was also a Democrat. So Carter blithely invited himself to negotiate with Haiti and in Bosnia, and Clinton sullenly allowed it to happen because hey…Democrats stick together, right?
This book was interesting because I got the sense that the author simultaneously admires and loathes Clinton. I lean more toward loath myself, because I think he is a sexual predator. One person making the claim is horrifying enough. But enough independent women have reported similar contact with him to add genuine fuel to the fire. But yeah….politicos stick together and forgive each other their trespasses…but heaven help the other guy.
