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Overview

President Bill Clinton’s My Life is the strikingly candid portrait of a global leader who decided early in life to devote his intellectual and political gifts, and his extraordinary capacity for hard work, to serving the public.

It shows us the progress of a remarkable American, who, through his own enormous energies and efforts, made the unlikely journey from Hope, Arkansas, to the White House—a journey fueled by an impassioned interest in the political process which manifested itself at every stage of his life: in college, working as an intern for Senator William Fulbright; at Oxford, becoming part of the Vietnam War protest movement; at Yale Law ...
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More About This Book

Overview

President Bill Clinton’s My Life is the strikingly candid portrait of a global leader who decided early in life to devote his intellectual and political gifts, and his extraordinary capacity for hard work, to serving the public.

It shows us the progress of a remarkable American, who, through his own enormous energies and efforts, made the unlikely journey from Hope, Arkansas, to the White House—a journey fueled by an impassioned interest in the political process which manifested itself at every stage of his life: in college, working as an intern for Senator William Fulbright; at Oxford, becoming part of the Vietnam War protest movement; at Yale Law School, campaigning on the grassroots level for Democratic candidates; back in Arkansas, running for Congress, attorney general, and governor.

We see his career shaped by his resolute determination to improve the life of his fellow citizens, an unfaltering commitment to civil rights, and an exceptional understanding of the practicalities of political life.

We come to understand the emotional pressures of his youth—born after his father’s death; caught in the dysfunctional relationship between his feisty, nurturing mother and his abusive stepfather, whom he never ceased to love and whose name he took; drawn to the brilliant, compelling Hillary Rodham, whom he was determined to marry; passionately devoted, from her infancy, to their daughter, Chelsea, and to the entire experience of fatherhood; slowly and painfully beginning to comprehend how his early denial of pain led him at times into damaging patterns of behavior.

President Clinton’s book is also the fullest, most concretely detailed, most nuanced account of a presidency ever written—encompassing not only the high points and crises but the way the presidency actually works: the day-to-day bombardment of problems, personalities, conflicts, setbacks, achievements.

It is a testament to the positive impact on America and on the world of his work and his ideals.

It is the gripping account of a president under concerted and unrelenting assault orchestrated by his enemies on the Far Right, and how he survived and prevailed.

It is a treasury of moments caught alive, among them:

• The ten-year-old boy watching the national political conventions on his family’s new (and first) television set.

• The young candidate looking for votes in the Arkansas hills and the local seer who tells him, “Anybody who would campaign at a beer joint in Joiner at midnight on Saturday night deserves to carry one box. . . . You’ll win here. But it’ll be the only damn place you win in this county.” (He was right on both counts.)

• The roller-coaster ride of the 1992 campaign.

• The extraordinarily frank exchanges with Newt Gingrich and Bob Dole.

• The delicate manipulation needed to convince Rabin and Arafat to shake hands for the camera while keeping Arafat from kissing Rabin.

• The cost, both public and private, of the scandal that threatened the presidency.

Here is the life of a great national and international figure, revealed with all his talents and contradictions, told openly, directly, in his own completely recognizable voice. A unique book by a unique American.


From the Hardcover edition.

Hear an audio excerpt of Bill Clinton discussing his start, his book, and his parents (4:37), and remembering the day he met JFK (1:27).

Editorial Reviews

From Barnes & Noble
In this hefty volume, the former president recounts his hardscrabble childhood in Hope, Arkansas; the illustrious academic career that took him to Oxford and Yale Law School; and his meteoric rise in politics. Offering a candid appraisal of his successes and setbacks, Clinton devotes plenty of space here to his White House years, paying particular attention to the policy initiatives he feels to be his true legacy. After unprecedented pre-publication media attention and build-up, My Life rewards our enduring fascination with this charismatic and controversial figure— celebrated by some as his generation’s most brilliant politician and condemned by others for his personal excesses.
Larry McMurtry
William Jefferson Clinton's My Life is, by a generous measure, the richest American presidential autobiography - no other book tells us as vividly or fully what it is like to be president of the United States for eight years. Clinton had the good sense to couple great smarts with a solid education; he arrived in Washington in 1964 and has been the nation's - or perhaps the world's - No. 1 politics junkie ever since. And he can write - as Reagan, Ford, Nixon and Lyndon B. Johnson, to go no farther back, could not.
— The New York Times
More Reviews (1) Fewer Reviews
From The Critics
[Clinton's] life is too fascinating, his mind too brilliant, his desire to charm too strong to permit him to produce a boring book. The combination of analytic and emotional intelligence that made him a great politician now makes him a compelling raconteur.
— The Washington Post

Product Details

  • ISBN-13: 9781400043934
  • Publisher: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
  • Publication date: 6/22/2004
  • Sold by: Random House
  • Format: eBook
  • Sales rank: 45,589
  • File size: 6 MB
  • Items ship to U.S, APO/FPO and U.S. Protectorate addresses.

Read an Excerpt

Chapter One:

Early on the morning of August 19, 1946, I was born under a clear sky after a violent summer storm to a widowed mother in the Julia
Chester Hospital in Hope, a town of about six thousand in southwest Arkansas, thirty-three miles east of the Texas border at Texarkana. My mother named me William Jefferson Blythe III after my father, William Jefferson Blythe Jr., one of nine children of a poor farmer in Sherman, Texas, who died when my father was seventeen. According to his sisters, my father always tried to take care of them, and he grew up to be a handsome, hardworking, fun-loving man. He met my mother at Tri-State Hospital in Shreveport, Louisiana, in 1943, when she was training to be a nurse. Many times when I was growing up, I asked Mother to tell me the story of their meeting, courting, and marriage. He brought a date with some kind of medical emergency into the ward where she was working, and they talked and flirted while the other woman was being treated. On his way out of the hospital, he touched the finger on which she was wearing her boyfriend’s ring and asked her if she was married. She stammered “no”—she was single. The next day he sent the other woman flowers and her heart sank. Then he called Mother for a date, explaining that he always sent flowers when he ended a relationship.

Two months later, they were married and he was off to war. He served in a motor pool in the invasion of Italy, repairing jeeps and tanks. After the war, he returned to Hope for Mother and they moved to Chicago, where he got back his old job as a salesman for the Manbee Equipment Company. They bought a little house in the suburb of Forest Park but couldn’t move in for a couple of months, and since Mother was pregnant with me, they decided she should go home to Hope until they could get into the new house. On May 17, 1946, after moving their furniture into their new home, my father was driving from Chicago to Hope to fetch his wife. Late at night on Highway 60 outside of Sikeston, Missouri, he lost control of his car, a 1942 Buick, when the right front tire blew out on a wet road. He was thrown clear of the car but landed in, or crawled into, a drainage ditch dug to reclaim swampland. The ditch held three feet of water. When he was found, after a two-hour search, his hand was grasping a branch above the waterline. He had tried but failed to pull himself out. He drowned, only twenty-eight years old, married two years and eight months, only seven months of which he had spent with Mother.

That brief sketch is about all I ever really knew about my father. All my life I have been hungry to fill in the blanks, clinging eagerly to every photo or story or scrap of paper that would tell me more of the man who gave me life.

When I was about twelve, sitting on my uncle Buddy’s porch in Hope, a man walked up the steps, looked at me, and said, “You’re Bill Blythe’s son. You look just like him.” I beamed for days.

In 1974, I was running for Congress. It was my first race and the local paper did a feature story on my mother. She was at her regular coffee shop early in the morning discussing the article with a lawyer friend when one of the breakfast regulars she knew only casually came up to her and said, “I was there, I was the first one at the wreck that night.” He then told Mother what he had seen, including the fact that my father had retained enough consciousness or survival instinct to try to claw himself up and out of the water before he died. Mother thanked him, went out to her car and cried, then dried her tears and went to work.

In 1993, on Father’s Day, my first as President, the Washington Post ran a long investigative story on my father, which was followed over the next two months by other investigative pieces by the Associated Press and many smaller papers. The stories confirmed the things my mother and I knew. They also turned up a lot we didn’t know, including the fact that my father had probably been married three times before he met Mother, and apparently had at least two more children.

My father’s other son was identified as Leon Ritzenthaler, a retired owner of a janitorial service, from northern California. In the article, he said he had written me during the ‘92 campaign but had received no reply. I don’t remember hearing about his letter, and considering all the other bullets we were dodging then, it’s possible that my staff kept it from me. Or maybe the letter was just misplaced in the mountains of mail we were receiving. Anyway, when I read about Leon, I got in touch with him and later met him and his wife, Judy, during one of my stops in northern California. We had a happy visit and since then we’ve corresponded in holiday seasons. He and I look alike, his birth certificate says his father was mine, and I wish I’d known about him a long time ago.

Somewhere around this time, I also received information confirming news stories about a daughter, Sharon Pettijohn, born Sharon Lee Blythe in Kansas City in 1941, to a woman my father later divorced. She sent copies of her birth certificate, her parents’ marriage license, a photo of my father, and a letter to her mother from my father asking about “our baby” to Betsey Wright, my former chief of staff in the governor’s office. I’m sorry to say that, for whatever reason, I’ve never met her.

This news breaking in 1993 came as a shock to Mother, who by then had been battling cancer for some time, but she took it all in stride. She said young people did a lot of things during the Depression and the war that people in another time might disapprove of. What mattered was that my father was the love of her life and she had no doubt of his love for her. Whatever the facts, that’s all she needed to know as her own life moved toward its end. As for me, I wasn’t quite sure what to make of it all, but given the life I’ve led, I could hardly be surprised that my father was more complicated than the idealized pictures I had lived with for nearly half a century.

In 1994, as we headed for the celebration of the fiftieth anniversary of D-day, several newspapers published a story on my father’s war record, with a snapshot of him in uniform. Shortly afterward, I received a letter from Umberto Baron of Netcong, New Jersey, recounting his own experiences during the war and after. He said that he was a young boy in Italy when the Americans arrived, and that he loved to go to their camp, where one soldier in particular befriended him, giving him candy and showing him how engines worked and how to repair them. He knew him only as Bill. After the war, Baron came to the United States, and, inspired by what he had learned from the soldier who called him “Little GI Joe,” he opened his own garage and started a family. He told me he had lived the American dream, with a thriving business and three children. He said he owed so much of his success in life to that young soldier, but hadn’t had the opportunity to say good-bye then, and had often wondered what had happened to him. Then, he said, “On Memorial Day of this year, I was thumbing through a copy of the New York Daily News with my morning coffee when suddenly I felt as if I was struck by lightning. There in the lower left-hand corner of the paper was a photo of Bill. I felt chills to learn that Bill was none other than the father of the President of the United States.”

In 1996, the children of one of my father’s sisters came for the first time to our annual family Christmas party at the White House and brought me a gift: the condolence letter my aunt had received from her congressman, the great Sam Rayburn, after my father died. It’s just a short form letter and appears to have been signed with the autopen of the day, but I hugged that letter with all the glee of a six-year-old boy getting his first train set from Santa Claus. I hung it in my private office on the second floor of the White House, and looked at it every night.

Shortly after I left the White House, I was boarding the USAir shuttle in Washington for New York when an airline employee stopped me to say that his stepfather had just told him he had served in the war with my father and had liked him very much. I asked for the old vet’s phone number and address, and the man said he didn’t have it but would get it to me. I’m still waiting, hoping there will be one more human connection to my father.

At the end of my presidency, I picked a few special places to say goodbye and thanks to the American people. One of them was Chicago, where Hillary was born; where I all but clinched the Democratic nomination on St. Patrick’s Day 1992; where many of my most ardent supporters live and many of my most important domestic initiatives in crime, welfare, and education were proved effective; and, of course, where my parents went to live after the war. I used to joke with Hillary that if my father hadn’t lost his life on that rainy Missouri highway, I would have grown up a few miles from her and we probably never would have met. My last event was in the Palmer House Hotel, scene of the only photo I have of my parents together, taken just before Mother came back to Hope in 1946. After the speech and the good-byes, I went into a small room where I met a woman, Mary Etta Rees, and her two daughters. She told me she had grown up and gone to high school with my mother, then had gone north to Indiana to work in a war industry, married, stayed, and raised her children. Then she gave me another precious gift: the letter my twenty-three-year-old mother had written on her birthday to her friend, three weeks after my father’s death, more than fifty-four years earlier. It was vintage Mother. In her beautiful hand, she wrote of her heartbreak and her determination to carry on: “It seemed almost unbelievable at the time but you see I am six months pregnant and the thought of our baby keeps me going and really gives me the whole world before me.”

My mother left me the wedding ring she gave my father, a few moving stories, and the sure knowledge that she was loving me for him too.

My father left me with the feeling that I had to live for two people, and that if I did it well enough, somehow I could make up for the life he should have had. And his memory infused me, at a younger age than most, with a sense of my own mortality. The knowledge that I, too, could die young drove me both to try to drain the most out of every moment of life and to get on with the next big challenge. Even when I wasn’t sure where I was going, I was always in a hurry.


From the Hardcover edition.

First Chapter

Early on the morning of August 19, 1946, I was born under a clear sky after a violent summer storm to a widowed mother in the Julia Chester Hospital in Hope, a town of about six thousand in southwest Arkansas, thirty-three miles east of the Texas border at Texarkana. My mother named me William Jefferson Blythe III after my father, William Jefferson Blythe Jr., one of nine children of a poor farmer in Sherman, Texas, who died when my father was seventeen. According to his sisters, my father always tried to take care of them, and he grew up to be a handsome, hardworking, fun-loving man. He met my mother at Tri- State Hospital in Shreveport, Louisiana, in 1943, when she was training to be a nurse. Many times when I was growing up, I asked Mother to tell me the story of their meeting, courting, and marriage. He brought a date with some kind of medical emergency into the ward where she was working, and they talked and flirted while the other woman was being treated. On his way out of the hospital, he touched the finger on which she was wearing her boyfriend's ring and asked her if she was married. She stammered "no"-she was single. The next day he sent the other woman flowers and her heart sank. Then he called Mother for a date, explaining that he always sent flowers when he ended a relationship.

Two months later, they were married and he was off to war. He served in a motor pool in the invasion of Italy, repairing jeeps and tanks. After the war, he returned to Hope for Mother and they moved to Chicago, where he got back his old job as a salesman for the Manbee Equipment Company. They bought a little house in the suburb of Forest Park but couldn't move in for a couple of months, and since Mother was pregnant with me, they decided she should go home to Hope until they could get into the new house. On May 17, 1946, after moving their furniture into their new home, my father was driving from Chicago to Hope to fetch his wife. Late at night on Highway 60 outside of Sikeston, Missouri, he lost control of his car, a 1942 Buick, when the right front tire blew out on a wet road. He was thrown clear of the car but landed in, or crawled into, a drainage ditch dug to reclaim swampland. The ditch held three feet of water. When he was found, after a two-hour search, his hand was grasping a branch above the waterline. He had tried but failed to pull himself out. He drowned, only twenty-eight years old, married two years and eight months, only seven months of which he had spent with Mother.

That brief sketch is about all I ever really knew about my father. All my life I have been hungry to fill in the blanks, clinging eagerly to every photo or story or scrap of paper that would tell me more of the man who gave me life.

When I was about twelve, sitting on my uncle Buddy's porch in Hope, a man walked up the steps, looked at me, and said, "You're Bill Blythe's son. You look just like him." I beamed for days.

In 1974, I was running for Congress. It was my first race and the local paper did a feature story on my mother. She was at her regular coffee shop early in the morning discussing the article with a lawyer friend when one of the breakfast regulars she knew only casually came up to her and said, "I was there, I was the first one at the wreck that night." He then told Mother what he had seen, including the fact that my father had retained enough consciousness or survival instinct to try to claw himself up and out of the water before he died. Mother thanked him, went out to her car and cried, then dried her tears and went to work.

In 1993, on Father's Day, my first as President, the Washington Post ran a long investigative story on my father, which was followed over the next two months by other investigative pieces by the Associated Press and many smaller papers. The stories confirmed the things my mother and I knew. They also turned up a lot we didn't know, including the fact that my father had probably been married three times before he met Mother, and apparently had at least two more children.

My father's other son was identified as Leon Ritzenthaler, a retired owner of a janitorial service, from northern California. In the article, he said he had written me during the '92 campaign but had received no reply. I don't remember hearing about his letter, and considering all the other bullets we were dodging then, it's possible that my staff kept it from me. Or maybe the letter was just misplaced in the mountains of mail we were receiving. Anyway, when I read about Leon, I got in touch with him and later met him and his wife, Judy, during one of my stops in northern California. We had a happy visit and since then we've corresponded in holiday seasons. He and I look alike, his birth certificate says his father was mine, and I wish I'd known about him a long time ago.

Somewhere around this time, I also received information confirming news stories about a daughter, Sharon Pettijohn, born Sharon Lee Blythe in Kansas City in 1941, to a woman my father later divorced. She sent copies of her birth certificate, her parents' marriage license, a photo of my father, and a letter to her mother from my father asking about "our baby" to Betsey Wright, my former chief of staff in the governor's office. I'm sorry to say that, for whatever reason, I've never met her.

This news breaking in 1993 came as a shock to Mother, who by then had been battling cancer for some time, but she took it all in stride. She said young people did a lot of things during the Depression and the war that people in another time might disapprove of. What mattered was that my father was the love of her life and she had no doubt of his love for her. Whatever the facts, that's all she needed to know as her own life moved toward its end. As for me, I wasn't quite sure what to make of it all, but given the life I've led, I could hardly be surprised that my father was more complicated than the idealized pictures I had lived with for nearly half a century.

In 1994, as we headed for the celebration of the fiftieth anniversary of D-day, several newspapers published a story on my father's war record, with a snapshot of him in uniform. Shortly afterward, I received a letter from Umberto Baron of Netcong, New Jersey, recounting his own experiences during the war and after. He said that he was a young boy in Italy when the Americans arrived, and that he loved to go to their camp, where one soldier in particular befriended him, giving him candy and showing him how engines worked and how to repair them. He knew him only as Bill. After the war, Baron came to the United States, and, inspired by what he had learned from the soldier who called him "Little GI Joe," he opened his own garage and started a family. He told me he had lived the American dream, with a thriving business and three children. He said he owed so much of his success in life to that young soldier, but hadn't had the opportunity to say good-bye then, and had often wondered what had happened to him. Then, he said, "On Memorial Day of this year, I was thumbing through a copy of the New York Daily News with my morning coffee when suddenly I felt as if I was struck by lightning. There in the lower left-hand corner of the paper was a photo of Bill. I felt chills to learn that Bill was none other than the father of the President of the United States."

In 1996, the children of one of my father's sisters came for the first time to our annual family Christmas party at the White House and brought me a gift: the condolence letter my aunt had received from her congressman, the great Sam Rayburn, after my father died. It's just a short form letter and appears to have been signed with the autopen of the day, but I hugged that letter with all the glee of a six-year-old boy getting his first train set from Santa Claus. I hung it in my private office on the second floor of the White House, and looked at it every night.

Shortly after I left the White House, I was boarding the USAir shuttle in Washington for New York when an airline employee stopped me to say that his stepfather had just told him he had served in the war with my father and had liked him very much. I asked for the old vet's phone number and address, and the man said he didn't have it but would get it to me. I'm still waiting, hoping there will be one more human connection to my father.

At the end of my presidency, I picked a few special places to say goodbye and thanks to the American people. One of them was Chicago, where Hillary was born; where I all but clinched the Democratic nomination on St. Patrick's Day 1992; where many of my most ardent supporters live and many of my most important domestic initiatives in crime, welfare, and education were proved effective; and, of course, where my parents went to live after the war. I used to joke with Hillary that if my father hadn't lost his life on that rainy Missouri highway, I would have grown up a few miles from her and we probably never would have met. My last event was in the Palmer House Hotel, scene of the only photo I have of my parents together, taken just before Mother came back to Hope in 1946. After the speech and the good-byes, I went into a small room where I met a woman, Mary Etta Rees, and her two daughters. She told me she had grown up and gone to high school with my mother, then had gone north to Indiana to work in a war industry, married, stayed, and raised her children. Then she gave me another precious gift: the letter my twenty-three-year-old mother had written on her birthday to her friend, three weeks after my father's death, more than fifty-four years earlier. It was vintage Mother. In her beautiful hand, she wrote of her heartbreak and her determination to carry on: "It seemed almost unbelievable at the time but you see I am six months pregnant and the thought of our baby keeps me going and really gives me the whole world before me."

My mother left me the wedding ring she gave my father, a few moving stories, and the sure knowledge that she was loving me for him too.

My father left me with the feeling that I had to live for two people, and that if I did it well enough, somehow I could make up for the life he should have had. And his memory infused me, at a younger age than most, with a sense of my own mortality. The knowledge that I, too, could die young drove me both to try to drain the most out of every moment of life and to get on with the next big challenge. Even when I wasn't sure where I was going, I was always in a hurry.

Excerpted from My Life by Bill Clinton. Copyright © 2004 by Bill Clinton. Excerpted by permission of Knopf, a division of Random House, Inc. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.

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  • Anonymous

    Posted December 10, 2011

    Great! Read over and over

    Wonderful read! He is human.

    1 out of 1 people found this review helpful.

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  • Anonymous

    Posted November 14, 2011

    Truly great read!

    You can't put this book down

    1 out of 1 people found this review helpful.

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  • Anonymous

    Posted January 24, 2012

    Great book by a great man.

    I loved reading this great book, it told me a lot about the man, i loved it very much.

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  • Posted September 24, 2010

    I Also Recommend:

    Captivating! You won't want to put the book down!

    This book was a wonderful read. The book is a little long but well worth it. It will give you a good idea why he believes in the polices that he does or a glance into his and Hillary's personal life. The part of this book that stood out to me, that shows why he believes in the polices that he does is the story of his grandfathers grocery store. His grandfather would black out the receipts of the customers who couldn't pay because his grandfather believed that if you're trying to feed your family and can't afford to, you need a break. Bill went on to say this is why he believed in food stamps. But what I think is the crux of the book is when he was elected to governor. A man who was on PCP had gotten a railroad tie and knocked down the door to the governors mansion. It took 3 very large secret service members to seduce the crazed man. I love this book and I highly recommend it to anyone looking for a good read. There were a few parts of the book weren't that well written. A good chunk of the book is filler. They are very bland and boring parts that are just there to fill the book. There are parts of the book that are just back and forth between him and someone he knows. This I a very well written and interesting book that gives a glimpse into this political and private life. If you liked this book you would also like the book written by his wife Hillary Clinton or our current president Barack Obama's book.

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  • Posted May 16, 2010

    A Life Not Yet Over

    My Life by Bill Clinton (957 pages) is immensely enjoyable - it would have been a great read even if it wasn't written by a former President of the United States. Besides the glimpses it offers into the Presidency and Mr Clinton's private life, it offers a guide for success: Start early, stay committed, rise above yourself and your circumstances, and persevere. The book is lucid, well written, and instructive. Mr Clinton, for example, discusses some of the people and lists several of the books that have been influential in his life, including Red Star Over China (Edgar Snow) and You Can't Go Home Again (Thomas Wolfe). He also serves to remind us that life consists of both successes and failures. For the former President, a balanced federal budget is a particularly relevant success story given the current climate of economic uncertainty, while the failure to broker successful negotiations between the Israelis and Palestinians continues to breed instability and human suffering. My Life is a gold mine of political ideas and personal lessons.

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  • Anonymous

    Posted June 5, 2009

    great read for all

    i would recommend this book to anyone. its a really enjoyable book that will keep you wanting more.

    0 out of 1 people found this review helpful.

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  • Anonymous

    Posted May 26, 2009

    I Also Recommend:

    president clinton tells all from the day he was born to his final day in the white house.

    former president bill clinton tells a true american story. he reveals a side of himself that was closed off to the public his entire eight years in office. he tells his story with enthusiasm and his own unforgetable charm. he leaves nothing unsaid in his journey coming from a middle class family in hope, arkansas to being presidant of the united states.

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  • Posted November 6, 2008

    more from this reviewer

    My Life by Bill Clinton

    When faced with impeachment after Monica rumor became The Story, President Clinton, to whom ambiguity was never part of his nature, took the worst situation to mean retreat from Office, which would not have relieved his soul.
    This autobiography is informative and tender in every corner. At times the ex-President aggravated his bitterness and despair; not a pleasing prospect for a vigorous man with an appetite for distinction. His excessive passions, one for his wife and the other for his daughter, at the end of the day had caused Miss Lewinski and partners to be removed from the White House. I believe the young lady was also a victim of irrational exuberance (Excuse me Mr. Greenspan)
    At times there is always some sort of melancholy demeanor than can grow daily more somber in high offices. President Clinton is telling us he could not possibly have been entirely impervious to the mounting evidence against him, such signs were motivated by political reasons from rival factions with nefarious ends - to hurt the Democrats from within.

    Clinton, once known for his vivacity, was now showing the strain of the shameful events.

    Clinton, the deep-rooted optimist who found it temperamentally difficult to resign from trouble, has had his face already sagging with worry as daily attacks compounded his sense of doom...

    At 55 he left office with a 65% approval rating. (One of the highest after WWII)
    However, the charismatic President looked a narrow-chest man with the face of a person much older in age. That did not at all resemble him nine years ago when he took that Office.

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  • Anonymous

    Posted April 3, 2008

    Great Book

    This is an outstanding book and was beatifully written by Bill. He tells us many great stories about his childhood and the ups and downs of his presidency. If you liked Bill as much as I did you will definatly enjoy this book. I think he has done many of great things for his country and he tells you all about it here. And also the downs of his presidency were the mistakes being made like the affair with Monica and whitewater. But everybody makes mistakes and I'm not like the hypocrite republicans and is concerned about his personal life. This was an enteresting and exciting book and like I said if you like Bill you will enjoy this really fine read.

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  • Anonymous

    Posted November 19, 2007

    An Interesting Book About a Special Time

    Back in 1992, I did not vote for President Clinton, being a conservative Republican. However, the 1990s were a very special time, with massive budget shortfalls being turned into surpluses as far as the eye can see, welfare programs being modified to encourage work, peace arising among nations, and unmatched economic prosperity for all classes of people. This book discusses these and other accomplishments while the president faced a strong headwind from congressman Newt and his buddies, along with Special Whitewater prosecutor Kenneth Star. Of course, President Clinton's major error in judgement with Monica is discussed with candor. He give appropriate credit to his critics at times. My sense is this is a pretty good account of this time frame from Mr. Clinton's standpoint . . . and it is interesting and entertaining. Now, I'm hoping he can contribute to getting the U.S. out of the deep ditch his successor has put us in.

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  • Anonymous

    Posted September 17, 2006

    Great Read!

    I had heard this book was long-winded and thought I would not like, but it was possibly the most interesting and gripping book I've ever read. If you have a passion for history, politics, the presidency, etc., than you'll love this. Clinton writes beautifully and with a great amount of candor.

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  • Anonymous

    Posted November 2, 2006

    A Legacy Builder...

    Proverbs 24:16 says 'for though a righteous man falls seven times, he rises again, but the wicked are brought down by calamity.' Bill Clinton has fallen, and I am sure the Monica Lewinsky affair is not the only time. But thank goodness he got up again. Bill Clinton's autobiography is not littered with accounts of his shortfallings or indiscretions. Bill Clinton's life is a testimony to grace and redemption (and probably continues to be!). So, if you are hoping to feel good about yourself by reading about somebody who may have screwed up more than you, you will not be satisfied. Instead, Clinton allows the reader to get inside his head, and see what passions motivate him. His passion is not for politics per se, but for the people affected by politics. He states that he was the poorest President to ever take office and I can believe why. Whenever he holds down a job that looks like it could pay something, he is off, serving somebody's campaign, or pouring his life savings into his own campaign. Questionable to me is how negative a picture he paints of his Republican opposition. Although many wrongs have been made, I cannot believe the Democrats have been as victimized as he would have us believe. Hopefully, I will find an autobiography such as this written about a Republican president (does Dubya write?), and get a different view. Besides learning about Clinton himself, I also learned a lot about American history, from about JFK onwards. If it were not so overtly pro-Democrat, it would probably make a great history textbook. The greatest thing I took away from this book, though, more than the history or the policies of Clinton and the Democrats, was how good a person can still be, even though the outside seems to be in shambles. Bill Clinton is the real thing and I applaud his legacy.

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  • Anonymous

    Posted May 19, 2006

    Rambling But A Good Insight

    This book is long and rambles on and on but unlike other celebrity books that appear more ghostwritten than actually written by the celebrity this book due to its length and conversational tone clearly is authored mostly by Clinton and it is a good insight into the man. Clinton may have some personal shortcomings but he was an effective and accomplished President-- he balanced the federal budget, generated tremendous economic growth that benefitted all Americans, lessened poverty, reformed welfare, lowered crime rates thru the COPS grant program, created several new national parks and undertook other legal reforms to protect the environment, made the federal government workforce smaller and more efficient, and he engaged in a great deal of foreign travel and international relations work. His Administration also fought terrorism--actually catching the World Trade Center and Oklahoma City bombers for example. Clinton's shortcomings are undeniable-- the affair that led to his impeachment--his uneven response to terrorism (such as the non response to the bombing of the USS Cole even after hunting down other bombers)-- the poor selection of directors and oversight of the CIA and FBI--his dubious last minute pardons-- all which leave a bad impression. But overall Clinton was one of the more successful Presidents despite the visciousness of his political critics. This book is worth reading to gain some real understanding of this complex, flawed, yet accomplished man.

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  • Anonymous

    Posted April 7, 2006

    Bill Clinton My Life.

    The title of the book is Bill Clinton My Life. The author of the book is Bill Clinton, our 42nd President of the United States of America. The genre of this book is a Biography. The major theme of this book is to learn about Bill Clinton¿s life, and how it was when he was a kid and how it was when he was growing up. The only main character in this book is Bill Clinton. The setting of this book is in a town called Hope, in Arkansas where Bill was born on August 19,1946. The point of view of this book is first person because it is a biography, and I think it is important because without first person point of view the book will not be the same. If the book would have been second or third person the book would have been an autobiography. The book wouldn¿t have had the same excitement as it did when Bill Clinton was telling it. Bill did a very good job explaining his childhood, his school years, and the friends he met throughout his young life and some that ended up working along with him during his presidency. There was a moment of suspense that I thought that was kind of funny but it had me concerned to. One day Bill was mowing the grass and he discovered that it became a nesting place for bumblebees. They swarmed him flying all over his body, his arms, and his face, but not one of the bees stung him. He ran off to catch his breath and about ten minutes later he went back to the bee hive. He didn¿t even go ten yards and they swarmed him again and this time they stung him all over his body. One bee got stuck between his belt and his belly button and kept stinging him over and over. He was delirious and had to be rushed to the doctor. Bill learned a valuable lesson about bees, life, if you get out of danger once, don¿t go back to the scene.

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  • Anonymous

    Posted January 11, 2006

    A good book about a terrible man

    The book is written fairly well, but Bill Clinton was one of the most corrupt presidents to ever live. So, basically, if you are a democrat blinded by the word 'democrat' that appeared on Clinton's ballot, and cannot see that he was a pitiful president, then by all means read the book. If you have decency and a mind of your own, stay away!

    0 out of 1 people found this review helpful.

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  • Anonymous

    Posted December 5, 2005

    Words From An Intelligent Leader!!

    It was truly inspirational to read the words of our former President, considering the conditions under which this nation finds itself, one forgets what a True leader sounds like. We had one! Unfortunately many Americans listen to the rhetoric that is spewed forth and actually believe!!! It was a real joy to read!!

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  • Anonymous

    Posted December 23, 2005

    A terrible book

    What a sad and pathetic figure. No doubt history will judge him for what he was/is. A failed president with failed policies with a sex drive for anyone who would pay attention to him. Is he really an intellectual? If he is, I choose not to be.

    0 out of 1 people found this review helpful.

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  • Anonymous

    Posted October 15, 2005

    WOW!

    I listened to the audio and was very surprised that I enjoyed it so much! I was especially surprised at the author's candid approach to writing this book. Because I was listening to the author read the book, I especially got a personal view that I would not have gotten otherwise! There were lots of political details that I did not have as much interest in but the presence of them gave me ample time to anticipate more of the other parts of this book! I would recommend this book to anyone, even if they don't really think that they would enjoy it! They may be surprised. I was!

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  • Anonymous

    Posted June 12, 2005

    As a I ranian man I found this book very fair and wondetful writing

    I learned a lot about US. How the US government is running. He is a real human with his up and down stories.

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  • Anonymous

    Posted April 2, 2005

    Wow what a man.

    Bill Clinton pours out his life like a glass of fine wine. A winning account of all those things about this man that fascinate and awe us. Glimpses into his personal and private life that reveal the essence of the man and a remarkable look at the U.S. presidency such as I never imagined I could know about. Amazing and a wonderful worthwhile book.

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