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Overview
From best-selling, award-winning biographer Nigel Hamilton, this is an insightful, prodigiously researched, and wonderfully readable account of Bill Clinton’s first term in office. It shows how a well-meaning but naïve new president failed to assert true leadership in his first two years, and then illustrates how, in an astonishing act of self-reinvention, the president turned defeat into victory. Bill Clinton: Mastering the Presidency is a gripping tale of hubris and redemption—and a chronicle of one of the most dramatic reversals of fortune in modern American politics.Editorials
Booklist
A straightforward, effective recounting of the ups and downs of a presidency shaped as much by personality as by policy.Bryan Burrough
Authorial idiosyncrasies aside, the book has its merits. Hamilton ably illustrates Clinton's strengths and weaknesses as a leader, how he thrived whenever the occasion called for him to inspire or commiserate, and how time and again his failures could be traced to what Hamilton calls his "inability to function as a manager of men and women in a structured environment"…And a few of Hamilton's insights do feel fresh. He is especially smart on the internal dynamics of Hillary's famed right-wing conspiracy, advancing the case that it was Clinton's own failures during his first year in office that emboldened those Arkansas troopers to come forward in 1993, which led to David Brock, Paula Jones and the long national stumble down sleazy street.—The Washington Post
The Observer
Scintillating biography, Hamilton's specialty, with a few nods to psychoanalysis, lies not just in telling us what happened but why and how it happened. As he follows William Jefferson Clinton from straitened beginnings to glorious success, he tries to burrow inside the man, to think as he thought, to see through his eyes the decisions that had to be made.Publishers Weekly
This second volume of the author's biography casts Clinton's first term as a Miltonian epic of fall and redemption. The years 1993-1994, culminating in the Democrats' loss of Congress in midterm elections, are "Paradise Lost": a disastrous failure caused by a weak White House chief of staff (Mack McLarty), Clinton's own promiscuous openness to ideas and indecisiveness and, most of all, "co-president" Hillary's baleful influence. 1995-1996 are "Paradise Regained": a new chief of staff (Leon Panetta) restores order, Hillary learns her place and Clinton grows a spine, comforts the nation after the Oklahoma City bombing, humiliates Newt Gingrich and wins reelection. (Alas, enter Monica Lewinsky, "a luscious fruit in the Garden of Eden, eager to be plucked.") Hamilton styles this arc, with many military metaphors, as a study of Clinton's maturing capacity for "command" as he grows from "arch-baby boomer" to "undisputed leader of his country." Unfortunately, this focus on character often overshadows the substance of policy (the treatment of Hillary's byzantine health-care plan is especially sketchy) and is not entirely convincing, since the early, feckless Clinton seems to have accomplished more than the "determinedly presidential" later Clinton, with his third way politics of triangulation. At the celebratory end of Hamilton's account, Clinton's comeback is a merely personal triumph, devoid of political significance. (July)
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