Observer Review: The Natural By Joe Klein Essay, Research Paper
Slick Willie: the half-truthThe Naturalby Joe KleinCoronet ?7.99, pp230Joe Klein’s dedication to a book subtitled ‘the misunderstood presidency of Bill Clinton’ – an apology to his children for the years he was not there – tells you all you need to know about the relationship of author to subject. Where was he? Following Bill Clinton, of course.Klein is a longstanding and distinguished US political commentator, who has written for both Newsweek and the New Yorker. In the early 1990s, he had the luck, or possibly misfortune, to encounter the then governor of Arkansas, the great white hope of the ailing Democrats, as he began his assault on the balsa-wood presidency of Bush the First. Like many others in the press corps, Klein fell under Clinton’s spell.For a year and more, Klein followed Clinton’s rollercoaster candidacy and watched an awesome campaigner on the primary trail. Even now, after all the disappointments and betrayals, he is still just a little bit in love: ‘There was,’ he writes, ‘a touching, uncynical transparency to the campaign: the candidate [Clinton] actually seemed moved by the stories he heard along the way.’Klein, who understands better than most the spookily intuitive psychological skills of his subject, is also revealingly good on ‘the physical, almost carnal, quality of [Clinton’s] public appearances’.On the road with the boys on the bus, Klein became a good deal closer to the man his staff called ‘Elvis’ or ‘the Natural’ than is usual for political commentators. There is a scene where, in a bowling alley together one midnight in New Hampshire, an exhausted six-foot Clinton actually leans against the diminutive reporter, ‘a strange, feline sensation’, from a political animal who ‘needed physical contact’.Love affairs, alas, must end. Prince Hal became king. Once Clinton was in the White House and the Clintonistas were launched on the four-year public-affairs seminar that was Clinton’s first term, Klein was just another New Democrat commentator. And as the Pepsi- and pizza-fuelled shambles in the West Wing turned into legislative gridlock, and then to congressional meltdown, Klein, who, like many Americans of his generation, had pinned his hopes on the boy wonder from Hope, Arkansas, found himself contrasting the huge promise of the campaign with the meagre accomplishments of office. His falling out of love with ‘the Natural’ (a borrowing from the Robert Redford movie) is a theme of this book that’s particularly compelling.But he could not escape Clinton’s spell. In a move that speaks volumes about the limitations of political journalism and the strangely redemptive power of fiction, he sat down in secret and in a white heat wrote a roman à clef about his experiences in the snows of New Hampshire and among the dogwoods of the South during the amazing spring of 1992.Primary Colors by ‘Anonymous’ (a device lifted from eighteenth-century English politics) was the sensation of 1996. As well as combining a cracking yarn about the dirty tricks of American primary campaigns with a brilliant portrait of Jack Stanton, aka the candidate, the book inspired a firestorm of debate about the identity of the mysterious author who seemed to know so much about the Clintons. Bestsellerism followed and then came the Washington Post’ s disclosure of Anonymous’s identity.Partly because he had lied to his colleagues about his authorship, he suffered a brutal evisceration by an enraged press corps. Klein claims now that Primary Colors was ‘a defence of larger-than-life politicians’ and, therefore, less critical of the Clintons than it seemed at the time, but there’s no doubt that there was a coolness where once there had been warmth.It hardly mattered. Even as Clinton was triangulating his way through the vicious partisan world of late Nineties Washington, towards his Oval Office rendezvous with his buxom nemesis, Klein’s novel (and subsequent movie deal) had not only made him a fortune but also established him forever as the supreme commentator on the Clinton presidency, a phenomenon he came to consider ‘tumultuous, sloppy, often brilliant, exhaustive – and elusive’.The elusiveness has not ceased to torment Klein. Since those heady days, he has continued to wrestle with his feelings about Clinton and to ply his trade as a magazine and newspaper commentator. There was a sequel to Primary Colors. Like most sequels, The Running Mate was a disappointment. Klein’s moment in the sun was over. Clinton, however, was still very much around and showing no signs of wanting to leave the stage on which he was conducting his bizarre love/hate-fest with the American people.So now, brilliantly, Klein has returned to his theme once more. The Natural is the latest and by far the best addition to the library of Clinton studies, better even than George Stephanopoulos’s excellent Clinton White House memoir, All Too Human. Inspired by a series of conversations between Klein and the President (their old relationship restored) in the aftermath of the disastrous Gore campaign of 2000, The Natural succinctly and deftly analyses both the highs and lows of the Clinton presidency and also, perhaps as importantly, its extraordinary modus operandi.Some of it is very funny. Even joyless New Labour policy wonks will enjoy the crisp analysis of the healthcare débcle, the welfare reform and the Gingrich revolution. Outside the evaluation of Clinton’s programme, Klein does not shy away from a discussion of Monica Lewinsky (the low point of the second term and ‘the most lurid month in the history of the presidency’), an astounding (and astoundingly tacky) drama that now seems strangely insignificant.The Natural is absorbing because what it describes is the American political tragedy of our times – a brilliant, charismatic president (perhaps the smartest man to occupy the White House in the twentieth century) whose character flaws, exacerbated by power and finally exposed by the media that had propelled him to the top of the greasy pole, prevented him from achieving the greatness that seemed at the outset his for the taking.At the end, Klein cites Machiavelli’s warning against ozio (indolence) as the greatest threat to the political health of a republic such as America’s. Old Nick is certainly one sixteenth-century master who would enjoy Klein’s anatomy of Clinton the multi-faceted, psephological seducer. The other is closer to home. Perhaps only a Shakespeare could truly do justice to the astounding, and fascinating, complexity of William Jefferson Clinton, a man, as Santayana said of William James, ’so extremely natural that there was no knowing what his nature was, or what came next’.