Reviewers have almost unanimously dismissed Bill Clinton’s mammoth memoir as dull. It is easy to see why: much of it is an undigested mass of diary entries, apparently re-dictated without reflection. Old speeches seem to have been pasted in randomly in the same manner.
And yet, if you gird yourself to read the book through, you keep stumbling across odd moments of revelation. Like this one: in the summer of 1971, young Bill Clinton had just been appointed co-ordinator of southern states for George McGovern’s campaign for the Democratic presidential nomination. The trouble was that Clinton’s new girlfriend, Hillary Rodham, had got a summer job at a law firm in Oakland, California. So Clinton quit the campaign and headed west. “During the day when Hillary was at work,” he writes, “I read books in the parks and coffee shops.”
Here was Bill Clinton’s first major political responsibility and he shrugged it off to chase a girl and spend his summer in coffee shops. History sometimes really does repeat itself.
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