BECAUSE HE COULD
By Dick Morris and Eileen McGann
Regan. 303 pp. $25.95
President Clinton with Dick Morris (right) in 1996
(Ap / Cnn)
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Dick Morris claims membership in a select Washington establishment: those who read every page of My Life, Bill Clinton's Sominex of a memoir. But even among that rarefied group, Morris stands out. He must have been the only reader who was shocked to discover that a presidential memoir was really, really bad. Clinton's former consigliere was so disappointed with the 42nd president's bloated autobiography that he and his wife, Eileen McGann, have dashed off their own book in response, 270 pages (plus endnotes and an index) of rebuttal, addenda and corrections.
For those keeping score at home, Because He Could is Dick Morris's second rebuttal to a book authored by a Clinton (the first was Rewriting History, written in response to Hillary Rodham Clinton's Living History) and at least his fourth book that relies heavily on his encounters with the former president. The man is like the bird that lives by eating ticks off the rhino's back. To assure those who suspect that the Morris oeuvre draws its inspiration from personal animosity, he and McGann make grand claims that history obliges them to respond to Clinton's omissions and untruths in My Life. They appear to believe that, were it not for the publication of their book, future historians would treat My Life as fact, rather than memoir.
Because He Could, published less than four months after My Life landed in stores, comes across as a hardcover version of the type of freelance press criticism published on the Internet. Online, it would be called SmarterMyLife.com. Like a good political Web log, Because He Could is parasitic, idiosyncratic and never boring. It's sometimes dishy and studded with small insights. But it's also over-the-top, contradictory and full of itself.
This extended blog entry with a dust jacket doesn't manage to avoid the drawbacks of the form. In the book's very first paragraph, the authors write of Clinton that "we still can't really say that we truly understand this complex, contradictory man." Two pages later, Morris -- much of the book is in his voice -- declares that reading My Life "permitted me -- for the first time since we met in 1977 -- to understand this man fully." Other times, Morris and McGann toss off an unexplained, unelaborated observation, such as the assertion that Bill Clinton was "the first postmodern president" or that he was "relatively devoid of emotion." They're eager to exhaustively catalogue what they feel to be My Life's imperfections: One chapter, titled merely "Errata," consists of a 35-page compendium ("a partial list") of "the statements in My Life that require rectification" and that didn't fit into any of Because He Could's previous 200-plus pages. And like any blogger, Morris feels no shame in footnoting himself: "In my previous account of this episode -- in Behind the Oval Office . . . "; "In a previous book, Off With Their Heads, I recounted. . . ." The only thing missing is the hyperlink.
Morris paints himself as a man who specialized in giving two kinds of counsel: good advice that Clinton took and great advice that Clinton ignored. If the president had listened to Dick Morris, Mohammed Atta would have been arrested before Sept. 11, and the countries later identified as the "axis of evil" would have been put on notice in 1995. What's more, Clinton would have never lied about an affair in a deposition, he would have salvaged some portion of health-care reform, and he would have divorced Hillary in the 1980s when dissolving his marriage wouldn't have hurt him politically. At one point in the book, Morris recalls grabbing Clinton by the shoulders during his first term, "shaking his slack body," and screaming at him with dialogue that sounds like it was taken from a Jerry Bruckheimer movie. ("You used to take chances," Morris shouts. "You used to have guts.") "Steeling himself after this confrontation," Clinton went on to balance the budget, take on the tobacco lobby and use force in Bosnia, Morris modestly concludes.
The best elements of Because He Could resemble the micro-initiatives Morris recommended to President Clinton: an appealing but loosely connected assemblage in which the whole is less than the parts. Among the nuggets that turn up in the stream: Clinton's now famous "Because I could" explanation for his affair with Monica Lewinsky -- to which the title of Morris and McGann's book alludes, and which Clinton called "the most morally indefensible reason anybody could have for doing anything" -- was itself an allusion to a Newt Gingrich comment reported in My Life. Clinton writes that the former speaker of the House explained why Republicans planned to impeach him by saying, "Because we can." Morris and McGann portray Clinton's greatest political strength, his empathy, as also his biggest weakness, because he understood his opponents' viewpoints too well and because his "highly tuned antenna amplified all risk to a screeching volume." When Bill Clinton was indecisive, they suggest, it was because he felt too much pain. Other tidbits: Morris says that he and Clinton bought political ads in 1996 aimed at influencing "the likely jury pool in Arkansas" for any potential trial by Kenneth Starr. He says Clinton wanted to promote class-based affirmative action but feared a 1996 primary challenge from Jesse Jackson. And, Morris says, Clinton told Senate Democrats that he would "make no deals with the Republicans for the balance of his term" if Democrats acquitted him in the Senate impeachment trial. Morris says the pact scuttled "an across-the-board deal providing for national debt reduction, Social Security and Medicare stabilization, tax cuts, and a prescription drug benefit for the elderly."
Perhaps most interesting of all, Morris writes that Clinton shifted "from economics to values issues" before his 1996 reelection campaign. Because He Could was written before the 2004 election and the subsequent chatter about the importance of "moral values" to voters, but Morris predicts -- based on the elections of 1996, 2000 and 2002 -- that a "fundamental shift is occurring" in the electorate, which is moving "away from bread-and-butter issues to quality-of-life concerns." As with so many of the bloggy insights in Because He Could, Morris spends barely more than a page on the subject so he can move on to complete his list of objections to My Life's sprawl.
But Clinton's legacy depends less on how historians regard his memoir than on how they regard his effort to revive the fortunes of the Democratic Party. Based on the elections of 2000 and 2004, it's at least possible that Clinton will be remembered as the man who saved his party, then lost it again by persuading a large majority of rural America that he and his fellow Democrats represent the party of libertines. Try as they might, neither Bill Clinton nor Dick Morris can blame My Life for that. •
Chris Suellentrop is the deputy Washington bureau chief of Slate.
