The Places Beyond A Biographer's Reach

One of the paradoxes of Bill Clinton is that he was drawn to a profession that promises constant tension and anxiety, conditions hardly conducive to keeping old demons at bay. Politics by its very nature demands parallel lives to some degree. It is the rare politician who can always say, in every situation, what he really believes or behave as he really is, and that politician is unlikely to get elected president. Politics makes it difficult for even the most secure and grounded people to feel integrated in mind, body and soul.

Rick Stearns, a fellow Rhodes Scholar, is quoted in the memoir as saying that Clinton was unsuited for politics because he wasn't tough enough. That was a serious misjudgment, of course; in many ways, Clinton proved to be the toughest Democrat of the postwar generation. But even if Stearns had been right, Clinton would have tried politics anyway. "I didn't think I could do anything else as well," he writes. After the lecture at the University of Arkansas about darkness and light, a student asked him why he was attracted to politics. Clinton said that it was "the only track" on which he could run.

Would Clinton have freed himself from his old demons had he lived a life outside politics? It is an almost academic question now, though a partial answer might emerge from how he lives his post-presidential life. In any case, for better and worse, his enormous drive to be a public figure, and to prevail, was overpowering. He chose a career that demanded the most of his talented outer life and imposed the most stress on his troubled interior life. After reading his book, that is how I view what he accomplished, or failed to accomplish, in his presidency. It was a constant battle between the man from Hope and the man of pessimism.

During the 1992 campaign, and occasionally during Clinton's White House years, I wondered why he argued so insistently that the media were mistakenly obsessed with his personal attributes and should instead be focused on his public actions, when it seemed so apparent that his personal actions were affecting his ability to govern. It made me think that he was a careless optimist trying to rush past his own problems and avoid responsibility. Now, as the whole melodrama of Clinton, Lewinsky and Kenneth Starr recedes and seems less comprehensible year by year, I think he was atrocious in his behavior but essentially right in arguing that he should be judged by how he governed the country, not how he governed himself. More than that, I think I now understand better why he felt that way.

Clinton's career was constructed on the paradox of parallel lives. If politics exacerbated his dark side, it also offered the best opportunity for him to use his uncommonly bright exterior to counteract it by doing something outside himself and larger than himself. The usual way of defining character is by talking about what is "inside" a person. From a lifetime of concern about his interior life, Clinton believed that anyone looking inside him would find that "it was dark down there." Considering "My Life" from that perspective, I find it is amazing not that he had so much trouble, but that he was able to fight off the demons and succeed to the degree that he did.

Author's e-mail:

maranissd@washpost.com

David Maraniss, an associate editor at The Post, won a Pulitzer Prize in 1993 for his coverage of Bill Clinton. His Clinton biography, "First in His Class," was published in 1995.