The President We Deserve: Bill Clinton: His Rise, Falls, and Comebacks

by Martin Walker

Martin Walker's critical biography of Bill Clinton focuses on the president as a classic figure of America's post-World War II meritocracy, a poor boy from the segregated old South who won scholarships to elite universities and became a lawyer fascinated by the process and the power of government.  Walker also unearths a private life that has resonated to the rhythmic clichés of a country-and-western   Clinton's father died in a car wreck before he was born; his mother buried three husbands and married two more; his stepdaddy beat his mother and fired gunshots into the bedroom walls; one brother went to jail; and his own marriage tottered under the pain he admitted inflicting upon it.  This president's background is as grittily American as the woeful tales that wail from jukeboxes in bars across the land.  He is Bubba with brains, a redneck with a Rhodes scholarship--America at her most raw, and most cultivated.  And his first term has been unpredictable, volatile, and fascinating.  Martin Walker shows us the why, the how, and the future of the Clinton administration.

Genres: Biography, American History, Politics

360 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 1996

About the author

Martin Walker is the U.S. bureau chief for The Guardian (London), a regular commentator for CNN, and a columnist for newspapers in the United States, Europe, and Moscow. A published novelist and poet, he lives in Washington, D.C. with his wife, the novelist Julia Watson, and their two daughters.

Reviews

[Rebecca Wilkins · Rating 4 out of 5]

I spent the summer reading Martin Walker's BRUNO CHIEF OF POLICE mystery series. I saw that he also wrote non-fiction in the past. The book that sounded most interesting was called CLINTON THE PRESIDENT THEY DESERVE. I had to get the book from Belgium as it wasn't available in the USA. It was written in the mid 90's. I see the title for the American version is slightly different being THE PRESIDENT WE DESERVE. I found the title quite provocative no matter whether it is "they" or "we" and wondered if some outsider (Walker is a Brit who spent 8 years in Washington DC writing for The Guardian) should write a book about the current US President and whether or not we deserve him! I am recently leaning toward the positive on that question.

Anyway this was a very interesting book and quite thorough, although somewhat jumbled up in that I never quite knew what year we were in and he repeated stuff which made me think these were originally separate essays or something. The book ends in 1996 with Clinton's re-election so none of the Lewinski incident is included. The hatred of Hillary started early and Walker says she made herself "an inviting target". She always had a sense of entitlement and arrogance but she was a smart woman and like so many other women didn't deserve the treatment she got. She was seen as the ultimate liberal even though she had come the farthest being a Goldwater Republican in her youth. Bill Clinton called himself a New Democrat but it apparently meant a "liberal Republican".

It was interesting to see how little has changed or the similarities between Clinton and Trump. Clinton went around the Washington Press Corps to reach the public by appearances and using smaller TV stations and talk radio outlets while Trump uses Twitter, not available to Clinton at the time. Clinton also "rejoiced in the adrenaline of the PERMANENT CAMPAIGN. He loved to plunge back into the massed rallies" which he was good at and mirrors Trump's constant rallies with his base.

For Clinton "the curious role that became the highlight of his campaigning trips---the TV host at one of his carefully staged town meetings---Clinton usually entranced audiences who were accustomed to the superficial charms and glib cliches of the talk show host." Just as the current American is comfortable with the reality TV show star.

Clinton, however, was a Rhodes scholar who was constantly reading books or talking to people to reinforce or learn about world affairs and political issues. "There was never a more assiduous maintainer of acquaintance and friendship than Clinton, and his political network was extraordinary."

Pat Buchanan keeps popping up with Walker quoting him in 1992 saying, "We must take back our culture and our country." In WHO WE BE by Jeff Chang, Buchanan says: "2009 the year that radicalized much of white America." Walker discussing the 90's says that "America's great swing to the right was overwhelmingly a male phenomenon." It didn't start in 2009 and reading about the 90's points clearly toward where we have ended up.

But was Clinton the President we/they deserved?

"Clinton was simply not familiar with the military model of leadership rooted in hierarchy and authority. He had not been bought up in that kind of home. He had been educated in an era and in universities where he was encouraged to speak back to his teachers and question authority. And he learned to govern as a way to rally consensus, as part of a generation whose first models of public action were the teach-in and the seminar. He was utterly characteristic as a man of his times."

"Clinton had been brought up by women and accepted women as intellectual equals."

"He was one of the most typical of all American Presidents, in that his own life paralleled so much of the nation's own growth. Bill Clinton contained all of the characteristics of his generation, distilled to an intensity that matched his ambition. He was the archetypal postwar American, his life unfolding to the rhythms of the vast social revolution that was gathering speed around him. The contradictions in his life defined him. He was, in his flaws and sensual weaknesses, his readiness to put off hard decisions until it was almost too late, his fondness for spending, and his casual approach to debt, utterly typical of the America of his day. He was, in that sense, the president America deserved."