The Nineties: A Book

by Chuck Klosterman

It’s always framed as surprising, for example, that Hillary Clinton (then Hillary Rodham) was a staff attorney during the Watergate impeachment hearings in 1974, and then married a man the following year who himself would be impeached roughly twenty-five years later. “You can’t make my life up,” Hillary would later joke. The connection seems like amazing trivia. But perhaps it explains the attraction between a woman academically intrigued by high-stakes political chess and a man who intuitively understood the dangerous contradiction between his growing political ambition and his own human weakness. Here is Bill Clinton writing about himself: I am a living paradox—deeply religious yet not as convinced of my exact beliefs as I ought to be; wanting responsibility yet shirking it; loving the truth but often times giving way to falsity. . . . I detest selfishness, but see it in the mirror every day. . . . I view those, some of whom are very dear to me, who have never learned how to live. I desire and struggle to be different from them, but often am almost an exact likeness. . . . I, in my attempts to be honest, will not be the hypocrite I hate, and will own up to their ominous presence in this boy, endeavoring in such earnest to be a man. This passage can be found in Clinton’s 2004 autobiography My Life, but that’s not when he wrote it. He wrote it as a high school junior as an assignment for English class, later admitting he did not fully understand what he was writing or what...