Clinton book bares old wounds

It is the first time he has publicly lost his composure over the issue. He expressed remorse last week over his relationship with the intern, describing his behaviour as “morally indefensible”.

One BBC programmer said that the display of anger was sustained, and described the interview as punctuated with some “memorable moments”.

The outburst reveals much about Mr Clinton’s inner anger, a rage he writes about in the exhaustive account of his life, which has already become a bestseller before a single volume has reached the bookshops. At one point, he writes that when he was angry or tired, the painful secrets of his childhood would overwhelm him, making him prone to self-destructive behaviour.

In an interview with Time yesterday Mr Clinton puts himself on the psychiatrist’s couch. He tells the magazine that when he first met Ms Lewsinsky in 1995, “I was involved in two great struggles: a great public struggle . . . the Republican Congress, and a private struggle with my old demons. I won the public one and lost the private one.”

Last night in an interview with the CBS programme 60 Minutes, Mr Clinton admitted that the “worst day” of his presidency came when he had to tell his wife that he had lied about his affair with Ms Lewinsky. “All my worst days in the White House related to my personal failures,” he added.

Asked about the extraordinary support of his wife in the face of his infidelities, he said: “I don’t think there is a way in the wide world that I could have become President without her.”

One of his greatest fears, he said, was that the Lewinsky affair would cost him the love and respect of Chelsea, his daughter.

“Sooner or later, every child learns that their parents are not perfect. This was way beyond that, and it was a hard dose to swallow.”

Mr Clinton told Time that his presidency was an unconscious return to the selfdestructive patterns of his childhood, a period of “parallel” lives dominated by a deep private anger over his stepfather’s drunken violence that he masked with a relentlessly sunny demeanour.

This childhood dynamic was transposed on to his presidency, Mr Clinton said. There was the private anger over the Whitewater investigation by the independent counsel Kenneth Starr, which uncovered the Lewinsky affair and led to his impeachment, and his public optimism.

Joe Klein, one of the Time journalists who interviewed Mr Clinton, said: “He is brutal about his childhood failings. He describes himself as ‘fat, uncool and hardly popular with the girls’.”

Mr Clinton also writes in his book that he “tended to make enemies effortlessly” and that he was so clumsy, he only outgrew his fear of riding a bicycle without stabilisers during his time as a Rhodes scholar at Oxford University.

More details about the book’s content emerged yesterday, including the fact that the former President clearly feels no remorse for the legal dodges he used to avoid being pinned down by prosecutors.

During his 1998 deposition in the case of Paula Jones, an woman who accused Mr Clinton of sexually harassing her in a Little Rock hotel room when he was Governor, he denied having “sexual relations” with Ms Lewinsky.

Mr Clinton now writes that “I would have answered . . . truthfully” if Ms Jones’s lawyers had asked the right questions. A judge later found Mr Clinton in contempt for his testimony, saying that the former President gave “false, misleading and evasive answers that were designed to obstruct the judicial process”. Mr Clinton writes that he strongly disagrees with that ruling.

Mr Clinton is ruthless about his enemies on the American Right, but singles out Mr Starr for the most sustained venom. He accuses him of “unconscionable conduct” and of illegally leaking grand jury testimony to the media. He echoes the loathing for Mr Starr expressed by his wife in her memoir, when he writes that “I will go to my grave being proud” of the battle against the “far-right” forces that pushed for his impeachment.

In what he sees as a crucial moment in his presidency, Mr Clinton describes an intense White House debate in 1993 about whether he should bow to demands to allow the appointment of an independent counsel to investigate the Whitewater issue, a failed Arkansas land deal in which Mr and Mrs Clinton had invested.

Against the advice of his wife, Mr Clinton writes that “I had nothing to hide”. Adding that he was “completely exhausted and grieving” over his mother’s death, he acceded to the appointment. “It was the worst presidential decision I ever made,” he writes.

WHAT THE REVIEWERS SAID

The book, which weighs in at more than 950 pages, is sloppy, self-indulgent and often eye-crossingly dull — the sound of one man prattling away, not for the reader, but for himself and some distant recording angel of history.

Michiko Kakutani, The New York Times, June 20

It’s a great combination: a tireless author who’s one of the most recognised people on Earth and who never tires of talking about himself or his ideas.

Avin Domnitz, chief executive officer of the American Booksellers Association

For someone to publicly be this introspective, reflective and critical of himself is pretty remarkable and rare. I don’t think I could do it.

Dan Rather, who interviewed Mr Clinton for 60 Minutes on CBS

Clinton was intent on adding his two cents to the never-ending partisan donnybrook . . . In his memoirs . . . he launched a blistering counter-attack against the people whose books and actions were not in his ‘non-nutcase’ category — the members of Hillary Clinton’s ‘vast right-wing conspiracy’, especially special prosecutor Kenneth Starr . . .

Joe Klein, on his interview with Mr Clinton in Time magazine, June 20