The question is whether he can finally put the scandal behind him.
Lewinsky came to call him the Creep: “I see him as a politician, all about ‘me’.” There have already been outraged calls to phone-in programmes across America from women who believe he is dumping on Monica again.
The “because I could” excuse sounds almost as disrespectful as calling her “that woman”. It is being compared as a soundbite with his infamous “I smoked but I didn’t inhale” line about cannabis, which defined another of his character flaws.
Yet Clinton, the gifted, easy-going chancer, has charmed America into voting for him twice and persuaded Hillary, his formidable political wife, to stand by him even though, as he admits — not all that contritely — she put him “in the doghouse” and forced him to sleep on the couch.
His confession is roguish, leavened with a dash of humour and a sheepish nod to sensitivities by calling his lapse “a terrible moral error”. He has reminded Americans that they liked him so much in the first place because there is nothing pompous or priggish about him. He might even persuade the public to transfer its affections one day to his wife.
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His controversial presidency, once overshadowed by the Lewinsky affair and the attempt in Congress to impeach him, is now being painted in golden hues by Democrats as President George Bush’s approval ratings fall. He is rich, having received a $10m-$12m advance for his memoir, My Life, published this week, and he is slim, having shed pounds on the South Beach diet. He talks about Hillary running for president one day in terms of “when” rather than “if”.
Is the comeback kid about to stage another triumph? “There’s no question there has been a renaissance,” said Leon Panetta, his former White House chief of staff. “People look back on his presidency as a time when life was good, the economy was booming and there was a more peaceful foreign policy.”
With the help of his book, Clinton hopes to polish his legacy, publicly heal the scars with Hillary and prepare for her conquest of the White House.
THIS week marks a defining moment for him. Already Clinton mania is under way. More than 1,000 movers and shakers and Hollywood celebrities will crowd into the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York tomorrow for the launch party of My Life. The next day 1.5m copies of his 957- page book will go on sale after being held under heavy guard in bookshops and warehouses.
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The first review, in this morning’s New York Times, is scathing. “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,” the paper’s chief reviewer concludes.
But even if, as The New York Times says, My Life “reads like a messy pastiche of everything that Clinton ever remembered and wanted to set down in print”, advance orders indicate he will easily beat Hillary’s impressive stack of 2.3m copies in print of Living History, her own bestselling memoir.
Clinton is also beginning a mammoth publicity drive. He will appear on CBS’s Sixty Minutes, the Oprah Winfrey Show and all America’s top-rated television news programmes.
An interview with David Dimbleby will be shown on BBC Panorama on Tuesday. Clinton’s comments on the Lewinsky affair in the book, “immoral and foolish”, and in interviews such as the one with tomorrow’s Time Magazine, “I’m hoping that by writing this book I’ll make other people . . . not be afraid to admit what they’ve done wrong”, are confined to a brief mea culpa.
Dimbleby pushes him further on the Lewinsky affair in the interview and, according to BBC executives, forces him to lose his temper. Even if he survives more hostile reviews, more fractious interviews, My Life could still turn out to be his last hurrah.
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By the end of November John Kerry, the Democrat presidential candidate, may be voted into the White House and Clinton’s grip on the affections and machinery of his party will loosen. With only one more grand occasion to come — the opening of his presidential library in Arkansas this autumn — Clinton could soon find himself consigned to history. But at 57 he is too young to disappear willingly from the political stage and the flame of ambition has been transferred to Hillary.
Dick Morris, Clinton’s former strategist, believes the timing of the book has been designed to hinder Kerry’s candidacy — if only by unfavourably contrasting his lack of charisma with Clinton’s great dollops of personality.
Clinton says the idea that the book will draw attention from Kerry is “insulting to the voters”. But he is muted in his praise, his most generous description in Time Magazine being that “My own experience of him, just from the psychological factors, I think he will be a successful president”.
If Kerry beats Bush, Hillary has little chance of winning her party’s presidential nomination in 2008. “Mr Clinton could easily have delayed his book until after the election. Christmas books sell very well. Why the rush?” Morris asked cynically.
Clinton has also been noticeably sympathetic towards Bush over the war in Iraq, while Bush generously lauded Clinton last week at the unveiling of a portrait of him at the White House. The back-slapping has been widely interpreted as an exercise in mutual self-preservation.
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Kerry has put a brave face on Clinton’s book launch, hoping that the hullaballoo will die down in time for the elections. Clinton knows that he must seize the limelight while he can. Not long ago he was being written off as a sad case who would overstay at fashionable parties and ring up his friends in the early hours of the morning with rambling out-takes from his book, consumed by loneliness at his cold and unwelcoming home in upstate New York while Hillary busied herself with her career as a senator in Washington. Now the boy from Hope, Arkansas, is back in the public eye where he has always felt that he belonged.
AS his memoir explains, he grew up in one of America’s poorest states with an extraordinary sense of destiny. He describes meeting John F Kennedy as a teenager and feeling like Abraham Lincoln, who wrote as a young man: “I will study and get ready, and perhaps my chance will come.” He also mentions, tongue in cheek, how he took the advice of a school teacher to look in the mirror every day and say: “You’re beautiful.”
His mother, Virginia Kelley, was a big-hearted woman with a love of men and red lipstick. But she did not choose her lovers wisely and was beaten and abused by them. Roger Clinton, his alcoholic stepfather, once fired a gun at her head.
When Bill was 14 he finally revolted. He ordered his drunken stepfather to stand up and pay attention to what he had to say. As the man stumbled to his feet, Clinton lifted him up and said: “Never ever touch my mother again.”
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Clinton writes that the violent and abusive atmosphere at home left him with feelings of fear and shame and a pattern of self-destructive behaviour that led him to keep secrets from those closest to him. His family creed was “don’t ask, don’t tell”.
Hillary, whom Clinton’s mother regarded as a bespectacled blue-stockinged frump, has also blamed his moral lapses on his chaotic upbringing. It has helped her over the years to reconcile his obvious admiration for her with his taste for tarty women, which led to “bimbo eruptions” before he became president.
Neither of them shows any sympathy for Kenneth Starr, the independent prosecutor into the Whitewater land deals in Arkansas, whose investigations led improbably to the DNA stains on Lewinsky’s dress. Clinton accuses Starr of being the agent of a “right-wing search and destroy operation” that was after him from the very beginning for being a president from the anti-Vietnam countercultural 1960s generation.
It is the one part of the book where he avowedly settles scores. According to a friend, Clinton “does not act like he has anything to be ashamed about. He really believes this was some right-wing conspiracy and he didn’t do anything wrong. Maybe he misbehaved in his marriage but so has every president in the last 50-100 years”.
ONE of the themes of My Life is how the generational battles of the 1960s came to shape the clashes of the 1990s. It is, perhaps, an even more appropriate comparison than Clinton himself might admit. With regard to women he is an archetypal product of the 1960s, respecting some women as feminists and regarding others as easy lays.
When he was finally obliged to confess that he had lied about not having “sexual relations” with Lewinsky, it was the disclosure as much as the deed that led to a crisis in his marriage. As Clinton reveals, Hillary looked as if he had punched her in the stomach when he came clean. In a bid to make amends, he attended counselling with her every week for a year. “We did it together, we did it individually, we did family work,” he told CBS’s Sixty Minutes.
It is telling that Hillary has a political explanation for why she forgave him: “On one level I was emotionally shell-shocked and trying to deal with the raw wound I had suffered. On another level I believed Bill was a good person and a great president.”
She was also determined that he should do his own explaining. Clinton now claims his marriage is stronger for having survived the scandal.
The 1960s slogan “the personal is the political” has particular resonance for the Clintons. For Hillary to reach the White House it is important to convince the public that they are united by more than ambition. Rarely in his life has Clinton missed an opportunity. If Hillary does make it there, he will have achieved his most astounding comeback. Because he could, he might say.
HIS LIFE AND HOT TIMES
Born: August 19, 1946 at Hope, Arkansas
Real name: William (Bill) Jefferson Blythe IV (adopts stepfather's name of Clinton in 1962)
Training: Law
1968: Escapes draft to Vietnam by going to Oxford University
1975: Marries Hillary
1978: Elected as youngest Arkansas governor
1980: Chelsea is born
1991: Declares candidacy for presidency
January 1992: Gennifer Flowers claims she had a 12-year affair with Clinton. He wins the Democrat nomination despite scandal
March 1992: Whitewater scandal breaks, as The New York Times alleges that he and Hillary were involved in illegal property deals
November 1992: Defeats George Bush Sr to win the presidency
1994: Paula Jones, a state employee, claims Clinton sexually harassed her when he was Arkansas governor
1995: Presides over self-rule agreement for Palestinians
1995: Gives Gerry Adams, Sinn Fein leader, a US visa, helping to bump-start peace process in Northern Ireland
1996 Easily wins second term as president
1997: Childhood friend Dolly Browning appears to claim that she had a 30-year affair with Clinton
January 1998: The Washington Post breaks news of Monica Lewinsky affair. Clinton claims: “I did not have sexual relations with that woman.”
August 1998: Clinton goes on television to admit an “inappropriate relationship” with Lewinsky. Fires cruise missiles into Sudan and Afghanistan in failed bid to kill Osama Bin Laden
December 1998: Clinton is impeached by Congress
November 2000: Hillary becomes the only first lady to be elected to the Senate