Running For History

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Bill Clinton has often joked about his obsession with history. He once told a black-tie dinner in Washington about his "Posterity War Room" at the White House, where, in defense of his place in presidential history, he would strategize about going "negative on James Buchanan and Warren Harding." But now that he's into his last 100 days, it's no laughing matter. Clinton is vigorously pursuing a campaign to win the ex-presidency--and history. "All kinds of Presidents had significant accomplishments who never get any credit in history because they couldn't control the story line," Clinton said at the start of his second term in 1997, recounts speechwriter Michael Waldman in his new book, POTUS Speaks. Controlling the story line, therefore, is at the top of Clinton's agenda. The pursuit has been manic and ambitious in the past months: the China trade bill, the Camp David summit, eight foreign trips to 14 countries, a year-end legislative showdown with Congress, strategizing his wife's senatorial campaign, planning a historic visit to Vietnam. Says Douglas Brinkley, a historian and biographer of Jimmy Carter: "He's treating every day like it's his last day in a Herculean struggle with history, to prove he was on the job and to prove he was a good President."

Clinton has largely come to terms with his misbehavior in the Monica Lewinsky affair and still tries to fit in a weekly session with at least one of his three spiritual counselors. However, there's more than a residue of anger and bitterness toward the enemies who exploited it and who pilloried him over Whitewater and other alleged misdeeds. He told Esquire magazine that the G.O.P. Congress still owes the country an apology for the spectacle of impeachment. "What's personal he takes responsibility for. What's political, he doesn't" is how one friend puts it. He still complains that as the newly elected President, he didn't get a single Republican vote for his first budget back in 1993, and he regularly rails against Whitewater and other investigations into his Administration as "bogus" and fraudulent. Earlier this year he declared, "A whole bunch of this stuff was just garbage, and we had totally innocent people prosecuted." Indeed, apart from confronting the 1995-96 government shutdowns, he believes surviving impeachment will be seen as his greatest achievement.

But survival is not vindication, and according to an associate who talks to him regularly, Clinton believes "the people who opposed his presidency will oppose the interpretation of his presidency." In private, Clinton follows scandal news assiduously. He touts books that defend his case, like Jeffrey Toobin's A Vast Conspiracy, and cites obscure articles that make his points. He complained in a New Yorker interview about billionaire Richard Mellon Scaife's funding of investigations against him, "going on 15 wild-goose chases to try to run somebody down." Occasionally in private, or in late-night calls, he will erupt into a rant against some foe, and in public he can still seem self-pitying. Blacks and gays stood by him, he told the Advocate, a gay magazine, in a recent interview, because "they've been there. The people who've been targeted, who've been publicly humiliated and abused, I think identified with what was going on."

But virtually everyone who knows Clinton says the outbursts, like summer storms, quickly pass, and he's no Nixon, nursing deep hatreds. "Bill Clinton does not believe that impeachment will be in the first paragraph of his obituary," says his friend Hollywood producer Linda Bloodworth Thomason. "It will be for some of his enemies, because that's the most significant thing in their lives. I don't think Bill Clinton believes that impeachment will be the most significant thing in his life." Payback is not part of the postpresidential agenda. Friends say Clinton, a great rationalizer about his own actions, tries in his own mind not to stay angry at others. "That guy can't help it; he was born that way" is a common Clinton put-down of a critic. Some aides think he's too forgiving. One recalls hearing him say of a congressional opponent, "He's got a tough district. If I'd been him, I might have voted to impeach me too." Still, as Skip Rutherford, a longtime Arkansas friend, points out, "if you look back, a lot of people who went after him politically are now on the sidelines, and he's still standing."

Friends and aides reject the notion that Clinton is primarily on a mission for atonement and redemption. Even the long-planned trip to Vietnam, the first ever by a U.S. President to the unified country and the capstone of his steady and little-noticed effort to normalize relations, has less to do with personal redemption than generational healing, say friends. "He feels the baby boomers never quite closed the circle, and he can do that," says one. Clinton himself, asked if he's somehow using his frenetic schedule to try to wash away his mistakes, answers both no and yes. No, because "the only thing that can cleanse a mistake is an apology and an atonement," he told the Washington Post recently. But yes, he said, "to the extent that the promise I made to the American people to work like crazy for them every day I was President is a part of that."