A Tale Of Two Bills

When Bill Clinton and Bill Gates played golf on Martha's Vineyard a few years ago, they didn't click. The President gave Gates a heavy dose of the Clinton Treatment, oozing charm and seeking emotional common ground in the fact that both had recently lost their mothers. Clinton must have been disappointed by the cool response of Gates, who saw the subject as unduly personal. Gates, for his part, was put off that Clinton didn't engage him on his favorite topic, technology. When the golfing ended, the two men went their separate ways. Gates didn't take sides in the Clinton-Dole election a couple of years later. Clinton let his Justice Department pursue a potentially devastating antitrust lawsuit against Microsoft.

It's not hard to see why these two larger-than-life figures--one the world's most powerful man, one the richest--didn't become fast friends. The two Bills are as different as the two ends of the baby-boom generation they represent. Clinton, who entered college in 1964, is dripping with Sixties values: a John F. Kennedy-style belief in public service as a calling; an Age-of-Aquarius focus on emotional connection; and a countercultural streak of sex, drugs, and rock 'n' roll. Gates, who came of age in the 1970s, has a Watergate-era detachment from politics, a mind-set more "me-generation" than "love-in," and a passion for the great revolutionary force of his own decade: the personal computer.

But Clinton and Gates are remarkably alike in other ways, particularly in their flaws. Both have almost limitless drive and self-absorption, and a willingness to push the rules to the edge--or past it--to get what they want. When called to account, both have been dismissive of the legal process and have had a strained relationship with the truth. These qualities have landed both men in similar binds: Clinton is waiting to hear if he will be removed from office, Gates is fending off the Justice Department's effort to rein in, or even carve up, Microsoft. Their flaws will take center stage this week, as both men mount defenses in their respective trials.

The two Bills began life worlds apart. Clinton's childhood in small-town, 1940s Arkansas was shaped by a mother who worked as a nurse and played at the racetrack, and an alcoholic stepfather. Gates, by contrast, was born into the Seattle upper crust, his father a lawyer and his mother president of the Junior League. Gates was a skinny prep school kid who spent all his free time in the computer lab--a nerd before the term was invented, a former teacher once said. Clinton, even in his schoolboy days, was the smooth saxophone player who used his music to meet women.

Both men found their callings early. Clinton was elected a senator at Boys Nation at 16. On a Washington field trip that year, he shook hands with President Kennedy--an iconic moment captured in a photo. After Yale Law School and a Rhodes scholarship, Clinton, at 32, became Governor of Arkansas. The single-minded rise to political power is a timeless story, but Clinton's came with the distinctive trappings of his era: the scruffy beard and antiwar protests while at Oxford, the experimentation with pot, the civil rights movement sensibility and the feminist wife who kept her name--at least initially.