Citizen Clinton

Those are the non-nutcase books about [my] Administration," Bill Clinton said, pointing to three shelves, arranged alphabetically by author, in the study of his newly renovated barn, adjacent to his home in Chappaqua, N.Y. This is the room where he wrote, in longhand, most of the latest contribution to Clinton lore: his 957-page memoirs, titled simply My Life. It is a comfortable room--a plasma TV, couches and rocking chairs, walls lined with Native American paintings and pottery ("We've been collecting it for 30 years," he said)--and Clinton seemed in a comfortable mood as he sat down to be interviewed by TIME Washington bureau chief Michael Duffy and me. The former President was dressed formally, in a blue suit, white shirt and pink tie, but he spoke easily and often quite candidly about his successes and failures. The purpose was to sell books, obviously, but Clinton was also intent on adding his two cents to the never-ending partisan donnybrook that has become a central component of his legacy. In his memoirs and our interview, he launched a blistering counterattack 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 Whitewater special prosecutor Kenneth Starr.

The night before, Clinton had made a remarkable appearance onstage at New York University after the screening of his friend Harry Thomason's new documentary, The Hunting of the President--an unabashedly partisan account of the Whitewater prosecution (or "persecution," as Clinton called it, perhaps not inadvertently). "Starr was the instrument of a grand design," the President said, launching a 30-minute disquisition into the historical roots of the rabid partisanship that marked his time in office. "He did what he was hired to do ... Hillary was hooted and derided for calling it a vast right-wing conspiracy. I joked with her afterwards, 'I don't know about the conspiracy word. A conspiracy is normally secret. This is wide open.'"

Indeed, if there was a cover-up, Clinton argued at the movie screening, it was perpetrated by the media, which didn't report the essential flimsiness of the charges and downplayed the exoneration of the Clintons in 1995 by the government agency investigating Whitewater. "The mainstream press was in the tank to Starr until the Starr report came out, and then they turned against him," Clinton said. "For years and years and years he had been crushing these innocent people" like Susan McDougal, who did 18 months in jail for refusing to cooperate with Starr and who was in the audience that night. Clinton told us he had a private meeting with McDougal after the screening "for the first time in 20 years ... It was touching. Both of us started crying."