Citizen Clinton

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Yes, Bill Clinton is back, and you will be seeing a lot of him over the next few weeks, and if the tears and talk and emotions and anger and empathy--the constant torrent of the man--seem all too familiar, there are some new twists as well. He has been through intense family therapy--a year of it after the Lewinsky scandal--and religious counseling. After moving through life like a shark, always forward, always thinking about tomorrow, in the words of his overutilized campaign song, he has spent an awful lot of time thinking about yesterday, in therapy and in writing the book. As a result, Clinton has settled on a starkly psychological explanation for his behavior. ("I believe in this," he told us twice, speaking of couples therapy.)

Clinton's theory is that he has always lived "parallel" lives. As a child, he hid the deep anger he felt over his stepfather's drunken violence behind a relentlessly sunny facade. He is brutal about his childhood failings. He describes himself as "fat, uncool and hardly popular with the girls." He writes that he "tended to make enemies effortlessly" and that he was so clumsy, he outgrew his fear of riding a bike without training wheels only as a college student at Oxford.

The presidency, he says, was an unconscious return to the self-destructive patterns of his childhood--private anger over the Starr investigation, public optimism about the work of state. (The notion of nursing shameful secrets is also an inferential acknowledgment of his amorous reputation, although he offers no new information about any of the famous "bimbo eruptions.") The case he builds against Starr in My Life is a lawyer's case, careful and powerful. In retrospect, it is clear that there was no substance to the Whitewater allegations and the other White House scandalettes--the travel-office firings, the FBI files, the death of Vince Foster--except, of course, Lewinsky. It seems clear that Starr conducted an unseemly and irresponsible investigation filled with "abuses of power," as Clinton contends, illegal leaks to the press and barely legal coercive tactics against prospective witnesses. And it also seems clear that the press was way too credulous about Starr's allegations and didn't pay nearly enough attention to his methods.

But Clinton takes the Starr assault well beyond the facts of the case and fits it into a witting effort by radical conservatives to keep power--the "vast right-wing conspiracy," a formulation he clearly supports but is careful not to use. For years Clinton has professed that fighting against impeachment was one of the triumphs of his Administration. He seems to have a dual purpose now: not just to discredit Starr but also to make the war against the ultraconservatives a significant part of his presidential legacy. He wants to be remembered for the Starr investigation. And so one of the more remarkable moments in our interview was when Clinton brought up his affair with Monica Lewinsky without our having to ask about it. Clearly he had fitted Lewinsky into his unified field theory of his life. "I think," he told us, "if people have unresolved anger, it makes them do nonrational, destructive things." The President insisted that was not an excuse, just an explanation. "I think a lot of it was that I was back to living my parallel lives with a vengeance, dealing with the Ken Starr thing."