Bill Clinton
Mastering the Presidency
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- £9.99
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- £9.99
Publisher Description
Nigel Hamilton's account of Bill Clinton's early life and career - Bill Clinton: An American Journey - drew widespread praise. Now, in Bill Clinton: Mastering the Presidency, Nigel Hamilton charts the experience of the 42nd President as he took presidential oath of office- and how he fared therafter in the piranha pool of Washington D.C.
Hamilton charts what was possibly the greatest disaster and re-reinvention of a president in office in modern times. How Bill Clinton faced up to his failures, and refashioned himself in the White House is an epic story. With a thriving U.S. economy and hard-won wisdom in international affairs and in combating the rise of terrorism, Clinton would begin his second term as the undisputed, immensely popular leader of the Western world - aware, however, that terrors ant treason within America loomed as large as dangers abroad.
Insightful, balanced, prodigiously researched and a joy to read, Bill Clinton: Mastering the Presidency is set to become, alongside its prequel, the classic story of Clinton's extraordinary effort to be a modern president, in a modern world-and a chronicle one of the most extraordinary reversals of fortune in modern American politics.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
This second volume of the author's biography casts Clinton's first term as a Miltonian epic of fall and redemption. The years 1993 1994, culminating in the Democrats' loss of Congress in midterm elections, are "Paradise Lost": a disastrous failure caused by a weak White House chief of staff (Mack McLarty), Clinton's own promiscuous openness to ideas and indecisiveness and, most of all, "co-president" Hillary's baleful influence. 1995 1996 are "Paradise Regained": a new chief of staff (Leon Panetta) restores order, Hillary learns her place and Clinton grows a spine, comforts the nation after the Oklahoma City bombing, humiliates Newt Gingrich and wins reelection. (Alas, enter Monica Lewinsky, "a luscious fruit in the Garden of Eden, eager to be plucked.") Hamilton styles this arc, with many military metaphors, as a study of Clinton's maturing capacity for "command" as he grows from "arch-baby boomer" to "undisputed leader of his country." Unfortunately, this focus on character often overshadows the substance of policy (the treatment of Hillary's byzantine health-care plan is especially sketchy) and is not entirely convincing, since the early, feckless Clinton seems to have accomplished more than the "determinedly presidential" later Clinton, with his third way politics of triangulation. At the celebratory end of Hamilton's account, Clinton's comeback is a merely personal triumph, devoid of political significance.
