The President We Deserve: Bill Clinton: His Rise, Falls, and Comebacks

Martin Walker’s critical biography of Bill Clinton focuses on the president as a classic figure of America’s post-World War II meritocracy, a poor boy from the segregated old South who won scholarships to elite universities and became a lawyer fascinated by the process and the power of government.  Walker also unearths a private life that has resonated to the rhythmic clichés of a country-and-western   Clinton’s father died in a car wreck before he was born; his mother buried three husbands and married two more; his stepdaddy beat his mother and fired gunshots into the bedroom walls; one brother went to jail; and his own marriage tottered under the pain he admitted inflicting upon it.  This president’s background is as grittily American as the woeful tales that wail from jukeboxes in bars across the land.  He is Bubba with brains, a redneck with a Rhodes scholarship–America at her most raw, and most cultivated.  And his first term has been unpredictable, volatile, and fascinating.  Martin Walker shows us the why, the how, and the future of the Clinton administration.