The Condensed Bill Clinton:Slate reads My Life so you don't have to.

The Condensed Bill Clinton
Slate reads My Life so you don't have to.
By Bryan Curtis, Chris Suellentrop, and Julia Turner
Posted Tuesday, June 22, 2004, at 4:28 PM PT

Page 1: The book's inauspicious first line reads, "Early on the morning of August 19, 1946, I was born under a clear sky after a violent summer storm to a widowed mother in the Julia Chester Hospital in Hope, a town of about six thousand in southwest Arkansas, thirty-three miles east of the Texas border at Texarkana."

Page 8: "New Orleans was an amazing place after [World War II], full of young people, Dixieland music, and over-the-top haunts like the Club My-Oh-My, where men in drag danced and sang as lovely ladies."

Page 187: As a law student, Clinton frequented New Haven's Elm Street Diner. "One night, a tall black transvestite sat down across from me and said his social club wanted to raffle off a television to make money; he wanted to know if the raffle would run afoul of the law against gambling." In exchange for giving advice, Clinton received a free raffle ticket "with the name of the social club on it in bold print: The Black Uniques."

Page 76: "[The priest] asked me if I had ever considered becoming a Jesuit. I laughed and replied, 'Don't I have to become a Catholic first?' ... I told him I was a Baptist and said, only half in jest, that I didn't think I could keep the vow of celibacy even if I were Catholic."

Page 197: "I was so exhausted I fell asleep while the stripper was dancing and the goat head was looking up at me." Look it up for yourself.

Page 272: "[Hillary and I] badly wanted to have a child and had been trying for some time without success. In the summer of 1979, we decided to make an appointment with a fertility expert in San Francisco as soon as we got back from a short vacation in Bermuda, but we had a wonderful time, so wonderful we never made it to San Francisco. Soon after we got home, Hillary found out she was pregnant."

Page 2: Clinton has at least two half-siblings other than Roger Clinton. His father had a son, Leon Ritzenthaler, by another woman and a daughter, Sharon Pettijohn (born Sharon Lee Blythe), by yet another woman. Both children were born before William Jefferson Blythe Jr.'s marriage to Virginia Kelley (Clinton's mother).

Page 22: As a child, Clinton lived in a farmhouse without an indoor toilet. "Later, when I got into politics, being able to say I had lived on a farm with an outhouse made a great story, almost as good as being born in a log cabin."

Page 42: "But because of the way Daddy behaved when he was angry and drunk, I associated anger with being out of control and I was determined not to lose control. Doing so could unleash the deeper, constant anger I kept locked away because I didn't know where it came from."

Page 104: "I briefly flirted with the idea of dropping out of school and enlisting in the military?after all, I was a democrat in philosophy as well as party."

Page 151: After his boyhood friend Bert Jeffries dies in Vietnam, "I wondered again whether my decision to go to Oxford was not motivated more by the desire to go on living than by opposition to the war."

Page 159: After deciding to apply to law school* at the University of Arkansas and applying to join ROTC, Clinton has regrets. "I wrote in my diary: 'Reading The Unfinished Odyssey of Robert Kennedy [by David Halberstam], I was reminded again that I don't believe in deferments. ... I cannot do this ROTC." He asks to be put back into consideration for the draft. His later learns his lottery number: 311.

Page 11: "I remember one Easter in the 1950s, when I was fat and self-conscious."

Page 19: "I was a little chunky anyway, and slow, so slow that I was once the only kid at an Easter egg hunt who didn't get a single egg, not because I couldn't find them but because I couldn't get to them fast enough."

Page 43: "On Friday nights there was always a dance in the gym of the local YMCA. I loved rock-and-roll music and dancing and went frequently, starting in eighth or ninth grade, even though I was fat, uncool, and hardly popular with the girls."

Page 57: "In 2002, a major medical study concluded that older people could increase their life span dramatically by sharply decreasing food intake. Coach McCauley knew that forty years ago. Now that I am one of those older people, I am trying to take his advice."

Page 113: On a visit home from Georgetown while his stepfather was sick: "Since I hardly slept, and ate with everyone who came by, I gained ten pounds in the two weeks I was home."

Page 273: Eliza Ashley, a cook on the Arkansas governor's mansion staff, "thought I looked too young to be governor in part because I was thin; she said if I were 'more stout' I'd look the part, and she was determined to make it happen."

Page 14: "Hillary says the first time she ever saw me, I was in the Yale Law School lounge bragging to skeptical fellow students about the size of Hope watermelons."

Page 19: As a kindergartner, Clinton broke his leg after trying?and failing?to jump over a rope tied from a tree to a swing set. From the resulting fear and feelings of clumsiness, he didn't learn to ride a bicycle without training wheels until he was 22.

Page 20: Clinton's favorite movie is High Noon. "I probably saw it half a dozen times during its run in Hope, and have seen it more than a dozen times since."

Page 36: "Elvis's first movie, Love Me Tender, was my favorite and remains so, though I also liked Loving You, Jailhouse Rock, King Creole, and Blue Hawaii. After that, his movies got more saccharine and predictable."

Page 36: "My favorite movies during [the late '50s] were the biblical epics: The Robe, Demetrius and the Gladiators, Samson and Delilah, Ben-Hur, and especially The Ten Commandments, the first movie I recall paying more than a dime to see."

Page 66: Clinton's senior year in high school included "lunches at the Club Café, with the best Dutch apple pie I've ever had, dances at the Y, ice cream at Cook's Dairy, and barbeque at McClard's, a seventy-five-year-old family place with arguably the best barbeque and unquestionably the best barbeque beans in the whole country."

Page 72: At Georgetown, "I got coffee and donuts for twenty cents every morning. ... At lunch, I splurged to thirty cents. Half of it bought a Hostess fried pie, apple or cherry; the other half went for a sixteen-ounce Royal Crown Cola."

Page 186: "[Yale law professor] Jan Deutsch was also the only man I'd ever met who ate all of an apple, including the core. He said all the good minerals were there. He was smarter than I was, so I tried it. Once in a while, I still do, with fond memories of Professor Deutsch."

Pages 197-198: Clinton works for the McGovern campaign in Texas. "In San Antonio, I discovered Mario's and Mi Tierra, where I once ate three meals in eighteen hours." Plus, the city's Menger Hotel "serves fantastic mango ice cream, to which I became addicted. On election eve 1992, when we stopped in San Antonio, my staff bought four hundred dollars' worth of it, and everyone on the campaign plane ate it all night long."

Page 17: "[My mother] had dated several men in New Orleans and had a fine time, according to her memoir, Leading With My Heart, which I'm sure would have been a bestseller if she had lived to promote it."

Page 186: "Once, instead of paying attention to class, I read Gabriel Garcia Marquez's One Hundred Years of Solitude. At the end of the hour, Professor Chirelstein asked me what was so much more interesting than his lecture. I held up the book and told him it was the greatest novel written in any language since William Faulkner died. I still think so."

Page 136: On his voyage to England with his Rhodes group, he drinks alcohol for the first time. But "in the late seventies I developed an allergy to all alcoholic drinks except vodka."

Page 148: While reading Eldridge Cleaver's Soul on Ice at Oxford, Clinton writes in his diary, "Soul is a word I use often enough to be Black, but of course, and I occasionally think unfortunately, I am not."

Page 252: Two white Pentecostal women that Clinton knew from Arkansas sang at the church service during his first inauguration. Afterward, Colin Powell asked, "Where did you find white women who could sing like that? I didn't know there were any."

Page 44: "[M]y major extracurricular interest from ninth grade on was the Order of DeMolay, a boys' organization sponsored by the Masons."

Page 110: "In the ethics class [at Georgetown] I took good notes, and one day in August another student, who was smart as a whip but seldom attended class, asked me if I'd take a few hours and go over my notes with him before the final exam. ... [T]he guy got a B on the test. Twenty-five years later, when I became President, my old study partner Turki al-Faisal, son of the late Saudi king, was head of Saudi Arabia's intelligence service, a position he held for twenty-four years."

Page 63: "I loved music and thought I could be very good, but I knew I would never be John Coltrane or Stan Getz. I was interested in medicine and thought I could be a fine doctor, but I knew I would never be Michael DeBakey. But I knew I could be great in public service."

Page 172: "I had fantasized from time to time about being a doorman at New York's Plaza Hotel, at the south end of Central Park. Plaza doormen had nice uniforms and met interesting people from all over the world. I imagined garnering large tips from guests who thought that, despite my strange southern accent, I made good conversation."

Page 175: In 1971, Clinton hits a Volkswagen and discovers he doesn't have his driver's license. "They stripped me of my belongings and took my belt so that I couldn't strangle myself, gave me a cup of coffee, and put me in a cell with a hard metal bed, a blanket, a smelly stopped-up toilet, and a light that stayed on."

Page 176: His constitutional law class was Yale Law School's "most interesting class by far."

Page 181: "She had thick dark blond hair and no makeup, but she conveyed a sense of strength and self-possession I had rarely seen in anyone, man or woman."

Page 182: Hillary tries to cut her own hair before Bill's mother arrives for a visit. "It was a minor fiasco; she looked more like a punk rocker than someone who had just walked out of Jeff Dwire's beauty salon. With no makeup, a work shirt and jeans, and bare feet coated with tar from walking on the beach at Milford, she might as well have been a space alien."

Page 183: "Hillary was a formidable presence in law school, a big fish in our small but highly competitive pond. I was more of a floating presence, drifting in and out."

Page 184: He turns down a job as George McGovern's southern coordinator to move to California with Hillary for the summer, after dating her for a month.

Page 65: "I overheard an attractive girl who was in the band with me say that maybe it was a good thing for the country that [JFK] was gone. ... It was my first exposure, beyond raw racism, to the kind of hatred I would see in my political career, and that was forged into a powerful political movement in the last quarter of the twentieth century."

Page 133: "I won a lot of elections and I think I did a lot of good, but the more I tried to bring people together, the madder it made the fanatics on the right. Unlike the kids [at the 1968 Democratic convention in Chicago], they didn't want to come back together. They had an enemy, and they meant to keep it."

Pages 220-221: While on the road campaigning for Congress against John Paul Hammerschmidt in 1974, Clinton loses five of his students' law-school exams. "I was mortified. I offered the students the option of retaking the exam or getting full credit without a specific grade. They all took the credit, but one of them was particularly upset about it, because she was a good student who probably would have made an A, and because she was a good Republican who had worked for Congressman Hammerschmidt. I don't think she ever forgave me for losing the exam or for running against her old boss. I sure thought about it when, more than twenty years later, that former student, federal judge Susan Webber Wright, became the presiding judge in the Paula Jones case."

Page 387: "Back in the 1970s, I had had a relationship with her that I should not have had." But "there was no 12-year affair."

On the Women "Procured" for Clinton by Arkansas State Troopers During His Tenure as Governor

Page 565: "The trooper story was ridiculous." David Brock "later apologized to Hillary and me" for the piece he famously put forth in the American Spectator. "If you want to know more, read [Brock's] brave memoir, Blinded by the Right, in which he reveals the extraordinary efforts made to discredit me by wealthy right-wingers with ties to Newt Gingrich and some adversaries of mine in Arkansas."

Page 335: When Clinton decides not to enter the race, Michael Dukakis is "relieved" and gives Clinton a T-shirt that says, "Happy 41^st. Clinton in '96. You'll only be 49!"

Page 340: During his disastrous 32-minute oration at the Democratic convention, Clinton writes, "I felt as though the speech was a 200-pound rock I was pushing up a hill."

Page 368: In 1991, Roger Porter calls from the Bush White House to say that if Clinton decides to run, the Bush campaign will try to destroy him personally. "We'll spend whatever we have to spend to get whoever we have to get to say whatever they have to say to take you out. And we'll do it early."

Page 564: "Simply an attempt by my enemies to discredit me and impair my ability to serve."

Page 571: "It was probably the first time in history when the flames of outrage against a politician were fanned because of money he lost, loans he didn't receive, and a tax deduction he didn't take."

Page 531: In a phone conversation on the night before Foster's death, Clinton says, "I did my best ... to persuade him to shrug off the [negative Wall Street] Journal editorials. The Journal was a fine paper, but not that many people read its editorials. ... Vince listened, but I could tell I hadn't convinced him. He had never been subject to public criticism before, and like so many people when they're pounded in the press for the first time, he seemed to think that everyone had read the negative things said about him and believed them."

Page 389: When Clinton's experiences with the draft came under attack during the 1992 primary: "George was curled up on the floor, practically in tears." Stephanopolous suggests withdrawing from the race.

Page 499: After the FBI raid on David Koresh's compound went haywire, Clinton says, "I knew I needed to speak to the press and take responsibility for the fiasco. ... George Stephanopoulos urged me to wait." When that decision played badly: "I didn't blame George. He was young and cautious and had given me his honest, albeit mistaken, opinion."

Page 573: Stephanopoulos, among others, advocates requesting a special prosecutor to defuse the media's interest in the Whitewater story. "It was the worst presidential decision I ever made, wrong on the fact, wrong on the law, wrong on the politics, wrong for the presidency and the Constitution."

Page 482: Not Hillary. Clinton took flak for putting her in charge: "When it came to the First Lady's role, it seemed Washington was more conservative than Arkansas." But he thought she "knew a lot about the issue ... had time to do the job right, and ... would be able to be an honest broker."

Page 547: Bob Dole, who turns down an opportunity to collaborate with the Clintons on a health-care proposal.

Page 601: William Kristol, who sent Republican leaders a memo "urging them to kill health-care reform" because successful Clinton legislation would pose a "serious threat to the Republican Party."

Page 537: Clinton and his team. "Our bond market gambit would work beyond our wildest dreams, bringing lower interest rates, a soaring stock market, and a booming economy."

Page 336: Although Bill Bennett "once inscribed a book to me with the words, 'To Bill Clinton, the Democrat who makes sense,' he apparently came to believe that either he had been wrong or I had lost whatever sense I had when he wrote those words."

Page 586: "William Safire, the New York Times columnist who had been a speechwriter for Nixon and Agnew, and who seemed determined to prove that all their successors were just as bad as they were, was especially avid in his unsupported assertions that Vince's death was linked to illegal conduct by Hillary and me."

Page 345: Iran-Contra "might have led to [Reagan's] impeachment had the Democrats been half as ruthless as Newt Gingrich."

Page 405: Jefferson had "weakness for women"; Washington faced "criticism of his expense accounts during the Revolutionary War"; Lincoln suffered "debilitating episodes of depression. ... If he had to run under modern conditions, we might have been deprived of our greatest president."

Page 444: "I went jogging with Chelsea downtown and stopped at McDonald's for a cup of water, as I had countless times before."

Page 508: "Whenever anyone made a snide remark about Yeltsin's drinking, I was reminded of what Lincoln allegedly said when Washington snobs made the same criticism of General Grant: ... 'Find out what he drinks, and give it to the other generals.' "

Page 773: During his deposition in the Paula Jones case, Clinton complains that Jones' lawyers ask only general questions about his sexual behavior. If they had just asked more specific questions, "I would have answered them truthfully, but I would have hated it."

Page 773: Clinton recounts his liaisons with Monica Lewinsky in language far less graphic than the Starr Report. "Inappropriate encounter" and "15 minutes" is about as hot as it gets.

Page 775: Clinton insists that the Monica cover-up was his only lie (a recurring theme): "Since 1991 I had been called a liar about everything under the sun when in fact I had been honest in my public life and financial affairs, as all the investigations would show. Now I was misleading everyone about my personal failings."

Page 774: The book's sole reference to Matt Drudge: "The [Lewinsky] story first emerged publicly early on the eighteenth [of January 1998], on an Internet site." David Brock nabs three brief mentions; Michael Isikoff, none.

Page 800: On Aug. 15, 1998, Clinton awakens Hillary and tells her about his affair with Monica Lewinsky. She reels "as if I had punched her in the gut."

Page 803: The post-Monica blues: "When there were no cameras around, my wife and daughter were barely speaking to me. I spent the first couple of days alternating between begging for forgiveness and planning the strikes on al Qaeda. At night Hillary would go up to bed and I would sleep on the couch."

Page 811: Bill and Hillary attend counseling. "Meanwhile, I was still sleeping on a couch, this one in the small living room that adjoined our bedroom. I slept on that old couch for two months or more. I got a lot of reading, thinking, and work done, and the couch was pretty comfortable, but I hoped I wouldn't be on it forever."

Page 846: Sometime around February 1999, Clinton returns to the boudoir. "I almost wound up being grateful to my tormentors: they were probably the only people who could have made me look good to Hillary again. I even got off the couch."

Page 489: They don't like touchy-feely games. At an early administration retreat at Camp David, "we were supposed to bond by sitting in a group, taking turns telling something about ourselves others didn't know." Clinton reveals he was mocked for being chubby as a child. Lloyd Bentsen and Robert Rubin refuse to participate.

Page 660: Dick Morris could be "difficult to deal with," had "off-the-wall ideas from time to time," and tended to "go around established White House procedures." And he gets caught with a prostitute.

Page 701: Madeleine Albright uses the word "cojones" in a speech about Cuba policy.

Page 738: Clinton reads George Stephanopoulos' All Too Human: "Until I read his memoir, I had no idea how difficult the pressure-packed years had been for him, or how hard he had been on himself, and me."

Page 917: Larry Summers reports meeting "some guy named Bono?just one name?dressed in jeans, a T-shirt, and big sunglasses. He came to see me about debt relief, and he knows what he's talking about." (Bonus Bono item: On Page 688, the singer gives Clinton a book of William Butler Yeats' plays autographed by Yeats and ... Bono.)

Page 633: Newt Gingrich becomes House Speaker after the GOP's runaway victory in the 1994 congressional elections. Clinton fumes, "[W]e weren't part of the culture Gingrich wanted to dominate America: the self-righteous, condemning, Absolute Truth-claiming dark side of white southern conservatism."

Page 634: He doesn't mean that: "I didn't want to demonize Gingrich and his crowd as they had done to us."

Page 682: Dick Armey, from Texas, "was a big man who always wore cowboy boots and seemed to be in a constant state of agitation." Armey admits that Clinton's "Mediscare" ads?which charged the Republicans with cutting Medicare and Medicaid?have succeeded in terrifying his mother-in-law.

Page 683: Gingrich says he shut down the federal government because Clinton snubbed him on the plane after Yitzhak Rabin's funeral and made him exit the plane through a rear door. "You just wonder, where is their sense of manners?" Gingrich grouses. Clinton says the back entrance was simply closer to Gingrich's car.

Page 778: In February 1998, Hillary sits with Gingrich at a state dinner. Newt says the charges against her husband are "ludicrous," "meaningless," and weren't "going anywhere."

Page 824: After Gingrich suffers a humiliating defeat in the 1998 congressional elections, a Clinton aide asks him why he's pushing impeachment. "Because we can," he replies.

Page 845: A Republican senator secretly funnels information to the White House about the GOP's attempt to nail down impeachment votes. Assuming that the leaker is someone who voted against both articles of impeachment, it's probably Olympia Snow, Susan Collins, Jim Jeffords, Arlen Specter, or John Chafee.

Page 556: In 1993,* "I read a list of our accomplishments to a group from Arkansas who were visiting the White House. When I finished, one of my home staters said, 'There must be a conspiracy to keep this a secret; we don't hear about any of this.' Part of the fault was mine. ... In politics, if you don't toot your own horn, it usually stays untooted."

Page 689: At a ceremony marking the end the Bosnian war, Clinton listens as Slobodan Milosevic peddles Kennedy assassination conspiracy theories and insists the U.S. government has "been successful in covering it up."

Page 776: On the Today show, a clueless Hillary blames a "vast right-wing conspiracy" for her husband's legal entanglements. Clinton, who knows the truth, writes, "seeing Hillary defend me made me even more ashamed about what I had done."

Page 642: Gingrich's Republican Congress opposes big government and international air travel. "A surprising number of them didn't even have passports," Clinton reports.

Page 822: Clinton notes, apropos of nothing, that it has recently come to light that Thomas Jefferson fathered several children with slave Sally Hemmings.

Page 914: In the middle of tense Middle East peace negotiations, Ehud Barak nearly dies after choking on a peanut.

Page 939-41: Clinton says he issued too few pardons on his way out the door?he wishes he had given passes to Webb Hubbell and Jim Guy Tucker. Of Marc Rich, whose ex-wife was a supporter: "I may have made a mistake, at least in the way I allowed the case to come to my attention, but I made the decision based on the merits."

Page 337: In 1987,* Clinton testifies against Robert Bork, who had been nominated to the Supreme Court. "President Reagan then nominated Judge Antonin Scalia, who was as conservative as Bork, but hadn't said and written as much to prove it." Scalia's behavior in Bush v. Gore amounted to "an act of judicial activism that might have made even Bob Bork blush."

Page 414: On choosing Al Gore as a running mate: "At first, I didn't think I would. On previous encounters, the chemistry between us had been correct but not warm."

Page 872: Clinton marvels at the genius of Bush's "compassionate conservatism"?"virtually the only argument he could make to swing voters against an administration with approval ratings in the 65 percent range."

Page 873: As the press reports that Clinton is sinking Gore's chances, Clinton calls Gore and volunteers to "stand on the doorstep of the Washington Post's headquarters and let him lash me with a bullwhip." Gore yuks, "Maybe we should poll that."

Page 927: Gore unveils his "people versus the powerful" slogan. In his only real criticism of Gore's campaign, Clinton writes, "The problem with the slogan was that it didn't give Al the full benefit of our record of economic and social progress or put into sharp relief Bush's explicit commitment to undo that progress. Also, the populist edge sounded to some swing voters as if Al, too, might change the economic direction of the country."

Page 928: On Gore's defeat in Arkansas: "I might have been able to turn it around, but it would have taken two or three days of rural work to do it, and I didn't know how big the problem was until I went home right before the election."

Pages 933-4: Clinton blames Gore's loss on the Supreme Court, calling Bush v. Gore "one of the worst decisions" ever handed down and ranking it with judicial disasters Dred Scott and Plessy vs. Ferguson.

Page 701: Chelsea's sweet 16 party in 1996: Les Misérables at the National Theater, then paintball with friends at Camp David.

Page 742: Strom Thurmond, 94, tells Chelsea, "If I were 70 years younger, I'd court you!"

Page 879: On a visit to Italy, the actor Roberto Benigni leaps into Clinton's arms and shrieks, "I love you!"

Page 653: After a White House interview with Kenneth Starr, Clinton offers him a tour of the Lincoln Bedroom.

Page 699: Clinton theorizes that Hillary critics Starr, Al D'Amato, and Bill Safire find the first lady too successful, too domineering: "Some guys don't like that in a woman. ..."

Page 802: Clinton calls his grand jury testimony on Aug. 18, 1998, a "pornographic home movie." He writes, "That's what the, to date, whole four-year $40 million investigation had come down to: parsing the definition of sex." Clinton, of course, had used the occasion to parse the definition of "is."

Page 862: The last word on impeachment: "I will go to my grave being proud of what I had fought for in the impeachment battle, my last great showdown with the forces I had opposed all of my life?those who had defended the old order of racial discrimination and segregation in the South and played on the insecurities and fears of the white working class in which I grew up. ... They also hated me because I was an apostate, a white southern Protestant who could appeal to the very people they had always taken for granted."

Corrections, June 23, 2004: This piece originally stated that Clinton was attending Arkansas law school when he decided to drop out of ROTC. In fact, he was in Oxford and planning to enroll at Arkansas the next fall when he made the decision. It also said that a group from Arkansas visited Clinton in the White House in 1992; this took place in 1993. Finally, it noted that Clinton testified against Robert Bork in 1988; he did so in 1987. Clinton, however, seems to have bollixed the details of Antonin Scalia's appointment to the Supreme Court: He suggests that Scalia was nominated after Bork, but Scalia was appointed to the Supreme Court in 1986.

CONT:

On Vince Foster's Suicide:

Page 531: In a phone conversation on the night before Foster's death, Clinton says, "I did my best ... to persuade him to shrug off the [negative Wall Street] Journal editorials. The Journal was a fine paper, but not that many people read its editorials. ... Vince listened, but I could tell I hadn't convinced him. He had never been subject to public criticism before, and like so many people when they're pounded in the press for the first time, he seemed to think that everyone had read the negative things said about him and believed them."

On George Stephanopoulos' Bad Ideas:

Who Quashed Health-Care Reform?:

Page 547: Bob Dole, who turns down an opportunity to collaborate with the Clintons on a health-care proposal.

Page 577: Bob Dole, who "would decide to kill any health reform."

Page 594: Interest groups that ran false ads bashing the plan.

Page 601: Newt Gingrich, who vowed to make "health-care reform unpassable."

Page 601: William Kristol, who sent Republican leaders a memo "urging them to kill health-care reform" because successful Clinton legislation would pose a "serious threat to the Republican Party."

Page 602: Bob Dole because "he was running for President."

Who's Responsible for the '90s Boom?:

Page 537: Clinton and his team. "Our bond market gambit would work beyond our wildest dreams, bringing lower interest rates, a soaring stock market, and a booming economy."

On His Conservative Critics:

Page 586: "William Safire, the New York Times columnist who had been a speechwriter for Nixon and Agnew, and who seemed determined to prove that all their successors were just as bad as they were, was especially avid in his unsupported assertions that Vince's death was linked to illegal conduct by Hillary and me."

On Other Presidents Who Got Off Easy :

Page 345: Iran-Contra "might have led to [Reagan's] impeachment had the Democrats been half as ruthless as Newt Gingrich."

On Mixing Fitness With Fast Food:

Page 444: "I went jogging with Chelsea downtown and stopped at McDonald's for a cup of water, as I had countless times before."

Page 449: On another post-jog visit to Mickey D's: "I got a cup of coffee."

On Boris Yeltsin:

The Lewinsky Affair:

Page 773: Clinton recounts his liaisons with Monica Lewinsky in language far less graphic than the Starr Report. "Inappropriate encounter" and "15 minutes" is about as hot as it gets.

On the Couch:

Page 800: On Aug. 15, 1998, Clinton awakens Hillary and tells her about his affair with Monica Lewinsky. She reels "as if I had punched her in the gut."

Secrets of the Clintonites:

Page 701: Madeleine Albright uses the word "cojones" in a speech about Cuba policy.

Page 738: Clinton reads George Stephanopoulos' All Too Human: "Until I read his memoir, I had no idea how difficult the pressure-packed years had been for him, or how hard he had been on himself, and me."

Page 917: Larry Summers reports meeting "some guy named Bono—just one name—dressed in jeans, a T-shirt, and big sunglasses. He came to see me about debt relief, and he knows what he's talking about." (Bonus Bono item: On Page 688, the singer gives Clinton a book of William Butler Yeats' plays autographed by Yeats and ... Bono.)

Secrets of the Gingrichites:

Page 634: He doesn't mean that: "I didn't want to demonize Gingrich and his crowd as they had done to us."

Page 682: Dick Armey, from Texas, "was a big man who always wore cowboy boots and seemed to be in a constant state of agitation." Armey admits that Clinton's "Mediscare" ads—which charged the Republicans with cutting Medicare and Medicaid—have succeeded in terrifying his mother-in-law.

Page 778: In February 1998, Hillary sits with Gingrich at a state dinner. Newt says the charges against her husband are "ludicrous," "meaningless," and weren't "going anywhere."

Page 824: After Gingrich suffers a humiliating defeat in the 1998 congressional elections, a Clinton aide asks him why he's pushing impeachment. "Because we can," he replies.

Conspiracy Theories:

Page 776: On the Today show, a clueless Hillary blames a "vast right-wing conspiracy" for her husband's legal entanglements. Clinton, who knows the truth, writes, "seeing Hillary defend me made me even more ashamed about what I had done."

Page 642: Gingrich's Republican Congress opposes big government and international air travel. "A surprising number of them didn't even have passports," Clinton reports.

Page 822: Clinton notes, apropos of nothing, that it has recently come to light that Thomas Jefferson fathered several children with slave Sally Hemmings.

Page 914: In the middle of tense Middle East peace negotiations, Ehud Barak nearly dies after choking on a peanut.

Page 939-41: Clinton says he issued too few pardons on his way out the door—he wishes he had given passes to Webb Hubbell and Jim Guy Tucker. Of Marc Rich, whose ex-wife was a supporter: "I may have made a mistake, at least in the way I allowed the case to come to my attention, but I made the decision based on the merits."

I Didn't Cost Gore the Election!:

Page 337: In 1987,* Clinton testifies against Robert Bork, who had been nominated to the Supreme Court. "President Reagan then nominated Judge Antonin Scalia, who was as conservative as Bork, but hadn't said and written as much to prove it." Scalia's behavior in Bush v. Gore amounted to "an act of judicial activism that might have made even Bob Bork blush."

Page 414: On choosing Al Gore as a running mate: "At first, I didn't think I would. On previous encounters, the chemistry between us had been correct but not warm."

Page 872: Clinton marvels at the genius of Bush's "compassionate conservatism"—"virtually the only argument he could make to swing voters against an administration with approval ratings in the 65 percent range."

Page 873: As the press reports that Clinton is sinking Gore's chances, Clinton calls Gore and volunteers to "stand on the doorstep of the Washington Post's headquarters and let him lash me with a bullwhip." Gore yuks, "Maybe we should poll that."

Pages 933-4: Clinton blames Gore's loss on the Supreme Court, calling Bush v. Gore "one of the worst decisions" ever handed down and ranking it with judicial disasters Dred Scott and Plessy vs. Ferguson.

The Perks of Power:

Page 516: Steven Spielberg and Kate Capshaw teach him the card game Oh Hell!

Page 701: Chelsea's sweet 16 party in 1996: Les Misérables at the National Theater, then paintball with friends at Camp David.

Page 742: Strom Thurmond, 94, tells Chelsea, "If I were 70 years younger, I'd court you!"

Page 879: On a visit to Italy, the actor Roberto Benigni leaps into Clinton's arms and shrieks, "I love you!"

What Is Ken Starr Thinking?:

Page 653: After a White House interview with Kenneth Starr, Clinton offers him a tour of the Lincoln Bedroom.

Page 699: Clinton theorizes that Hillary critics Starr, Al D'Amato, and Bill Safire find the first lady too successful, too domineering: "Some guys don't like that in a woman. ..."

Page 862: The last word on impeachment: "I will go to my grave being proud of what I had fought for in the impeachment battle, my last great showdown with the forces I had opposed all of my life—those who had defended the old order of racial discrimination and segregation in the South and played on the insecurities and fears of the white working class in which I grew up. ... They also hated me because I was an apostate, a white southern Protestant who could appeal to the very people they had always taken for granted."

Corrections, June 23, 2004: This piece originally stated that Clinton was attending Arkansas law school when he decided to drop out of ROTC. In fact, he was in Oxford and planning to enroll at Arkansas the next fall when he made the decision. It also said that a group from Arkansas visited Clinton in the White House in 1992; this took place in 1993. Finally, it noted that Clinton testified against Robert Bork in 1988; he did so in 1987. Clinton, however, seems to have bollixed the details of Antonin Scalia's appointment to the Supreme Court: He suggests that Scalia was nominated after Bork, but Scalia was appointed to the Supreme Court in 1986.

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