Bill of right: what Clinton really reveals in his new memoir.

• Author: Cooper, Matthew
• Position: On Political Books - Book Review

My Life By Bill Clinton Knopf, $35.00

The early reviews of Bill Clinton's long-awaited, lucrative memoir have been consistent: The book is disorganized and chaotic, like the man who wrote it. While there are some interesting Arkansas riffs, the conventional wisdom goes, the presidency is treated as a slap-dash schedule dump--we bounce from bill signing to foreign summit with no real coherence. Indeed, there was such bad buzz after The New York Times took the unusual step of trashing the book in a front page review by influential critic Michiko Kakutani that even some diehard Clinton veterans worried that the memoirs might crash and burn. On Monday, June 20, before the book's release but after Kakutani's review and the "60 Minutes" interview with Dan Rather, I was with some former Clinton administration officials who were fretting that the memoir would hurt John Kerry by dredging up Monica Lewinsky and impeachment. "It's a disaster," said an old Democratic hand who had watched the Rather interview. "No one is going to want to read this."

Of course, as has so often been the case, the conventional wisdom about Bill Clinton was wrong this time, too. Elites may have scorned the book, but its sales have been extraordinary; early indications are that they may even surpass those for Hillary's memoirs, which themselves wildly exceeded expectations. The whole episode reminds me of Clinton's 1998 State of the Union address, widely chided at the same time by reporters for going on too long, but which surveys later showed was well appreciated by a public whose appetite for detail is often underestimated. Readers who are willing to slog through the nearly 1,000 pages will find things that the critics missed. (They'll see that, yes, the book can be rambling and slapdash, too--which is as much a reflection on Knopf as it is on Clinton, since the publisher insisted the memoir cover his whole life.) The sections on Monica that so dominated the first days stories are brief and uninteresting. Okay, he feels bad. We get it. (Indeed, once it was revealed during the president's impeachment trial that Clinton had taken all the risks of the world's most calamitous affair while refraining from intercourse because he didn't want to go all the way, it was pretty, clear that he had, uh, issues.) Clinton's unalloyed hatred of Ken Starr is neither surprising nor especially unjustified when you read, once again, how wildly far the prosecutor went after the former...