The tragedy of his success: the best and the worst of Bill Clinton were inextricably linked.

• Author: Greenfield, Jeff
• Position: Book by John F. Harris - Book Review

The Survivor: Bill Clinton in the White House By John F. Harris Random House, $29.95

By historical standards, President Clinton's presidency ended the day before yesterday, but book-length assessments have long since begun to appear. Read Joe Klein's The Natural, and you're examining a presidency that, on the domestic front at least, accomplished large things with incremental tools such as the Earned Income Tax Credit. Read Legacy by National Review editor Rich Lowry, and you're dealing with a pathologist's report on a fatally flawed man and message. Open Sidney Blumenthal's The Clinton Wars--if you can lift it--and there is Clinton as heroic figure, struggling to fulfill his promise while under withering, mendacious assault from ideological zealots driven to frenzy by Clinton's political skills. In the wake of the September 11 attacks, the Clinton administration has been painted both as a study in dereliction and--by former National Security Advisor Richard Clarke--a presidency far more alert to the dangers of al Qaeda than the Bush team.

Washington Post reporter John F. Harris, who covered the White House during Clinton's last six years, has made the most ambitious effort thus far: to chronicle the Clinton years in the context of the eras political trends and to connect the successes and failures of his presidency back to his character. It is a scrupulously fair-minded book, with plenty of ammunition for both Clinton's admirers and detractors. And if you're like me, you'll put the book down with the sense that you have read a modern reworking of a tragedy with a special Clintonian twist: The hem's flaws do not bring him down--he's earning, and is loved by, millions--but instead help put the party he led in its most perilous state in decades.

Bill Clinton arrived on the national scene after the Democrats had suffered three consecutive presidential defeats--losses that came in large measure because, as the young Arkansas governor told the centrist Democratic Leadership Council in 1991, "too many of the people Who used to vote for us, the very burdened middle class we are talking about, have not trusted us in national elections to defend our national interests abroad, to put their values into our social policy at home, or to take their tax money and spend it with discipline." Much of The Survivor charts the Serpentine course Clinton traveled in trying to pursue policies that reflected this conviction. Harris is particularly impressive in chronicling the fight between the liberal populist inclinations of some on the president's team (Labor Secretary Robert Reich, political aides George Stephanopoulos and Patti Begala) and the more centrist views of those aides who came from the financial establishment (Lloyd Bentsen, Clinton's first treasury secretary, and Robert Rubin, the president's chief economic advisor and later Bentsen's successor). Years after his 1993 tax and budget proposals squeezed through Congress--by a margin of one vote in each house--the American economy was in the best shape in its history. The Republican warnings that...