![]() Maraniss traces these qualities through Clinton's youth in Hope and then Hot Springs, his high school years, his college years at Georgetown, then Oxford as a Rhodes scholar, and then Yale Law School, and then throughout his rise in Arkansas politics. ![]() ![]() Others were put off by his glad-handing and apparent deviousness. Many people were drawn into his orbit by his charm and charisma. This affected Clinton too - probably much more so than he let on with friends as he would talk about his biological father's death buy kept fairly mum about Roger Clinton and his excesses.įrom boyhood, Clinton alternately attracted and repelled people. While his fun-loving mother, Virginia, remarried, Clinton had an uneasy relationship with his alcoholic and abusive step-father Roger Clinton. This caused Clinton to continually seek out potential father figures as he grew up and even when he was a young adult. As one can imagine, this has a profound effect on Clinton's life (he was born William Jefferson Blythe but later legally changed his last name to Clinton) as he grew up without a father. Maraniss begins by discussing the death of Clinton's father, William Blythe, in an auto accident before Clinton is even born. Clinton was constantly seeking the middle ground with people, something which was a harbinger of what he tried to do later as president. As Maraniss notes, Clinton (and Hillary too later on in the book) is a rash of contradictions: someone equally at home in a rural black church or playing golf at a ritzy country club where all the members are white. Maraniss focuses on who Bill Clinton really is, or perhaps a better way to phrase it is that he tries to focus on who Bill Clinton really is. This book was written during Clinton's presidency, in the mid 1990s, and takes us only through Clinton's decision to formally announce his candidacy for the presidency on 10/3/91. One of the reasons that David Maraniss's biography of the early Bill Clinton is so engrossing is because he neither has an ax to grind with the Clintons, nor does he think that either of them are remotely close to pillars of virtue. Many people fall into one of two camps: the Clintons are evil and represent all that is wrong with politics, or they are two people who have devoted their lives to serving the public and making things better for working-class Americans. While most politicians manage to antagonize one side or the other (or both), feelings about the Clintons are hyper-ventilated. In this age of extreme partisanship it is difficult to find a neutral book about Bill or Hillary Clinton. He has won several other notable awards for achievements in journalism, including the George Polk Award, the Dirksen Prize for Congressional Reporting, the ASNE Laventhol Prize for Deadline Writing, the Hancock Prize for Financial Writing, the Anthony Lukas Book Prize, the Frankfort Book Prize, the Eagleton Book Prize, the Ambassador Book Prize, and Latino Book Prize. He is also the author of The Clinton Enigma and coauthor of The Prince of Tennessee: Al Gore Meets His Fate and "Tell Newt to Shut Up!"ĭavid is a three-time Pulitzer Prize finalist and won the Pulitzer for national reporting in 1993 for his newspaper coverage of then-presidential candidate Bill Clinton. David Maraniss is an associate editor at The Washington Post and the author of four critically acclaimed and bestselling books, When Pride Still Mattered: A Life of Vince Lombardi, First in His Class: A Biography of Bill Clinton, They Marched Into Sunlight War and Peace, Vietnam and America October 1967, and Clemente The Passion and Grace of Baseballs Last Hero.
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