President Clinton’s memoirs are already breaking records. The initial print run of the book, for which the ex-president is rumored to have been paid $12 million, is the highest ever at 1.5 million copies. Substantial advance orders suggest that the first edition could well sell out.
If some reviewers, including the New York Times literary critic, are to be believed, the Clinton memoirs could also break records for tedium.
Leaving aside the quality of this personal history, the very fact that its publication has been greeted with such razzmatazz highlights something odd that seems to happen to virtually all US presidents. It is that regardless of how disastrous their terms of office has been, regardless of the enthusiasm with which the electorate voted them out of office, the minute they quit, former occupants of the White House go into a media safe zone where they are treated with reverence by both press and public.
Even Richard Nixon, the man who utterly disgraced the great office he was elected to serve, was eventually allowed to creep back into the public limelight. Though serious enough, Clinton’s disgrace was by contrast a minor affair. It was not so much the sordid nature of his original offense as the lawyer-smart terms in which he chose to deny it which gave rise to the gravest charge against him: that he had lied to a US court and obstructed justice. Clinton was impeached but cleared at the subsequent trial.
Washington politics are notoriously tough. Scandal often follows legislators into retirement. Yet presidents, even when they do not leave office in a triumphant glow, are elevated to a status where they become beyond further criticism, at least while they are alive. Perhaps part of the explanation is that each former occupant of the White House maintains the honorific title “Mr. President” along with full round-the-clock secret service protection. More importantly, he creates his own presidential library, where papers, memorabilia and anything else that seems minutely relevant to his incumbency, is stored and displayed to the public. Some presidents choose to be buried in the grounds of their library. These institutions thus acquire the status, though never the beauty, of a Taj Mahal.
Until the man is dead and the historians set in on him, most past US presidents have been elevated to untouchable status. Bill Clinton is clearly on that plain. Thus to promote his memoirs, he has sat through a series of prime time television interviews. Each of these encounters has been marked by the kid gloves with which the interviewers handled their guest. Clinton clearly felt this to be his due and expected nothing less. This explains the flash of anger when he submitted himself to a British TV interview where he was asked if he really had been sincere when he expressed his contrition over the Monica Lewinsky affair. It seemed for a moment that the 42nd president had forgotten that foreign journalists do not share the respect of their US colleagues and that not everyone beyond America’s backyard sees the world the way it does.
