With the election of 2016 it would appear that Bill and Hillary Clinton are now finished as active politicians. They are in the process of moving into the realm of history. So what are we to make of the Bill Clinton presidency? Was he a significant president who shaped his era and left a strong, lasting legacy in policy and legislation? Or was he a political minority elected because of fissures in the dominant coalition, who, because of his weak political base, found it easier to dominate foreign policy rather than center his agenda on domestic issues? And how badly did reckless behavior in his personal life damage his political legacy? Less than two decades removed from a Clinton presidency, Russell L. Riley’s “Inside the Clinton White House: An Oral History” (Oxford, 2016) and Patrick J. Maney’s “Bill Clinton: New Gilded Age President” (Kansas Press, 2016) suggest that the dust is still settling on the reputation of our 42nd president.
It is clear that the subjects of the various oral histories in Russell L. Riley’s book have a positive opinion of Clinton. Housing and Urban Development Secretary Henry Cisneros argues that Clinton’s decision to reduce the deficit made economic growth and any number of social developments that stemmed from it possible. Deputy National Security Advisor Nancy Soderberg lauded his decision-making abilities, commenting that she “literally never saw Clinton make a foreign policy decision for anything but policy reasons.” The view that emerges from these and many other interviews is of a principled and able politician, advancing an agenda he believed in and developing a foreign policy for the post-Cold War era that would endure.
Riley has also done an impressive job of taking dozens and dozens of interviews and sewing them into an engaging, entertaining read. The chapters are organized in a roughly chronological manner. The book is rife with great quotes. Stanley Greenberg on gays in the military: “Our poll numbers crashed.” Roger Altman on internal debates within the administration on what to prioritize in 1993: “Were there different views? Sure. But was it a battle? No. I’ve seen Washington battles and that wasn’t one of them.”
With that said, many times the interviewees dodge important issues. Commerce Secretary Mickey Kantor on the impeachment: “Well, it is a Clinton pattern to get in trouble when he is doing better.” On why Clinton had so many critics, Secretary of State Warren Christopher argued: “One thing I think has to do with his ‘Southern-ness’ and the fact that he came from a state that’s not very highly regarded nationally.”
In contrast, Patrick J. Maney’s book is more realistic than negative. Clinton had a weak political base, but managed to get several major pieces of legislation passed because of his political flexibility. With that point made, many of the major changes taking place in the 1990s had little to do with who was in the White House, and reflected major developments in technology and commerce. While the economy grew, so did income inequality, and many jobs were lost as new industries came to replace older ones. In many ways the 1990s were a repeat of the 1890s. Clinton failed to exert that much influence on the nation, because “the flywheel of contemporary history was powered in the private, not the public, realm.” This “new Gilded Age” argument is interesting, but it disappears for large chunks of the book.
While the oral history interviewees argue that Clinton was ideologically committed to a middle course, Maney sees him as far more opportunistic. He supports that position in convincing fashion. Clinton went left in his first year, only changing course after health care reform and lifting the ban of gays in the military failed. Clinton supported deregulation (with mixed results), pushed his party to a more centrist position and reformed welfare, which neutralized crime and welfare as issues the Republicans could use against Democrats. Even then, Maney argues Clinton’s reelection owes more to Republican ineptitude than his own skill.
In foreign policy, he got better with time. Under Clinton, the North Atlantic Treaty Organization intervened in Bosnia, but ignored the mass killing in Rwanda. During its first term, the Clinton Administration spent time trying to develop a strategy, which Clinton began to believe was a fool’s errand. Historians and “the chattering class” gave foreign policy more coherence after the fact. Maybe, maybe not, but Maney argues cogently that Clinton had real influence in his second term. His foreign policy team was more cohesive and he expanded the war-making authority over Congress. A U.S. intervention in Kosovo brought peace to the region, while ignoring the War Powers Act. Clinton took anti-terrorism efforts seriously and was targeting al-Qaeda long before he left office. He also notes that Clinton and a large, bipartisan majority in Congress changed U.S. policy towards Iraq in 1998, calling for regime change rather than containment. There were limits, though. Maney makes a good argument that the effort to negotiate a peace settlement between Israel and Palestine was never as close as Clinton and his staff believed.
Part of the problem in assessing any president so quickly after he leaves office is that subsequent events can quickly change a legacy. Maney argues that Clinton’s most significant action was to make the Democrats more centrist, but Barack Obama appears to have pushed the party back to the left again. Clinton took the terrorism threat seriously and changed foreign policy on Iraq, but in many ways that seems to have made him just a prologue for George W. Bush. Getting to the White House is no small thing, but there are legends like Lincoln and the Roosevelt’s, and then there are those with more modest reputations like Harding and the Harrisons. It is still too early to tell where Clinton will finish or, rather, how his reputation will change over time. These books set a good standard for the studies to come.
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