Clinton Ambition Biographer Recounts The Methodical, Fateful And Perpetual Campaign That Won The Presidency

“First In His Class: A Biography of Bill Clinton” By David Maraniss (512 pages, Simon & Schuster, $25)

There is a recurrent scene in “First in His Class,” a new biography of Bill Clinton, that gives the reader a vivid glimpse of the president’s ambition and political instincts.

As a young man, David Maraniss reports, Clinton assembled a cardboard box filled with alphabetized and annotated index cards listing the names and telephone numbers of classmates, professors, political organizers and other acquaintances who might be useful to him in a future political career.

While running (unsuccessfully) for Congress in 1974, Clinton, Maraniss writes, “spent time each night combing through the file, placing telephone calls, and writing notes to friends who might help his campaign.” He would return to the file many times in the years to come.

By 1980, when Clinton lost a reelection bid for the Arkansas governorship, the card file included more than 10,000 names.

Each card, Maraniss observes, recorded important interchanges Clinton had had with the individual, and another row of dates noting “when that person had received a letter from Clinton or his aides known as a for Glad to Meet You.”

By 1982, the card file had been computerized, resulting in a sophisticated campaign machine that “ran around the clock, churning out Glad-to-Meet-You letters, fundraising solicitations, special letters for black supporters, for first-time supporters, for teachers, for the elderly.”

“Letters to friends of Bill went out in an endless stream,” Maraniss writes.

Indeed, the portrait of Mr. Clinton that emerges from this biography is not one of a visionary leader or statesman, but of an indefatigable, instinctual politician, driven throughout his life to seek the approval of friends and strangers alike.

By now, of course, none of this is exactly news. Although Mr. Clinton is only halfway through his first term in office, three other books on him or his presidency (“The Agenda,” by Bob Woodward, “On the Edge,” by Elizabeth Drew, and “Highwire,” by John Brummett) have already appeared.

In addition, countless articles - including a Pulitzer Prize-winning series written by Maraniss for The Washington Post in 1992 - have chronicled and rechronicled his life and political career.

Those newspaper articles by Maraniss provided the basic armature for this book, though a curious shift in tone seems to have occurred along the way. Whereas the campaign pieces tended to stress the positive aspects of Clinton’s political stamina, ambition (or “sense of purpose”) and faith in the principle of reconciliation, “First in His Class” often looks at those same qualities through a darker lens.

In his first few chapters, Maraniss seems distinctly uncomfortable writing in the long-distance form of the book, doggedly describing Clinton’s feelings and other people’s impressions of him without pulling the material together into a coherent pattern of meaning.

The second half of the book is decidedly less myopic, though its assessments can sometimes verge on the obvious. For instance, Maraniss concludes that the part of Clinton that “is indefatigable, intelligent, empathetic and self-deprecating” coexists with “the part of him that is indecisive, too eager to please and prone to deception.”

Maraniss’s attempts to situate the president within the larger context of the baby-boom generation are highly simplistic, and his occasional efforts to wax poetic can result in unfortunate sentences like this one: “Luck and fate always seem to appear at the edge of the road as Bill Clinton drives along his highway of ambition, two friendly hitchhikers, thumbs out, ready to be picked up for stretches here and there when other passengers appear less attractive.”

When Maraniss sticks to straightforward reporting, the results are decidedly better.

He sets down a minutely detailed account of Clinton’s convoluted dealings with the draft during the Vietnam War, and he agilely demonstrates how Clinton’s tenure as governor of Arkansas prefigured many of his problems as president, including a reputation for overly expedient decisions, a penchant for blaming others and a tendency to displease everyone by trying to please all.

The overall narrative, which ends with Clinton’s announcement in 1991 that he is running for president, is fairly comprehensive, though highly selective in its points of emphasis.