Description:
On August 17, 1998, after testifying to a grand jury put together by independent prosecutor Kenneth Starr about the nature of his relationship with a young woman named Monica Lewinsky, President Bill Clinton addressed the United States in a four-and-a-half-minute televised speech. One of the people watching was Clinton biographer and NBC commentator David Maraniss. In The Clinton Enigma, Maraniss uses the rhetorical device of "dissecting" the speech to rehash many of the usual negativities attached to Clinton: the lying, the quibbling over legal definitions, the extramarital affairs, the dysfunctional childhood (including some admittedly unconfirmed, but apparently still worth mentioning, rumors of illegitimacy in the circumstances of his birth). Maraniss does include some remarks that serve to disassociate himself from what First Lady Hillary Rodham Clinton once called "a vast right-wing conspiracy" out to smear the president's reputation, but The Clinton Enigma is ultimately cut from the same cloth as such other instant commentaries as Jerome Levin's The Clinton Syndrome and William J. Bennett's The Death of Outrage (and, to be ideologically balanced, James Carville's attack on Starr, And the Horse He Rode in On). The book is far more revealing about its author than its purported subject. --Ron Hogan
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