The president we deserve

Martin Walker's critical biography of Bill Clinton focuses on the president as a classical figure of America's post-World War II meritocracy, a poor boy from the segregated Old South who won scholarships to elite universities and became a lawyer fascinated by the process and the power of government. This president's background is as grittily American as the woeful tales that wail from jukeboxes in bars across the land. Bill Clinton is Bubba with brains, a redneck with a Rhodes scholarship - America at her most raw - and most cultivated. Martin Walker presents a thorough and insightful account of the tumultuous Clinton administration from the president's foreign policy failures in Bosnia and Somalia to his successes in the Baltic and Northern Ireland, and to the ever-changing role of Hillary Rodham Clinton and her impact on her husband's presidency, beginning with the First Lady's health reform efforts to her involvement in Whitewater and the travel office controversy. Martin Walker shows us the why, the how, and the future of the Clinton administration, which has been unpredictable, volatile, and continually fascinating.