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July/August 2001

My Affair with Clinton: An Intellectual Memoir By Benjamin R. Barber W.W. Norton Click on the title to buy the book

Benjamin Barber's very nice book offers insight into Bill Clinton, the wonk. A Rutgers professor known for smart, interesting policy books like McWorld v. Jihad, a study of globalism, Barber was something of a hanger-on in the Clinton White House. The president¹s speechwriting team would occasionally tap him for ideas; Clinton had Barber up to Camp David to talk out themes for his State of the Union address, and Barber was briefly under consideration to head the National Endowment for the Humanities.

I didn¹t keep track, and Barber doesn¹t spell it out specifically, but it sounds as if he met with Clinton about a dozen times during his eight years in office, almost always in a group setting, only having private words on a couple of occasions. That may not sound like the best fodder for a memoir. But often the best accounts are written by minor characters, less concerned with how history will judge them, than by the principals who write with a hesitant pen. 

Barber¹s a small enough fry that he gleefully notes how he gobbled up souvenirs at the Camp David gift shop. Big shots actually do this too, he notes, since so few outsiders get to visit Camp David. But it¹s impossible to imagine, say, David Gergen chronicling how he snagged a Camp David Frisbee or going on at length about the White House¹s chicken with pumpkin gnocchi. Barber¹s utter lack of pretension leads to some funny moments, like his hysterical account of sitting next to Clinton at a dinner where the two shared a dish of nuts: ³Every time I casually reached out with my hand to take a nut, the president¹s large left hand shot out like a cobra¹s head dropping over the mouth of the cup blocking my access." 

To Barber¹s credit, he¹s self-aware enough to know that he sounds like an academic Sammy Glick sometimes‹too ambitious for his own good. After he¹s turned down for the NEH head‹in favor of Bill Ferris, the Mississippi folklorist who, unlike Barber, had the full backing of Trent Lott‹Barber painfully begs the First Lady¹s Chief of Staff Melanne Verveer, one of his champions, to reconsider. As the two meet at the White House, Barber keeps begging. She finally has to declare: ³It¹s over." Defeated, he winds up, by coincidence, sitting next to Ralph Nader on the plane as he leaves Washington. Unable to contain himself, Barber unloads his frustrations on Nader. Even though it¹s still years away until his 2000 presidential bid, Nader is already foaming with anti-Clinton hatred, telling Barber that he has to go public to denounce the atrocity of his not getting the NEH job.

When Barber gets home, The New York Times is calling for the inside account of what happened. (Nader had already leaked to the Gray Lady.) Sensing that maybe he should stop his whining, Barber declines to lambaste the president in print. It¹s as nice a little tale as you¹ll find about the hope and heartbreak surrounding the confirmation process.

The truth, as Barber sees it, is that intellectuals ultimately have little effect on governance, even with a brainiac president like Clinton. For all the advice Clinton got at various dinners and confabs with academics, ultimately he took only snippets of what they said and incorporated it into his agenda. The long dinners with academics like Robert Putnam of Bowling Alone fame or Theda Skocpol, the political theorist, are really just ³mental golf" for the president. A useful distraction, but hardly a tutorial. Barber is wise enough to know that this is as it should be. Academics shouldn¹t run the White House, he acknowledges; the president should.

Still, he can¹t help but feel hurt when he would submit entire speeches to the Clinton speech writing team and they¹d use barely a sentence or two. (He reprints them here as if to get out his frustration. But, believe me, I think Clinton did the right thing by only taking bits.) This leaves him feeling a somewhat like a rejected lover, giving the word ³affair" in the title a double meaning. Seduced by Clinton, but unsatisfied, he¹s sort of like Monica with a doctorate. Some of this, though, sounds like whining.

Take the issue of national service. Barber¹s a big advocate of national service and indeed Clinton announced his AmeriCorps plan in a speech at Barber¹s Rutgers. (There¹s a very funny account of how Barber single-handedly convinced the White House to do the speech at the New Jersey state university by saying he could guarantee a crowd of 10,000. Of course, he had no such ability. But once the White House announced the speech, the crowd took care of itself.)

Barber is upset that Clinton never did enough to shore up the philosophical underpinnings of national service. He felt the president, like Colin Powell with his America¹s Promise, put too much emphasis on the good works of public service rather than the transformative effects on the service workers themselves. But does that really matter? Regardless of whether Clinton used Barber¹s preferred philosophical rhetoric, the fact is that national service is alive and thriving even after the Bush takeover. 

A few other quibbles: Barber has got a habit of quoting people at length in the book. Unless he was tape-recording conversations, it¹s hard to imagine how he¹s doing more than paraphrasing. So why be so sloppy with what were supposed to have been verbatim quotes? Indeed, given other annoying errors in the book‹Tom Brokaw¹s bestseller was The Greatest Generation not The Heroic Generation‹you start to wonder about the accuracy of these recollections. (I should add here that my wife once worked for Bill Clinton and that a number of friends of mine are mentioned in the book.) 

But these are quibbles. This is a smart book about Clinton and the presidency in general. It gets at that perennial question of who makes a good president. Is it intellectuals like Wilson or Clinton or Jefferson or less academic types like, say, Truman or Reagan? Ultimately, I found myself liking Clinton more after the book not because he was so bookish‹often he had less toleration for the talkathons than you¹d imagine‹but because he had the good sense to know when to blow off the academics and follow his political gut.

Barber seems torn about this. On one hand, he¹s glad that intellectuals don¹t rule the roost, but he¹s also a little remorseful that he didn¹t have more clout and that Clinton wasn¹t more philosophical. Fortunately for the rest of us, we don¹t have to have that kind of ambivalence. There are upsides to having a bookish president, but it hardly seems a prerequisite of effective leadership.