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★★★★★
'He just can't stand law enforcement.'
Jefferson has Dumas Malone, Lincoln has Carl Sandburg, and Bill Clinton has Barbara Olson -- the biographer who, if there's any justice in the world (for him, if not for her), will be associated with his name for the rest of time.
Olson's final book is a chronicling of the last weeks of Bill and Hillary Clinton's co-presidency. She gives us a quick, but important, survey of a number of Clintonian outrages, including massive land and power-grabs, Senator-to-be Hillary's shameless and desperate panhandling of expensive gifts before she fell under the Senate's ethics rules, and Slick's international 'farewell tour' of foreign countries -- a field trip that cost taxpayers billions and gained us, diplomatically, less than nothing.
But where Olson's analysis really shines is in her efforts to get to the bottom of 'Pardongate,' the wave of commutations, clemencies, and pardons that Clinton dished out, some literally in his last minutes in office. About a quarter of the book is spent detailing Clinton's most outrageous pardon, that of multi-billion dollar tax cheat Marc Rich. The last quarter or so discusses his other pardons, handed out to a rogue's gallery consisting largely of relatives, business partners, ex-girlfriends, Cabinet members, and cocaine dealers.
Even as skilled a reporter as Barbara Olson is at a loss to explain why Clinton chose to pardon who he did, or why he consulted so few people before issuing the pardons. One of Olson's theses -- both provocative and believable -- is that Clinton was so outraged at being compelled, on his last full day in office, to sign a deal with the independent counsel admitting his wrongdoing in the Lewinsky case and disbarring himself from the practice of law, that Clinton chose to lash out at his own 'persecutors' by granting clemency to criminals whom police and prosecutors had spent years pursuing. As one of Clinton's own Justice Department lawyers noted, 'He [Clinton] just can't stand law enforcement' (p. 141).
Ultimately, Olson helps us put Clinton in context, marshalling observers from Left and Right before drawing her own conclusions. Forrest McDonald, acclaimed historian of the American presidency, asks simply, 'What did [Clinton] get done? Was there any major legislation he was responsible for? ... Everyone approves of what he's doing, but no one can say anything he did' (p. 212). More directly, Andrew Sullivan of The New Republic notes, 'In Bill Clinton, we had for eight years a truly irrational person in the White House, someone who, I think, lived on the edge of serious mental illness. He was and is a psychologically sick man' (p. 199).
It's clear to see why -- if reports are correct -- Hillary Clinton was so anxious to get this book silenced following Barbara Olson's death. If, as it's said, people in democracies get the leaders they deserve, we can at least repay the favor by making sure our 'leaders' get the biographers they deserve. There's no question that Barbara Olson is the biographer Bill and Hillary Clinton deserve, and it's just one of many reasons to mourn her untimely death that she will no longer be able to chronicle this venal and dangerous politician ... and her husband, America's most corrupt president.
Let this book be (part of) her memorial.
November 2001 · Books