No Lewinsky Tune From Little Rockefella

Hillary's eyes were wide open in the autumn of 1970 when Clinton arrived at Yale. Hillary describes him in her book, looking "more like a Viking than a Rhodes Scholar returning from two years at Oxford. He was tall and handsome somewhere beneath that reddish brown beard and curly mane of hair. He also had a vitality that seemed to shoot out of his pores." Her eyes were still focused on him when they exchanged their first lines. As Clinton remembers it in his My Life: "For once she was staring back at me. After a while she closed her book, walked the length of the library, looked at me in the eye and said: 'If you are going to keep staring at me and I am going to keep staring back, we ought to at least know each other's names. Mine's Hillary Rodham, what's yours?'."

The problem with Clinton's memoirs, self-serving as political memoirs tend to be, is that there are no throwaway lines that he cares to offer, for example, on Monica. For that we have to turn to Andrew Morton's Monica's Story or—even better—Starr's 445-page investigative effort, which Clinton derides at great length: "...the lawyers tried hard to turn my interrogation into admissions that were humiliating and incriminating. That's what the...$40 million investigation had come down to: parsing the definition of sex."

Just for a lark, I checked the dates mentioned in the Starr report against the almost diary-style entries in My Life. All I could see was that Hillary and Bill at the end of October celebrated their 20th wedding anniversary, a tender moment, barely a fortnight or so before Clinton's first sexual encounter with Monica on November 15. This is what Clinton writes: "At the end of the month Hillary and I celebrated our twentieth wedding anniversary. I got her a pretty diamond ring to mark a milestone in our lives and to make up for the fact that when she agreed to marry me, I didn't have enough money to buy her an engagement ring. Hillary loved the little diamonds across the thin band, and wore the ring as a reminder that, through all our ups and downs, we were still very much engaged". There are no entries for November 15 or 17 or for any of the other days. On April 3, Clinton was "devastated" by the death by accident of Ron Brown, a close friend and commerce secretary. Starr's investigations say that on April 7, three days after Ron Brown's death, "Ms Lewinsky performed oral sex. The President did not ejaculate in her presence." Searching for clues in My Life is a mug's game. This is what Clinton has to say for that period: "In the awful week between the crash and the funeral (April 10), I carried on with my duties as best as I could."

At a reported $10 million, Clinton consumes an extraordinary number of pages to continue with his hallmark evasiveness. At least Hillary conceded that she felt like wringing Bill's neck when he woke her up to confess his inappropriate relationship with Monica two days before the grand jury hearing. Bill, in contrast, says, "I spent the first couple of days alternating between begging for forgiveness and planning the strikes on Al Qaeda. At night Hillary would go up to bed and I slept on the couch."

It is this extreme circumspection that makes the book somehow incomplete. Not a word, for instance, on how Chelsea was told and how she reacted. But it's not just Monica Lewinsky. Soon after he married Hillary in 1975, Clinton ran into Gennifer Flowers, "a television reporter for a local station who often interviewed me". Asked to give a deposition on Ms Flowers in 1998, "I acknowledged that back in the seventies I had had a relationship with her that I should not have had." The memoir steers clear of such relationships, which is why I suppose it is a political memoir.

In closing, Clinton says, "I think it is a good story and I've had a good time telling it." It took two and a half years to write, all longhand. Reading it is another story altogether. Some stories are lost in the telling; his story is occasionally engaging but often inane which is surprising for someone who, by all accounts, lived an interesting life. His childhood years, adolescence and early adulthood are for the most part better narrated; his relationship with his mother and his stepfather are touching. In the later years he tends to get lost in the minutiae of a president's daily life.

But Bill Clinton deserves to be remembered in New Delhi more for getting a sense of higher purpose, including a blueprint for broad action, into America's relationship with India so soon after the nuclear explosions in Pokhran and the way he persuaded Nawaz Sharif to pull his army back from Kargil. He was scheduled to come to India in February 1998, but couldn't and the Pokhran nuclear explosions later in May changed the complexion of relations before Clinton took them forward. But in the book, disappointingly, he does not care to go behind the scenes into the tale still waiting to be told authoritatively: how Washington and New Delhi gingerly reached out for engagement after Pokhran. For that I guess we'll have to wait for Strobe Talbott's memoirs. Clinton's account of his visit to the subcontinent is pedestrian. He, however, has an interesting anecdote on the missile strike at Osama bin Laden's camps in Afghanistan where some terrorists were also being trained to be deployed in Kashmir.

"The Pakistani intelligence service used some of the same camps that bin Laden and Al Qaeda did to train the Taliban and the insurgents who fought in Kashmir. If Pakistan found out about our planned attacks in advance, it was likely that Pakistani intelligence would warn the Taliban or even the Al Qaeda. On the other hand, deputy secretary of state Strobe Talbott, who was working to minimise the chances of a military conflict on the Indian subcontinent, was afraid that if we didn't tell the Pakistanis... they might assume the flying missiles had been launched at them by India and retaliate, conceivably, even with nuclear weapons."

The solution: "We decided to send the vice-chairman of the joint chiefs of staff, General Joe Ralston, to have dinner with the top Pakistani military commander at the time the attacks were scheduled. Ralston would tell him what was happening a few minutes before our missiles invaded Pakistani airspace, too late to alert the Taliban or the Al Qaeda, but in time to avoid having them shot down or sparking a counterattack on India. "

One entertaining moment in Clinton's book is the account of the famous White House reconciliation between plo chairman Yasser Arafat and Yitzhak Rabin. Rabin was reluctant to shake hands with Arafat and most certainly didn't want Arafat to kiss him. Although Rabin was later persuaded to shake Arafat's hand, Clinton's advisors had to think of a way to prevent Arafat from attempting that kiss. Clinton tells that story of the kissless handshake nicely. Pity is, all aspects of the book don't match up to the Palestinian-Israeli episodes.