Bill Clinton
Mastering the Presidency
by Nigel Hamilton
PublicAffairs, 766 pp., $32

Nigel Hamilton is an excitable sort. People who read JFK: Reckless Youth, the first and, as it turned out, the only book in a projected multi-tome life of John Kennedy, understand that he is a writer given to great hates and great crushes, vast and unstoppable waves of emotion that go on and on to great length.

His crush in that first book was on one Inga Arvad, the World War II flame of Lieutenant Kennedy shortly before he went off to the Solomon Islands for the rendezvous with destiny and the Japanese navy which would come in handy years later in the runs for political office that he never thought at the time he would make. A sex-bomb/earth-mother, a Danish edition of Sophia Loren, she impressed Hamilton even more than JFK, and the hot breath soon rose out of the pages as he detailed her remarkable attributes and the course of that intense and ill-starred romance.

The bête noire was Joseph P. Kennedy Sr., known to history as a man of crude ways and dreadful political judgment, but portrayed here as a figure of endless malevolence. His name seldom appeared without being attached to a long string of unflattering adjectives, and he was likened to Stalin, a tyrant and murderer whose similar first name was described as highly significant. At one point, on the basis of no grounds whatever, it was implied that Kennedy père molested his retarded daughter, and had her

This warns but does not prepare you for what you will find in the second of what will undoubtedly be a full three-volume life of Bill Clinton, as neither the former president nor anyone close to him will find a thing about which to complain. In the Kennedy book, Inga Arvad and Joe Kennedy were not central figures, and did not completely unbalance the story. In this book, one's luck does not hold. In this one, the crush is Bill Clinton himself, and the bêtes noires are his enemies--the racists, bigots, primates, low-lives, KKK rejects, and cross and/or heretic burners--who constitute the modern conservative movement and who, largely for reasons of sexual jealousy, focused their wrath on poor Bill.

The result is neither a case nor a narrative, but rather an adjective dump, in which truckloads of words--all meaning the same thing, and sometimes the same words, used over and over--are trundled over to the appropriate objects and unloaded on them, in a torrent of excess and overkill. If your politics are of the MoveOn.org genre, and your taste in literature is an Al Gore tirade mixed with the gushings of Barbara Cartland, then this is a book you will cherish. If not, you have been warned.

In theory, this is a fall-and-rise story, taking Clinton from his inauguration in 1993 through his early misjudgments and setbacks, through the crushing rebuke in the 1994 midterm election, to his recovery in 1995 after the bombing in Oklahoma City and his reelection the following year. In the event, it is an old-fashioned morality story, framed as a battle of epic proportions between the forces of evil and goodness, the former being "the cynical, self-centered, brazen, often hypocritical Republican ethos .  .  . the right wing trash machine .  .  . the white, re-incarnated, K-K-K fundamentalists .  .  . [practicing a] religious, right-wing ideology, such as was being practiced in Iran."