chamber, and ideological world in which to me if ideas were presented to the public and which one couldn't challenge those ideas without fear of punishment. it was one in which they never voted for hitler to the one in 1938 and 39 is ready to do everything hitler wanted it to do. >> good evening everybody. thank you for coming out on this springlike winter evening. i guess it is going to last for

another day or so. i'm one of the co-owners of politics and prose. we both welcome all of you and also on behalf of our great staff. a few housekeeping announcements before we get going. most of you have been here so you know the drill, but if anybody doesn't, michael will speak about his book the first half of the program that he will be happy to take questions. we only have one microphone and it's right here so hopefully you can make it appear and this is being recorded so it is helpful to become helpful to if you want to ask him something. if you have a cell phone or other noisemaking device. we have plenty of copies of the book and it's a pretty cool looking book.

plenty of copies up front so you can go get one and have him sign it appeared at the table. and if you wouldn't mind also folding up your chairs at the end and putting them to th to de that wilthe sidethat will expedg and in easier exit and it will also make the staff very happy. we appreciate that. i just want to make two announcements. one, we have been posting some teachings starting this month we have one on civil liberties in the next one will be in february. we are mailing out the dates and it will be on immigration reform followed by trying for one a month so if you are interested please check the website. i don't know how many of you have been to them. they've been very well attended and quite spirited. it's been a really interesting

project that we are happy about and encourage you to attend. on a lighter note we want to call your attention to some new items downstairs at the coffeehouse. the recipe of the month is excellent and we continue to have the changing literary so please check out the menu items. i'm going to try to resist making a comment about my intake as of the last week. but moving on it is a pleasure to host michael here at politics and prose. even in the month that featur fd a presidential inauguration back-to-back with one of the

biggest social protest marches we seem we can't get enough politics and politicians around here and michael will be amplifying the discussion. many of you know him as a special correspondent or you have read his excellent work in the new york review of books and in addition to writing extensively on the current affairs he's the editor-in-chief and that democracy and was the executive editor of prospect and the guardian and is the author talking about bill clinton. i'm introducing him in the book for the presidential speechwriter but i assure you i am very unbiased and objective. the book is the latest installment in the series

published and edited by the eminent american historians arthur sloss ensured junior. we think that we've counted correctly and this brings the total to 43 of the now 45. barack obama for obvious reasons so congratulations on filling the big hole with bill clinton. i just want to say that he is in very esteemed company. they are distinguished academics and journalists but it is without a doubt true he drew the shortest straw and it's been commented on wisely. there is an enormous amount is quite voluminous for the challenge to anyone trying to

write the story in brief. it's in the 150 pages. so we congratulate you again. please welcome michael. [applause] >> good evening everyone. thank you for those kind words and thank you for doing this.

it's very nice to know that it's in such good hands. it's nice to see this turn out to talk about a politician. [laughter] >> being called about 11,000 times after the election because i predict a different outcome i have had a lot of company in predicting that so i don't feel too bad about it but the point was driven home on my twitter feed consistently and regularly. [inaudible] he was a very consequential president put his stock is at a low point right now.

i think in some ways it makes it interesting to examine bill clinton from that perspective through that lens to talk about where his legacy stands today and where it stood then and where it stood over the course of the past 15. instant finally where it stands today. and we are here under different circumstances. when they asked me to write this installment i was flattered and i was happy to be asked to join.

yes but for that reason i was thinking this could work out pretty well. there might be quite a lot of renewed interest. it didn't work out that well. before i get into talking about the book i will do a short reading selection. we must acknowledge the current reality and i assume some of you are interested in asking about bill clinton that some of you are interested in asking about other things going on that we are either obsessed with or panicked about right now. if you want to do that, that's

fine we can us could use the q.a session however you want to use it. the thing i learned as i was researching this book but i had known but had forgotten, he had a reputation and that's all the pundits said he puts his finger in the wind and he does what the polls tell him to do. if you dig a little deeper, no.

he followed his compass. sometimes i agree with that and sometimes not. he followed his own belief system more than he was given credit for at the time and he did some unpopular things that were hard to do. his intervention in 1994, which i'm sure many of you remember that was a hard thing to do. do you remember that circumstance he was a man of the left and a land reform or.

the people of haiti where desperate for someone to do something to help them restore their rightful president and the only person that could do anything along those lines was the united states of america so the cold war had just ended and here was a president using the power of the american military not to install a dictator in guatemala and iran but to install someone the united states had no such vested

interest and was a person of the left, not the kind of person we supported during the cold war. it didn't necessarily end while a buddy was a brave thing to do. it was the veto of the partial birth abortion 1999 to set the stage a little bit, congress then in republican hands passed a bill outlawing the

partial-birth abortion that the elite -- he stood firm and made a veto. there were things he didn't get credit for because he had a reputation that went all the way back. looking at the vantage point today, the obvious thing would

be he took a hit dog from the right but from the left and subjected the record by hillary clinton herself. the black lives matter movement challenged her and him, bill clinton and bernie sanders and the populist weighing.

but for many other things as well. so the complex efforts and decisions that constituted the legacy that were thought of as positive and going forward to the bush years suddenly were anathema in that they were things that democratic party should never have done. we haven't seen a presidential reputation forth like that. and i was struck often and i wrote a lot of columns on these

lines trying to remind people of the context. i became a bigger supporter as it became clear to me how insane he drove the right-wing there must be something about him i am missing. i used to joke with friends i'm part of the few proud during the scandal. [laughter] at the beginning i was not a great fan but i recognized all the things he was doing the democratic party had to do some of these things.

so the last three presidential elections in a row and i don't think that happened ever, it happened to the party going back 50 years before then so that was a crisis to lose three in a row. if you lose two of them you think you can write it off to the charisma and personality. ronald reagan had something special. but when you lose the third one, it is time to take a look in the

mirror and do something about all different. so they founded the council in 1984, 85 and had seen bill clinton gave a speech. he said there is this guy. he said it to him and recounted it and said i want you to become the leadership council will travel and meet a lot of people and you will give a lot of speeches and run for president and when and we will both be important people. he said that sounds good to me and that's what happened.

he had a lot of talent of course but to return to the decisions, the democratic party did have a sorry reputation with respect to issues like crime. this was 25 years ago new york city was topping 22 homicides a year and it's back down to around 400. welfare was an issue and you all know of a story you don't need me to tell you this.

there is a reason to take the positions he did and it's worth remembering that whether you agree or disagree it is worth remembering that he did take those positions and when and he did probably save the democratic party. they probably would have lost again. they don't have any appreciati appreciation. it was necessary to become a majority party again.

i had fun writing this section of the book. over the course of a couple of chapters. it was something that was never confronted and i talked about this in the book. we live in an age of polarization and that started at

the level that we understand n now. first of all, the media changed. they started before it became a thing in the 1990s. another new thing in 1990s was the media again for the first time in history this went back which told people you have to represent both sides.

everybody in the media is a bunch of liberals. then came his imitators. so you had a conservative media apparatus that happened for the first time and came together and hillary didn't know how to handle it and she botched the

response to the whitewater thi thing. under other influences it became intensely partisan than the republican party have ever been. another thing that happened is the rise of grover norquist

never to raise income tax goes after george h. w. bush raised income taxes. to this day, not a single housee republican or senator voted for a tax increase. think about how much the changed politics. up until that point and 83, 84

when it came time to raise taxes we would raise them and that's what happened. they pushed through jfk's tax cuts. my point is before 1992 they were not against the tax increase. that changed politics. clinton walks into these areas that no president ever faced. my telling of the story discusses how on the one hand,

it happened because of the government shutdown. do you remember that he met her in a shutdown so if there had been no partisan effort to two of them would have never met so let's start with that. then, there was a group of people and it probably wasn't fast bu that there was a right-g conspiracy trying to catch bill clinton in a perjury trial around the issue of some woman that he had slept with so there were all of these lawyers detailed in the book that i have

it in a short version so there was a group of lawyers that called themselves the elves so that kenneth starr could interview bill clinton and get him to lie about it but they were only grasping at straws and they didn't have anything solid. ..

>> i don't want to do all of that too much. we should talk about other aspects of his presidency and legacy. i wanted to talk about it to set up a short reading i'm going to do. which is from a day in august

august 1998. when bill clinton finally had to tell the truth to us about the nature of his relationship with monica lewinsky. i'm sure you remember that night it was the same day that he had been -- by with his attorneys and asked point blank about monica. and he told the truth, more or less. and he knew was going to be leaked out so he decided he better go on tv. so this starts a couple of days

before actually. >> on saturday morning, august 15, 1998, bill clinton woke up his wife and told her the truth. he said he was ashamed and sorry but he cannot tell anyone, even her at the time because he didn't want to be ran out of office with the flood tide that was his deposition in january. then he told his daughter. the fights might've decided to hand him an easier day work was that there is a terrorist attack in long island. on the fateful day of the deposition the speechwriter wrote, the west wing was ghostly note on. [inaudible]

when asked whether he was physically intimate with monocle galinsky, he read a statement acknowledging conduct that was wrong but stop short of intercourse and thus do not constitute sexual relations as he had understood the meaning of the term engineer 17. there was a previous deposition. the question continued for four hours. clinton said he never asked anyone to live. the whole thing whole thing wrapped up around 6:30 p.m. the white house staff agreed in advance that clinton would have to address the nation that night. two speeches were prepared. one that would express only the act but the other who did that. top top aides argued that clinton should just go full contrition. a stonefaced hillary said you got yourself into this mess and only you can decide what to say about it. clinton. clinton comes still be so speaking from the same room as what he was questioned he went from the angry. he said i did have a relationship that was not appropriate. then he said this is going on

too long, cost too much, and her too many innocent people. now, this matters between me, the two people i love most, my people i love most, my wife and my daughter, and our god. i must put it right. it is private and i intend to reclaim my private life for my family. snow anybody's business but ours. >> the poll suggested most people would agree but he was savaged by the pundits. the next day, the first remove the for their long summer vacation on martha's vineyard. the cameras lingered on the backs as they walked across the white house lawn toward marine one. hillary on the left, bill on the right, and chelsea in between them. holding both parents hands. with his other hand, the president held the leash of his new dog, the well named, buddy. alisa was was observed he had one friend in the picture. so. that is that. but you know he came out of that pretty well, didn't he? i mean his approval rating through the whole thing never went below 60%.

usually was 65 or 66 or 68. should he resign no, the huge majority, should he be impeached, absolutely not, the massive majority. do you approve of the job he's doing the job is doing as president? of course we do. 74% 75%. bombed iraq, the night the house voted the articles of impeachment, to remember that? people thought it was awake the dog thing. everybody thought thought it was awake the dog thing. i think we all know know that the joint chiefs of staff are not going to order a bombing raid to get the presidents chestnuts out of the fire. it's not going to happen. bombing raid approval, 70 percent. even newt gingrich said the president did absolutely the right thing today. so he was, by that time a really

popular, really successful and really surefooted president. there is no question that he would've won the third term if he could've stayed in. he left on what for him was a frustrating notes in that remember the last thing he was trying to do was the middle east peace deal. i do a pretty good job of discussing that in the book, although it's very short. his own retelling of the in my life is quite riveting. there are some good versions out there too. but literally every second, down to the last second of his presidency as it was ticking away. as he was doing his duty by the way to ensure the peaceful transition of power, he

privately found the decision absolutely appalling but he didn't say that. it wasn't his job. his job was to ensure the peaceful power but he was trying what he could to get middle east peace. he got the israelis to agree to the most remarkable set of concessions. that they they had never agreed to before. and he went back to arafat and he said yes,, look at what they done, you have to go for that. he called them up and the saudi's, and he called others and he said talked him into taking this their crazy they don't take this. and then he walked away. arafat did not have the guts to do it.

and arafat called him the day before he left office and said to him, i just want to thank you for all your efforts mr. president. you are a great man. said i'm not a great man, i'm a failure failure and you have made me one. so, an interesting complex man. he got a lot done, did a lot of necessary things and did a lot of very good things in the face of the opposition that no president had ever faced before. if his legacy is a little bit down right now, i think there will come a point when it will come back up. that time, depending on how things go in the next four years

may come sooner than we think. thank you all for listening to me. ,. [inaudible] >> thank you for being here. to bill clinton cooperate? and if, how? >> know. and i asked him to. i asked him for an interview. it's usually not been the case for these books that the authors receive any cooperation. how would they cooperate after all? but, i thought since he's alive and since i know a man i've interviewed him. i don't know well but i've interviewed him and i know plenty of people in that orbit who are in the white house. i thought it's worth a shot.

maybe output and interviewing is in a blog or something. and then they considered it seriously, but then said no. they didn't really say why. so i'm just speculating here but i suspect it was because it was during his wife's presidential campaign and they did not want him to slip up and say anything that he wasn't supposed to say. i did get cooperation from some of the folks who were around greenberg and a few others. >> inc. you for your talk. i'm from the younger generation, bore 92, the year he was elected. i agree, i think my generation should be better

informed about bill clinton, specially now that barack obama has completed now that barack obama has completed his presidency. lester democratic presidents both lasted two terms and with the rocky times. the comparisons notably going to rise. what would you say to inform people for my age of bill clinton, specially when barack obama with their more familiar with? >> that's an important question. i hope you people are interested in reading this. if they want to get a good sense of the guy without having to read is 600 page hundred page door stopper this is where you come. as a set of my remarks. a lot of the things he did that young people's would disagree with. you need you need to understand the context of the time. the democratic party was perceived in a different way and there's also there is no sense at that time that there is any public ground swell for the kinda popular as some that

bernie came to represent. there are politicians who are trying to do that sort of thing. there were tom harkin tried to run the campaign in 1992 and he won one state, some state. so there just was not much of a sense that there is a lot of hunger for that kind of politics at that time. there is more of a hunger frankly, for what clinton did. everybody's everybody's a product of their time. he did largely what his times demanded. he also did a lot of progressive things. they just don't sound as progressive as young people want them to sound today. he moved the country forward on racial stuff and he protected choice. there were a number of things he

did that helped working-class people and poor people. more people were out of poverty than when he was president then certainly any other matter president. those were a few things. >> i have a question about the post-presidency. how do you understand bill clinton after he left office in the context of both international and global focus rather than domestic and in comparison to those who came before him, also from what we've seen from president bush and what we're likely to see from a far more vocal obama if we take him met his own work with the trump administration. >> i'm glad you asked. i wanted to talk about his post-presidency. it presidency. it was a big factor in this campaign. and not to the good. so remember the context when he left office.

remember the scandals, or some of the scandals that were cooking around as he left office that his staff had trashed the white house. remove the w's from the keyboard so of the computers in the east wing or west wing as a protest against bush. that he and hillary -- to westchester county with a lot of furniture that plunked to the white house. most of of this, almost all of this is not true. but, nevertheless just pounding news through the days of his presidency. and then -- and now that is something he did do of course. that was genuinely scandalous to a lot of people. apparently clinton from what i

have read and people i've talked to, apparently clinton didn't really understand that it was going to be this controversial. a pardon recommended by -- anyone? but yes. eric holder. aha they say. but this just absolutely ate up all the coverage it really did think his poll numbers and it didn't damage him. so he comes out of the white house flying at 65%, but within one month he is, i don't know where honestly, but well down. so he's in hiding for the first few months of his presidency

after his presidency. hillary is in senate and comes up on weekends but she also has to go to jamestown watertown and connect and do the things senator does. so he doesn't quite know what he's going to do with himself. the clinton foundation started out i think for his library to raise money for his library, then there was a natural disaster of some sort, indonesia? was it. yes. india maybe. anyway. he and the foundation got involved in this natural disaster with human relief effort and that is what led him to move the foundation in a global direction. so that's when he decided to dedicate the foundation to working on aids, malaria, third

world health, and those kinds of issues. and that is when he set up the fundraising and when the foundation really became what it became. the foundation got a lot of good press for about eight years. it really helped resuscitate him. everybody forgot about other stuff because the clinton foundation was doing such good stuff. then the new new york times ran a story in 2009 about him and this guy, big donor and that kazakhstan deal and it made it sound impossibly sleazy. the story has since been questioned word discredited but that story really set the template for the coverage that the foundation has done for the last several years.

i think he has made some mistakes, and she, she should not have even the speeches to goldman sachs. i think they sought to big of a fortune. they don't need don't need $60 million or hundred million dollars or whatever it is. they made a lots of errors. but, the foundation got a lot of undeserved and unfair bad press two. then she got a lot of undeserved and unfair hits over the course of the campaign. their stories ensure you will remember. it was a judicial watch freedom of information request that found that some donors to the clinton foundation had bought access to the state department. so they did not get it. but there is a story that some of you will remember and maybe september about all lebanese nigerian businessman who they

befriended because he gave money to the foundation and doug band called houma avidin and said that's raise the have a meeting with the sky. and so she did what people in washington usually do, which is nothing. she just ignored it. so it never happened. the guy never got his meeting. but there it is on the front page it is on the front page of the washington post. in the seventh paragraph finally said no meeting never took place. nevertheless it leads to the perception. >> thank you for the work on this book. my question is, what, what was it about bill and hillary clinton but drove the right crazy? i worked in industry at that time and they never gave

clinton's a chance. does it get to the issue of the democratic president is not really considered legitimate regardless of who it is question or resent more of a generational thing that they have a different life experience. no military service, etc. service, et cetera. >> that's a great question. i think it is sort of all of the above. depending on the eye of the beholder. but yes. there there was a sense back then among republicans that the white house is ours. and this guy was some sort of -- made the worse by the fact that it was a draft dodger in his eyes. that that was a big thing in 1992. the lieutenant colonel in arkansas with whom clinton had dealt in the late 60s had always said while clinton was government governor. well, do not treat him differently than anybody else. but in 1992 she said and wrote a column in the wall street journal that said this man is a draft dodger and we are about to elect a draft dodger and is a

danger to the republic. so he completely changes too. so, there's that. there's a general generational stuff about the woodstock generation and so forth. with hillary, a lot of it is purely ideological and purely about her stance as a feminist on her position. i finally read for the first time during this campaign or thesis that she wrote at wesley about the radical organizer in chicago she studied. they made this thesis into being some kind of document that was her secret plan to -- you know the right wing. she said said 50 secret plans over the last quarter-century. it's a study of three things and

they try to organize a community in two of them are failures. and she said that pretty mean so it's just what they represented. in a whole lots of ways. it took me time to realize that, to see that. i did not understand how ferocious they were about it. >> i just want to make one point in response to the young man who was saying what your generation needs to know. i have two points. one is if you look at the appointments of the current administration. it's easy to forget the diversity of the appointments in bill clinton's administration. he really ushered in a whole new

context for presidential contexts that involved much greater diversity. but with some shocking emphasis on competence as well. that gets gets lost now especially after eight years of brock obama, we forget how significant and unusual that was at the time. the second thing and i'm in a bookstore and i own a bookstore so i have to say this. it's refreshing to have a president in bill clinton and barack obama were deeply intellectual. who read constantly. you might want to comment about this but bill clinton would literally read 405 books a week while he was president. i was just running your comments are not. >> on the diversity question he was the first president to set them can have a cabinet that looks like america and he did. and not just a cabinet, but at the cabinet level level and throughout his presidency and in the agencies and it was really

an impressive thing. i think another thing i learned about him i guess that i had not fully appreciated is the extent to which i think hatred of racism was deep in him from the time he was a little boy. he he grew up surrounded by of course. and he saw it. he really was genuinely antiracist in a very personal way. his enemies in arkansas when he was coming up were republicans but also the democrats. the old line dixiecrat people they hated him and justice jim johnson and these people. and clinton really took them on. on racial stuff in arkansas when

that was really hard to do. so that's another feather in the clinton courage cap. now, on his intellectual curiosity. yes, just like he new policy inside and out. and he knew history and ideas too. but really policy he knew inside out. he would talk to his aides about bills and they were astonished at the stuffy new. the specific things he knew about legislation and about what kind of effect it would have in this policy and this knowledge and this ration is this, this did him good at important time. like when he was negotiating

with gingrich and bob dole at the time of the first government shutdown. they all expected he was going to cave because that kind of had happened earlier. so they thought we can roll this guy. he's not going to shut down government. but he stood up to them. and he stood up to them for very specific things. very specific cuts they wanted to make to medicare. very. very specific cuts they wanted to make to education into environmental programs that he would not tolerate. he argued them under the table he said no. i'm i'm not going to make that cut you could run me down to 5% popularity rating and i'm not going to make that cut. so, it was a knowledge and intelligence that he put often to good use.

>> any more questions. >> the book is available at front. please come up and get it signed and please help me in thanking michael for the talk. [applause] [inaudible] [inaudible] [inaudible] >> here's a look at authors recently featured on afterwards. our weekly author interview program. alfred university