Bill Clinton: Mastering the Presidency - Tapa dura

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Nigel Hamilton’s account of Bill Clinton’s early life and career – Bill Clinton: An American Journey – drew widespread praise for its candid reconstruction of the archetypal baby-boomer’s extraordinary political ascent, from humble beginnings in small-town Arkansas to the winning of the White House at age 46 in November 1992. Now, in Bill Clinton: Mastering the Presidency, Nigel Hamilton takes us on another journey: charting the experience of the 42nd President as he took presidential oath of office– and how he fared therafter in the piranha pool of Washington D.C.

In riveting narrative, Hamilton charts what was possibly the greatest disaster and re-reinvention of a president in office in modern times. The Clinton Administration began ominously badly – kicking off with the worst Transition in living memory. The presidency then deteriorated through a series of fiascos at every level, from domestic policy and congressional relations to international failures such as Somalia, Haiti, Rwanda and the failure to act over Bosnia. The disaster over health care reform capped a litany of errors; in fact, when the Democrats lost their majority in both houses of Congress in 1994 for the first time in forty years it looked as if the President’s days in office were numbered.

How Bill Clinton faced up to his failures, and refashioned himself in the White House thereafter - from the Oklahoma City bombing to the peace he established in Bosnia, the battle with Speaker Newt Gingrich over the nefarious shutdown of the U.S. Government in 1995 and Clinton’s trouncing of his Republican opponent Bob Dole in the 1996 election - is thus an epic one. It is a story that climaxes with William Jefferson Clinton becoming the first Democrat to win re-election to the White House since Franklin Roosevelt. With a thriving U.S. economy and hard-won wisdom in international affairs and in combating the rise of terrorism, Clinton would begin his second term as the undisputed, immensely popular leader of the Western world – aware, however, that terrors ant treason within America loomed as large as dangers abroad.

Insightful, balanced, prodigiously researched and a joy to read, Bill Clinton: Mastering the Presidency is set to become, alongside its prequel, the classic story of Clinton’s extraordinary effort to be a modern president, in a modern world—and a chronicle one of the most extraordinary reversals of fortune in modern American politics.

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Praise for Bill Clinton: An American Journey:

'Nigel Hamilton traces the threads of Clinton's personality to their origins, in this superbly researched work .... His adventures are so breathtakingly dangerous that this biography has the feel of a thriller' Michael Portillo, Sunday Telegraph

'Nigel Hamilton's study is written on the grand scale. A gripping account of the rise of one of the most charismatic politicians of our age. This first volume of Nigel Hamilton's fascinating and fluidly-written biography, reading at times like a modern morality play' Graham Stewart, The Spectator

'Distinguished biographer Nigel Hamilton is the first to probe the inner self of Clinton in a sustained and unflinching narrative. It's a dangerous high-wire act. No matter what one's taste in biography might be, there is no mistaking that Bill Clinton is a bold, highly readable interpretive study of the man from Hope in which no aspect of his inner or external life is off-limits' Boston Sunday Globe

'Biographers usually find it difficult to learn much meaningful detail about a subject's parents, childhood and adolescence. By conducting large numbers of interviews and locating documents in unlikely places, Hamilton has overcome the hurdle impressively. He supplements the facts, rumors and gossip with frequent psychological analysis. Hamilton is especially strong when reporting and ruminating about the role of social class in Clinton's rise from small-town Arkansas to the White House .... At times, the psychological insights seem downright brilliant' Baltimore Sun