The breezy and aerodynamic Bill Clinton — welcomed like a hero in Harlem, awarded a $10-12 million book contract by Alfred A. Knopf — seems to have gotten over his post-presidential malaise rather briskly. There was someone named Marc Rich, we vaguely remember, there was something about pardons.... But that was in another country.
Clinton's secret is our secret: In a culture gone to attention deficit disorder, the most intense public passions pass quickly. You have only to wait. Everyone's attention span is short. The public images in our minds are made of electronic dust coalesced for a moment on television or computer screens; and you cannot even wrap yesterday's fish in hallucinations. Show me the money.
Nonetheless, I try wistfully to imagine a publisher who might have talked to Clinton like this:
PUBLISHER: Mr. President, we're honored you brought the proposal to us. But, er, frankly, we think the asking price of $12 million is a little steep, considering... CLINTON (bristling): Considering what? This is history in the raw — Bosnia, welfare reform, Gingrich, government shutdown, Osama Bin Laden, Kosovo: years of lightning, days of drums. I'm the only one who can tell the story!
PUBLISHER (brightening a bit, playing with an idea): "Years of Lightning: Days of Thongs"...Not bad. A little cheesy. Might work. But it's not $12 million worth, or even $10 million. Ken Starr got there first — already wrote the book that had all the sexy material. The rest is just history — just homework. Maybe that was Starr's intent all along — to queer your post-presidential book deal by pre-emptively spilling the most salacious stuff (the blue dress and the cigar and all that) under the plain brown wrapper of an official special counsel's report.
CLINTON (icily): I think you have misunderstood. I am thinking along the lines of Kay Graham's book — frank, yet dignified.
PUBLISHER: Mr. Clinton, we were not born yesterday. You have displayed a genius for the presidential imitation of Jimmy Swaggart, the sincerity-dripping prayer-breakfast public pseudo-confession, which is a variation on your brilliant "we've-had-trouble-in-our-marriage-and-leave-it-at-that" formula that got you and Mrs. Clinton through the Gennifer Flowers episode just before the New Hampshire primary in 1992. You know how to tell a story, or seem to tell a story, while skating away from the dirty details, and making it all seem — blink, blink — like a sort of dream. It's a magic trick — Muhammad Ali's old rope-a-dope adapted to the arena of scandal, a way of elegantly dancing off from the punch, while at the same time seeming to absorb the punch, to defy the punch. If we paid your exorbitant price for this memoir, you would just do the rope-a-dope again — the brief illusion of candor, the dignified drawing of the curtain, the ambient vapor of self-pity, the appeal to higher, more important issues at play, then long expanses of intricate policy wonkery punctuated by outbursts of humanitarian rhetoric....If we allowed you to flim-flam us into this contract, you'd pull the same stunt.
And it wouldn't sell. I see Himalayan piles of remaindered books. Anything new and juicy in the book would be instantly picked up and reported by the media even before publication. Why would people spend $30 or $35 for the book, when they'd have the only good stuff immediately, from the papers and the evening news?
No, for us to pony up that kind of cash, the book would need to present Bill Clinton in an entirely new dimension — something like complete honesty. If I am a judge of your character, that is not going to happen. An honest autobiography requires a certain ruthless introspection of which, in my view, you are not capable. We'll offer you a $300,000 advance, half now, half on delivery.
CLINTON (who has risen and stalked angrily toward the door): EXPLETIVE.
PUBLISHER: You might try Knopf.