Quotes of the Day

Those are the non-nutcase books about [my] Administration," Bill Clinton said, pointing to three shelves, arranged alphabetically by author, in the study of his newly renovated barn, adjacent to his home in Chappaqua, N.Y. This is the room where he wrote, in longhand, most of the latest contribution to Clinton lore: his 957-page memoirs, titled simply My Life. It is a comfortable room—a plasma TV, couches and rocking chairs, walls lined with Native American paintings and pottery ("We've been collecting it for 30 years," he said)—and Clinton seemed in a comfortable mood as he sat down to be interviewed by TIME Washington bureau chief Michael Duffy and me. The former President was dressed formally, in a blue suit, white shirt and pink tie, but he spoke easily and often quite candidly about his successes and failures. The purpose was to sell books, obviously, but Clinton was also intent on adding his two cents to the never-ending partisan donnybrook that has become a central component of his legacy. In his memoirs and our interview, he launched a blistering counterattack against the people whose books and actions were not in his "non-nutcase" category—the members of Hillary Clinton's "vast right-wing conspiracy," especially Whitewater special prosecutor Kenneth Starr.

The night before, Clinton had made a remarkable appearance onstage at New York University after the screening of his friend Harry Thomason's new documentary, The Hunting of the President—an unabashedly partisan account of the Whitewater prosecution (or "persecution," as Clinton called it, perhaps not inadvertently). "Starr was the instrument of a grand design," the President said, launching a 30-minute disquisition into the historical roots of the rabid partisanship that marked his time in office. "He did what he was hired to do ... Hillary was hooted and derided for calling it a vast right-wing conspiracy. I joked with her afterwards, 'I don't know about the conspiracy word. A conspiracy is normally secret. This is wide open.'"

Indeed, if there was a cover-up, Clinton argued at the movie screening, it was perpetrated by the media, which didn't report the essential flimsiness of the charges and downplayed the exoneration of the Clintons in 1995 by the government agency investigating Whitewater. "The mainstream press was in the tank to Starr until the Starr report came out, and then they turned against him," Clinton said. "For years and years and years he had been crushing these innocent people" like Susan McDougal, who did 18 months in jail for refusing to cooperate with Starr and who was in the audience that night. Clinton told us he had a private meeting with McDougal after the screening "for the first time in 20 years ... It was touching. Both of us started crying."

Yes, Bill Clinton is back, and you will be seeing a lot of him over the next few weeks, and if the tears and talk and emotions and anger and empathy—the constant torrent of the man—seem all too familiar, there are some new twists as well. He has been through intense family therapy—a year of it after the Lewinsky scandal—and religious counseling. After moving through life like a shark, always forward, always thinking about tomorrow, in the words of his overutilized campaign song, he has spent an awful lot of time thinking about yesterday, in therapy and in writing the book. As a result, Clinton has settled on a starkly psychological explanation for his behavior. ("I believe in this," he told us twice, speaking of couples therapy.) Clinton's theory is that he has always lived "parallel" lives. As a child, he hid the deep anger he felt over his stepfather's drunken violence behind a relentlessly sunny façade. He is brutal about his childhood failings. He describes himself as "fat, uncool and hardly popular with the girls." He writes that he "tended to make enemies effortlessly" and that he was so clumsy, he outgrew his fear of riding a bike without training wheels only as a college student at Oxford. The presidency, he says, was an unconscious return to the self-destructive patterns of his childhood—private anger over the Starr investigation, public optimism about the work of state. (The notion of nursing shameful secrets is also an inferential acknowledgment of his amorous reputation, although he offers no new information about any of the famous "bimbo eruptions.") The case he builds against Starr in My Life is a lawyer's case, careful and powerful. In retrospect, it is clear that there was no substance to the Whitewater allegations and the other White House scandalettes—the travel-office firings, the FBI files, the death of Vince Foster—except, of course, Lewinsky. It seems clear that Starr conducted an unseemly and irresponsible investigation filled with "abuses of power," as Clinton contends, illegal leaks to the press and barely legal coercive tactics against prospective witnesses. And it also seems clear that the press was way too credulous about Starr's allegations and didn't pay nearly enough attention to his methods.

But Clinton takes the Starr assault well beyond the facts of the case and fits it into a witting effort by radical conservatives to keep power—the "vast right-wing conspiracy," a formulation he clearly supports but is careful not to use. For years Clinton has professed that fighting against impeachment was one of the triumphs of his Administration. He seems to have a dual purpose now: not just to discredit Starr but also to make the war against the ultraconservatives a significant part of his presidential legacy. He wants to be remembered for the Starr investigation. And so one of the more remarkable moments in our interview was when Clinton brought up his affair with Monica Lewinsky without our having to ask about it. Clearly he had fitted Lewinsky into his unified field theory of his life. "I think," he told us, "if people have unresolved anger, it makes them do nonrational, destructive things." The President insisted that was not an excuse, just an explanation. "I think a lot of it was that I was back to living my parallel lives with a vengeance, dealing with the Ken Starr thing."

No doubt Clinton's enemies will have a field day with that. No doubt his account of the struggle with "my old demons" will seem disingenuous to many readers. No doubt Clinton will feel—as he did when he became the first presidential candidate to admit that his marriage had not "been perfect"—that he has gone the extra mile, established a new level of candor in presidential memoirs and not received any credit for it. Of course, the sum of Clinton's presidency and memoirs is not the struggle against Starr. But the intensity of his feelings on that subject tends to put everything else—the substantive achievements and the embarrassments like the pardon of fugitive financier Marc Rich—on the back burner. He spends very little time in the book discussing the intricacies of domestic issues like health care, welfare reform and even his triumphant economic policy. He spends more time on foreign affairs, especially the failed Middle East peace negotiations. Though he has said he would have liked to take a "mulligan," or do-over, for the Rich pardon, he defends it here: "I may have made a mistake, at least in the way I allowed the case to come to my attention"—that is, through the special pleadings of Rich's wife and former Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak—"but I made the decision based on the merits."

My Life is two books, really: Arkansas and the presidency. It is no secret that Clinton wanted to write two separate books but was dissuaded by his publisher, Knopf. In My Life he has written the first one and compiled the other. In our interview, Clinton said the haphazard account of the presidential years was intentional: "It's much more like a diary of what it's like to be President." There are an awful lot of passages like "In mid-month, Hillary and I flew to St. Louis, where I signed the Mississippi River flood relief legislation ... Then we flew on to Denver, where we welcomed Pope John Paul II to the United States." Of course, those sorts of passages are a chronic disease in presidential memoirs.

Embedded in the travel logs are occasional nuggets of brilliant political analysis. His discussion of Al Gore's 2000 "the people vs. the powerful" campaign slogan, for example, combines smart analysis and a haymaker: "The problem with the slogan was that it didn't give Al the full benefit of our record of economic and social progress or put into sharp relief Bush's explicit commitment to undo that progress. Also, the populist edge sounded to some swing voters as if Al, too, might change the economic direction of the country."

The arrival of My Life will doubtless cause several weeks of hemming, hawing and projectile pontification. It will be a brief return to the noxious '90s, a brouhaha for which not many people are nostalgic. Already, parasitic blasts from the past—people like Larry Klayman and David Bossie who made their reputations at Clinton's expense—are issuing press releases announcing their availability for comment. John Kerry cannot be pleased, even though Clinton hopes this latest Comeback Tour will remind the public of the depredations of those who are attacking Kerry now. As for the White House, two weeks of Clinton bashing on Fox News will certainly be more fun than two weeks of Iraq apologetics.

In the end, one has to wonder about Bill Clinton. So talented, so intelligent, so candid about his demons—and so much in thrall to them, even now. He professes optimism and says he forgives his enemies. "It would be a mistake to treat them the way they treat us," he said at N.Y.U.—good advice, if a double-edged bit of high-mindedness, confirming his supporters' angriest assumptions. His book and attendant commentary seem calculated to reopen old wounds. One wonders how Clinton reacted to the funeral of Ronald Reagan, another optimistic small-town son of a drunk, who served two full terms as President and was a lightning rod for the opposition. But Reagan never admitted to demons, and he was always confident about his fate. Clinton professes not to have thought about his own funeral yet—whether he wants the riderless horse, the pomp of the National Cathedral—but he must be wondering whether he will rate the same outpouring of tears and encomiums as Reagan, whether his personal Armageddon will ever be resolved and his reputation restored or whether, instead of a placid eternal flame at his grave, he'll have to make do with occasional, torrid blasts of heat lightning.

• JOE KLEIN