Clinton on Clinton: A Portrait of the President in His Own Words

Fifty years ago, when I was born in a summer storm to a widowed mother in a little town in Arkansas, it was unthinkable that I might ever become President.

Like other people, I have had crises in my life, personal crises, personal failures, the sense that I had let myself and others down, the sense that maybe I’d never be the person God wanted me to be.

He was the first president to represent the baby-boom generation and the last president of the twentieth century. An activist chief executive whose ambition was to build a bridge to a rapidly changing American future, he was the product of a small Arkansas upbringing steeped in tradition. Now, here is a portrait of William Jefferson Clinton, a brilliant and complex man and leader, in the words of the one person who knows him best: himself. Here are the most fascinating and revealing glimpses into one of the most quotable presidents of our time.

We must never let a blizzard of statistics blind us to the real people and the real lives behind them.

There’s a poll saying that forty percent of the American people think Hillary’s smarter than I am. What I don’t understand is how the other sixty percent missed it.