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1、【精品文档】如有侵权，请联系网站删除，仅供学习与交流比尔_克林顿_my_life.精品文档.Bill Clinton My Life ALFRED A. KNOPF NEW YORK2004To my mother, who gave me a love of life To Hillary, who gave me a life of love To Chelsea, who gave joy and meaning to it all And to the memory of my grandfather, who taught me to look up to people others
2、 looked down on, because were not so different after allPROLOGUE When I was a young man just out of law school and eager to get on with my life, on a whim I briefly put aside my reading preference for fiction and history and bought one of those how-to books:How to Get Control of Your Time and Your L
3、ife, by Alan Lakein. The books main point was the necessity of listing short-, medium-, and long-term life goals, then categorizing them in order of their importance, with the A group being the most important, the B group next, and the C the last, then listing under each goal specific activities des
4、igned to achieve them. I still have that paperback book, now almost thirty years old. And Im sure I have that old list somewhere buried in my papers, though I cant find it. However, I do remember the A list. I wanted to be a good man, have a good marriage and children, have good friends, make a succ
5、essful political life, and write a great book. Whether Im a good man is, of course, for God to judge. I know that I am not as good as my strongest supporters believe or as I hope to become, nor as bad as my harshest critics assert. I have been graced beyond measure by my family life with Hillary and
6、 Chelsea. Like all families lives, ours is not perfect, but it has been wonderful. Its flaws, as all the world knows, are mostly mine, and its continuing promise is grounded in their love. No person I know ever had more or better friends. Indeed, a strong case can be made that I rose to the presiden
7、cy on the shoulders of my personal friends, the now legendary FOBs. My life in politics was a joy. I loved campaigns and I loved governing. I always tried to keep things moving in the right direction, to give more people a chance to live their dreams, to lift peoples spirits, and to bring them toget
8、her. Thats the way I kept score. As for the great book, who knows? It sure is a good story. 6ONE Early on the morning of August 19, 1946, I was born under a clear sky after a violent summer storm to a widowed mother in the Julia Chester Hospital in Hope, a town of about six thousand in southwest Ark
9、ansas, thirty-three miles east of the Texas border at Texarkana. My mother named me William Jefferson Blythe III after my father, William Jefferson Blythe Jr., one of nine children of a poor farmer in Sherman, Texas, who died when my father was seventeen. According to his sisters, my father always t
10、ried to take care of them, and he grew up to be a handsome, hardworking, fun-loving man. He met my mother at Tri-State Hospital in Shreveport, Louisiana, in 1943, when she was training to be a nurse. Many times when I was growing up, I asked Mother to tell me the story of their meeting, courting, an
11、d marriage. He brought a date with some kind of medical emergency into the ward where she was working, and they talked and flirted while the other woman was being treated. On his way out of the hospital, he touched the finger on which she was wearing her boyfriends ring and asked her if she was marr
12、ied. She stammered “no”she was single. The next day he sent the other woman flowers and her heart sank. Then he called Mother for a date, explaining that he always sent flowers when he ended a relationship. Two months later, they were married and he was off to war. He served in a motor pool in the i
13、nvasion of Italy, repairing jeeps and tanks. After the war, he returned to Hope for Mother and they moved to Chicago, where he got back his old job as a salesman for the Manbee Equipment Company. They bought a little house in the suburb of Forest Park but couldnt move in for a couple of months, and
14、since Mother was pregnant with me, they decided she should go home to Hope until they could get into the new house. On May 17, 1946, after moving their furniture into their new home, my father was driving from Chicago to Hope to fetch his wife. Late at night on Highway 60 outside of Sikeston, Missou
15、ri, he lost control of his car, a 1942 Buick, when the right front tire blew out on a wet road. He was thrown clear of the car but landed in, or crawled into, a drainage ditch dug to reclaim swampland. The ditch held three feet of water. When he was found, after a two-hour search, his hand was grasp
16、ing a branch above the waterline. He had tried but failed to pull himself out. He drowned, only twenty-eight years old, married two years and eight months, only seven months of which he had spent with Mother. That brief sketch is about all I ever really knew about my father. All my life I have been
17、hungry to fill in the blanks, clinging eagerly to every photo or story or scrap of paper that would tell me more of the man who gave me life. When I was about twelve, sitting on my uncle Buddys porch in Hope, a man walked up the steps, looked at me, and said, “Youre Bill Blythes son. You look just l
18、ike him.” I beamed for days. In 1974, I was running for Congress. It was my first race and the local paper did a feature story on my mother. She was at her regular coffee shop early in the morning discussing the article with a lawyer friend when one of the breakfast regulars she knew only casually c
19、ame up to her and said, “I was there, I was the first one at the wreck that night.” He then told Mother what he had seen, including the fact that my father had retained enough consciousness or survival instinct to try to claw himself up and out of the water before he died. Mother thanked him, went o
20、ut to her car and cried, then dried her tears and went to work. 7In 1993, on Fathers Day, my first as President, theWashington Post ran a long investigative story on my father, which was followed over the next two months by other investigative pieces by the Associated Press and many smaller papers.
21、The stories confirmed the things my mother and I knew. They also turned up a lot we didnt know, including the fact that my father had probably been married three times before he met Mother, and apparently had at least two more children. My fathers other son was identified as Leon Ritzenthaler, a ret
22、ired owner of a janitorial service, from northern California. In the article, he said he had written me during the 92 campaign but had received no reply. I dont remember hearing about his letter, and considering all the other bullets we were dodging then, its possible that my staff kept it from me.
23、Or maybe the letter was just misplaced in the mountains of mail we were receiving. Anyway, when I read about Leon, I got in touch with him and later met him and his wife, Judy, during one of my stops in northern California. We had a happy visit and since then weve corresponded in holiday seasons. He
24、 and I look alike, his birth certificate says his father was mine, and I wish Id known about him a long time ago. Somewhere around this time, I also received information confirming news stories about a daughter, Sharon Pettijohn, born Sharon Lee Blythe in Kansas City in 1941, to a woman my father la
25、ter divorced. She sent copies of her birth certificate, her parents marriage license, a photo of my father, and a letter to her mother from my father asking about “our baby” to Betsey Wright, my former chief of staff in the governors office. Im sorry to say that, for whatever reason, Ive never met h
26、er. This news breaking in 1993 came as a shock to Mother, who by then had been battling cancer for some time, but she took it all in stride. She said young people did a lot of things during the Depression and the war that people in another time might disapprove of. What mattered was that my father w
27、as the love of her life and she had no doubt of his love for her. Whatever the facts, thats all she needed to know as her own life moved toward its end. As for me, I wasnt quite sure what to make of it all, but given the life Ive led, I could hardly be surprised that my father was more complicated t
28、han the idealized pictures I had lived with for nearly half a century. In 1994, as we headed for the celebration of the fiftieth anniversary of D-day, several newspapers published a story on my fathers war record, with a snapshot of him in uniform. Shortly afterward, I received a letter from Umberto
29、 Baron of Netcong, New Jersey, recounting his own experiences during the war and after. He said that he was a young boy in Italy when the Americans arrived, and that he loved to go to their camp, where one soldier in particular befriended him, giving him candy and showing him how engines worked and
30、how to repair them. He knew him only as Bill. After the war, Baron came to the United States, and, inspired by what he had learned from the soldier who called him “Little GI Joe,” he opened his own garage and started a family. He told me he had lived the American dream, with a thriving business and
31、three children. He said he owed so much of his success in life to that young soldier, but hadnt had the opportunity to say good-bye then, and had often wondered what had happened to him. Then, he said, “On Memorial Day of this year, I was thumbing through a copy of the New YorkDaily Newswith my morn
32、ing coffee when suddenly I felt as if I was struck by lightning. There in the lower left-hand corner of the paper was a photo of Bill. I felt chills to learn that Bill was none other than the father of the President of the United States.” 8In 1996, the children of one of my fathers sisters came for
33、the first time to our annual family Christmas party at the White House and brought me a gift: the condolence letter my aunt had received from her congressman, the great Sam Rayburn, after my father died. Its just a short form letter and appears to have been signed with the autopen of the day, but I
34、hugged that letter with all the glee of a six-year-old boy getting his first train set from Santa Claus. I hung it in my private office on the second floor of the White House, and looked at it every night. Shortly after I left the White House, I was boarding the USAir shuttle in Washington for New Y
35、ork when an airline employee stopped me to say that his stepfather had just told him he had served in the war with my father and had liked him very much. I asked for the old vets phone number and address, and the man said he didnt have it but would get it to me. Im still waiting, hoping there will b
36、e one more human connection to my father. At the end of my presidency, I picked a few special places to say goodbye and thanks to the American people. One of them was Chicago, where Hillary was born; where I all but clinched the Democratic nomination on St. Patricks Day 1992; where many of my most a
37、rdent supporters live and many of my most important domestic initiatives in crime, welfare, and education were proved effective; and, of course, where my parents went to live after the war. I used to joke with Hillary that if my father hadnt lost his life on that rainy Missouri highway, I would have
38、 grown up a few miles from her and we probably never would have met. My last event was in the Palmer House Hotel, scene of the only photo I have of my parents together, taken just before Mother came back to Hope in 1946. After the speech and the good-byes, I went into a small room where I met a woma
39、n, Mary Etta Rees, and her two daughters. She told me she had grown up and gone to high school with my mother, then had gone north to Indiana to work in a war industry, married, stayed, and raised her children. Then she gave me another precious gift: the letter my twenty-three-year-old mother had wr
40、itten on her birthday to her friend, three weeks after my fathers death, more than fifty-four years earlier. It was vintage Mother. In her beautiful hand, she wrote of her heartbreak and her determination to carry on: “It seemed almost unbelievable at the time but you see I am six months pregnant an
41、d the thought of our baby keeps me going and really gives me the whole world before me.” My mother left me the wedding ring she gave my father, a few moving stories, and the sure knowledge that she was loving me for him too. My father left me with the feeling that I had to live for two people, and t
42、hat if I did it well enough, somehow I could make up for the life he should have had. And his memory infused me, at a younger age than most, with a sense of my own mortality. The knowledge that I, too, could die young drove me both to try to drain the most out of every moment of life and to get on w
43、ith the next big challenge. Even when I wasnt sure where I was going, I was always in a hurry. 9TWO Iwas born on my grandfathers birthday, a couple of weeks early, weighing in at a respectable six pounds eight ounces, on a twenty-one-inch frame. Mother and I came home to her parents house on Hervey
44、Street in Hope, where I would spend the next four years. That old house seemed massive and mysterious to me then and still holds deep memories today. The people of Hope raised the funds to restore it and fill it with old pictures, memorabilia, and period furniture. They call it the Clinton Birthplac
45、e. It certainly is the place I associate with awakening to lifeto the smells of country food; to buttermilk churns, ice-cream makers, washboards, and clotheslines; to my “Dick and Jane” readers, my first toys, including a simple length of chain I prized above them all; to strange voices talking over
46、 our “party line” telephone; to my first friends, and the work my grandparents did. After a year or so, my mother decided she needed to go back to New Orleans to Charity Hospital, where she had done part of her nursing training, to learn to be a nurse anesthetist. In the old days, doctors had admini
47、stered their own anesthetics, so there was a demand for this relatively new work, which would bring more prestige to her and more money for us. But it must have been hard on her, leaving me. On the other hand, New Orleans was an amazing place after the war, full of young people, Dixieland music, and
48、 over-the-top haunts like the Club My-Oh-My, where men in drag danced and sang as lovely ladies. I guess it wasnt a bad place for a beautiful young widow to move beyond her loss. I got to visit Mother twice when my grandmother took me on the train to New Orleans. I was only three, but I remember two
49、 things clearly. First, we stayed just across Canal Street from the French Quarter in the Jung Hotel, on one of the higher floors. It was the first building more than two stories high I had ever been in, in the first real city I had ever seen. I can remember the awe I felt looking out over all the city lights at night. I dont recall what Mother and I did in New Orleans, but Ill never forget what happened one of the times I got on the train to leave. As we p