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1、DedicationTo my mother, who gave me a love of lifeTo Hillary, who gave me a life of loveTo Chelsea, who gave joy and meaning to it allAnd to the memory of my grandfather,who taught me to look up to people others looked down on,because were not so different after allPrologueWhen I was a young man jus
2、t 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 Life, by Alan Lakein. The books main point was the necessity of listing short-, medium-, an
3、d 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 designed to achieve them. I still have that paperback book, now almost thirty years old. And
4、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 successful political life, and write a great book.Whether Im a good man is, of course, for God
5、 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 Chelsea. Like all families lives, ours is not perfect, but it has been wonderful. Its flaw
6、s, 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 presidency on the shoulders of my personal friends, the now legendary FOBs.My life in politics was
7、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 together. Thats the way I kept score.As for the great book, who knows? It sure is a good story.Ch
8、apter 1E arly 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 Arkansas, thirty-three miles east of the Texas border at Texarkana. My mother named me Willi
9、am 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 tried to take care of them, and he grew up to be a handsome, hardworking, fun-loving man.
10、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, and marriage. He brought a date with some kind of medical emergency into the ward where she
11、 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 married. She stammered noshe was single. The next day he sent the other woman flowers and her
12、 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 invasion of Italy, repairing jeeps and tanks. After the war, he returned to Hope for Mother a
13、nd 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 since Mother was pregnant with me, they decided she should go home to Hope until they could
14、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, Missouri, he lost control of his car, a 1942 Buick, when the right front tire blew out on a wet ro
15、ad. 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 grasping a branch above the waterline. He had tried but failed to pull himself out. He drowned, o
16、nly 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 hungry to fill in the blanks, clinging eagerly to every photo or story or scrap of paper that
17、 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 like him. I beamed for days.In 1974, I was running for Congress. It was my first race and the lo
18、cal 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 came up to her and said, I was there, I was the first one at the wreck that night. He then told Mo
19、ther 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 out to her car and cried, then dried her tears and went to work.In 1993, on Fathers Day, my first as
20、 President, the Washington 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. The stories confirmed the things my mother and I knew. They also turned up a lot we didnt know, incl
21、uding 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 retired owner of a janitorial service, from northern California. In the article, he said he had written
22、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. Or maybe the letter was just misplaced in the mountains of mail we were receiving. Anyway, when I rea
23、d 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 and I look alike, his birth certificate says his father was mine, and I wish Id known about him a lo
24、ng 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 later divorced. She sent copies of her birth certificate, her parents marriage license, a photo of my fa
25、ther, 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 her.This news breaking in 1993 came as a shock to Mother, who by then had been battling cancer for some t
26、ime, 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 was the love of her life and she had no doubt of his love for her. Whatever the facts, thats all she neede
27、d 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 than the idealized pictures I had lived with for nearly half a century.In 1994, as we headed for the celeb
28、ration 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 Baron of Netcong, New Jersey, recounting his own experiences during the war and after. He said that he wa
29、s 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 how to repair them. He knew him only as Bill. After the war, Baron came to the United States, and, inspire
30、d 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 three children. He said he owed so much of his success in life to that young soldier, but hadnt had the oppo
31、rtunity 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 York Daily News with my morning coffee when suddenly I felt as if I was struck by lightning. There in the lower left-hand corner of the
32、 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.In 1996, the children of one of my fathers sisters came for the first time to our annual family Christmas party at the White House and brought me a gift: the condolence l
33、etter 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 hugged that letter with all the glee of a six-year-old boy getting his first train set from Santa Claus. I hun
34、g 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 York when an airline employee stopped me to say that his stepfather had just told him he had served in the war w
35、ith 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 be one more human connection to my father.At the end of my presidency, I picked a few special places to say good
36、bye 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 ardent supporters live and many of my most important domestic initiatives in crime, welfare, and education were p
37、roved 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 grown up a few miles from her and we probably never would have met. My last event was in the Palmer House Hotel
38、, 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 woman, Mary Etta Rees, and her two daughters. She told me she had grown up and gone to high school with my mother, t
39、hen 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 written on her birthday to her friend, three weeks after my fathers death, more than fifty-four years earlier. It
40、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 and the thought of our baby keeps me going and really gives me the whole world before me.My mother left me the wedd
41、ing 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 that if I did it well enough, somehow I could make up for the life he should have had. And his memory infused me, at
42、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 with the next big challenge. Even when I wasnt sure where I was going, I was always in a hurry.Chapter 2I was born on
43、 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 Street in Hope, where I would spend the next four years. That old house seemed massive and mysterious to me then
44、 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 Birthplace. It certainly is the place I associate with awakening to lifeto the smells of country food; to buttermilk chur
45、ns, 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 our party line telephone; to my first friends, and the work my grandparents did.After a year or so, my mother dec
46、ided 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 administered their own anesthetics, so there was a demand for this relatively new work, which would bring more prestige to
47、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 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 b
48、ad 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 things clearly. First, we stayed just across Canal Street from the French Quarter in the Jung Hotel, on one of the hi
49、gher 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 pulled away from the station, Mother knelt by the side of the railroad tracks and cried as she waved good-bye. I can see her there still, crying on her knees, as if it were yesterday.For more th