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November 21, 2003
TT: A not-so-little list
Click here to read a list of Bill Clinton's 21 favorite books, which includes, among other things, Maya Angelou's I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings, Marcus Aurelius' Meditations, Hillary Clinton's Living History, Thomas à Kempis' Imitation of Christ, George Orwell's Homage to Catalonia, and Reinhold Niebuhr's Moral Man and Immoral Society.Once you've looked at the whole list, which is quite spectacularly impressive, tell me this: whatever your political beliefs or your personal opinion of Bill Clinton, do you really, truly believe these are his 21 favorite books?
I'm not saying they aren't. But having spent a good number of years writing editorials about politics for a New York newspaper--and thus having spent quite a bit of time talking to politicians of all kinds--I'm also not disposed to take such a list at face value, even when it comes from a man who's known to be unusually smart. Politicians, after all, rarely make any public statements not precisely calculated to enhance their popularity in as many quarters as possible.
Don't take my word for it. Take this person's words for it:
A walking, talking person-shaped but otherwise not very human amalgam of "positions," that familiar, tirelessly striving figure interviewed on the evening news who resoundingly tells you what he is thinking--and you keep wondering whether you should believe a word of it. These are people who don't seem to live in the world so much as to inhabit some point on graph paper, whose coordinates are (sideways) the political spectrum and (up and down) the latest overnight poll figures.
That's from Meg Greenfield's Washington, a memoir written in secret by an old Washington hand (she ran the editorial page of the Washington Post for years) who made sure it wouldn't be published until after her death. She mentioned a few exceptions to the rule, but not many, and Clinton wasn't one of them.
I'd very much like to think that Bill Clinton has read and reflected on each and every one of those high-voltage books. I loathe living in a time when most people's snap reaction to such a list is to reflexively assume the converse. I don't like being cynical about politicians. I'd dearly love to suppose that a former President of the United States had read Homage to Catalonia. And perhaps this one has. Here's hoping, anyway.
Posted November 21, 2003 1:50 AM
