Verwandte Artikel zu Bill Clinton: An American Journey

Bill Clinton: An American Journey - Hardcover

Hamilton, Nigel

 
9780375506109: Bill Clinton: An American Journey
Hardcover
ISBN 10: 0375506101 ISBN 13: 9780375506109
Verlag: Random House Inc, 2003

Inhaltsangabe

The first in a two-volume biography of America's first baby-boomer president offers thought-provoking examination of Bill Clinton's background and career, from his Arkansas upbringing and education at Oxford to meeting of his wife, Hillary Rodham, and early political life, and discusses the extramarital activities that nearly destroyed his career. 150,000 first printing.

Die Inhaltsangabe kann sich auf eine andere Ausgabe dieses Titels beziehen.

Über die Autorinnen und Autoren

Nigel Hamilton was born in 1944 and took an honors degree in history at Cambridge University. His first major biography, The Brothers Mann, was critically acclaimed both in Britain and the United States, as was Monty, his three-volume official biography of the legendary World War II commander Field Marshal Bernard Montgomery, which won the Whit-bread Prize and Templer Medal. He is also the author of the bestselling JFK: Reckless Youth. Nigel Hamilton is the John F. Kennedy Scholar and Visiting Professor in the John W. McCormack Institute of Public Affairs, University of Massachusetts at Boston.

Nigel Hamilton is the John F. Kennedy Scholar and Visiting Professor in the John W. McCormack Institute of Public Affairs, University of Massachusetts at Boston.

Aus dem Klappentext

Bill Clinton, forty-second president of the United States, is the quintessential baby boomer: on the one hand blessed with a near-genius IQ, on the other, beset by character flaws that made his presidency a veritable soap opera of high ideals, distressing incompetence, model financial stewardship, and domestic misbehavior. In an era of cultural civil war, the Clinton administration fed the public an almost daily diet of scandal and misfortune.

Who is Bill Clinton, though, and how did this baby-boom saga begin? Clinton s upbringing in Arkansas and his student years at Georgetown, Oxford, and Yale universities help us to see his life not only as a personal story but as the story of modern America.

Behind the closed doors of the house on the hill above Park Avenue in Hot Springs, the struggle between Clinton s stepfather and mother became ultimately unbearable, causing Virginia to move out and divorce Roger Clinton. Dreading confrontation, Bill Clinton excelled in almost every field save athletics. But the fabled success of the scholarship boy would be marred by the decisions he came to make regarding Vietnam and military service choices that haunt him to this day.

We watch with a mixture of alarm, fascination, and awe as Bill Clinton does so much that is right and so much that is wrong. He sets his cap for the star student at Yale, young Hillary Rodham, seducing her with his dreams of a better America and an aw-shucks grin. Wherever he goes, he charms and disarms young and old, men and women...and more women. He becomes a law professor straight out of college; he contests a congressional election in his twenties and almost wins it. He becomes attorney general of his state and within two years is set to become the youngest-ever governor of Arkansas, at only thirty-two.

Yet, always, there is a curse, a drive toward personal self-destruction and with that the destruction of all those who are helping him on his legendary path. His affair with Gennifer Flowers strains his marriage and later nearly scuttles his bid for the presidency. He is thrown out of the governor s office after only one term and suffers a life-shaking crisis of confidence. Though with the stalwart help of a female chief of staff he regains his crown, it is clear that Bill Clinton s charismatic career is a ceaseless tightrope walk above the forces that threaten to pull him down the most potent of them residing in his own being.

Imbued with sympathy, deep intelligence, and the storyteller s art, this extraordinary biography helps us, at last, to understand the real Bill Clinton as he stumbles and withdraws from the 1988 presidential nomination race but enters it four years later, to make one of the most astonishing bids for the presidency in the twentieth century: the climax of this gripping political, social, and scandalous journey.

Auszug. © Genehmigter Nachdruck. Alle Rechte vorbehalten.

CHAPTER ONE

THE WALLS OF HOPE

Arkansas Beginnings

Few American presidents have had so little idea of their family’s past as William Jefferson Clinton. On his father’s side—well, the many questions that surround his paternity we must defer until later. On his mother’s side, however, he had reasonable cause to believe he was a sixth-generation southerner, able to trace his Cassady forebears back through Alabama to South Carolina in the early nineteenth century. Then, in the late nineteenth century, he was told, a certain James Monroe Cassady left Alabama with his wife, Sarah Lou, and his Russell parents-in-law, in a traditional covered wagon. They migrated across the Mississippi River, moving to an area known as the New Hope Community and settling beside Ebenezer Primitive Baptist Church in Bodcaw, Nevada County, Arkansas, a group of extended families numbering perhaps a hundred souls, 110 miles southwest of Little Rock, the state capital. There, in 1886, they built a wooden house, became Arkansans, and began cotton farming.

Whatever had been the motive for the Cassadys’ move, however, it did not bring prosperity for the family. Arkansas was, at the end of the nineteenth century, a backward, landlocked state, the twenty-fifth in the Union, some 55,000 square miles in size, bordering the Mississippi on its eastern side and abutting Indian territory on its western frontier. In between, spread out not only across its lowland, delta landscape but up high into its hinterlands, which stretched across the Ozark and Ouachita Mountains to the northwest, the state boasted almost one million people, almost no industry, the worst schools in the nation, and widespread poverty among whites as well as blacks—who, in the wake of slavery and the Civil War, made up more than a fifth of its population.

James Eldridge Cassidy

The Cassady family seemed to go in for presidential names—though none can seriously have imagined that one of their descendants would actually become a U.S. president. William Jefferson Clinton’s great-great-grandfather had been baptized with the names George Washington Cassady—though why James Monroe, his eldest son, left Alabama, several years after getting married in 1880, nobody knows. It was on the small cotton farm in Bodcaw, Arkansas, however, that James Monroe’s third son, James Eldridge Cassady—William Jefferson Clinton’s grandfather—was born on August 19, 1898, the youngest of their five children.

James Eldridge Cassady’s childhood was marred by poverty and death. He was orphaned at eight, when his father died of pneumonia on a train trip to the old family home in Alabama. The family farm was sold two years later, in 1906, and, moving with his mother to her widower brother’s home, he was thereafter raised by his uncle Bill Russell, alongside Bill’s ten children, on whose cotton farm he was expected to work once he left school. This he did at age thirteen, after fifth grade.

Had cotton been financially profitable or had they been able to obtain credit to switch to other forms of farming, the life of small Arkansas sharecroppers might have held out the prospect of economic progress after the ruinous years of civil war. However, without access to banking credit, small farmers in Arkansas had come to rely on cotton as their sole cash crop in order to survive—and the decline in the price of cotton in the latter part of the nineteenth century had resulted in white penury on a gigantic scale. “The debt-ridden, one-crop economy consigned the majority of Arkansans to subsistence on an annual income well below what would have been reckoned the poverty level in the growing American cities,” one historian summarized.

It was in rural poverty in Bodcaw, then, that young James Eldridge Cassady worked as a half orphan—and at age twenty-three, having changed the spelling of his name to Cassidy, he got married on January 3, 1922, to Valerie Edith Grisham, the nineteen-year-old proverbial girl next door, whose family was also “eking out a living raising cotton” on her family’s “hardscrabble farm.”

Opting for Change

“Edie” Grisham was a short, handsome, feisty girl who was somewhat better schooled than Eldridge, having reached eleventh grade. The following year, on June 6, 1923, Edie gave birth to a child, indeed their only child, a daughter whom they named Virginia—Virginia Dell Cassidy.

Poverty in rural Arkansas made for a difficult domestic life. Virginia later characterized her mother as a woman subject to uncontrollable rage—an anger that welled from somewhere deep inside her. Edie had been dealt, Virginia reflected, a cruel hand: born in south Arkansas in rural poverty, growing up on the land, and marrying on the land. In those days, Edie had no option—a person’s life mirrored the relentless pattern of nature and the seasons.

With Virginia’s birth, Edie did, however, opt for change. She insisted at the end of 1923 that she, her husband, and the infant leave the land and move twelve miles away, to the local market town of Hope.

Hope had a population thirty times larger than Bodcaw, having expanded around a major cotton-market station on the Cairo & Fulton Railroad, effectively displacing the old Hempstead County town of Washington. Her childhood, Virginia later recalled, was punctuated with the whistles and bells of heavy locomotives, since her home was always by a railroad track. The segregated town’s main roads had only recently been paved for whites, in 1920, and boasted several expensive residences on “Cotton Row”—but the Cassidys were far from wealthy. They were “country poor,” as the town historian Mary Nell Turner put it, and lucky to find employment at the bottom of the proverbial white ladder.

One town resident later recalled that it was “a rough, busy, dirty, smelly town—in the damp, still air of evening every privy contributed its quota of perfume—but you couldn’t help but love it.” Eldridge eventually found work in the Ivory Handle Company factory—which would ruin his health, thanks to its boiling furnaces, dyes, and tanning chemicals. It did, however, permit him in time to purchase his own four-room house on Foster Street, on a mortgage.

Edith, meanwhile, decided to carve her own career and proceeded to take a correspondence course in nursing, gaining a certificate as an auxiliary, or private-duty, nurse without having to attend college. It was just as well. In the wake of the Great Crash, a long drought, and the worsening economy, as Virginia recalled, money would become “extremely tight”—so tight that when Eldridge lost his job, he was unable to keep up the payments on his mortgage. The Great Depression had arrived.

The Depression Strikes

The Depression hit Arkansas as hard as or harder than any other state in the Union, largely because of its overdependence on cotton. “Cotton remained king for the first half of the twentieth century,” the Pulitzer Prize–winning newspaper editor–turned–historian Harry Ashmore related—and the cost, in the 1920s and ’30s, was ruin. After a brief rise in the price of cotton during World War I, the price began to slide until it fell lower than the cost of production: down to 16 cents per pound in 1928, even before the Great Crash—and to a mere 4 cents four years after that.

In a state where, in 1930, 63 percent of Arkansas farmers worked someone else’s land, the quasi-feudal system of sharecropping spelled, in the Depression years, disaster and starvation. Attempts to unionize tenant farmers proved a failure, and cooperative farming also...

„Über diesen Titel“ kann sich auf eine andere Ausgabe dieses Titels beziehen.

Verlag
Random House Inc
Erscheinungsdatum
2003
Sprache
Englisch
ISBN 10 
0375506101
ISBN 13 
9780375506109
Einband
Gebundene Ausgabe
Anzahl der Seiten
816
Kontakt zum Hersteller
Nicht verfügbar
Verantwortliche Person
Purmerul LTD
https://strengholt.nl/en/

22 Liuleburgaz Str., floor 4, app. 9
Plovdiv
Bulgarien