Resumo de The Survivor - JOHN F HARRIS

Bill Clinton aspired to be another Franklin D. Roosevelt, someone whose
presidency historians would rightly view as epochal. John F. Harris, who
covered the last six years of Clinton''s
administration for the Washington Post, concludes in The Survivor:
Bill Clinton in the White House that he fell considerably short of that
mark. But Harris credits him with being more effective and courageous than his
detractors admit. The drama in Harris'' account, though, proceeds less from Clinton''s clashes with his
avowed enemies than from the irresolvable tensions between his worthy ambitions
for the nation and his own flawed character. Intelligent, hardworking and
driven though he was, it is clear that Clinton''s
chief survival trait was his resilience.

Because he grew in political wisdom during his eight years in office and
emerged triumphant into a generally prosperous society, it is easy to forget
that Clinton floundered pathetically during the early months of his first
term?so much so that Time magazine depicted him on its cover as The
Incredible Shrinking President. The villains at this point were not the
partisan Republicans in Congress but Clinton''s
conflicting support team and his own indecisiveness. Then there was the
increasingly skeptical press to deal with. When the Republicans won the House
of Representatives in 1994, his prospects really began to look grim.

But gradually, as Harris demonstrates, Clinton
started showing traces of leadership and resolve. Disregarding the polls, he
came to the aid of Mexico
when its economy was collapsing. He intervened, albeit with excruciating
caution, to stop the bloodbaths taking place in the former Yugoslavia. He
fought the tobacco industry and protected vast stretches of federally owned
land from development. It wasn''t exactly the New Deal revisited, but it wasn''t
such a bad deal, either.

Harris is especially adept at creating close-ups of Clinton and his advisers
at work. He deftly sketches in the context of the moment and then summarizes
with bits of recorded or remembered dialogue the essence of each encounter.
Instead of keeping his readers behind the rope, figuratively speaking, he takes
them by the elbow and drags them into the thick of the action. In one very
telling scene, Clinton and his priapic Rumpelstiltskin, Dick Morris, discuss
what it will take to move the standing of his presidency from borderline third
tier (as Morris sees it) to first tier.

Apart from his analytical skills, Harris also has a real gift for the apt
phrase. Describing the election-night euphoria that accompanied Clinton''s 1992 victory, he says, t was as if somebody
had flicked a switch and turned off gravity in Little Rock. When he reviews the incident in
which Monica Lewinsky flashed her thong underwear at the commander-in-chief, he
wryly observes, Somehow, he interpreted this delicate signal as an invitation.

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