Former President Bill Clinton moderates a panel during the Clinton Global Initiative summit on Sept. 24, in New York.Alex Kent/Getty Images
- Title: Citizen: My Life After the White House
- Author: Bill Clinton
- Genre: Memoir
- Publisher: Knopf
- Pages: 464
In the introduction of his new memoir, Citizen: My Life After the White House, Bill Clinton writes that when he left office in January, 2001, he was determined not to spend a day of his life wishing he were still U.S. president, a job he loved. “I supported the two-term limit,” he writes. “I wanted to live in the present and for the future.”
The now-78-year-old admits there have since been exceptions to that self-imposed rule: There was the 2016 election, for one, then the COVID-19 pandemic. And, of course, the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the Capitol. In other words, basically anything to do with Donald Trump. Although the book was written well before the results of the 2024 election, it wouldn’t be surprising if the first Democratic president in six decades to be elected twice holds the same sentiment today.
Twenty-plus years of self-reflection have helped Clinton point out his own shortcomings during his White House years. While well-written and worth the read, however, the book is not nearly as self-analytical and self-critical as I would have hoped. There is no real reckoning and sense of struggle with himself. Clinton could have used the book to put forth real insight – especially since this autobiography, his second, could well be his last. While he seems to make amends, he neglects to connect any lessons learned to the world as it is now. And he either doesn’t truly see his part in his personal and presidential mistakes – or chooses not to.
There are shadows that hang over Clinton’s time in the White House. The 1994 genocide in Rwanda is one of them. The mass killings of minority Tutsis inflicted by leaders of the majority Hutu Tribe resulted in 800,000 murders in just 90 days. “I ordered the evacuation of all Americans from Rwanda and sent troops to guarantee their safety, but we were so preoccupied with Bosnia, with the memory of Somalia just six months old, and with strong opposition in Congress to military deployments in faraway places not vital to our national interests that neither I or anyone on my foreign policy team adequately focused on Rwanda.”
Clinton writes that someone in the State Department or the White House told the U.S. United Nations officer to oppose Canada’s proposal to lead a force of 10,000 to halt the slaughter – which he says he shouldn’t have done. “The failure to stop Rwanda’s tragedy became one of the greatest regrets of my presidency.”
But fast-forward to 2024: Last month at the tail end of vice-president Kamala Harris’s election campaign, Clinton spoke at a Michigan rally. “I understand why young Palestinian and Arab-Americans in Michigan think too many people have died,” he said to an audience of Arab-American voters who were against the Biden administration’s support for Israel’s ongoing war in Gaza – what many are calling a genocide. “I’m not keeping score that way.”
Although he doesn’t come right out and say it, Clinton’s most personally painful regret points to Monica Lewinsky. In June, 2018, he was asked on a Today Show appearance whether “with the reckoning of the MeToo movement, if the same thing that triggered my impeachment had happened today, would I resign?” Clinton writes that he answered in the negative. “The impeachment process was not legitimate and had to be fought.”
Host Craig Melvin proceeded to read from Lewinsky’s 2018 Vanity Fair column about how the MeToo movement changed her view of sexual harassment, and asked if Clinton felt differently, three decades later. “No, I felt terrible then,” Clinton remembers responding. Melvin asked if the former president had apologized to Lewinsky in person. Clinton answered that he had apologized to her and everyone else he had wronged.
“I was caught off guard by what came next,” he writes. Melvin persisted that Clinton had not apologized to Lewinsky, according to the people his team had spoken to. “I fought to contain my frustration as I replied that while I’d never talked to her directly, I did say publicly on more than one occasion that I was sorry.” He admits in the book that the interview wasn’t his finest hour.
Another shadow: Jeffrey Epstein. In 2018 and 2019, The Miami Herald revisited the 2008 arrest of Epstein, which, in turn, led to his rearrest. “The Herald stories and his rearrest raised questions about several well-known people’s connection to him, including me,” he writes.
Clinton explains that in 2002 and 2003, Epstein let him travel on his private airplane for Clinton Foundation work; in return for providing transportation to Clinton, his staff, and his Secret Service detail, Epstein asked that Clinton take an hour or two each trip to discuss politics and economics. “He had just donated $10-million to Harvard for brain research and he asked a lot of questions. That was the extent of our conversations.” Clinton says his only other interactions with Epstein were two brief meetings, one at his office in Harlem and another at Epstein’s home in New York.
“I had always thought Epstein was odd but had no inkling of the crimes he was committing,” Clinton writes. “He hurt a lot of people, but I knew nothing about it and by the time he was first arrested in 2005, I had stopped contact with him.” He elaborates that the insinuation that a woman had seen him on Epstein’s island was inaccurate as proven by depositions that were unsealed in early 2024. “She’d only heard I was there but didn’t actually see me.” In the end, even though his acquaintance with Epstein allowed him to travel on behalf of his foundation, Clinton regrets the association. “I wish I had never met him.”
With his many initiatives post-presidency, Clinton has done good for his country and the world, despite his faults. He closes in his introduction: “I can’t sit still and I can’t go back. So as many people do everyday, I aim to get caught trying.”