Bill Clinton: an American journey, by Nigel Hamilton

Kill Bill (volume one)

The career of the 42nd President of the United States has generated a vast literature of scandal - books like Passion and Betrayal and The Woman Who Wouldn't Talk. UK readers unfamiliar with Washington's Regnery Publishing, purveyors of The Secret Life of Bill Clinton, may not be aware that in 1984 the then Governor of Arkansas spent several weeks engaged in drugged-up orgies with an assortment of women and his younger brother Roger in the corporate suite of the Vantage Point apartments in Little Rock. Now, however, thanks to the efforts of the Whitbread prize-winner and Professor of Biography at De Montfort University, they will be.

As the erstwhile biographer of Field Marshal Montgomery and Thomas Mann, Nigel Hamilton might seem an unlikely author of a work whose longest footnote elaborates the sexual encounters of a southern evangelist and a stripogram performer. Indeed, Hamilton's ostensible point in citing this liaison is to contrast it with that of Clinton and Paula Jones, whose suit for sexual harassment led to proceedings for his impeachment. Jones may have refused Clinton, and neither may ever have met the Rev Jimmy Swaggart, but the latter's combination of eloquence, evangelism and evasion makes him a major model for Hamilton's portrait of the president. In Swaggart's "Dragon Lady" wife Frances, who cannily "feels the pain" of his congregation, Hamilton discovers his model for Hillary.

Bill Clinton: an American journey is biography by analogy. Capitalising on the sex-fuelled success of its predecessor, JFK: Reckless Youth, Hamilton interrupted his progress to chronicle Clinton's life as a "mirror to the many changes that have taken place in our generation's cultural history". But as he confesses, Hamilton is "prone to misunderstand certain aspects of American culture". Indeed, this book identifies Whittier (California) and the Perdenales (river valley in Texas) - ancestral homes of Richard Nixon and Lyndon Johnson respectively - as the authors of US legal textbooks. Nevertheless, Hamilton is obliged to write this biography as social history because he has so little new infor- mation about his subject. As his acknowledgements reveal, he had virtually no co-operation from any primary sources. With the exception of two Arkansas associates - the attorney Jim Blair and Clinton's gubernatorial Chief of Staff Betsy Wright - he was granted no access to any of the major figures in the politician's life.

As for Clinton himself, Hamilton recounts their sole encounter, at a 2002 fundraiser in Little Rock. There the former President, having declined interviews, suddenly offers the writer a vivid account of Wittgenstein brandishing a red-hot poker at Karl Popper during a philosophical argument. Whether this was, as the author claims, a warning, or a calculated display of erudition, neither Bill nor Hillary was likely of offer infor- mation that would reduce the value of their own memoirs.

Hamilton's American Journey is accomplished by cutting and pasting - Clinton biographies serious and scurrilous, histories of the South, pop psychology and odd bits of evolutionary biology. In what was clearly a very rapid transcription of these texts, mistakes are made. In the years I know about, the 1970s, events are shifted from London to Little Rock, friends become lovers, and Clinton's sexual success at Oxford is wildly exaggerated. More amusingly, Hamilton inflates the significance of such details with faux-learned references - to Lady Chatterley's Lover (when Clinton has sex with British women) or Kaiser Wilhelm's dismissal of Bismarck (when Clinton sacks an Arkansas aide). This hodgepodge is unified by a central theme: that Clinton is the personification of Christopher Lasch's culture of narcissism, a self-gratifying sex addict in an era of unrivalled permissiveness. Fascinated by the seductive power of JFK, the chubby mama's boy becomes Reckless Youth II, the anointed leader of the sex-obsessed Western world.

If you detect a conservative strain in this argument, you're correct. Lasch's study was a rebuke to the new sexual politics of the 1960s and 1970s, to which Hamilton adds the contemporary conservatism of sociobiology. By seeking mutual fidelity in heterosexual partnerships, he argues, modern women like Hillary defy evolutionary verities. But if Bill was merely fulfilling his genetic programming with Gennifer, Paula, Monica and several hundred others, he is censored for self-indulgence, immaturity, deception, and a "downright small" penis.

It takes 689 pages of this stuff to get to Clinton's first presidential election, and the book reveals remarkably little about his record as Attorney General and four-term governor of America's second poorest state. We learn about the ease with which he raised money from southern corporations, virtually nothing about how this eviscerated his programmes. We're told that Clinton genuinely believed in the death penalty, but not why. His attempts to increase his state's international trade, and their relation to his support for the controversial NAFTA treaty, are ignored. So is a wonderful incident in which the ambitious governor agreed to a federal nuclear installation, and a missile accidentally went off in the woods.

Perversely (and that term seems entirely apposite), Hamilton's biography becomes a striking example of the late 20th-century phenomenon it describes - making sex what Foucault called "the explanation for everything". And that's before volume two, with the stained dress, the cigar and the vast proliferation of sexual discourse which accompanied the president into notoriety. The politics that led from there to 9/11, the Bush imperium and the Clinton-supported invasion of Iraq are less likely to be explained.

Mandy Merck is professor of media arts at Royal Holloway, University of London