American presidents are supposed to renounce pomp and disappear into private life when their term ends. George Washington enjoyed sampling the whiskey produced by the distillery at his Virginia plantation, while George W Bush currently amuses himself by clearing underbrush on his Texas ranch. Bill Clinton, aged only 54 when he left office in 2001, spurned bucolic oblivion; as he says with scriptural solemnity: “I didn’t think my work here on Earth was finished just yet.” Although he calls his memoir Citizen to signal his reduced status, he admits to hankering after his years as a conqueror, with military bands that struck up Hail to the Chief as his personal anthem whenever he strode into a room.
Because the presidency has grown ever more undemocratically monarchical, Clinton toyed with a possible succession. His wife’s candidacy in 2016 offered him the prospect of returning to the White House as her First Gentleman, and his daughter, Chelsea, might have exotically extended the family line: in 2002 Muammar Gadaffi suggested marrying her to his son and thereby “launching a dynasty”. But Hillary lost to Trump, Chelsea nixed the proposal, and instead Clinton has incorporated himself. He set up the Clinton Foundation, kept it flush with his lecture fees and soon presided over an empire of eponymous acronyms - the CCI (Clinton Climate Initiative), the CDI (Clinton Development Initiative), the CGI (Clinton Global Initiative), the CHAI (Clinton Health Access Initiative), and so on to the end of the alphabet.
He is frank about his initial motive for keeping busy. “I had to start making money,” he admits, mostly to pay the legal bills accrued during the Republican attempt to impeach him over his entanglement with Monica Lewinsky. Yet for this hyperactive man, being busy is its own reward. In the first section of his book he hurls himself into disaster zones like an ambulance-chasing attorney, usually taking celebrities such as Oprah Winfrey or Sean Penn along for the adrenalised ride. “I volunteered to help,” he says after hearing about an earthquake in Gujurat. With the Asian tsunami he teasingly stands on ceremony: “My staff called the White House to say I wanted to help.”
On the ground he is generous with his presence, reporting that at an Indian hospital he “visited with the patients and families who wanted to say hello”. In a Rwandan village he and Chelsea helpfully mime the filtration process of murky water that would benefit “countless millions of poor people”. A Puerto Rican hurricane supplies “the most fun” when Lin-Manuel Miranda lays on a performance of Hamilton; George Clooney, despatched by Nespresso to encourage ruined coffee planters, joins the party. After a consoling sortie to the battered Maldives, Clinton resumes a triumphal junket “to China, Japan, South Korea and Taiwan to promote my autobiography”. Other countries expecting seismic upsets are tipped off about his likely availability: “I’ll show up if I can.”
Having shown up, Clinton can be counted on to speechify. Although he believes that “the world doesn’t need another talkfest”, he is unstoppably loquacious. With Kim Jong-il he picks over “the usual stilted talking points” and in Bosnia he delivers terse “remarks”. In Accra, however, boosted by loudspeakers at a rally in an open square, he holds forth to a million auditors, “the largest crowd I’ve ever addressed”. He mistakenly assumes that George HW Bush is equally gabby and obliges him “to talk too long to too many people” on one of their humanitarian tours; George W Bush, raising funds for yet another hurricane, astutely warns Clinton to be “short and sweet”. Only once is he both out-talked and unmanned. As a student at Oxford, invited to tea at a women’s college, he likens himself to the ball boy at a testicular tennis match, exhausted by “the verbal serves and volleys that flew across the net”.
Garrulous he may be, but Clinton is convivial without being confidential. On a mission to extricate two journalists held hostage in North Korea, he remembers to be diplomatically expressionless in the official photograph and even rehearses not smiling. This long book about himself has the same ultimately dreary impersonality. “We all experience good times and grief,” he says, shuttering his private life. He bridles when accused by an interviewer of not apologising personally to Monica Lewinsky: didn’t he express generalised regrets in a public forum during a meeting with “faith leaders” at the White House? It was not, he says, “my finest hour”, referring to the tetchy interview, not to his exploitation of an infatuated intern.
Autobiographical anecdotes are twisted into what Clinton calls “teachable moments”, as when his reminiscence of an outdoor toilet in his Arkansas boyhood, “attractive to snakes in the summer”, introduces a homily about “productive grassroots partnerships with business”. The snakes must have been real enough but the grass they slither in is merely metaphorical. A single specimen of candid unpolitical speech is brattishly uttered by the three-year-old Chelsea when introduced to George HW Bush at his home in Maine. “Where’s the bathroom?” she asks her host.
No wonder that Clinton, always on guard against intimate leakages, so enjoyed collaborating with James Patterson on two thrillers published in 2018 and 2021, in which successive US presidents shed their inhibitions and enjoy careers as action heroes: the first anonymously slips out of the White House to thwart a cyberterrorist, the second ventures to Libya to rescue his kidnapped daughter. Clinton warns that climate change will eject us into “a real-life sequel to the post-apocalyptic Road Warrior movies”, but that swashbuckling apparently appeals to him. Politics, by contrast, seems as deadly dull as the language he uses to describe it. America, he says, has gone “off the rails”, although responsible commentators try “to keep the train on the tracks”: is he angling for honorary membership of Aslef?
Handed a microphone, Clinton is eager to share “an overview of how I view the world”, although these omniscient surveys mostly consist of faded neoliberal truisms. At the end of his book, this overview of the world is replaced by an underview of the universe as he scrutinises “the far reaches of outer space” at a scientific observatory in Hawaii. The interstellar void seen through the telescope makes him ask, with a shudder that the banal phrasing fails to muffle: “What does it all mean in the grand scheme of things?” His foundation, its funds and its global good works suddenly shrivel, and Clinton rebukes those who pursue “worldly political power” with a misplaced messianic zeal.
Then a few lines later he resumes pontificating about public service, and after a possible glimpse of a “creator God” out there in the darkness, he concludes by insisting “I’m happy.” This was written before the recent election; I’ll bet he no longer feels quite so cosmically complacent.
• Citizen: My Life After the White House by Bill Clinton is published by Cornerstone (£30). To support the Guardian and Observer order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply
