Biography: In the movie Primary Colors there is a compelling scene in which the presidential candidate Jack Stanton (based on Bill Clinton and played by John Travolta) pleads passionately with an adviser (based on Clinton aide George Stephanopoulos) to stay with him despite the "bimbo eruptions" that have almost crippled his election campaign.
They must go on, he argues, to win the White House and make a difference to American people's lives. To me, this scene captured the essence of Bill Clinton: wilful and promiscuous, yes, charming and calculating too, but worth sticking with as a passionate, caring and driven politician. That's what makes Clinton so captivating a personality to millions of people, and has helped make his autobiography My Life a record bestseller.
The book Clinton has written, under incredible pressure from his publishers, reflects the man. It is at times charming, but it is calculating and self-absorbed too. More unforgivably, it is also boring and, like the curate's egg, interesting only in parts. It is really two books. One is the account of his life growing up as a pudgy, smart-ass boy in a violent Arkansas household. In it, Clinton tells of how he struggled to come to terms with an alcoholic stepfather and a good-time mother.
At one point, "Daddy" fires a shot between young Bill and his mother in a drunken rage, but stepfather and stepson become close when the former nears death. As a kid Clinton gets punched by bullies and gored by a ram, and as a 10-year-old he sits cross-legged on the floor, totally absorbed by the televised Republican and Democratic conventions. This section lasts for about 200 pages and, if published on its own, would be hailed by critics.
The rest of the 957-page volume, however, is tough going. It is a page-turner all right: on two three-hour train journeys between New York and Washington this week I found myself, eyes blurring, turning over page after page as I skipped bits beginning "I announced . . .", "I named . . .", "I met with . . .", "I recommended . . .", "I signed . . .", "I urged . . .", "I was introduced to . . .". It is a chronology of Clinton's political life crammed with names and campaigns, and clearly written in a rush. No one told Clinton that the secret of writing a non-fiction book is setting realistic horizons. Clinton set no limits. Everything is crammed in here and the book lacks focus. It is a relentless succession of diary pages, travel notes and cameos. However, it's not as bad as some commentators have made out and it comes to life here and there, especially when Clinton takes issue with the well-financed right-wing conspiracy theorists who accused him of everything from corruption in the Whitewater case to the murder of Vince Foster, a friend who committed suicide after being harshly and unjustly attacked in the Wall Street Journal. He settles scores with the media that hounded him mercilessly over Whitewater, especially the New York Times, which set the agenda for the rest. Journalists were terrified to get beaten in another Watergate.
There are, here and there, some amusing anecdotes. There was the disastrous speech at the 1988 Democratic convention in Atlanta, where a politically immature Clinton droned on so long that he was cheered when he said "In closing . . .". It nearly finished his career, but he made a comeback by poking fun at himself and playing the saxophone on the Johnny Carson Show a week later. At a low point in the 1992 campaign he rallies the despairing Stephanopoulos, who was "curled up on the floor practically in tears". He recalls Boris Yeltsin being asked if he was happy with their meeting and replying: "Happy? One cannot be happy outside the presence of a beautiful woman. But I am satisfied." There is also a hilarious scene when Yitzhak Rabin agrees to shake Yasser Arafat's hand at the White House but insists on "no kissing", which leads to Clinton and Tony Lake rehearsing a hand-and-arm grip that would make a kiss impossible.
Historians and specialists in aspects of Clinton's presidency will mine the book for anecdotes such as this and deeper insights into what went on behind the scenes. If their experience is anything like mine, they will find slim pickings.
As the author of a book on how Clinton got involved in the Irish peace process - I was Washington correspondent of The Irish Times in the early 1990s - I was interested to read in My Life Clinton's retrospective view of his wheeling and dealing with Irish politicians and paramilitaries, but I found almost nothing new. I recall Clinton speaking passionately to an Irish forum in New York in 1992 - when he made his "Irish promises" - about the need for a new governing rationale in the aftermath of the Cold War, but here there is only a skimpy account of the event and a number of niggling errors. Peter King, who he says was there, was not comptroller of Queens at the time but of Nassau County. Niall O'Dowd, who he also says was there, was not, and he is the publisher, not the editor, of the Irish Voice. Also, Clinton writes that it was he who suggested to Albert Reynolds that he could give Adams a ground-breaking visa in January 1994 if Reynolds could arrange for Adams to be invited to the US. Reynolds told me later that he had to push the White House for the visa after Bill Flynn invited Adams to a foreign policy conference in New York to force the president's hand (though with all the intrigue going on at the time the two accounts may not be contradictory). Clinton says that after he granted the visa, the then prime minister John Major refused to take his calls for a week, but according to contemporaneous accounts it wasn't until after Clinton granted Adams fundraising rights in the US almost a year later that a furious Major stopped taking his calls.
Interestingly, Clinton gives credit to Nancy Soderberg for persuading him to issue the first visa to Adams over the objections of the British government, the US state department, the CIA and the FBI. Disappointingly, we learn little of Clinton's encounters with the Northern visitors who used to trek into the White House or of the evolution of his involvement. Clinton records, for example, that George Mitchell called him from Belfast at 5 a.m. on the day of the Belfast Agreement to tell the president he must talk to Gerry Adams to settle the deal. But we are not told why, or what was said.
A lot of people will buy this book to learn more about the wilful side of Clinton and to see how he handles the accounts of his "bimbo eruptions". In the Primary Colors movie the Hillary character slaps her husband across the face when taped conversations based on those of Bill Clinton with Gennifer Flowers are made public. Hillary's actual reaction is not recorded here. Clinton writes simply that he and she decided to go on CBS to answer questions about the charges, which Clinton denied. But, in 1998, in relation to the Paula Jones case, he acknowledged that he "had had a relationship with her that he should not have had". Clinton denies Paula Jones's charge of sexual harassment but does not say what happened in the hotel room in Little Rock. It is one of many omissions.
Another is the name of Rickey Ray Rector, the brain-damaged murderer whose execution Clinton supervised during the 1992 campaign when he needed to show he was tough on crime.
Much of what he writes about Monica Lewinsky has already been reprinted this week and Clinton has subjected himself to a number of painful interviews about how he got involved in the affair at a time when Kenneth Starr was out to get him. His explanation is that at times of stress the demons suppressed in his youth with an alcoholic father resurfaced and he found release in self-destructive "inappropriate behaviour". He had "inappropriate encounters" with Lewinsky in November 1995, April 1996 and again in February 1997, when he met her alone for 15 minutes, after which he says he was "disgusted with myself for doing it". Clinton admits he lied to "Hillary, Chelsea, my staff and cabinet, my friends in Congress, members of the press and the American people" over his "immoral and foolish" affair. When he confessed to Hillary it was as if he had punched her in the stomach, he writes (which synchronises with Hillary's account in her bestseller, Living History, of gasping for air). This was followed by two months sleeping on a couch (was the Lincoln Bedroom not free?) and a year of once-a-week counselling. What enabled him and Hillary to stick together was their determination "to fight off the right-wing coup" attempt.
Clinton settles scores with his enemies, particularly special prosecutor Kenneth Starr, the book's villain, who jailed Susan McDougall, one of Clinton's partners in Whitewater, with instructions that she be treated like a child murderer for refusing to tell him what he wanted to sink the president. The special prosecutor's obsession with Clinton's sex life produced one of the most unsavoury documents in modern American history, the kinky Starr report. Clinton did not deserve such unprecedented worldwide humiliation. The perpetual right in the US always needs an enemy, Clinton says, and when communism fell, he was the next best thing. That's a bit much, but there is something to it. It is hard to blame Clinton for self-pity. However, it adds little to the debate on the state of the nation or where the US is going, which one would expect a president's memoirs to do. The book is not half as brilliant as the author, and seems written more for for royalties than for history. The next one will be better, when the pressure is off and the man has more time to think.
• Conor O'Clery is North America Editor of The Irish Times