Focusing on the president's contradictory nature and rise to power, journalist, presidential biographer and Montgomery Fellow David Maraniss spoke on President Clinton to a Cook auditorium crowd with students and community members yesterday afternoon.
Maraniss, author of "First In His Class," is one of the nation's foremost scholars on Clinton
Clinton's ascent to the presidency began when he was a young boy, Maraniss said.
"No president wanted to be president more than Bill Clinton," Maraniss said. When Clinton was a young boy, his mother would talk about how her son would be president, Maraniss said. Clinton himself arranged to shake hands with John F. Kennedy when he was at the White House for Boys' Nation.
"He was running for president when he was born, and he'll be running for president for the rest of his life," Maraniss said.
Maraniss stressed that Clinton is a study in contradictions, both in his personal and political lives.
Clinton will be remembered for the moderate Republican initiatives that pushed for and signed into law, such as the North American Free Trade Agreement, the balanced budget and welfare reform, Maraniss said.
In addition, Clinton's rise to power was in direct contrast to the decline of the Democratic Party, particularly in the legislative realm. Clinton is the first two term Democratic president since Franklin Delano Roosevelt, while Congress switched to Republican control during his time in office.
One issue Clinton seems to return to consistently is education. While governor of Arkansas, Clinton instituted many educational reforms, Maraniss said.
"Some of them were important and systematic and some of them were just the rhetoric of making the people there feel that they had more opportunities," Maraniss said.
Clinton is willing to take risks and speak out on important issues, but only if doing so won't result in political losses, Maraniss said, adding that this contradiction makes Clinton predictable.
As an example Maraniss cited the example comparing Clinton's time as a law professor at University of Arkansas and his Presidency. While he worked hard to fight against racism and for civil rights at the University of Arkansas, he refused to issue an executive order opening the military to gays, because Clinton worried such action would undermine his relationship with the military.
Maraniss spent a relatively small amount of time confronting the current presidential scandal, though he did question why Clinton allowed the situation to happen in the first place.
Since the Lewinsky scandal came to light, Clinton has lost his position as a moral leader within the United States, Maraniss said.
"Why did someone who wanted to be president their entire life, who was incredibly intelligent ... why would someone with all of that risk it all with such foolish, kind of reckless behavior?" Maraniss asked.
Now that the impeachment proceedings have come to a close, Maraniss predicted Clinton would have a more productive last two years than most people anticipate. He also said Hillary Rodham Clinton could possibly run for the New York Senate seat as a way of being remembered for being more than Clinton's faithful wife.
The lecture was the final in a six-part series of lectures on "Power and the Presidency" sponsored by the Montgomery Foundation.
Maraniss is a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist and has been a reporter at the Washington Post for 21 years.
