Absorbing Bill Clinton Documentary Goes On Air

In 1973, Hillary Rodham told her boss at the White House that her Arkansas beau was coming to visit.

“He’s going to be president of the United States,” Rodham, a recent Yale Law School grad working an entry-level job, told a skeptical Bernard Nussbaum, then-White House counsel.

 

Fomer US President Bill Clinton
(Pix:AP)

Her certitude — recounted in Barak Goodman’s absorbing documentary “Clinton” — seems as much mission statement as romantic guile.

The ever-fascinating partnership of Bill and Hillary Clinton overshadows all else in a four-hour film that stretches from William Jefferson Clinton’s hardscrabble childhood in Hope, Ark., to the day in January 2001 when furniture movers had to all but drag him out of the Oval Office.

 The American Experince

Life And Times of

Former President Bill Clinton

Covering both the personal and the political, and with participation from 70 Clinton administration insiders, journalists, foes and friends, “Clinton” is the eighth entry in the Public Broadcasting Service’s ongoing “Presidents” series of “The American Experience” documentaries.

This installment is among the most compelling, on par with “Reagan” and “The Kennedys,” if not matching the series’ pinnacle “Abraham and Mary Lincoln: A House Divided” in epic scope.

Bill and Hillary Clinton

Neither the former president nor his first lady were invited to sit for new interviews. Goodman said he wanted to avoid allowing the documentary to become memoir. Their absence is barely felt, given the abundance of archival footage and photos that document each phase of Clinton’s life and career.

More questionable is Goodman’s decision to exclude both Monica Lewinsky and Linda Tripp, two key players — unwitting or complicit — in the Republican-led attempt to topple the Clinton presidency.



Hillary Rodham Weds Bill Clinton In Fayetteville In 1975

  Perhaps surprisingly, the pre-Lewinsky era — covered in the first of the film’s two parts — is the more captivating. Goodman sketches a boy raised by an alcoholic stepfather and an unconventional, working-class mother with “exuberant” hairstyles, make-up and jewelry (“Virginia was fun,” recalls a friend).

Clinton is dutiful and ambitious, with a reckless need to be worshipped.



Hillary,Bill and Chalsea Clinton


When the brainy, straightforward Rodham approaches the flirtatious Bill in a Yale library, the two are smitten — he with her drive and intelligence, she with his good looks and BMOC charisma.

In keeping with other entries in the “American Experience” presidents series, “Clinton” is more admiring than critical, though it doesn’t whitewash his shortcomings.

“Clinton” airs on PBS tonight at 9 p.m. and Tuesday February 21, 2012 at 8 p.m.



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