THE POLITICIAN.(Book Review)

One can make a plausible, if narrow, case that Bill Clinton was one of the most accomplished American politicians of the twentieth century. Among the century's seventeen Presidents, beginning with Theodore Roosevelt, Clinton went the farthest on his own steam, without any of the extrinsic advantages that gave all the others a leg up in one way or another. Unlike fully half of them, Clinton did not inherit the Presidency, either directly, as did T.R., Coolidge, Truman, Johnson, and Ford, or indirectly, as did Taft, Nixon, and George H. W. Bush. Unlike T.R., Harding, Franklin D. Roosevelt, Kennedy, Carter, and Bush, Clinton had no family money and no family connections. ...