posted on June 21, 2004 05:58:08 AM new
Clinton prepares for book launch
Bill Clinton will hold a lavish Manhattan party for 1,000 guests on Monday to mark the publication of his autobiography, "My Life".
Many bookshops will stay open at midnight to sell the first copies, with thousands ordered in advance.
The sections about his affair with White House intern Monica Lewinsky will be the most eagerly-awaited.
But the New York Times says that the book is "sloppy, self-indulgent and often eye-crossingly dull".
In an interview with the BBC to promote the book Mr Clinton says the relationship with Ms Lewinsky happened during a period in his presidency when he had been vulnerable.
He suggested to the BBC's Panorama programme that the affair was to some extent the fault of pressures exerted by his political enemies.
'Old demons'
Elsewhere, Mr Clinton has said he has revealed more about his life than any public figure before him - probably more than anyone ever should.
Clinton managed to salvage his family life
He said it had been "like living in a madhouse", in an interview with the CBS network's 60 Minutes programme.
He blamed his infidelities on "old demons", but added that the humiliation of public scandal and a year of intensive counselling which saved his marriage with Hillary Clinton, he now felt that it was "liberating"
When he first told Hillary about his affair with Monica Lewinsky, "she was angry and she was mad and she was as mad about me not telling her before", he writes.
On foreign policy, Mr Clinton says that his two greatest regrets were not cementing a Middle East between Israel and the Palestinians, and not capturing Osama Bin Laden.
The New York Times review said that much of the book was "the sound of one man prattling away, not for the reader, but for himself and some distant recording angel of history". But the interest in the book is considerable, with Mr Clinton's publisher Knopf printing 1.5 million copies, breaking the record of 1.2 million for the first printing of Pope John Paul II's 1994 "Crossing the Threshold of Hope".
posted on June 21, 2004 09:11:52 AM new
Libra - although I agree that many of the older branch of the republicans during the Clinton administration could probably be termed as a evil, I don't think I would call them demons......
~~~ • ~~~ • ~~~ • ~~~ • ~~~
If it's really "common" sense, why do so few people actually have it?
