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The 1990s was a decade of extreme change. Shifts in culture, politics, and technology radically altered the way Americans did business, expressed themselves, and thought about their role in the world. At the center of it all was Bill Clinton, the charismatic and flawed baby boomer president, along with his polarizing but increasingly popular wife, Hillary.
Although it was in many ways a Democratic Gilded Age, the 1990s was also a time of great anxiety. The Cold War was over. America was stable and prosperous. Yet Americans felt more unmoored and isolated. This was the era of glitz and grunge, when we relished living in the Republic of Everything even as we feared it might degenerate into the Republic of Nothing. Bill Clinton dominated this era, but his complex legacy has yet to be clearly defined.
Historian Gil Troy examines Clinton's presidency alongside the decade's cultural changes. Taking the '90s year-by-year, Troy shows how the culture of the day shaped the Clintons even as the Clintons shaped it, offering answers to two enduring questions about Bill Clinton's legacy: How did such a talented politician leave Americans thinking he accomplished so little when he actually accomplished so much? And, to what extent was Clinton responsible for the catastrophes of the following decade, specifically 9/11 and the collapse of the housing market?
Even more relevant as we head toward the 2016 election, The Age of Clinton will appeal to readers on both sides of the aisle as it chronicles the wild, transformative decade and the president at its center.
- Sales Rank: #467738 in Books
- Published on: 2015-10-06
- Released on: 2015-10-06
- Original language: English
- Number of items: 1
- Dimensions: 9.44" h x 1.43" w x 6.45" l, .0 pounds
- Binding: Hardcover
- 384 pages
Review
"A fun romp through the decade and an intelligent way of understanding the cultural context and legacy of Bill Clinton’s era." -Associated Press
“With the 1990s passing from memory into history, Gil Troy, one of our leading political historians, is here to help us make sense of it. He not only takes us through the highs and lows of Bill Clinton's underappreciated presidency but sets its political events within the context of the cultural and technological developments that were transforming the country. In Troy's eminently readable narrative, filled with revealing nuggets of information, Clinton emerges, for all his foibles, as the rare president who grasped the future before it happened and helped set the nation on a course of progress.” ―David Greenberg, author of Republic of Spin: An Inside History of the American Presidency
“Offering a sweeping cultural and political review of the 1990s, Gil Troy ties together the likes of Oprah Winfrey, Newt Gingrich, Bill Gates, Kurt Cobain, and Harry Potter. He convincingly identifies the decade as the Age of Clinton for the president who personified its noble aspirations, notable achievements, missed opportunities, and embarrassing excesses.” ―Donald A. Ritchie, author of Reporting from Washington: A History of the Washington Press Corps
“It takes an historian of enormous skill and subtlety to capture a man as complicated as Bill Clinton and a time as confusing as America in the 1990s. Gil Troy is that historian. His book is fresh, compelling, and fascinating. It combines powerful storytelling with creative synthesis. It's the best book on the man and his times.” ―Steven M. Gillon, author of The Pact: Bill Clinton, Newt Gingrich, and the Rivalry that Defined a Generation
“Gil Troy's The Age of Clinton is a delightful romp down our memory lane of the 1990s. The narrative is seamless and written with insightful verve. Highly recommended!” ―Douglas Brinkley, Professor of History at Rice University and author of Cronkite
“This is the book we didn't know we were waiting for. It is the needed correction to the lazy idea that because we had peace and prosperity in the 1990s not much happened. Gil Troy shows us that living through history is no guarantee we understand it. Only now do I realize how much I missed. Troy takes the history seriously and shows us why we should too in an engrossing and balanced cultural study of the first order.” ―Rick Shenkman, publisher of History News Network
“Gil Troy takes us on a captivating safari through America in the 1990s. His book on the Clinton years has a brilliant insight on just about every page about the president, the politics, the culture, and all of us. It's a magnificent read.” ―Lesley Stahl, correspondent, Sixty Minutes
About the Author
Gil Troy is a professor of history at McGill University and a visiting scholar in Governance Studies at the Brookings Institution for the fall of 2015. Originally from Queens, New York, the is the author of ten previous books, including See How They Ran: The Changing Presidential Candidate; Morning in America: How Ronald Reagan Invented the 1980s; and the award-winning Moynihan's Moment: America's Fight Against Zionism as Racism. A weekly columnist for The Daily Beast, he has offered political commentary on all major TV networks in the United States and Canada. His articles have appeared in The New York Times, The New Republic, The Washington Post, The Jerusalem Post, and The Wilson Quarterly, among other major media outlets.
Most helpful customer reviews
2 of 2 people found the following review helpful.
An insightful history for people who lived through the 90s in the US
By Aaron C. Brown
This is a social history of the United States in the 1990s, organized around the Presidency of Bill Clinton. The author's thesis is that three US Presidents in the 20th century defined their periods in office both culturally and politically: Franklin Roosevelt, Ronald Reagan and Bill Clinton; and that all three presided over major social and political transformations.
I can think of two other candidate periods, the Progressive Era in the early part of the century, and the Vietnam period which could be dated from the passage of the Civil Rights Act until Nixon's resignation. But both of these involve more than one President, and of the Presidents involved only Theodore Roosevelt could be said to define a cultural change.
Franklin Roosevelt's New Deal/WWII era unquestionably meets the author's definition. Reagan also personified his era, and it was one of great change, but the issues people got passionate about in the 1980s seem mostly unrelated to the transformation that occurred. I think a person in 1945 reading a modern history of Franklin Roosevelt's administration would agree that the right issues were covered (he might disagree with opinions about them). But I think a person from 1989 reading a modern (post 2008) history of the Reagan years would be baffled by most of the stuff included in the book, and would wonder why the important stuff was omitted. In the 1980s, to paraphrase Allen Saunders, "History is what happened when politicians were busy fighting about other things."
For the Clinton years, the problem is different. The things we fought about in the 1990s are the same things we're fighting about now: universal health care, free trade, immigration, a balanced budget, school shootings, terrorism, entitlement funding, government shutdowns, foreign massacres and police violence. We still have an unruly and aggressive crowd of young populist Republicans in the House fighting a centrist Democrat in the White House, who is trying to hold together a coalition of Beltway insiders, technocrats and the traditional Democratic base (an effort in which Clinton was mostly successful and Obama was mostly not). We may still have a Clinton versus Bush Presidential election. If there is an Age of Clinton, when did it end? The author suggests September 11, 2001, along with the 2000 stock market crash and of course, the disputed election of 2000. But it seems more natural to think of Clinton helping to launch post-Cold-War America on a path whose outcome is still uncertain, rather than presiding over a well-defined Age.
This matters for the book, because without the organizing premise, it's just a list of events in national politics and pop culture, with a few other news stories thrown in. Kind of like reading the Time Annual: the Year in Review books for 1990 to 1999 and skipping the parts on foreign countries.
Although I don't fully accept the author's thesis, I think it contains enough truth to make this a genuine history rather than an almanac of facts. If you were in the US and aware of the news in the 90s, this will help you organize your memories of the era, and fill in a few blanks. It's a satisfying experience that brings deeper understanding and closure. If you weren't paying attention to these events at the time, you may have difficulty following the accounts in this book. That makes it similar to Strange Days Indeed, an excellent account of the 70s for people who were there, that's just a bunch of anecdotes to people who weren't. The major differences are that book's decade-appropriate focus was on paranoia rather than any individual, the author did not choose to write the book in chronological order and he demonstrated a better sense of humor.
I have to raise one final topic. The author presents Bill Clinton as a masterful politician, with a strong vision that changed the terms of debate in American politics, but who was undercut by personal failings. I think that's a mushy way to put things. A clearer statement is that the Clintons were personally dishonest and corrupt, but only for relatively small dollar amounts, and never in a way to affect core policy. From taking money from a sleazy futures broker, taking a free interest in a real estate venture from a sleazy developer, trying to skim from the White House travel office, selling pardons, stealing the White House furniture and soliciting gifts from people who had extensive business with the government; these are not people you would leave unsupervised in a room with your wallet (and in Bill's case, with your daughter).
Clearly that's better than people who steal larger amounts of money, and people who take bribes for major policy actions. It's up to you how you feel about the Clinton crimes relative to personally honest people who are beholden to narrow special interests; or people who manage to get plenty of money in legal ways via old boy networks or revolving doors; or people who grovel for campaign contributions. And you can certainly say that stealing a few tens of thousands of dollars on several occasions should be ignored compared to the massive political achievements of the Clinton administration. Or you can take comfort that none of these crimes were ever proven beyond a reasonable doubt.
But even small personal corruption should be clearly distinguished from the politicians who are personally honest, are sincerely trying to represent everyone's interest (however idiotic their efforts may appear to opponents), who stand up to donors and who earned all their money without direct or indirect selling of influence. The author never draws that bright line. He's free with the label "corrupt," Marion Berry, some unnamed Congressional Democrats, politics in general and the tobacco industry all earn it, but never anyone named Clinton. The author disapproves of bribery, embezzlement and theft, and he admits the facts of the Clintons' actions, but he won't use the words.
I have no personal issue with promiscuity, I think that's between the people involved, so I don't consider it a form of corruption. I would go so far as to say I admire a guy who can have sex with as many women as Bill Clinton, and have only one public complaint. In principle I would object to abuse of power to coerce women into sex, and certainly one is entitled to suspect that when the President of the United States is caught with an intern, but I've never seen convincing evidence the Bill Clinton had unwilling partners. Nevertheless, I feel that the author treats this important subject with the same sort of circumlocutions as he uses for financial corruption.
This squishiness allows the author to go easy on the Clinton tactics for fighting scandal. The usual approaches of scandal-hit politicians who don't want to resign are to keep quiet and let the lawyers try to beat the formal charges, to admit the facts and ask for forgiveness or to tell a credible lie and stick with it. The Clintons pursued a unique strategy that should have been suicidal: vicious attacks on truthful witnesses and honest investigators (not to say there weren't plenty of less-than-honest witnesses and partisan investigators as well), serial lies that were not meant to be believed and were discarded without apology when disproved and aggressive public lawyering against formal consequences. The combination of exploiting every legal technicality and making up some new ones on one hand, with willingness to hide crucial evidence until the day the statute of limitations ran out, lie under oath, and meddle with criminal investigations should outrage both legalists and non-legalists. But, somehow it worked, probably due to a combination of respect for the Clintons' political achievement combined with the relatively minor nature of the underlying offenses (but somehow that didn't work for Nixon).
Because the author never clearly says that the Clintons committed crimes, although he describes those crimes accurately, he is able to present the Clinton counterstrategy as a kind of he-said/she-said unseemly partisan squabble. While there were certainly unseemly people and tactics on the other side, there's no doubt that the Clintons started things, not just by committing the crimes in the first place, but by employing dishonest scorched earth tactics.
Overall, this is a informative and well-written social history of the 90s, interwoven with a detailed account of the Clinton Presidency. It has an interesting thesis, but one that I feel was only partly demonstrated, and it is undercut by an unwillingness to speak plain truth about Clinton misdemeanors. It assumes too much familiarity with the events in question to be a good introduction to the period to someone who didn't live through it, but I think readers with the appropriate background will enjoy it.
1 of 1 people found the following review helpful.
A Timely Reminder of the Clinton Years
By takingadayoff
It's only 15 years since Bill Clinton left office and you might think that's too soon to start thinking about his presidency as history. But a lot has happened since then and if we look at when he was first elected, that's twenty-three years ago, an entire generation ago. What are we waiting for?
Presidential historian Gil Troy looks at the Clinton presidency as a product of the times, that is, The Nineties. He reminds us frequently what was going on at the time that Clinton was taking any particular action. There's the rise of the internet, the birth of the cellphone (no smartphones yet!), Columbine. Osama bin Laden, who had fought against the Soviets in Afghanistan, with America aid, was also an anti-American who was starting to worry American intelligence agencies. The things he did get done seem more like victories for Republicans than for Democrats (Welfare Reform and the gutting of the Glass-Steagall Act.)
Troy seems to be generally pro-Clinton, but can't overlook his many faults. Consequently it's a fair look at the man and the presidency set against the times. For all his oversized ambitions, Clinton accomplished very little and left the nation with conflicting thoughts about the Clinton era. Bill Clinton was a charming, greedy, selfish, generous, confident, insecure man and president. You could argue that he was exactly the president Nineties America deserved. A thoughtful and fascinating look at recent history, especially pertinent as Hillary Clinton runs for President in 2016.
(Thanks to St. Martin's Press for a review copy.)
0 of 0 people found the following review helpful.
Dizzying survey of the 1990s and Bill Clinton's presidency
By Kathy Cunningham
Gil Troy’s THE AGE OF CLINTON isn’t so much a book about Bill Clinton’s presidency as it is about the decade he both reflected and influenced. Troy posits that Clinton is one of three presidents who define their decade (Reagan in the 1980s and Roosevelt in the 1930s are the other two). As Troy puts it, “This book’s central assumption is that we can best understand Clinton and the 1990s by overlaying the story of his presidency on the broader story of the decade, viewing the two together, to see what stands out.” And what stands out are the iconic events that underscored Clinton’s presidency, the challenges he faced in office, the mistakes he made, and the things he accomplished in spite of them. On one level, this is a massive book of lists, as Troy catalogs American ‘90s pop culture, political craziness, world events, and a down-home Southern redneck president who oversaw it all. On another level, it’s a very personal story, the saga of a golden couple who came to Washington amidst massive change and social turbulence, weathered the storm, and came out still golden (if a little less shiny) on the other side.
If you’ve lived through the ‘90s, this will feel like a nostalgic trip into the past. Troy references the news stories we all remember (Anita Hill, Rodney King, the OJ Simpson trial, the Oklahoma City bombing, Columbine, and genocide in Rwanda) and the pop culture touchstones that define the ‘90s (Harry Potter, “Thelma and Louise,” Madonna, Billy Ray Cyrus, “The Blair Witch Project,” Y2K, and “West Wing”). At times, it all feels very “Forrest Gump,” with Troy racing through the highs and lows, the tragedies and the silliness that define the 1990s. There’s little actual depth here, and nothing that seemed new or strikingly revealing, but it is at times a hoot to relive these years through Troy’s very sharp lens.
Clinton himself comes across as a man who embraced both the successes of the Reagan years and the magical promise of a technological future. He led American into the computer age, tried to tackle the health care problem, battled his own weaknesses and failings, and ended up – as Troy puts it – as both a hypocrite and a “noble game changer.” The Age of Clinton, says Troy, was “an Age of Giddiness,” “an Age of Indulgence,” and “an Age of Skepticism.” And Clinton’s “unique mix of vice and virtue, of cynicism and idealism, of craftiness and innocence, of frankness and falseness, worked in the 1990s.”
THE AGE OF CLINTON isn’t totally successful in its attempt to define both a President and a decade. At times its lists seem dizzying, and I found myself lost in the overwhelming quantity of its details. Troy also assumes that his readers are familiar with the events and personalities he references – he provides very little background, and even less depth of discussion. When he writes about Anita Hill, for example, he assumes we know who she is, and why she was testifying at Clarence Thomas’s confirmation hearing. It’s the same with Troy’s portrayal of the Monica Lewinsky affair and Clinton’s eventual impeachment – he mentions the “blue dress,” and Clinton’s famous parsing of the word “is,” but explains none of it.
Troy’s portrayal of Hillary Clinton is interesting. He shows her morphing from Bill’s “Co-President and Health Care Czarina,” to “Hillary the Celebrity” (with the publication of her book “It Takes a Village”), to “the Wronged Wife,” and finally to an “Independent Woman” running for her own Senate seat . . . and eventually for President in her own right. It’s interesting watching her develop as both a woman and a candidate.
I liked parts of THE AGE OF CLINTON very much, and Troy definitely has a knack for drawing together such diverse elements as politics, pop culture, and media craziness. Then again, perhaps they aren’t diverse at all. And I found many similarities between the 1990s and the 2010s – the same desperate division between Democrats and Republicans, the same arguments over health care and gay rights, the same fears about gun violence and school shootings, the same fixation on technology and the Internet, and the same obsessions with sex and scandal. It was eye-opening to realize how much of what America is today was born in the decade of Clinton’s presidency. This book paints an interesting portrait of America in the 1990s, even if it leaves the reader less than fully satisfied.
[Please note: I was provided a copy of this book for review; the opinions expressed here are my own.]
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