Listening to Hugh Hewitt this morning, I have received a full dose of Craig Melvin’s interview of President Clinton on the Today Show as edited in the segment below. Quizzed about Monica Lewinsky and the growth of the MeToo movement, Clinton usefully reminds us of several of his distasteful personal qualities.
Clinton is out peddling his new book, The President Is Missing, coauthored with James Patterson, proprietor of the Patterson factory of factitious suspense novels. Patterson looks on uncomfortably during the interview until he instructs Melvin to move on. Query the formation of their literary partnership and how many words either one of the two co-authors contributed to The President Is Missing.
Katherine Patterson addresses the questions I raise in her witty review of the Patterson/Clinton novel for Newsday. She introduces her review with these observations: “It is not unknown for heads of state to write novels: Mussolini, Franco and Saddam Hussein did, but presidents of the United States tend to eschew fiction. (Except, perhaps, in their memoirs.) Jimmy Carter seems to have been our first presidential novelist with ‘The Hornet’s Nest.’ Appearing more than 20 years after he left office, it is set during the Revolutionary War and is so earnest and instructive that Carter most likely did write it himself….”
Quotable quote (back to President Clinton): “I left the White House $16 million in debt…I had a sexual harassment policy when I was governor in the ’80s.”
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