Bill Clinton : mastering the presidency / Nigel Hamilton.

Includes bibliographical references (pages 721-728) and index.

"A decade-and-a-half after President William Jefferson Clinton first took the oath of office, Nigel Hamilton charts the experience of the forty-second president's first term. This study of self-inflicted disaster shows how a well-meaning but naive new president failed to assert true leadership in his first two years. Hamilton then reveals how, in an astonishing act of self-reinvention, the president turned defeat into victory. The result is a tale of hubris and redemption - and of Clinton's ultimate triumph over himself and his foes." "The Clinton presidency began calamitously - kicking off with the worst transition in living memory and deteriorating through a series of misfortunes at every level, from gays in the military to international catastrophes such as those in Somalia, Haiti, and Rwanda, and the failure to act over Bosnia. Hillary Clinton's botched health care reform capped a litany of errors. When the Democrats lost their majority in both houses of Congress in 1994 for the first time in forty years, it looked as if the president's days in office were numbered." "How Bill Clinton faced up to his failures and refashioned himself in the White House thereafter - from the Oklahoma City bombing to the peace he established in Bosnia and the battle with Newt Gingrich over the shutdown of the government in 1995 - is an epic, hitherto unwritten story. It is a story that climaxes with the trouncing of Bob Dole in the landslide presidential election in 1996, and with Clinton becoming the first Democrat to win re-election to the White House since Franklin Roosevelt. Clinton began his second term as the undisputed and tremendously popular leader of the Western world."--BOOK JACKET.