The first black president: "single-parent household, born poor, working-class, saxophone playing, McDonald's-and-junk-food-loving boy from Arkansas" was how Nobel Prize–winner Toni Morrison described Bill Clinton. And, indeed, Clinton enjoyed his highest rating with blacks even when his popularity was at its lowest. This collection of short pieces and interviews with Clinton, edited by
USA Today
columnist Wickham (Woodholme: A Black Man's Story of Growing up Alone), gathers a wide variety of black professionals, politicians and intellectuals addressing the myriad issues on which African-Americans engaged with the president. Terry Edmonds (Clinton's director of speech writing) captures the heart of this relationship in his statement, "for Clinton, black America was never an afterthought." Harvard Medical School psychiatrist Alvin Poussaint was troubled by Clinton's attack on Sister Souljah "for being anti-white," but was still won over by the president's appointments of black judges, cabinet and subcabinet members, and by his attendance at black churches and singing of hymns. The collection is at its best when it mixes personal anecdotes (law professor Mary Frances Berry telling Clinton jokes during a Black History Month dinner) with substantive analysis, as when William H. Gray III of the United Negro College Fund reports on helping Clinton revise his disastrous Haitian refugees policy. While a great deal of the material here states the obvious (actor/producer Tim Reid's statement that "he's given the black people something that no one has given them at this point: hope"), what comes through again and again is the manner in which his black constituency felt well represented by Clinton. (Feb.)
Forecast:Clinton's current Harlem base of operations is just one more gesture of solidarity with the African-American community. But with the former president's political role in flux, this book's main audience will be those wanting a walk through the 1990s' White House domestic policy making—as well as the African-Americans and many others with cases of Clinton nostalgia.
