Introduction

Former president Bill Clinton's highly anticipated memoirs will be published in June. My Life, an account of Clinton's life through the White House years, is one of the most eagerly awaited books of recent years. The book will go on sale nationwide, with a first printing of 1.5 million copies. My Life also will be available from Random House Audio (abridged) and will be read by Bill Clinton himself.

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Excerpt

Chapter One:

Early on the morning of August 19, 1946, I was born under a clear
sky after a violent summer storm to a widowed mother in the Julia
Chester Hospital in Hope, a town of about six thousand in southwest
Arkansas, thirty-three miles east of the Texas border at Texarkana.
My mother named me William Jefferson Blythe III after my father,
William Jefferson Blythe Jr., one of nine children of a poor farmer in
Sherman, Texas, who died when my father was seventeen. According to
his sisters, my father always tried to take care of them, and he grew up to
be a handsome, hardworking, fun-loving man. He met my mother at Tri-
State Hospital in Shreveport, Louisiana, in 1943, when she was training
to be a nurse. Many times when I was growing up, I asked Mother to tell
me the story of their meeting, courting, and marriage. He brought a date
with some kind of medical emergency into the ward where she was working,
and they talked and flirted while the other woman was being treated.
On his way out of the hospital, he touched the finger on which she was
wearing her boyfriend’s ring and asked her if she was married. She stammered
“no”—she was single. The next day he sent the other woman
flowers and her heart sank. Then he called Mother for a date, explaining
that he always sent flowers when he ended a relationship.

Two months later, they were married and he was off to war. He served
in a motor pool in the invasion of Italy, repairing jeeps and tanks. After
the war, he returned to Hope for Mother and they moved to Chicago,
where he got back his old job as a salesman for the Manbee Equipment
Company. They bought a little house in the suburb of Forest Park but
couldn’t move in for a couple of months, and since Mother was pregnant
with me, they decided she should go home to Hope until they could get
into the new house. On May 17, 1946, after moving their furniture into
their new home, my father was driving from Chicago to Hope to fetch his
wife. Late at night on Highway 60 outside of Sikeston, Missouri, he lost
control of his car, a 1942 Buick, when the right front tire blew out on a
wet road. He was thrown clear of the car but landed in, or crawled into, a
drainage ditch dug to reclaim swampland. The ditch held three feet of
water. When he was found, after a two-hour search, his hand was grasping
a branch above the waterline. He had tried but failed to pull himself
out. He drowned, only twenty-eight years old, married two years and
eight months, only seven months of which he had spent with Mother.

That brief sketch is about all I ever really knew about my father. All
my life I have been hungry to fill in the blanks, clinging eagerly to every
photo or story or scrap of paper that would tell me more of the man who
gave me life.

When I was about twelve, sitting on my uncle Buddy’s porch in Hope,
a man walked up the steps, looked at me, and said, “You’re Bill Blythe’s
son. You look just like him.” I beamed for days.

In 1974, I was running for Congress. It was my first race and the local
paper did a feature story on my mother. She was at her regular coffee
shop early in the morning discussing the article with a lawyer friend
when one of the breakfast regulars she knew only casually came up to her
and said, “I was there, I was the first one at the wreck that night.” He then
told Mother what he had seen, including the fact that my father had
retained enough consciousness or survival instinct to try to claw himself
up and out of the water before he died. Mother thanked him, went out to
her car and cried, then dried her tears and went to work.

In 1993, on Father’s Day, my first as President, the Washington Post
ran a long investigative story on my father, which was followed over the
next two months by other investigative pieces by the Associated Press and
many smaller papers. The stories confirmed the things my mother and I
knew. They also turned up a lot we didn’t know, including the fact that
my father had probably been married three times before he met Mother,
and apparently had at least two more children.

My father’s other son was identified as Leon Ritzenthaler, a retired
owner of a janitorial service, from northern California. In the article, he
said he had written me during the ‘92 campaign but had received no
reply. I don’t remember hearing about his letter, and considering all the
other bullets we were dodging then, it’s possible that my staff kept it from
me. Or maybe the letter was just misplaced in the mountains of mail we
were receiving. Anyway, when I read about Leon, I got in touch with him
and later met him and his wife, Judy, during one of my stops in northern
California. We had a happy visit and since then we’ve corresponded in
holiday seasons. He and I look alike, his birth certificate says his father
was mine, and I wish I’d known about him a long time ago.

Somewhere around this time, I also received information confirming
news stories about a daughter, Sharon Pettijohn, born Sharon Lee Blythe
in Kansas City in 1941, to a woman my father later divorced. She sent
copies of her birth certificate, her parents’ marriage license, a photo of
my father, and a letter to her mother from my father asking about “our
baby” to Betsey Wright, my former chief of staff in the governor’s office.
I’m sorry to say that, for whatever reason, I’ve never met her.

This news breaking in 1993 came as a shock to Mother, who by then
had been battling cancer for some time, but she took it all in stride. She
said young people did a lot of things during the Depression and the war
that people in another time might disapprove of. What mattered was that
my father was the love of her life and she had no doubt of his love for her.
Whatever the facts, that’s all she needed to know as her own life moved
toward its end. As for me, I wasn’t quite sure what to make of it all, but
given the life I’ve led, I could hardly be surprised that my father was more
complicated than the idealized pictures I had lived with for nearly half a
century.

In 1994, as we headed for the celebration of the fiftieth anniversary of
D-day, several newspapers published a story on my father’s war record,
with a snapshot of him in uniform. Shortly afterward, I received a letter
from Umberto Baron of Netcong, New Jersey, recounting his own experiences
during the war and after. He said that he was a young boy in Italy
when the Americans arrived, and that he loved to go to their camp, where
one soldier in particular befriended him, giving him candy and showing
him how engines worked and how to repair them. He knew him only as
Bill. After the war, Baron came to the United States, and, inspired by
what he had learned from the soldier who called him “Little GI Joe,” he
opened his own garage and started a family. He told me he had lived the
American dream, with a thriving business and three children. He said he
owed so much of his success in life to that young soldier, but hadn’t had
the opportunity to say good-bye then, and had often wondered what had
happened to him. Then, he said, “On Memorial Day of this year, I was
thumbing through a copy of the New York Daily News with my morning
coffee when suddenly I felt as if I was struck by lightning. There in the
lower left-hand corner of the paper was a photo of Bill. I felt chills to
learn that Bill was none other than the father of the President of the
United States.”

In 1996, the children of one of my father’s sisters came for the first
time to our annual family Christmas party at the White House and
brought me a gift: the condolence letter my aunt had received from her
congressman, the great Sam Rayburn, after my father died. It’s just a
short form letter and appears to have been signed with the autopen of the
day, but I hugged that letter with all the glee of a six-year-old boy getting
his first train set from Santa Claus. I hung it in my private office on the
second floor of the White House, and looked at it every night.

Shortly after I left the White House, I was boarding the USAir shuttle
in Washington for New York when an airline employee stopped me to
say that his stepfather had just told him he had served in the war with my
father and had liked him very much. I asked for the old vet’s phone number
and address, and the man said he didn’t have it but would get it to me.
I’m still waiting, hoping there will be one more human connection to my
father.

At the end of my presidency, I picked a few special places to say goodbye
and thanks to the American people. One of them was Chicago, where
Hillary was born; where I all but clinched the Democratic nomination on
St. Patrick’s Day 1992; where many of my most ardent supporters live
and many of my most important domestic initiatives in crime, welfare,
and education were proved effective; and, of course, where my parents
went to live after the war. I used to joke with Hillary that if my father
hadn’t lost his life on that rainy Missouri highway, I would have grown up
a few miles from her and we probably never would have met. My last
event was in the Palmer House Hotel, scene of the only photo I have of
my parents together, taken just before Mother came back to Hope in
1946. After the speech and the good-byes, I went into a small room
where I met a woman, Mary Etta Rees, and her two daughters. She told
me she had grown up and gone to high school with my mother, then had
gone north to Indiana to work in a war industry, married, stayed, and
raised her children. Then she gave me another precious gift: the letter
my twenty-three-year-old mother had written on her birthday to her
friend, three weeks after my father’s death, more than fifty-four years earlier.
It was vintage Mother. In her beautiful hand, she wrote of her heartbreak
and her determination to carry on: “It seemed almost unbelievable
at the time but you see I am six months pregnant and the thought of our
baby keeps me going and really gives me the whole world before me.”

My mother left me the wedding ring she gave my father, a few moving
stories, and the sure knowledge that she was loving me for him too.

My father left me with the feeling that I had to live for two people,
and that if I did it well enough, somehow I could make up for the life he
should have had. And his memory infused me, at a younger age than
most, with a sense of my own mortality. The knowledge that I, too, could
die young drove me both to try to drain the most out of every moment of
life and to get on with the next big challenge. Even when I wasn’t sure
where I was going, I was always in a hurry.


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Excerpted from My Life by Bill Clinton Copyright© 2004 by Bill Clinton. Excerpted by permission of Knopf, a division of Random House, Inc. All rights reserved.
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