The Secret Life of Bill Clinton
ISBN 9780895264084 | | |
The Secret Life of Bill Clinton: The Unreported Stories is a critical biography about certain episodes during the administration of former United States president Bill Clinton by English author and investigative journalist Ambrose Evans-Pritchard.
Content
The book, published in 1997 by
Evans-Pritchard had initially intended the book to be titled The Secret History of the Clinton Presidency, in reference to Secret History, a sixth-century book by Procopius of Caesarea "about Justinian and Theodora and the wicked things that went on in the Byzantine court - the salacious gossip and terrible goings-on and murders and so forth".[1]
The Secret Life makes various allegations about Clinton, including drug use, visits to prostitutes and dishonesty.[2] In the book he also repeats the
In Clinton's America, Evans-Pritchard alleged: "The way American reporters cover Arkansas is exactly the way they covered Nicaragua, which is they didn't go out into the hills and talk to ordinary people."[citation needed]
Reaction
Evans-Pritchard's work has been criticized as: "little more than wild flights of conspiratorial fancy coupled with outrageous and wholly uncorroborated allegations", although Robert Novak defends Evans-Pritchard as: "...being no conspiracy-theory lunatic.... [H]e was known in Washington for accuracy, industry and courage."[4]
However, long-time Clinton defender Gene Lyons, columnist for the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette and author of Fools for Scandal: How the Media Invented Whitewater (Franklin Square Press, 1996), says in an article: 'When necessary, Evans-Pritchard resorts to even more questionable methods. The temptation, in addressing so manifestly absurd and error-filled a piece of work, is to raillery. In form, Evans-Pritchard's book is a feverish concatenation of what his countryman, Guardian Washington correspondent Martin Walker, calls "the Clinton legends" into one vast, delusional epic.'[3]
References
- ^ "The Coming Storm | 1. The Dead Body". BBC Radio 4. 4 January 2022.
- ^ "THE "UNOFFICIAL" BILL CLINTON". zpub.com. Archived from the original on 7 March 2021.
- ^ a b "Gene Lyons: The Pied Piper of the Clinton Conspiracists". Salon. 23 December 1997. Archived from the original on 25 November 2007. Retrieved 1 July 2010.
- ^ FindArticles: News Publications: Insight on the News, Dec 15, 1997 by John Berlau Retrieved 1 July 2010