Bill Clinton was on a roll, telling a rapt audience at New York University this week about his battles against impeachment and life in the White House. But then he abruptly stopped, and left listeners with a big tease:

"If you like what I talked about," he said,"wait until you read the book."

With Clinton's memoir,"My Life," set to hit stores next week, the stories behind its publication are bursting with superlatives: The former president got a $10-million advance from publisher Alfred A. Knopf, which is thought to be the largest amount ever paid for a nonfiction political book. And the company announced a first printing of 1.5 million copies, the largest ever for a presidential autobiography.

No previous White House memoir has generated comparable interest. And the reason, many observers contend, does not rest in the Monica S. Lewinsky sex scandal alone. It is the fact that the long-awaited life story of Clinton -- loved by some, hated by others -- is hitting the American book market at a moment when it is primed to sell more copies of such a work than ever before.

Media attention also has been stoked by the possibility that Clinton's book, appearing in the midst of a presidential campaign, could affect the outcome. Opinions are mixed on whether the fortunes of presumed Democratic candidate John F. Kerry's fortunes will be helped or hindered by news stories and publicity focusing on Clinton.

"This is a unique event in publishing history," said John Baker, editorial director of Publishers Weekly."It is by far the biggest, most ambitious marketing campaign for a presidential memoir that I have ever seen."

When most presidents leave office, there is a sense that Americans know the important details about them, and that their stories have largely been told.

But Clinton remains a fascinating character to many people, someone whose persona is evolving. And there is an expectation that his book will reveal key details about his life.

At the NYU event, for example, he regaled the crowd with tidbits about his battle with Whitewater prosecutor Kenneth W. Starr and others he considered political enemies.

As a presidential author, some observers say, Clinton is in a category by himself -- with more public interest in his celebrity than his governing.

"Do you really think readers will be spending money to get his 50-page take on the Middle East?" asked one publishing executive who has had experience with presidential memoirs."They're going to turn immediately to the stuff on [White House intern] Monica Lewinsky...."

Brian Whitaker, in the Guardian (June 16, 2004):

The undecided fate of Saddam Hussein's surviving monuments in Iraq sparked controversy last night at a public forum in the British Museum as debate focused on whether to demolish them or preserve them as a reminder of his rule.

"What counts is to have a fresh start," said Ghaith Abdul Ahad, a 28-year-old Iraqi architect-turned-journalist. "These monuments are just symbols of oppression."

However, Kanan Makiya, the author of The Monument, a book about Saddam's use of historical images to legitimise his regime, said the monuments should be kept to provide "thoughtful reflection".

Mr Makiya, who spent 35 years in exile, is founder of the Iraq Memory Foundation, which seeks to document the atrocities of Ba'athist rule and turn the area around Baghdad's Hands of Victory arches into a place for "education on life under tyranny".

The 140-ft twin arches are shaped like crossed swords and held by fists modelled on Saddam's own hands. Some of the metal came from the guns of Iraqi soldiers killed during the bloody eight-year conflict with Iran, and the ground below is scattered with the helmets of dead Iranian troops.

Mr Abdul Ahad said the idea of preserving the structures reminded him of foreigners coming back from Iraq with Saddam Hussein watches. "Why don't you get a couple of bones from a mass grave?" he told the audience at the event which was jointly organised by the Guardian and the museum.

He was less concerned about Babylon, which Saddam rebuilt using bricks inscribed with his name alongside those bearing the name of the Babylonian king Nebuchadnezzar.

"Nebuchadnezzar was a tyrant and Saddam was a tyrant. Together, they spanned "a continuous line of despotism," Mr Abdul Ahad said.

The British Museum's director, Neil MacGregor, noted that one of the first acts of new regimes is to obliterate the face of the previous ruler from monuments. He added: "The Iraqis need to decide what should happen to them."

John S.D. Eisenhower, in the International Herald Tribune (June 6, 2004):

The 60th anniversary of the Allied landings in Normandy, on the day known in common parlance as D-Day, was once again an occasion to pause and contemplate its significance. Like all Americans, I am proud of the achievements of my fellow soldiers but aware of the ordeal they underwent. To this day, I view those men with respect bordering on awe.

To me, as the son of Dwight D. Eisenhower, the general who commanded that invasion, it carries an added dimension. I find it difficult to believe, even after all these years, that my own father was such a historic figure. Sixty years of repetitive observances of D-Day have not dimmed my wonder....

I am asked time and again, "What would your father think if he were alive today?"

At this point, I must emphasize that I cannot with any confidence give an opinion regarding what my father would make of today's scene. He was unpredictable when examining any new problem because he always viewed it in its entirety, totally free of thumb rules and largely independent of tradition. More obviously, the world has changed drastically during the 43 years since my father left the presidency in 1961....

The most fundamental conviction that the period of Ike's command in Europe and the Mediterranean imprinted on his mind was the cruelty, wastefulness and stupidity of war. He saw at firsthand how war destroyed cities, killed innocent people (in which I include most of the participating soldiers), wiped out national economies and tore up the structure of civilizations. Its wastefulness cut him to the bone, and its specter never left him. As a result, as president he kept the military budget as small as was consistent with the safety of the nation. He expressed his convictions eloquently in April 1953, about three months after his inauguration as the 34th president of the United States:

"Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired signifies, in the final sense, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and are not clothed….

"The cost of one modern heavy bomber is this: a modern brick school in more than 30 cities.

"It is two electric power plants, each serving a town of 60,000 population.

"It is two fine, fully equipped hospitals….

"We pay for a single fighter plane with a half million bushels of wheat. We pay for a single destroyer with new homes that could have housed 8,000 people."

Not surprisingly, the war that included D-Day had made a pacifist of the man who bore the responsibility, its supreme commander.

As I consider the effect that D-Day and the war in Europe had on my father, I am struck by the degree to which it convinced him of the value of allies.

With his detestation of war as a means of settling international disputes, Ike applauded the formation of the United Nations in 1945, even though he had no hand in its formation. Leaving the army in 1948 for private life, he was recalled to active duty in early 1951 to organize the military forces of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization when the military threat from the east seemed to become imminent. In his stay in Paris, Ike developed a strong belief in NATO that he never lost.

It so happens that I was witness to one example of Ike's concern for the opinions and attitudes of his allies during his presidency. In September 1959, Premier Nikita Khrushchev of the Soviet Union served up an ultimatum to the Western allies to get out of West Berlin or else. Ike chose to negotiate while rejecting the ultimatum. In the course of the ensuing talks, a mix-up in signals in the State Department resulted in an unintended invitation for Khrushchev to visit the United States alone, not in the company of all the nations involved in the current crisis.

That unilateral invitation may or may not have turned out to be a good thing, but the incident illustrated Ike's concern that his allies - now Britain, France and the newly emerging West Germany - be assured that he had no intention of representing their interests in his forthcoming conferences with Khrushchev. So Ike took some of his personal staff and boarded a new Boeing 707 on its maiden voyage as Air Force One to visit Konrad Adenauer in Bonn, Harold Macmillan in Britain and de Gaulle in Paris. With all of them he conducted frank talks, and Ike's allies were reassured. He would have it no other way....

Ike totally disapproved of "preventive war," and that conviction was put to the test early in his presidency. Some time in the early 1950s the Soviet development of the hydrogen bomb and the means to deliver it caused many Americans, some of Ike's advisers among them, to advocate launching a preemptive strike against the Soviet Union while the United States still enjoyed a preponderance of atomic power and the means of delivering atomic weapons. It would be preferable, these people argued, to remove the Soviet weapons of mass destruction. No legal or moral justification was required. A few million Americans would be killed, of course, but a far fewer number than if we waited and allowed the "Evil Empire" (not Ike's term) to strike first.

Ike would have none of it. Throughout his presidency he combined a policy of maintaining a military deterrent to war while at the same time extending the hand of friendship. The uneasy peace between the United States and the Soviet Union - the cold war - continued for nearly 50 years. It was expensive and it was dangerous, but civilization survived....

Many of Ike's policies were different from those we see being followed today. But he was the first to admit that situations change, and the policies followed in one generation might be used as guides to future action but never rules. How he would view today's world scene, I repeat that I do not know.

But I wonder.

Elisabeth Bumiller, in the NYT (June 14, 2004):

...This past weekend, the White House Web site prominently featured a collection of Reagan remembrances and a photo essay of Mr. Bush at the funeral for the former president. The Bush campaign Web site went one better, offering a video of Mr. Reagan uttering his most famous lines -"These are the boys of Pointe du Hoc" - interspersed with Mr. Bush's own words -"He had the confidence that comes with conviction, the strength that comes with character."

It was difficult to tell where the 40th president ended and the 43rd began, a blurring further promoted by Ken Mehlman, the president's campaign manager, who told an Iowa Republican Party convention on Saturday that Mr. Reagan's spirit lived on."Every time an American soldier, sailor, airman or marine risks his or her life to ensure our security and peace, Ronald Reagan will be there," Mr. Mehlman said.

Of course, Mr. Bush's effort to wrap himself in the Reagan legacy drew plenty of skeptics, including a number of top Reagan officials, who said, all anonymously, that the presidencies could not have been more different. Mr. Reagan was pragmatic, they said, but Mr. Bush is ideological. Mr. Reagan was a unifier, they argued, while Mr. Bush has polarized.

"Bush wants to defeat his opponents, Reagan wanted his to join him," one former official of the Reagan White House said.

Leaving aside what many historians call a nostalgic rewriting of the Reagan era - plenty of Democrats despised and derided Ronald Reagan in a highly partisan time -there are still striking and significant contrasts in the politics, artifice and style of the two presidencies.

The first that leaps out is Mr. Reagan's ease with the camera and the way it captured his personality and seemed to enhance who he was. Americans felt they knew Mr. Reagan, who was little different off television than on.

"He had so much experience - he knew the expressions, the posture, the lighting, the angles," said Michael Evans, Mr. Reagan's White House photographer, who recalled that Mr. Reagan, so used to Hollywood sets, had no problems letting him into the Oval Office on historic occasions to shoot through the day.

"I'd say hello in the morning, and then he'd just totally ignore me," Mr. Evans said.

Mr. Bush, in contrast, is stiffer and often more tongue-tied on television than in person. He finds the camera so distracting that his staff quickly shoos photographers away."He just likes to get it over with," said David Hume Kennerly, who has photographed every president since he was Gerald R. Ford's White House photographer."If he had his choice, he wouldn't do it."

The second difference is in the business of politics. Mr. Bush, who is his own de facto campaign manager, loves the combat and gossip. His advisers say he knows his exact standing in recent polls, the names of his chairmen in the battleground states and probably the names of important county chairmen.

Mr. Reagan, in contrast, did not."Are you kidding me?" said Kenneth M. Duberstein, who was Mr. Reagan's last White House chief of staff."He didn't want to hear about the political ups and downs." Mr. Reagan's detachment meant that his operatives handled the dirty work, while Mr. Bush's immersion has helped drive one of the most politically aggressive White Houses in decades....

John Tierney, in the NYT (June 13, 2004):

If you've been following the election coverage, you know how angry you're supposed to be. This has been called the Armageddon election in the 50-50 nation, a civil war between the Blue and the Red states, a clash between churchgoers and secularists hopelessly separated by a values chasm and a culture gap.

But do Americans really despise the beliefs of half of their fellow citizens? Have Americans really changed so much since the day when a candidate with Ronald Reagan's soothing message could carry 49 of 50 states?

To some scholars, the answer is no. They say that our basic differences have actually been shrinking over the past two decades, and that the polarized nation is largely a myth created by people inside the Beltway talking to each another or, more precisely, shouting at each other.

These academics say it's not the voters but the political elite of both parties who have become more narrow-minded and polarized. As Norma Desmond might put it: We're still big. It's the parties that got smaller.

Just because a state votes red or blue in a presidential election doesn't mean that its voters are fixed permanently on one side of a political divide or culture gap. The six bluest states in 2000, the ones where George W. Bush fared worst - Rhode Island, Massachusetts, New York, Hawaii, Connecticut and Maryland - all have Republican governors. Even California went red last year when Arnold Schwarzenegger, a moderate Republican, became governor.

Most voters are still centrists willing to consider a candidate from either party, but they rarely get the chance: It's become difficult for a centrist to be nominated for president or to Congress or the state legislature, said Morris P. Fiorina, a political scientist at Stanford and senior fellow at the Hoover Institution.

"If the two presidential candidates this year were John McCain and Joe Lieberman, you'd see a lot more crossover and less polarization," said Professor Fiorina, mentioning the moderate Republican and Democratic senators. He is the co-author, along with Samuel J. Abrams of Harvard and Jeremy C. Pope of Stanford, of the forthcoming book, "Culture War? The Myth of a Polarized America."

"The bulk of the American citizenry is somewhat in the position of the unfortunate citizens of some third-world countries who try to stay out of the cross-fire while Maoist guerrillas and right-wing death squads shoot at each other," the book concludes. "Reports of a culture war are mostly wishful thinking and useful fund-raising strategies on the part of culture-war guerrillas, abetted by a media driven by the need to make the dull and everyday appear exciting and unprecedented."

The book presents evidence that voters in red and blue America are not far apart. Majorities in both places support stricter gun control as well as the death penalty; they strongly oppose giving blacks preference in hiring while also wanting the government to guarantee that blacks are treated fairly by employers. They're against outlawing abortion completely or allowing it under any circumstances, and their opinions on abortion have been fairly stable for three decades. Virtually identical majorities of Blues and Reds don't want a single party controlling the White House and Congress.

Further evidence of a truce comes from Paul DiMaggio, a sociologist at Princeton, and colleagues who have studied attitudes toward a wide range of issues like race, crime, the role of women and the welfare state. They looked at various demographic divisions - by race, age, sex, education, religious denomination, region - and found that gaps among groups have been constant or shrinking for the past three decades....

Why, if the public is tolerant, would the political elites be so angry? One reason given by Professor Fiorina is the decline of party bosses, who promoted centrist candidates because their patronage systems depended on winning elections, and the corresponding rise of special-interest groups, who are more concerned with candidates' ideology.

Philip Taubman, in the NYT (June 6, 2004):

It seems an immutable law of Washington: directors of central intelligence are better remembered for their failures than their successes. George J. Tenet joined the roll last week. Historians may someday credit him for rebuilding the marquee spy service at a dangerous hour in the nation's history, but for now his critics will consign him to the company of men like Allen W. Dulles, who was fired by President Kennedy after the disastrous 1961 Bay of Pigs invasion of Cuba, and William J. Casey, who died in office as the Iran-contra scandal engulfed the Reagan administration.

As he packs up his papers, Mr. Tenet is facing the sort of treatment Dulles was accorded after the Bay of Pigs debacle. Upon learning of the failed invasion, Dean Acheson, Harry Truman's secretary of state, acidly observed to his old boss,"Why we ever engaged in this asinine Cuban adventure, I cannot imagine.''

As Mr. Tenet bid a sad farewell to his colleagues at the Central Intelligence Agency last week, it was hard to recall the last time a Washington spy master stepped down in triumph - or, for that matter, the last time the nation celebrated the achievements of the C.I.A. The closest thing to a rousing success in recent years was the agency's clandestine role in the 1980's in evicting Soviet forces from Afghanistan - though that operation inadvertently laid the groundwork for the rise of Osama bin Laden - and the capture or killing of top Al Qaeda leaders since Sept. 11, 2001.

In recent decades, the most notable distinction of directors of central intelligence has been their limited tenure. Until Mr. Tenet's seven-year run, the turnover rate was dizzying. There were 10 directors from 1973 to 1997, when Mr. Tenet was appointed.

The casualty rate, and the C.I.A.'s reputation, were not always so dismal. Though the agency has courted trouble almost from the day it was born in 1947, there was a halcyon era: the 1950's.

It was a time of expanding ambitions for the C.I.A., when its founding generation - many from Yale, Princeton and other elite universities - came to Washington to serve secretly on the front lines of the cold war. Raw practices that the agency would later come to rue, including assassination plots and expedient alliances with repressive foreign security services, first appeared in the 1950's, but the small circle of people who knew about them ardently believed that the hard-boiled methods were justified by the need to contain the Soviet threat.

Before his unhappy departure in 1961, Dulles spent most of his nearly nine years as director building a first-class intelligence agency, a pioneer in espionage science and technology. At the direction of President Dwight D. Eisenhower, he reluctantly took the lead in developing exotic hardware that revolutionized the spy business, including highflying spy planes and satellites. Eisenhower's decision to turn the projects over to the C.I.A. instead of the Air Force - he thought the agency was more nimble and better at keeping secrets - gave it an important new role that produced some prized accomplishments, including the first photo reconnaissance satellite in 1960.

The C.I.A. prospered, in part, because Dulles operated in a freewheeling environment that most of his successors would have envied. Congressional intervention was almost nonexistent. Only a handful of House and Senate leaders were kept informed, and even those limited consultations were treated like chummy conversations at a well-heeled men's club.

The Washington press corps was much smaller and less aggressive than it is today. There were no embarrassing headlines about the agency's serial failures to get its first spy satellite into operation, for example, because reporters didn't know that the rockets blowing up on a launch pad in California were part of a secret project.

Even the most audacious covert operations - the installation of a pro-American leader in Iran in 1953 and a coup in Guatemala a year later - largely escaped public scrutiny and only enhanced the reputation of the C.I.A. in the classified corridors of Washington.

The turning point was the Bay of Pigs invasion, an improbable scheme cooked up in the final months of the Eisenhower administration that presumed that a small force of Cuban exiles trained by the C.I.A. would ignite an uprising against Fidel Castro, the Cuban leader. The failed attempt, just weeks after John F. Kennedy's inauguration, taught the new president and the nation about the dangers and embarrassments of misconceived covert operations. It has been mostly downhill ever since for the C.I.A., at least in terms of public esteem....

Jeffrey Bell, in the Weekly Standard (May 24, 2004):

FOR GEORGE W. BUSH, it would be bizarre if the most loyal and gifted member of his cabinet were to be the instrument of his defeat in November 2004. Recent developments on the Iraq front of the war on terror make such thoughts about Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld harder and harder to put aside.

No, it isn't about the prison scandal. Bad as this is, a successful execution of the president's Iraq strategy will in the end render Abu Ghraib an ugly sideshow.

The danger to the Bush presidency lies in the decision to pull the Marines back from attacking Sunni terrorists in Falluja, and the growing probability that similar avoidance of U.S. military risk is being adopted in other parts of Iraq. This sends the worst conceivable signal to Iraqi advocates of democracy and would-be political leaders....

A clue to what may be going on is Rumsfeld's recent, and rare, confession of unpleasant surprise at the number of U.S. casualties taking place a full year after the fall of Baghdad. Rumsfeld was an elective politician in the 1960s. His first stint as defense secretary began nearly three decades ago, just a few months after the North Vietnamese conquest of South Vietnam. It is a commonplace that the Vietnam experience turned many American hawks into doves or isolationists. Less well understood is what it did to those American hawks who never stopped being hawkish.

Hawks who wanted the United States to be able to act militarily after Vietnam created the movement called military reform. They fought successfully to end the draft. Their version of a modernized military emphasized technology, speed, and surprise, often involving airpower, rather than frontal infantry assaults. Again and again, they were proven right, never more so than in Rumsfeld's dazzling war plans for Afghanistan and Iraq.

What these hawks' military success obscured is a political analysis that is deeply flawed. Their premise, often unstated, is that U.S. public opinion turned against involvement in Vietnam because of persistently high U.S. casualties. But the truth is that public support for the war held up long after casualties became high (far higher, of course, than those we're seeing now). It began to falter when political elites faltered in their will to prevail, culminating in the visible demoralization of Lyndon Johnson and his administration in the wake of the Tet offensive of early 1968.

It is often recalled, as an oddity, that the breakthrough Eugene McCarthy vote in New Hampshire in March 1968 consisted more of hawks than doves. But that McCarthy vote was no oddity. The turn against the Johnson-Humphrey war strategy, and the ultimate passing of presidential dominance to the GOP, was not due to the doves, most of whom wound up voting for Humphrey in November 1968. The center of gravity of American politics shifted because of Vietnam hawks voting their frustration at the loss of a simple, understandable mission....

Arianna Huffington, column (June 2, 2004):

As our anger, anguish and anxiety about Iraq continue to mount, I find myself looking for clarity and understanding not in the media's daily play-by-play, which confuses more than it illuminates (Did we win in Fallujah or get our butts kicked?), but rather in Shakespeare's "Henry V."
I've found it contains far more truth about our present situation than anything coming out of the White House or the Pentagon.

The impetus for this rearward search for insight was an invitation to take part in a debate sponsored by The Shakespeare Theatre in Washington, D.C., about the wisdom of King Henry V's decision to lead an English army into France in 1415.

The parallels between Shakespeare's wartime king and our current president, George II, are many and delicious — from the pair's hard-partying younger days (Prince Hal was a 15th-century feckless frat
boy-prankster) to the challenge of following in a powerful father's footsteps right up to the critical matter of whether their wartime adventures made them courageous commanders or failed leaders.

The central question, then as now, was whether the invasion of another country was a war of choice or a war of necessity. If the answer is a war of choice — and it is for both Henry and W — then the inevitable conclusion is that they were both immoral wars. For there can be no moral war of choice.

As Shakespeare has a commoner tell a disguised Henry on the night before the decisive battle at Agincourt: "If the cause be not good, the King himself hath a heavy reckoning to make, when all those legs, and arms, and heads, chopped off in a battle, shall join together at the latter day and cry all, 'We died at such a place.'"...

Contemplating the invasion of France, Henry V says, "France being ours, we'll bend it to our awe/Or break it all to pieces." Iraq gave us shock and awe, and Powell's Pottery Barn rule: "You break it, you own it." We did — and now we do. And we'll be paying it off for years and years and years.

In Henry V's time, history was much slower to cast its verdict. It took 30 years for England to lose control of France and dissolve into civil war.
In the end, Henry “lost France and made his England bleed.”

The verdict on Iraq is already in: George II has lost the war, emboldened our enemies and made America bleed.