POLici: Remember the 1990s? New Clinton, Bush Books Do

Contemporary academic historians tend to underplay the influence of presidents. The new orthodoxy in Civil War history, for example, is that Abraham Lincoln didn’t free the slaves; instead, enslaved people won their own freedom. Popular historians typically overcorrect. When you hear a title like Destiny and Power, for example, who comes to mind? Churchill? Napoleon? Julius Caesar? Joan of Arc? The correct answer, according to Jon Meacham, is George H. W. Bush. With similar overreach, Gil Troy’s new book is called The Age of Clinton: America in the 1990s. Until now, has it ever occurred to anyone to call the '90s a Clinton-formed “age”— as opposed to, say, the Age of Bill Gates or Steve Jobs or Alan Greenspan (or even Oprah)? Has anyone not named Clinton or Troy ever thought that Bill Clinton invented the '90s?

Both of these books are worth reading once you get past the hyped-up titles. Meacham has written a traditional biography that, perhaps because he witnessed Bush’s political career as a journalist and interviewed him multiple times after he left office, is much better than