President Bill Clinton

On a humid August night in 1963, a teenage boy from Hope, Arkansas, stood in the East Room of the White House and shook hands with the President of the United States. John F. Kennedy looked thinner and more fragile than he did on television, but to the seventeen-year-old Bill Clinton he seemed like the living embodiment of possibility—youth, ambition, public service bound together in a single image. The moment lasted only a few seconds. A photograph captured the handshake; history later attached great significance to it. For Clinton himself, it lodged in his mind as a kind of private vow: somehow, someday, he too would stand at the center of American politics.

Bill Clinton’s road from that handshake to the presidency is one of the most improbable and intensely American stories of the late twentieth century. It i ...