PBS’ ‘Clinton’ documentary examines his legacy

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US President Barack Obama (R) shares a smiles with former president Bill Clinton after speaking at the Clinton Global Initiative on the sidelines of the UN General Assembely in New York on September 22, 2009. AFP PHOTO/Jewel SAMAD (Photo credit should read JEWEL SAMAD/AFP/Getty Images)

Updated: March 19, 2012 8:03AM

PASADENA, Calif. — “American Experience” executive producer Mark Samels pondered the question: When does history begin? At what point does it make sense for the respected PBS documentary program to profile a past U.S. president?

For a new film on President Bill Clinton, Samels said, “It felt like it had some perspective,” he said. “I feel like the distance we have now from the Clinton presidency — 12 years — is enough time to make an assessment. Someone like Clinton, I think, is going to have a wild ride through the rankings of American presidents as time goes by.”

“Clinton” (8 p.m. Monday and 7 p.m. Tuesday on WTTW-Channel 11), does not shy away from the Monica Lewinsky scandal, beginning its first part with his Rose Garden apology before flashing back in time. Colleagues, politicos and authors then weigh in on the Clinton presidency.

Filmmaker Barak Goodman, who wrote, produced and directed “Clinton,” said that he saw history repeating. He points out similarities in the first two years of the administrations of Bill Clinton and Barack Obama. The film expounds on the similarities and differences in their personalities.

“I think he went into politics to do good, but he came out of a dysfunctional family,” he said of Clinton. “Unlike Barack Obama, what Bill Clinton did was just plow forward all the way through his whole life, just getting past it. He learned how to survive because of that.

“So he got to the White House, and he carried his problems with him there, but they also allowed him to overcome those problems. He was an incredible survivor. When the Republicans went after him in 1994, he ate them alive because of all those skills he developed, whereas Barack Obama, coming out of dysfunction, resolved that. He spent nine years of his life dealing with his own sort of biracial, bicultural, all of that — living with not having a father, not living with his mother that often. He worked that all out, got to the White House an integrated person.

“He’s an ultra-rational man in an irrational society. So Clinton and Obama come from the exact same places and deal with them differently, and it carried, in both places, into the White House.”

Scripps Howard
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