A Tale Of Two Bills

By ADAM COHEN

When Bill Clinton and Bill Gates played golf on Martha's Vineyard a few years ago, they didn't click. The President gave Gates a heavy dose of the Clinton Treatment, oozing charm and seeking emotional common ground in the fact that both had recently lost their mothers. Clinton must have been disappointed by the cool response of Gates, who saw the subject as unduly personal. Gates, for his part, was put off that Clinton didn't engage him on his favorite topic, technology. When the golfing ended, the two men went their separate ways. Gates didn't take sides in the Clinton-Dole election a couple of years later. Clinton let his Justice Department pursue a potentially devastating antitrust lawsuit against Microsoft.

It's not hard to see why these two larger-than-life figures--one the world's most powerful man, one the richest--didn't become fast friends. The two Bills are as different as the two ends of the baby-boom generation they represent. Clinton, who entered college in 1964, is dripping with Sixties values: a John F. Kennedy-style belief in public service as a calling; an Age-of-Aquarius focus on emotional connection; and a countercultural streak of sex, drugs, and rock 'n' roll. Gates, who came of age in the 1970s, has a Watergate-era detachment from politics, a mind-set more "me-generation" than "love-in," and a passion for the great revolutionary force of his own decade: the personal computer.

But Clinton and Gates are remarkably alike in other ways, particularly in their flaws. Both have almost limitless drive and self-absorption, and a willingness to push the rules to the edge--or past it--to get what they want. When called to account, both have been dismissive of the legal process and have had a strained relationship with the truth. These qualities have landed both men in similar binds: Clinton is waiting to hear if he will be removed from office, Gates is fending off the Justice Department's effort to rein in, or even carve up, Microsoft. Their flaws will take center stage this week, as both men mount defenses in their respective trials.

The two Bills began life worlds apart. Clinton's childhood in small-town, 1940s Arkansas was shaped by a mother who worked as a nurse and played at the racetrack, and an alcoholic stepfather. Gates, by contrast, was born into the Seattle upper crust, his father a lawyer and his mother president of the Junior League. Gates was a skinny prep school kid who spent all his free time in the computer lab--a nerd before the term was invented, a former teacher once said. Clinton, even in his schoolboy days, was the smooth saxophone player who used his music to meet women.

Both men found their callings early. Clinton was elected a senator at Boys Nation at 16. On a Washington field trip that year, he shook hands with President Kennedy--an iconic moment captured in a photo. After Yale Law School and a Rhodes scholarship, Clinton, at 32, became Governor of Arkansas. The single-minded rise to political power is a timeless story, but Clinton's came with the distinctive trappings of his era: the scruffy beard and antiwar protests while at Oxford, the experimentation with pot, the civil rights movement sensibility and the feminist wife who kept her name--at least initially.

Gates was, in his own field, just as much the boy wonder. He started his first computer company, Traf-O-Data, in high school. After dropping out of Harvard to build Microsoft, he hit the big time at 25 when IBM made an epic blunder in letting him retain the rights to the operating system Microsoft developed for IBM's PCs. Gates, who spent most of his waking hours among computers, turned as inward as the glad-handing Clinton turned outward. New acquaintances traded tales of his bad haircuts, dirty glasses and odd rocking motion. His early reluctance to give to charity--which he's recently begun to abandon--added to a perception that he lacked the Clintonian ability to feel others' pain.

During their meteoric ascents, both Bills came to be regarded as unstoppable forces of nature. Clinton turned setbacks--being voted out as Governor at 34, "bimbo eruptions" that threatened to derail his campaigns--into triumphs. Gates crushed his competition, to the point that his dominance of the software field began to seem godlike. (Cyberjoke: How many Microsoft employees does it take to change a lightbulb? A: None. Bill Gates just redefines Darkness as the new industry standard.) In the end both landed at the top of the world. Clinton was elected and re-elected President; Gates' software controls more than 90% of the world's PCs, and his personal fortune tops $73 billion.

But now each man's indomitable drive may have taken him too far. Clinton's passion for connecting with other people drew him into an affair with a White House intern. Gates' need to plant himself at the top of the computer world may have led him to create a monopoly and use it to illegally beat down the competition. What has hurt both Bills most, though, isn't what they did but their similarly flawed responses to the charges against them. Clinton's seemingly false statement in a sworn deposition that he did not have sexual relations with Monica Lewinsky seemed to his critics to show contempt for the judicial process--and it now lies at the heart of his impeachment trial. The government's case against Microsoft has, in much the same way, found its greatest traction not from testimony about Gates' business practices but from excerpts of his own videotaped deposition in which he claimed not to recall key meetings and e-mails sent under his name. In their respective depositions, Gates and Clinton both diminished themselves with evasive, lawyerly responses--Gates claiming confusion about the meaning of the word "ask," Clinton saying his answer depended on the meaning of "is."

Both Bills have been survivors all their lives, and for now that pattern seems to be holding. Clinton's approval ratings have risen since the Lewinsky scandal broke. And Gates' personal wealth has increased over 500% since the antitrust case was filed. After months of being maligned by prosecutors, both men will have a chance this week to put forth their defense. Clinton will deny that he engaged in perjury and obstruction of justice, and argue that the charges against him do not rise to the level of impeachable offenses. Microsoft will contend that it is not a monopoly, that its seemingly dominant position in software could quickly collapse and that hardball business practices are the norm in this highly competitive field.

How will these two epic biographies end? When Gates built his sprawling $60 million mansion, he had a quote from The Great Gatsby inscribed in the library: "He had come a long way to this blue lawn, and his dream must have seemed so close that he could hardly fail to grasp it." It was an odd choice, and the software magnate may have missed its tragic import. In the end of the novel, Jay Gatsby does fail to grasp his dream, and success destroys him. The two Bills are already modern Gatsbys of a sort, having achieved their very different versions of the American Dream. Whether their flaws, like the original Gatsby's, pull them down remains to be seen.