PBS gets a perspective on Bill Clinton

"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 (Monday and Tuesday night at 9 on WNET/13), Samels looked to the past and a film on Ronald Reagan that aired 10 years after he left office.

"It felt like it had some perspective," he said at a PBS news conference last month. "I feel like the distance we have now from the Clinton presidency -- 12 years -- is enough time to make an assessment. It's not journalism, so it's not a first pass of history.

"It's sort of a mid-pass at history. Someone like Clinton, I think, is going to have a wild ride through the rankings of American presidents as time goes by."

"Clinton" -- written, produced and directed by Barak Goodman -- does not shy away from the Monica Lewinsky scandal, beginning its first part with Clinton's Rose Garden apology before flashing back in time to scenes of George Stephanopoulos -- now a "Good Morning America" anchor -- working on the Clinton campaign.

"With Bill Clinton, you cannot separate the impulses that drive him in reckless directions from the one that drove him to the White House and his idealism," journalist David Maraniss, author of two books on Clinton, said at the news conference.

"I think that he went into politics to do good, but he came out of a dysfunctional family," Maraniss said of Clinton. "And unlike Barack Obama, what Bill Clinton did was just plow forward all the way through his whole life, not really dealing with the holes in his 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. And when the Republicans went after him in 1994, he ate them alive because of all those skills he developed."