The Best of Times: The Boom and Bust Years of America before and after Everything Changed

by Haynes Johnson

We were awash in money and spellbound by celebrity and scandal. It was a time of breathtaking strides in science and unprecedented possibility. A time of squandered opportunities and grave distraction. A time of tragic complacency and belief in our invulnerability.

In The Best of Times , Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Haynes Johnson looks back on the decade that defied anyone's expectations, for better or worse. With a sharp eye for the quote or detail that perfectly captures a moment in time, Johnson tells the whole story, no holds barred, of the roller-coaster, self-indulgent nineties when America paid no attention to gathering foreign storms or looming economic collapse.

The product of four years of interviews with the decade's most influential players, this is in the best tradition of timeless social history--a memorable portrait of the entire wonderful yet woeful decade that ended in the cataclysmic flames of September 11.


A James H. Silberman Book
National Bestseller


Now with a New Foreword, Afterword, and Postscript

In offering this paperback edition of the bubble years, I hope the stories I tell of that newly old America will illuminate how in a few short years we went from the best of times to the worst of times. In my Afterword, I suggest what lessons we must learn from that experience to avoid further disasters and close the circle on some events that typified the period.
--Haynes Johnson
From the new Foreword

Genres: History, Politics, Nonfiction, American History

672 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 2001

About the author

In his four decades in journalism, Mr. Johnson was widely esteemed for his coverage of domestic affairs in general and of the capital in particular.

source

Reviews

[Al · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is a great read. He does a wonderful job of explaining the events and the dynamics of the era. Additionally, from the perspective of 2001 (pre 9-11), he explains what America needs to do in order to make our society more functional and sustainable. We need to reform our political system and to remove special interest money. We need to invest in areas that will keep us at the leading edge of advancement. We need to support policies and to make investments that help build strong, healthy, families and communities. We need to diminish the widening gap between the haves and the have-nots.

He is literally standing in 2001 and screaming at us; PLEASE, LISTEN! From where we stand today, it is obvious that not enough people are listening. The irony is that I think we have a pretty good track record in doing these things. The sad thing is that after the last several decades of me...me....me, I don't think many people remember our history. This book leaves me with a very real warning call, and with a very real sense of sadness. The really upsetting thing is that it doesn't need to be so.

Disclaimer: I voted for Bill. Having said that, I personally see the Clintons as the perfect poster children for the 90's. So full of promise, potential, and intelligence, yet so destructive and corrosive to others. I can't help but think we would all be better off if they just "faded away."

[Annie · Rating 3 out of 5]

At first I didn't like the book--I wasn't ready to read about the American obsession with celebrities. I got through the section on the OJ Simpson trial and breathed a sigh of relief. Then I went through the very long section on Bill Clinton and the Monica affair. It seemed too long, but I found myself fascinated by the details. I had to face the fact that there are some celebrity narratives too juicy for me to put down. I thought it was well written but a little unbalanced. I would rather have shorter chapters on more subjects. All in all, I found the book to be interesting and a little disturbing. I guess we need to spend more time on important things and less time on watching all those celebrities.

[John · Rating 4 out of 5]

I really liked the beginning and end of the book. It was a nice academic review of the Nineties with analysis of what a self-centered, celebrity/scandal fixated decade it was. I lived it but the systematic description really tied things together for me. I didn't as much care for the sell of the Clinton scandal as a mutual love-affair rather than as sexual harassment of a man in power to a young evidently very stupid girl. Not buying it. I would almost skip those chapters and read the rest.

[Drew McCall · Rating 1 out of 5]

Haynes Johnson's poorly argued and over-written book is not history but a long think-piece with more opinion than fact. His language is archaic--he refers to a defense attorney as a "flamboyant black"--and his work as a whole is short-sighted. How can a book published in 2000 assess the 19990s as a whole? The decade wasn't even over when Johnson would have been writing. He criticizes the media for describing the O.J. Simpson trial and the Monica Lewinsky scandal in lurid detail, yet the bulk of his weighty book does just that, with overly-narrated play-by-play of both scandals.

[Jackie · Rating 3 out of 5]

"As my curtain rises, America stands poised to make a great leap into a future that promises to produce the most radical change in all of recorded history. All this raises a question for a new millenium. Is the best--or worst--yet to come?" p 7

Very interesting to read a historical account of the 1990s as an era, as it is the first historical review of a decade that I personally remember.

[Frederick Bingham · Rating 3 out of 5]

This books describes the mood of the country in the 1990's while Clinton was president. It talks about the Microsoft case, the OJ Simpson trial, the Monica Lewinsky scandal, the stock market bubble, and the general cultural mood in the 1990's.The description of the impeachment trial is especially vivid and highlights what a monumental waste the whole thing was.

[Geoffrey Kelley · Rating 5 out of 5]

It is always a challenge to sum up a decade shortly after it ends. Haynes Johnson undertook to examine the Clinton 1990s and published “The Best of Times”, modelled after Frederick Lewis Allen’s classic “Only Yesterday”, a look back at the Roaring Twenties. Johnson’s book was released in 2001, and Allen’s in 1931. In both cases, it is remarkably how the analyses provided have stood the test of time. Johnson has four main themes he develops. First he examines the technological explosion caused by the arrival of the Internet and the dot com boom. He then takes us through the O.J. Simpson trial and the media circus that accompanied it. Then in a very long and detailed section he recounts the Clinton-Lewinsky affair, the excessive role played by the Special Prosecutor Kenneth Starr, and an examination of the complex personality of President Clinton. One of the strongest passages, (highly pertinent today?), is a discussion of the grounds for impeachment and the eloquent testimony that former Senator Dale Bumpers(D-Ark) gave in defence of President Clinton before his former Senate colleagues. His final section attempts to understand the mentality of the millennials with the highly controversial 2000 Bush-Gore election as a backdrop.
Reading the book almost two decades later, Johnson is spot on regarding the tumultuous changes in the media and how we inform ourselves. He correctly identified the increasingly partisan divide long before the Tea Party emerged. And he highlights the challenges that many institutions faced during these “ best of times”. The title, of course, comes from Charles Dickens and The Tale of Two Cities”. Dickens wisely reminded us it was also “ the worst of times”.

[Alex · Rating 2 out of 5]

This was very underwhelming. I expected a history of the 90s, but at the end what I felt was I had just read through a set of scattershot articles sometimes on technology, sometimes on entertainment, sometimes on social issues, but overwhelmingly dominated in coverage by the OJ Simpson and Monica Lewinsky scandals and even those weren’t comprehensive chapters.

It felt like you got more out of them if you were already familiar with the events, and the readers in the early 2000s when this book came out typically would be, but then that eliminates this book from being a work of history. Johnson was just another commentator in a sea of commentators.

Throughout the unrelated articles is the recurring themes that American life, even politics has all become consumed by and ultimately integrated into entertainment. There’s a pessimism underlying the whole book, a liberal pessimism, about increasing materialism and vapid entertainment, deregulation of television stations, a decline in national investment in technology, about common people placing their hopes of getting rich in the internet stock trading. Johnson can at least be commended for not being a talking head and actually writing a book, but it was ultimately not a very good treatment on the 90s.

The book was published right before 9/11, so his reflections, fears, and hopes for the future are all that more dated and awkwardly inadequate.

[Michael · Rating 3 out of 5]

Much better written than O’Neill’s book on the 90s, and there was a lot of analysis that I enjoyed here, but it’s major drawback is the fact that Johnson spends over 200 pages out of 550+ on the Clinton scandals, and l most of that, obviously is about Lewinsky. Clearly this was an important part of Clinton’s presidency, but this book is about America during the Clinton Years, not just Clinton’s presidency. I understand that he would discuss Lewinsky, but the level of granular detail he gets into is off balance for a book that is supposed to be about the 90s in general. At one point he spends six pages discussing how Clinton chose the speechwriter for his closing defense during his impeachment trial. Too much. He could have easily covered the Lewinsky scandal in detail in 50 or so pages and then given time to discussing other culturally important events from the 90s. Other than that, I enjoyed it.

[Sebastian · Rating 4 out of 5]

i needed a book to get me immersed in the culture and politics of the clinton era, and i found this in the clinton era section of an extremely thorough used-book store, presumably printed before the title changed. it wound up being the exact book i had in mind, with a near perfect blend of pure facts and allowing a narrative to form. one thing i love in particular is how haynes lays out the context for each of the key players - it genuinely makes history easier and more fun to learn and absorb.

[Marianne · Rating 4 out of 5]

I was a little disappointed because his book on Reagan was so great. The stuff on Clinton was a 10, but the other stuff brought it down to a 7.

[Andy Miller · Rating 3 out of 5]

This was a history of the 1990s written in 2001, it is written in terms of themes instead of a chronological timeline. Many chapters were dated, especially "the Culture of Success" which detailed the technology boom. While the author, Haynes Johnson, recounts the fast changes and predicts even faster changes in the next 10 years, he clearly did not anticipate the bust in 2008 nor Microsoft's changed, and diminished role in innovation and business success after 2000

There is a chapter on celebrity which focuses on the OJ Simpson trial, reading that sad chapter takes us back to America's obsession with the case while today's perspective shows that our obsession missed the big picture of the case--that while OJ Simpson was certainly guilty, the police rush to arrest as opposed to building a case for conviction, was as responsible for the injustice as much as anything

And the Bill Clinton/Monica Lewinsky scandal. Sigh. It seems even more tawdry now; one new perspective is knowing that Newt Gringich had the gall to run for President in 2012 after we are reminded of his partisanship and sanctimony during the Lewinsky investigation

While there was some good analysis and some interesting reading, I think this book would have been better read at the time it was written or that a good history of that time would be better if written from the perspective of a later time

[John Porter · Rating 2 out of 5]

Lots of fun facts, but it seemed so ... arbitrary. "After Everything changed"? Really? When a book spends a lot of effort trying to tell people how important a time period was, and then spends a lot of time (and I mean, a real whole lot) on Monica Lewinsky and O.J. Simpson, it's hard to know what to say. They're neither important nor tragic. The implication made is that the media caused a seismic shift and drop in our societal value and what we think of as important. But the book is part and parcel to what it attacks. And so serious and full of itself! ”A time of squandered opportunities and grave distraction.  A time of tragic complacency and belief in our invulnerability.” Seriously. Which makes it nothing like the first decade of the twentieth century. Or the post WWI decade. Or the sixties. Or, well, any other time period. Sheesh. One and a half stars.

[Toesnorth's mom]

good