Book excerpt: Until his recent death in federal prison, Jim McDougal was the irrepressible ghost of the Clintons' Arkansas past. As Bill Clinton's political and business mentor, McDougal - with his knowledge of embarrassing real estate and banking deals, bribes, and obstructions of justice - has long haunted the White House. Jim McDougal's vivid self-portrait, completed only days before his death and coauthored by veteran journalist Curtis Wilkie, takes on the rich particularity of character and plot to reveal the hidden intersections of politics and special interests in Arkansas and the betrayals that followed. It is the story of how ambitious men and women climbed out of rural obscurity and "how friendships break down and lives are ruined."