Saturday, July 14, 2007

A compelling review of Hillary Rodham Clinton Bios...

New York Times Book Review: By JENNIFER SENIOR

...But it’s Bernstein who ultimately makes the sharper, more lasting impression, despite the soft-focus portrait of the junior senator from New York on his cover. While he plows some of the same emotional terrain as previous Hillary biographers — notably Gail Sheehy in “Hillary’s Choice” — his book holds together as a piece of writing, and he keeps the psychobabble to a merciful minimum. He also attempts to write a genuine biography, describing and interpreting the life Hillary has led and the varieties of forces that shaped her. ...

“By the time Hillary had reached her teens,” Bernstein writes, “her father seemed defined by his mean edges — he had almost no recognizable enthusiasms or pretense to lightness as he descended into continuous bullying, ill humor, complaint and dejection.” Much has been made of Hillary’s marital stoicism over the years. It’s one of the reasons people distrust her. But it’s possible she comes by it honestly...

[Bernstein's] book suggests that it isn’t his executive-scandal bona fides that make him a qualified Hillary biographer; it’s his bona fides as a lousy husband. Like Bill Clinton, Bernstein carried on a very public affair while married to a formidable, high-profile woman (see Nora Ephron’s “Heartburn” for further details), and one of the perverse strengths of his book is his intuitive understanding — a sinner’s lament, really — of what happens to a proud woman when she’s intimately betrayed and publicly humiliated. The blockbuster news item to come out of Bernstein’s book was that Hillary contemplated running for governor of Arkansas in 1989, when she discovered her husband was thinking about abandoning his post and his family for another woman. (Here, the priceless quotation from the long-suffering Clinton aide Betsey Wright: “Bill, you’re crazy if you think everybody in this office is oblivious to the fact that you’re having an affair. You’re acting like an idiot.”) But the impulse to run for governor didn’t occur to Hillary in a vacuum. It was the clear product of years of pent-up frustrations, thwarted ambitions, sacrifice and injured pride....

Yet Hillary Rodham always knew that tying her fate to Bill Clinton was a risky proposition. It’s what gives her story the whiff of Greek tragedy (and bathos). Certainly she was smitten with him for all the reasons we know — his like-minded political vision, his charisma, his enthusiasm in the face of her own force — but she also knew he had an ungovernable tomcatting problem and a mystical attachment to Arkansas, a backwater for career women. For years, he asked her to marry him, and for years, with tons of job options before her, she wavered....

Considering these charged circumstances of risk, humiliation and sacrifice, one can see how Hillary Clinton would become only more invested in her marriage — and the choices she’d made — rather than less, especially when coupled with the stronger and more difficult aspects of her character, which Bernstein documents in unvarnished detail: perfectionism, toughness, secrecy, oversensitivity, a sanctimony born of intelligence and boomerdom and Methodist do-gooder conviction. Another woman with less at stake both emotionally and intellectually might have left, but she, teeth gnashed and head high, stuck it out. “She doesn’t look at her life as a series of crises but rather a series of battles,” an unnamed former aide tells Bernstein. Bob Boorstin, another former aide, puts it less flatteringly: “I find her to be among the most self-righteous people I’ve ever known in my life.” [So much for Boorstin!]...

The trouble is that Hillary didn’t always know how to wield power gracefully. Her tin-eared staffing decisions led to early mini-scandals like the firings at the White House travel office, and her secretive, uncompromising attitude toward health care contributed heavily to the first upending of the Democratic majority in the House in 40 years. On a retreat with Senate Democrats, she rebuffed Bill Bradley’s request for a more realistic bill, declaring the White House would “demonize” anyone who stood in its way. “That was it for me,” Bradley tells Bernstein, “in terms of Hillary Clinton.” ...

By the book’s end, this seems incontrovertibly true, as does his more damning observation that “with the notable exception of her husband’s libidinous carelessness, the most egregious errors, strategic and tactical, of the Bill Clinton presidency, particularly in its infancy, were traceable to Hillary.”...And in public office, she embodies the very quality she could never show when someone else held the reins: the ability to compromise. In her story lies a parable: Sanctimony and rigidity are the desperate weapons of the minority party. Had she embraced her inner executive from the start, she might never have become her own worst enemy....

Gerth and Van Natta do point out in their introduction that Hillary’s stubborn refusals to admit she might have made a mistake repeatedly get her into trouble. Her world seems a lot like Bushworld in this way, they shrewdly note, right down to the secretive loyal coterie of advisers. But their initial explanation for Hillary’s secrecy and defensiveness — “She feared that admitting a mistake would arm her enemies and undermine her carefully cultivated image as an extremely bright person who yearns only to do good for her fellow citizens” — never evolves into something more nuanced....From these observations, we can’t get a more enlightened sense of what kind of president Hillary might be.

Bernstein’s book gives us a better clue. She may live among loyalists, just like Bush. But you get the sense that she’d be almost the reverse of W. in 2000: polarizing at election time, but consensus-seeking once she got into office. ...


As I started to read this review, I was surprised that the NYT Book Review had not assigned it to a "bigger name." But the review, I think, is terrific: vivid and pointed, much more so than others I have seen, and than tv appearances by the various authors. The portrait of Hillary that emerges (perhaps exaggerated by my selection of excerpts) is more coherent and compelling than I have seen elsewhere. I speak as a metaphoric "spurned lover": my degree of admiration for (and perhaps identification with) Hillary during the 1992 campaign could not have been greater, nor could my initial excitement as she took on the health reform portfolio early in the Clinton Administration. It would be difficult to overstate my disappointment in the results, or in Hillary's performance since.

I also share a not inconsiderable identification with some of her failings.

No comments: