The Humanity of Hillary

Monday, Jun. 16, 2003 By JOE KLEIN

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It is probably no accident that reality TV came into vogue just as Bill and Hillary Clinton were leaving the White House: something had to fill the void. The Clintons anticipated Survivor. Each week they faced daunting challenges and terrible embarrassments, and everyone waited to see if they would be kicked off the island. In the end, they survived--tarnished but still together, quasi-triumphant, even. There was a Homeric quality to all this; the Clinton saga seemed more fantastic than real, the mischievous work of some puckish minor deity. (Cyclops and the Sirens had nothing on Gingrich and Lewinsky.) Bill Clinton was, and remains, a phenomenon of divine--or demonic--exaggeration, a compendium of astonishing strengths, flaws and appetites. But we are talking about Hillary here, and she is far more difficult to explain.

As First Lady, she was a confusing and an uncomfortable public presence--a feminist who came to prominence as a wife, a professional woman laboring under the burden of a dainty, antiquated official title. She was independent, tough minded and yet allowed herself to endure one of the most spectacular spousal humiliations in history. The Hillary enigmas are only semiunraveled in this memoir, but one thing we do learn is that she was as confused and discomforted as we were. She suggests that her ever changing hairstyles, which are a running gag in this book, were a metaphor for her inability to figure out who she was supposed to be and what she was supposed to be doing. (It is no accident that now Senator Clinton--duly elected and with a well-defined role to play--has not changed her hairstyle at all.)

Hillary Clinton's palpable humanity is the pleasant surprise of Living History. Unlike her husband, she is not larger than life. She is a recognizable, somewhat overmatched human being in an utterly ridiculous situation. She is paralyzed and discombobulated by events; she gets angry; she cries; she admits to being brittle. "We were both in the eye of the storm," she writes, "but I seemed to be buffeted by every gust of wind, while Bill just sailed along."