The Humanity of Hillary

(3 of 4)
"Are you out of your mind?" asks her friend Sara Ehrman when Hillary Rodham decides to abandon a promising legal career in Washington and follow young Bill Clinton to Arkansas. "Why on earth would you throw away your future?" It is the central question of her life. Her answer is simple: she loves the guy. I tend to believe her; others will be more cynical. I believe her because of the way she describes her husband's hands and his shimmering intelligence and also because of the way she describes her parents--who are nearly as roughhewn as Bill's notoriously trashy family but far more proper and upwardly mobile. She arrives at Wellesley a country mouse, daunted by her wealthy, sophisticated Eastern classmates--they read the New York Times!--and she almost quits after a month. She attends the 1968 Republican Convention as a Rockefeller volunteer and is astonished by the opulence of the Fontainebleu Hotel; she orders room service, and "I can still see the giant fresh peach that came wrapped in a napkin." In her way, Hillary Rodham--the awkward Midwestern grind, the Methodist too-gooder--is as much of an outsider as Bill Clinton. Her swoon is inevitable, her willful blindness to his flaws almost understandable. Almost.

But how does one explain the arrant ingenuousness that defines her many years with Bill? Mrs. Clinton would have us believe that Monica Lewinsky was the first betrayal. Gennifer Flowers, Paula Jones, the tales the troopers told--all are dismissed as smears floated by political enemies or by grifters looking for money. (By the time the President told her about Monica, he had already admitted in a deposition to having had a sexual relationship with Gennifer Flowers, but Mrs. Clinton doesn't mention that.) One imagines the serial infidelities are too painful, too embarrassing. One imagines she doesn't want to expose Chelsea to the gory details. But there is a skittish, elliptical quality to her descriptions of the nonsexual imbroglios that marked her time in the White House as well.

At one point she mentions in passing that Bill was "weathering controversies over gays in the military and his nominations for Attorney General." His nominations? The First Lady was intimately involved in the selection process, insistent that one of the top four Cabinet officers be a woman. These were, arguably, her nominations as much as his. Her account of the great health-insurance disaster is sketchy to the point of emaciation. She never even describes what her plan was or why she was so unwilling to compromise. It is defeated not on its merits or because of her stubbornness, she says, but because conservative thinker William Kristol convinces the Republicans that passing it would make the Democrats unbeatable in 1994. Al Gore is a nonperson in this book. Her long and bitter rivalry with the Vice President is not mentioned. Sadly, she gives no account of any serious policy fights with her husband. That might have been fun. Her close friend, the late Diane Blair, once told me about an invigorating, substantive screaming match between the Clintons, followed by an embarrassingly passionate reconciliation. There is none of that intimacy here.