Take the name: Even after she married, she insisted on Hillary Rodham. Then, at a low point in her husband’s political career, she became Mrs. Bill Clinton. Once he was president, she asked to be called Hillary Rodham Clinton. Now that she’s the candidate, she’s Hillary Clinton.
There’s something slippery about the first lady. Five hard-cover books published in the last year have tried to pin her down. Here are just some of her inconsistencies, as laid out by the authors:
She’s a feminist, yet her power comes from a man, and her response to her husband’s infidelities is always a misogynistic attack on the victim.
She’s potently ambitious — most likely to succeed in high school, graduation speaker in college — yet she waited until she was in her 50s to strike out on her own.
She’s a spiritual woman, but she has been involved in every White House scandal, built her nest egg through a shady commodities investment and was the administration’s go-to person when it was time to play hardball.
She’s a Midwesterner with an occasional Southern drawl who soon may develop a New York accent.
As first lady, she is both revered and reviled. Among her many firsts are: first to head a major program (health care); first to run for the Senate; first to be subpoenaed; and first to almost face criminal indictment.
Some of the questions still asked about her: Why would a woman with any self-respect marry a man who was cheating on her–and why would she stay married to him when he continued to stray? When she said her husband was innocent in the Monica Lewinsky affair–the target of a “vast right wing conspiracy”–was she lying to us? Or to herself?
She’s brilliant, but is she as smart as she thinks she is? And are we as stupid? Did she think we’d fall for the dancing-on-the-beach photo op or the A+ on David Letterman’s pop quiz?
And, most basic, who is she? Here are some answers we’ve drawn from the latest batch of books about her:
Christopher Andersen is famous for titillating details, and he doesn’t disappoint in “Bill and Hillary” (William Morrow and Company Inc., September 1999).
Among the many he notes are: Hillary never shaved her legs or used deodorant when she and Bill were dating and she had body odor. When asked by a campaign worker if she was gay, she said, “It’s nobody’s [expletive] business.” In the late 1980s, she demanded that Bill take an AIDS test. When she heard the tape of Clinton saying, “Good bye, baby,” to Gennifer Flowers, she flinched “as if she had been struck in the face.”
Hillary has thrown various objects at the president, and when he told her about Monica, she slapped him and said, “You stupid, stupid, stupid bastard.”
“Still the crucial questions remain,” writes Andersen. “Do Bill and Hillary love each other, or has it always been a calculated arrangement based on power? Yes and yes. . . . Bill is in awe of Hillary’s intelligence, grit and unwavering loyalty. To her he represents not only an avenue to power–and by extension a means of accomplishing great things–but above all else, a figure of historical importance. Hillary’s fatal flaw is Bill, and Bill’s fatal flaw is–and likely always will be–himself.”
Gail Sheehy, known for getting under the skin of her subjects, says everything Hillary does stems from a decision she made many years ago: “Not to know what she knew.” That is “Hillary’s Choice” (Random House, November 1999).
At some level she knew everything, but she “kept building walls, blocking off the doubts beneath her carefully controlled life strategy. . . . The dark side of her husband’s soul was not a territory she cared to explore any more closely than was absolutely necessary for their political survival.”
As a young woman, writes Sheehy, Hillary had an “exaggerated sense of responsibility for others less fortunate, but she really didn’t like people all that much.” Friends call her “aloof,” “hard to know” and “tough as nails.” When she first met Clinton, she “sensed something childlike and needy” about him that appealed to her “mature den mother persona.” When, while dating Clinton, she found out he was cheating on her, she blamed those around him for not keeping the women away. “She never turns her fury on Bill,” according to Sheehy.
Sheehy says Clinton actually fell in love with one of his mistresses. In the late 1980s, he would phone Marilyn Jo Jenkins up to 18 times a day. They had a rendezvous the morning he left for his first inauguration. Yet Hillary stayed with him. Why? Sheehy says she’s addicted to him.
“He is her only rebellion, the one thing she can’t logically explain.”
In “Hell to Pay” (Regnery Publishing Inc., November 1999), Barbara Olson, a rabid conservative who frequently spars with Geraldo and John McLaughlin, calls Hillary “angry, bitter, obsessive, and even dangerous.” Olson says Hillary was a rabble-rousing radical in the ’60s with ties to the Black Panthers and the Communist Party and has “a lifetime record of support for the Palestine Liberation Organization.”
Hillary is motivated by “a lifelong ambition,” says Olson, “to make the world accept the ideas she embraced in the sanctuaries of the liberation theology, radical feminism, and the hard left . . . a politician who . . . learned to mask her true feelings and intentions. She became a master manipulator of the press, the public, her staff, and–likely–even the president.”
“The First Partner” (William Morrow and Co. Inc., May 1999) is Joyce Milton’s second book about Hillary Clinton. The first is for children, a flattering biography; this one is decidedly less so. Milton says Hillary’s mother taught her to keep her emotions in check and that her father was never satisfied with her. When Hillary brought home a straight-A report card, he said she must go to “a pretty easy school.” “She did everything he asked, and he would respond by raising the bar a few inches higher.” Hillary reacted by expecting much of herself.
“No one can doubt that Hillary Clinton is a very hard worker who strives to do good, consistent with her own ambitions,” writes Milton. “But she had also been a victim of that great delusion of the 1960s–namely that it’s possible to continually reinvent oneself, rewriting the rules to suit whatever role one happens to be playing at the moment.”
Peggy Noonan, a New York Republican, sees Hillary’s Senate run as an act of “Boomer selfishness and narcissism . . . a thing of utter and breathtaking gall.” Still, the first lady may be elected, she writes in “The Case Against Hillary Clinton” (ReganBooks, HarperCollins Publishers, April 2000), because women see aspects of themselves in her.
“There’s something for almost everyone. Women who have been abused and humiliated by a man . . . see her as a fellow survivor. . . . Feminists see her as a woman operating in the world against the odds.” Noonan sees her as a brown-noser who used to snitch on the girls smoking in the lavatory.
Noonan’s most outrageous charge is that Hillary “appears to be disturbed.” “Multifaceted, but only in the sense that Sybil, or Eve in `The Three Faces of Eve’ were multifaceted.” There’s Take-Charge Hillary wowing Congress, Sobbing Hillary complaining to her staff about how alone she is, Hard Hillary hiring private eyes to spy on her husband, Victim Hillary leaking her troubles, Traditional Hillary encouraging children to read, Hollywood Hillary glamming it up in gowns and jewels, Yankees Fan Hillary, Jewish Hillary . . .
Perhaps the reason biographers have such a hard time understanding Hillary Clinton is because there are so many of her.
