The Humanity of Hillary

By Joe Klein

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."

She does not tell all. The quality of her humanity is glimpsed fleetingly, often by inference. The vivid moments in the book--like the now famous scene when Bill tells her the truth about Monica--are packaged like fragile crystal, surrounded by rhetorical Styrofoam. There are many sentences, sometimes whole paragraphs, that snooze along reflexively: "I wanted to guard the social safety net--health care, education, pensions, wages and jobs--that was in danger of fraying for citizens less able to absorb the changes resulting from the high-tech revolution and a global consumer culture." Living History is, first and last, a political memoir, and the leaden formalities of the genre apply. It is also the memoir of an active--and very ambitious--politician. The Senator is looking to augment her political viability. She reveals that she once went hunting and killed a duck (Chelsea was horrified). She reveals that she met with a bipartisan prayer group (including James Baker's wife Susan). She tosses in lectures about the evils of terrorism and her admiration for the military. Occasionally, she hurls a smoke grenade at Bill's successor: "Despite the occasional serious political differences between the United States and France," she sniffs, "Bill and I maintained a comfortable dialogue with the Chiracs during our years in the White House."

There is very little here that is intellectually or politically adventurous, but that doesn't mean Hillary Clinton isn't a daredevil in her own way. Occasionally she will risk a moment of self-deprecating candor, leavened by dry wit. "I was not the same person who had worn the violet blue gown in 1993," she writes of the second Inauguration. "Nor could I fit into it after four years of White House fare. And I had grown not only older but blonder." When a paparazzo catches her and Bill slow-dancing in their bathing suits on a tropical beach, she admits to being embarrassed by how she looks from the rear. Her sense of femininity is as intense as her feminism; her motherhood and her wonkiness complement and compete against each other. And the interplay of these dancing, dueling factors provides the subtext for the often inexplicable choices she makes.

"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.

She does admit to a disagreement with the President about asking for a special Whitewater prosecutor. She's against (wisely, as it happened). She describes the Whitewater silliness in far greater detail than she does health care, welfare reform or all those other things she cares about. There is real merit to her complaints about the linked and persistent Republican efforts to discredit her husband. But the Clintons were hardly blameless, and her case is damaged by oversimplification and opacity--her insistence on secrecy, her terrible choice of friends and business partners, her profits in the commodities market (another case of creative naivete), her husband's relentless fudging and lawyering of the truth. She doesn't mention the damage caused by his 1992 military-draft controversy, when Bill Clinton misled the press about receiving his induction papers--the first breach of faith in a disastrous relationship with the media. This is such a long book, and there are so few details. She seems in full flight from the anguish of those years.

"I have devoted considerable space in these pages to my foreign travels," she notes in the introduction. This is a staggering understatement. The only overseas problem that is not explored in these pages may be the deforestation caused by the printing of 1 million copies of Living History. Every other issue, especially those affecting poor women and children, is given long shrift. In a way, this is understandable. The overseas trips were Hillary's happiest times as First Lady. Every crowd was adoring; every stop promoted a worthy cause. Even the traveling press was friendly. She often traveled with Chelsea, and they were a joy to watch together. I was on the first of these jaunts, to South Asia, and I think we all left wondering why life couldn't be more like this in Washington. But Washington is too vital to be civil for very long.

And that is why I won't be surprised if she never runs for President. She must be aware that it would be a crazy, ugly campaign. And in the exceedingly unlikely event that she won, her victory would be easily attributable to her husband's genius--and she knows that the first woman President shouldn't be elected like that. No, the Senate seems a most suitable perch for her privacy and humanity. It is collegial and orderly, a place to grow older and blonder still.