Her way : the hopes and ambitions of Hillary Rodham Clinton /

A THOUGHT experiment: What would Hillary Rodham Clinton have been like if she hadn't decided to be a political spouse - or lead a public life? Would she have been the kind of gal who invited other women into her office for a late-night Scotch, regaled them with a dead-on impersonation of the firm's managing partner (though she'd probably be the managing partner) and actually complained about her husband? If you're an admirer, this vision seems entirely plausible. If you aren't, your ideas about the private Hillary are probably a good deal more baroque (sharpened knives, purloined files, etc.). And that's the problem, isn't it? After 16 years on the national stage, Hillary Clinton is still a bafflement - a formidable building that appears, no matter how many times you circle it, to have no door. This impenetrability doubtless accounts for the wide range of feelings she generates (absent knowing what's inside, voters can ascribe motivations both good and evil). And it's this impenetrability that doubtless explains why so many journalists can't stop writing about her, even though she's a biographical subject who appears, at both first and 50th blush, to offer few rewards. In the last month and a half, three extremely well-respected journalists have come out with two books that attempt to divine who the real Hillary might be. One, Carl Bernstein's "Woman in Charge," is plainly sympathetic, while the other, Jeff Gerth and Don Van Natta Jr.'s "Her Way," is more severe. (If there's any doubt as to which is which, just consult the two book covers - Gerth and Van Natta's shows Hillary in, quite literally, a much harsher light.) Both go off the rails at the moments their grand unified theories can't quite accommodate the facts, and both practically narcotize readers when they descend into rote recapitulations of the Clinton scandals. 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. Gerth and Van Natta are more apt to treat the former first lady as a supercomputer - unfeeling and cool to the touch, mutely calculating in binary code. Bernstein opens "A Woman in Charge" by taking a close and ultimately useful look at her father, Hugh Rodham, "a sour, unfulfilled man" who made regular sport of humiliating not only his children but also his wife, Dorothy. Like Hillary, Dorothy Howell waited years to marry her husband, suspecting he was involved with another woman, and like Hillary, she soberly tolerated her husband's excesses, prompting not a few people to wonder why on earth she stuck by him. "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 is best known for his coverage of Watergate with Bob Woodward six administrations ago. But his 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. From the moment Hillary arrived at Yale Law School in 1969, she was a campus celebrity: her graduation speech at Wellesley College had earned her a photograph in Life magazine; she was fielding invitations to speak before the League of Women Voters and to appear on national TV. Everyone assumed she had a bright future in politics. 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. Only after her work on the Nixon impeachment committee ended and she failed the Washington bar exam did Hillary pack up and head down to Fayetteville, where Bill was running for Congress. When she arrived, Bill was carrying on with a student volunteer. After he lost, he threw a "payback chicken dinner" for supporters, and the men retreated to the back of the room to talk politics. When an old law school friend, Nancy Bekavac, tried to join them, Hillary stopped her, instructing her to stay with the women through dessert and coffee. "Bekavac told Hillary she couldn't believe she was in modern America," Bernstein writes. '"This is Australia in 1956,' she said. 'This is like mind Jell-O.'" Roughly a year later, in 1975, Hillary at last decided to marry Bill, but she made it clear she wasn't going to be a typical Southern bride or spouse. She refused an engagement ring and announced she wasn't changing her name; at the wedding of her closest friend, she wore a tux. (Turns out Rudy Giuliani isn't the only 2008 front-runner to have appeared publicly in drag.) But once Bill became governor, Arkansans grew wary of her independence and policy role. Over time, Hillary was forced to attend the quaint ladies' lunches she once avoided; she even changed her name. And all the while, she endured rumors about Clinton's extramarital affairs. (In 1987, Wright compiled a list of potential problem women and concluded there were so many it was impossible for him to run for president: "I was horrified because I thought I knew everybody," she tells Bernstein.) By 1989, when Hillary contemplated running for governor herself, Dick Morris took a poll and discovered she'd reined herself in so completely that most respondents didn't think she had an identity of her own. "It seems wildly tragic that we know she could have been president if she had just not even married him," a Wellesley alumna says. "Her way of moving toward electoral politics was to marry someone who was going to run." 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 dogooder 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." One can also see how these compromised circumstances made Hillary that much more anxious to cling to the only kind of power she had - behind-the-scenes - and how Bill allowed it. Not only did he genuinely rely on her judgment, but he also clearly felt he owed her after years of serial humiliations. (After The American Spectator ran its "Troopergate" article, David Gergen says, "I cannot recall him publicly confronting her on any health care issue.") 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." At the outset of the book, Bernstein says, "The most essential and yet elusive dynamic of the Clinton presidency came to be the relationship between the two of them - the sand in the gears in bad times, the grease that moved the machinery in good ones." 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." Less persuasive is Bernstein's secondary thesis: that over the years, Hillary has demonstrated "extraordinary capability for change and evolutionary development," evinced in everything from her fashion makeovers to her decision to become a senator. (Just as often, Bernstein discusses her rigidity and her tendency to repeat mistakes.) A stronger thesis - one that the facts in Bernstein's book support - is that Hillary found her better self only when she had a sovereign, independent power base from which to operate. As first lady, alone on a trip to China, she gave a speech on women's rights that earned her the most positive press coverage of her tenure; on her solitary trips to Africa and Asia, she similarly dazzled leaders and civilians alike. 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. Jeff Gerth is no stranger to executive-branch scandals either. He covered Whitewater when he was a reporter for The New York Times, and his co-author, Don Van Natta Jr., is an investigative journalist for The Times who did no shortage of Lewinsky reporting himself. These experiences have heavily informed the sensibilities of "Her Way." (Cynics might add that Gerth's wife is a top foreign policy aide to Christopher Dodd, another Democratic presidential hopeful, but Gerth's Whitewater reporting seems far more influential in forming the book's biases.) While Bernstein can barely conceal his skepticism about Whitewater - you call this a scandal? I put the "gate" in -gate! - Gerth and Van Natta describe in detail what this and other Arkansas business deals were made of, including Hillary's brief and lucrative adventure in commodities futures. Based on their lucid reporting, it's clear there was indeed something alternately naïve and inappropriate about these ventures, and that Hillary was less than forthright about her legal work for a savings and loan whose business was regulated by the State of Arkansas. However, they also flatly declare that "Hillary was unaware" - not claimed to be unaware, but actually was - of Jim McDougal's unlawful Whitewater transactions and the ways her brokerage firm played fast and loose with the rules. They also say, "Her likely indiscretions were altogether modest." If that's the case, these matters hardly deserved the reams of coverage they got at the time, and Bernstein is right to make the determination that they certainly don't deserve to be revisited now. 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. On Page 8, she doesn't admit to her mistake in voting for the Iraq war because it would "undermine her image as the brainiest senator in Washington"; on Page 111, we're told she wouldn't admit to misspeaking on the campaign trail because of "her own idealized view of herself"; on Page 163, we're told she can't admit to farming out work at the Rose Law Firm "because it would undermine her public image as a top-notch corporate lawyer." After a while, this hypothesis seems awfully crude. Doesn't it cry out for a more layered explanation, some illuminating testimony from friends and foes? Indeed, isn't that what a biography is for? "Her Way" is quite short on insight into Hillary's character, which may reflect the authors' inability to get the same kind of access to friends and insiders that Bernstein did. When describing her childhood in Park Ridge, Ill., the authors simply call it "a happy one," deferring almost entirely to Hillary's autobiography for details, and her decision to follow Bill to Arkansas gets a similarly perfunctory treatment. One suspects if they'd gone any deeper, what they might have found would have interfered with their thesis: that Bill and Hillary Clinton hatched a plan more than 30 years ago to revolutionize the Democratic Party and occupy the White House. "Once their '20-year project' was realized," the authors write, "their plan became even more ambitious: eight years as president for him, then eight years for her. Their audacious pact has remained a secret until now." Actually, one version or another of this "pact of ambition" has floated around for quite some time, but if this particular iteration has remained a secret for so long, perhaps it's because there's little evidence to substantiate it. The authors initially support this claim not with a quotation but with a footnote, simply citing interviews with the author and former Times reporter Ann Crittenden and her husband, John Henry. Only on Page 129 do we discover that Crittenden and Henry heard about this his-and-hers White House plan from the Pulitzer Prize winner Taylor Branch, a friend of the Clintons, who issued a statement on May 31 that said: "I never heard either Clinton talk about a 'plan' for them both to become president. Late in his second term, she and I did have a few glancing conversations about whether she might run for the Senate." In the last third of the book, "Her Way" attempts to be current, analyzing Hillary's time in the Senate. But it often focuses on small-bore stuff, like her failure to notify the Ethics Committee about Senate fellows who overstayed their four-week limit. Even when the authors report on something far more momentous - that Hillary most likely never read the classified intelligence reports about Iraq - they are forced to concede that only six senators, according to news reports, did (and some of them, it should be noted, still voted for the war, including the Democrats Jay Rockefeller, Joe Biden and Dianne Feinstein). They are right to assail Hillary for repeating the idea that there was a link between Saddam Hussein and Al Qaeda; they are even more right to expose the spectacular disingenuousness of her claim that she thought she was authorizing additional diplomacy, not a war; and they give Hillary's late-breaking attempt to board the climate-change bandwagon the hard, skeptical eye it deserves. But this is the stuff, ultimately, of magazine and news articles, not a 438-page biography. 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. One suspects she wouldn't need to cling to bad policies to prove she's different from the previous occupant of the White House who shared her name. She's already thrown off the yoke. It's not Bernstein's executive-scandal bona fides that make him a qualified Hillary biographer; it's his bona fides as a lousy husband. Hillarys world seems a lot like Bushworld, Gerth and Van Natta note, right down to the secretive loyal coterie of advisers. Jennifer Senior, a contributing editor at New York magazine, writes about politics.

"Since New York Times reporters Gerth and Van Natta's book on Hillary Clinton appears only a few weeks after Carl Bernstein's A Woman in Charge, it is difficult to review the new entry without comparing it to what came before. When put side by side, this book is the far inferior work. One reason why can be found in the authors' notes. Although Clinton was not interviewed for either work, Bernstein clearly had access to friends and family, which makes his book far richer. For instance, he takes several chapters to chronicle Hillary's formative years and includes an array of insightful quotes and commentary that helps explain what shaped her. Gerth and Van Natta wrap up the early years more quickly, using virtually nothing beyond familiar incidents and material from Clinton's autobiography. In later chapters, Her Way relies heavily on information from Kenneth Starr and others from the Office of the Independent Counsel, all of whom clearly still have an ax to grind, slanting the material. One of the scoops of this book is the (flimsily sourced) news that the Clintons made a pact decades ago that both would have eight-year presidential terms, making Hillary seem even more calculating than usual. In the final pages, the authors do admit that their subject has strength of will, but their tone, and most of what comes before, makes even this seem like an undesirable characteristic."--"Cooper, Ilene" Copyright 2007 Booklist

Gertz was one of the New York Times investigative reporters who started poking around the Whitewater case, but that doesn't mean readers should expect any four-alarm scandals from this unauthorized biography. Even with never-before-seen material from sources like White House counsel Vince Foster's notebooks, the worst Gertz and Van Natta (First Off the Tee) can say about Senator Clinton is that she may have padded her fees as a corporate lawyer and is lax about the required paperwork for hiring staff advisors. Their primary contention about Clinton-that she's a "meticulous architect of her persona" with "an almost scientific devotion to self-creation" and an unwillingness to admit to her mistakes-is hardly news, although a ballyhooed "secret pact," in which she and Bill planned from the earliest days of their marriage to maneuver him into the White House, may raise eyebrows. The profile in ambition is rich in anecdote, spending far more time on Clinton's Senate career than Carl Bernstein's bio. Far from a conservative hit job, their reportage tends to focus on public reaction to Clinton rather than to her politics, with the notable exception of her 2002 vote to support George W. Bush's invasion of Iraq, including her vocal support of the theory that Saddam Hussein supported Al Qaeda, and her subsequent attempts to reinvent herself as an anti-war presidential candidate without refuting her previous position. The analysis of the early stages of her presidential campaign is somewhat hurried by necessity, but effectively supplements the balanced character study. Though they face stiff competition, Gertz and Van Natta's version of events is poised to gain traction. (Jun. 8) Copyright 2007 Reed Business Information.