A Woman in Charge
by Carl Bernstein
Hutchinson £25, pp640
It took Carl Bernstein 200 interviews and eight years to stitch together his pre-election biography of Hillary Clinton. You can't help feeling he might have done better with eight months and two interviews (since both Mr and Mrs C sat this book out).
He's kind to Hillary; he's on her side; he's certainly chatted interminably to her friends and admirers. But what does almost a decade's toil produce? Mostly the views of others, sometimes different, sometimes the same. She's clever, but she can be stupid: or - think how she failed the DC bar exam! - she's merely average. She's arrogant, but often humble. She's in love with Bill, except when she isn't. She's 'a mind conservative and a heart liberal' (her own contribution to balanced non-clarity). Do we know or understand her better at the end? No.
There's an undigested feel to this book, then: the work of a legendary investigative journalist who didn't find a storyline to hang his research on. She may be the first woman President of the United States come 2009, but (apart from growing up in a broken, slightly dysfunctional family in Chicago, going to Wellesley, then Yale and meeting Bill, the child of another broken family) her life is really her husband's life, too, and there's little rational prospect of disentangling them. So the major crises and events are already pretty well chronicled: Arkansas and the fight to be nominated in 1991; Medicare; Whitewater; more other women; the death of Vince Foster; and a woman called Monica.
Some of this is Hillary's tale. The collapse of her health reform plans, for instance, can fairly be blamed on a stubborn, and pretty typical, refusal to compromise. Bill, says Carl, loved her for the 'toughness' she brought him. But that's often just another word for stubborn. The thesis is that magnetic, hugely talented Bill needed a married minder, a more disciplined, driving intellect to keep his ambition charged. Certainly, that's often true. Equally, though, the pair were competitors as well as companions. See how she dominates the first months in Washington, then retreats in failure after the health debacle. See how she rescues him over Paula Jones and Monica Lewinsky, and becomes senior partner again. Either he's up or she's up.
In that sense they're rivals, always unconsciously looking for dominance: and Madam President is never better placed than when heroically pulling hubby's wandering iron out of the fire. He might have divorced her in Arkansas (but she dug in). She might have divorced him a dozen times (but swallowed her pride and anger). Do they love each other? Probably, in a convoluted way. But what would the ex-Prezza do if Hillary won the White House? Your guess is as good as Bernstein's.
The real question is whether she's learnt from her mistakes (and whether her enemies have learned to treat her more gently, too). She was defensive, hostile, suspicious of Washington, paranoid about the press. She was potentially the most influential First Lady since Eleanor Roosevelt, but she divided rather than healed, snarled rather than smiled. In the end her achievement was keeping him in office for two full terms. Will a 'mellower', more seasoned Senator from New York do better at transition time?
She certainly strives to give that impression. Capitol Hill counts her an insider now, not a hick from the Little Rock sticks. The rabid Republicans who savaged the Clintons mercilessly may be somewhat tamer after the disasters of Bush. The press, too, must surely be less hysterical. (What did Whitewater amount to? Damn all, as Bernstein demonstrates. Why was the Wall Street Journal, long before Rupert Murdoch, such a reporting disgrace? Where on earth was anything you could call common sense in the mayhem of Monicagate?) She was there through the tribulations. She must have emerged a wiser, calmer person. And yet those infernal contradictions linger. She was a brilliant lawyer but a lousy client. She was chilly when she tried to do warm. She doesn't, for a second, have Bill's rhetorical skills or sense of humour. She believes in truth but tells lies under pressure. Bernstein has laboured mightily and he's compiled and regurgitated a useful pre-presidential primer. But don't order a second edition until the ice lady sings.
