Hillary Studies

Two new books about Clinton add to the canon, but do little to illuminate who she really is as she eyes the White House.

By Walter Shapiro

Read more: Bill Clinton, Books, Hillary Rodham Clinton, Whitewater, Health Care, Walter Shapiro, Iraq, The New York Times, Reviews, Book reviews, 2008 election

Photo: Reuters/Jason Reed

Hillary Clinton gestures during a forum on faith, values and poverty June 4 at George Washington University in Washington.

June 8, 2007 | Any day now, some upstart college with a keen sense of public relations and the political zeitgeist will announce the creation of a new department called "Hillary studies." When that inevitable intellectual breakthrough occurs, this cutting-edge academic discipline will not lack for a reading list. The woman born and married as Hillary Rodham, transformed by the political realities of Arkansas into Hillary Rodham Clinton and now hailed in her campaign materials simply as "Hillary," does not yet match Abraham Lincoln in the bookshelf-space derby. But, hey, Honest Abe had a 140-year head start.

Just published are the two latest entries in the Hillary canon: "A Woman in Charge," by Carl Bernstein, and "Her Way," by Jeff Gerth and Don Van Natta Jr. In familiar fashion, they chart her now seemingly inevitable progress from child of the conservative Chicago suburbs to Wellesley antiwar commencement speaker to Arkansas political wife to first lady to New York senator to 2008 presidential candidate. It is a "Pilgrim's Progress" for our times -- and her route may soon double back to the White House.

Formerly in the hands of political journalists (David Maraniss and Michael Tomasky), psycho-biographers (Gail Sheehy) and right-wing attack artists (Barbara Olson and David Brock, until he repented), the torch has now been passed to the investigative reporters. Bernstein, of course, is the less prolific half of the legendary Watergate duo with Bob Woodward. Gerth (who wrote the original 1992 Whitewater story for the New York Times) and Van Natta (who still works at the paper) are both Pulitzer Prize winners. But despite the talents of these journalistic gumshoes, the haul from their collective labors would hardly pay the rent on Sam Spade's office, let alone justify their book advances.

Gerth and Van Natta, for example, breathlessly announce in their opening chapter, "More than three decades ago, in the earliest days of their romance, Bill and Hillary struck a plan ... to work together to revolutionize the Democratic Party and ultimately make the White House their home ... [W]ith Bill's victory in 1992, 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." Talk about a scoop -- Bill and Hillary were ambitious! Get me rewrite! As for a long-planned his-and-then-hers presidency, Gerth and Van Natta offer no tangible evidence that Hillary was plotting to run for public office prior to the first post-impeachment rumblings of a New York Senate bid.

In his initial research, Bernstein won the trust of Diane Blair, Hillary's closest friend, who died in 2000. Blair, a political scientist at the University of Arkansas, had thought of writing an insider's account of the 1992 campaign and interviewed 126 members of the Clinton staff after the election. She shared her notebooks with Bernstein, but Blair's research does little to alter the long-standing impression of Hillary as a tough-minded campaign strategist. Bernstein writes, "The big story of the campaign, [Hillary] feared, was going to be Bill's private life and hers, and a grotesque record of the Arkansas years ... It's apparent in interview after interview in Diane's binders that the real guiding premise [of the Clintons] was: Keep them away from us and our private lives." Once again, there's no there there. After a brutal primary campaign that revolved around the Gennifer Flowers debacle and the candidate's Vietnam draft record, it was no secret to any political reporter on the planet that the Clinton high command wanted to plant Do Not Enter signs on the borders of Arkansas.

This is not to dismiss the books as entirely unrevealing, unfair or unnecessary. Bernstein's "A Woman in Charge" is sprightly written, often insightful in its judgments, and studded with factual nuggets that enhance the Hillary saga. "Her Way," which at times becomes bogged down in investigative minutiae, offers a valuable account of Clinton's slow migration away from her hawkish stance on Iraq. But after digesting 1,076 pages of chronology and footnotes (the books, incidentally, together weigh 3.8 pounds), I am weary of reading the same stories over and over with a few different factual flourishes. I am fatigued from going through the same small-bore Hillary "scandals," from commodities trading to Whitewater to the White House travel office dismissals. And most of all, I am tired -- so tired -- of theorizing about that mysterious entity known as the Clinton marriage. (After Bill Clinton left office, I vowed to myself that I would never again type those three fateful words, "the Clinton marriage." But, as I should have learned by now, good intentions rarely survive contact with a presidential campaign.)

What both books inadvertently illustrate is that Hillary Clinton may have been investigated out. If there are major secrets still buried about the current presidential candidate, they are unlikely to be unearthed in time for this campaign. Almost nothing that Bernstein, Gerth or Van Natta discovered is startling enough to launch a single attack commercial or oppo-research hit. What seems far more relevant at the moment are the lessons that the candidate draws from her life experience rather than new details about Bill Clinton's philandering ways in 1987.

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