Hillary Studies

Both biographies have yawning gaps, one in its research, the other in its chronology. "Her Way," the Gerth and Van Natta entry, is comprehensive in its timeline, carrying Hillary from girlhood in Park Ridge, Ill., to the announcement of her presidential campaign. But a close reading of the footnotes suggests that almost every anecdote about her life before her 1975 marriage has been borrowed from earlier books, especially her own 2003 autobiography, "Living History." Bernstein's "A Woman in Charge" is meticulously researched, but the author seemingly ran out of time and energy, truncating Hillary's entire life after the 1999 impeachment vote to a single 18-page chapter.

There was a time when I, too, thought of majoring in Hillary Studies. During the early 1990s, I hunted down some of her Wellesley classmates (and heard their stories before they had grown stale from constant retelling) and looked up her Arkansas friends. I first interviewed Hillary, nearly 15 years ago, in the governor's mansion in Little Rock, and several times after that. What stays with me is something that she said during a 1993 White House interview, back in the hopeful days when healthcare reform was slated to be her signature achievement and Monica Lewinsky was still off at college. "I am a Rorschach test," she declared, reflecting a shrewd awareness of how, even then, her public persona was in the eye of the beholder. Tomasky, in his 2001 book on her initial Senate race, "Hillary's Turn," captured the same reality when he wrote, "Hillary Clinton has existed primarily as a symbol, both to those who admire her and to those who detest her."

The rigors of the 1992 campaign -- probably augmented by her own bent toward overpreparation and caution -- made Hillary an oddly distant figure, easier to theorize about than understand. These days, anyone trying to write something fresh and original about her has to grapple with the problem of access: As Bernstein writes, "Both Hillary and Bill Clinton told me on several occasions that they would welcome being interviewed by me. In the end, both formally declined." (There is no textual evidence that the Clintons spoke with Gerth and Van Natta either.) Would-be chroniclers must also deal with the intense loyalty that has long been a feature of Hillaryland; almost no one close to her is willing to tell all (especially on the record), and virtually everyone in her orbit tends to be nervous about how even the most innocuous comments might look in print.

But the biggest obstacle to reporters is that this woman who has been probed and psychoanalyzed and hounded by special prosecutors understands the political virtues of repetition and boredom. As first lady, senator and now presidential candidate, she has rarely veered away in public from her self-scripted agenda.

If there was a turning point -- a moment when Hillary Clinton seemed to go robotic -- it probably came during the waning days of 1992 primary campaign. Attacked in a debate by Democratic presidential gadfly Jerry Brown over her legal work while her husband was governor, Hillary snapped, "I suppose I could have stayed home, baked cookies and had teas, but what I decided to do was to fulfill my profession." Bernstein points out that Hillary went on to talk about the difficult choices that women have to make, but notes that her words were attacked "as evidence of radical feminist disdain for traditional values." What neither biography picks up is the larger significance of the "cookies and tea" furor: Bill Clinton had to step in to help his wife mend her image. This moment marked a change in the couple's power dynamic, for up until then, it had always been Hillary who took on the Sisyphean task of cleaning up Bill's messes.

At this late date, the Bernstein-Gerth-Van Natta trio of investigative reporters finds it hard to become overexcited by Hillary's own messes from her days in Arkansas. Bernstein, who knows what a real scandal looks like, is scathing about the wasted journalistic energies that went into investigating the Clintons' involvement in an ill-starred real estate venture called Whitewater. "In truth, the 'Whitewater story' became overblown almost from the moment the New York Times first wrote about it," states Bernstein, an alumnus of the Washington Post, who adds, "The Clintons' response was not straightforward, and served only to arouse suspicion." Even Gerth, who was heavily involved in the Times' Whitewater coverage, now concludes that Hillary Clinton was probably guilty of nothing more heinous than padding her bills for legal work. The authors of "Her Way" state, without a hint of Times culpability, "Her likely indiscretions were altogether modest, but the scandal that would result from Hillary's attempt to cover up her sins in the past would be enormous."

It is strange that the one Clinton-era scandal that might resurface in the 2008 campaign is brushed off in a single paragraph in both biographies. Fred Thompson, poised to enter the Republican presidential race as one of the front-runners, presided over the 1997 Senate investigation into the flagrant fundraising abuses of the Clinton reelection campaign, from Lincoln Bedroom sleepovers to shady Asian influence peddlers wandering around the White House. As Bernstein all too briefly summarizes, "Johnny Chung, a Democratic fund-raiser who later pleaded guilty to funneling illegal contributions to the Clinton campaign, had shown up one day in Hillary's office with a check for $50,000 for the reelection committee. 'You take, you take,' he demanded of some startled Hillaryland aides."

The Gerth and Van Natta biography offers an intriguing theory about who Hillary's enabler was in framing her hawkish stance on the Iraq war -- Bill Clinton. The authors, citing interviews with unnamed Clinton associates, write, "Just as he has engaged in most aspects of her Senate career, Bill served as her main counsel on the Iraq war vote." They also note that Hillary outdid even Joe Lieberman in her speech justifying her vote in favor of the Iraq war resolution by claiming that Saddam Hussein was guilty of giving "aid, comfort and sanctuary to terrorists, including Al Qaeda members." (This is a belief, by the way, that only Dick Cheney still holds.) While Hillary's judgment on the war was execrable (as was that of John Edwards), it becomes tricky for Democratic primary voters to simultaneously revere the foreign policy of the Clinton administration and excoriate the New York senator for following the advice of Bill Clinton in casting her Iraq vote.

Even when "Her Way" and "A Woman in Charge" score with telling details, there remains a sense that their subject remains tantalizing close, yet also out of reach. Hillary Studies (or, at least, political reporting about her as president or senator) is likely to be a growth area over the next decade. But like so many other fledgling disciplines, it is still in search of its core textbook -- a nuanced biography that captures Hillary Rodham Clinton as both human being and political figure, instead of dissecting her like a laboratory slide through the lens of investigative reporting.

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