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The roots of a hostage crisis
The angry Cuban detainees in Louisiana are just some of the illegal immigrants trapped in the INS's permanent limbo.
By Robert Bryce and Lisa Tozzi
[12/20/99]

To the moon, Al
Al Gore and Bill Bradley square off in New Hampshire, with Ted Koppel cast in the role of marriage counselor.
By Jake Tapper
[12/18/99]

Arianna Huffington is dead wrong
In her unbelievable defense of the Serbs, the syndicated columnist condones the massacre of innocent civilians by the Serbs.
By Ian Williams
[12/17/99]

Adios to all that
Old passions run high over the fate of a little boy, but both Cubans and the exile community are ready to embrace a new future -- together.
By Joe Conason
[12/17/99]

A GOP rebel in Dixie
If passionate presidential candidate John McCain hopes to topple George W. Bush, he may have to dare to be boring.
By Jake Tapper
[12/17/99]

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Fast forward to 1968 and she's Wellesley's senior-class president and commencement speaker, denouncing the "acquisitive and competitive corporate life" in favor of "more immediate, ecstatic ... modes of living." (An actual photo of her would appear that year in Life magazine, part of a feature on student leaders.) Now, here she is working with the legendary Saul Alinsky, the "Rules for Radicals" author and father of community organizing. She would turn down a job with Alinsky for Yale Law School and a summer internship with Black Panther lawyers in Oakland (where's that photo with Huey Newton?), and eventually meet the future president.

But that's not all: Next she goes to work for the congressional committee that investigated Watergate, where she had the job of listening to Nixon's infamous Oval Office tapes. We can see her, headphones squeezed over long, unruly hair, eyes wide behind her big unflattering glasses, listening to Nixon himself describe what's on the tapes, fired by her fervor to drive the wrongdoer from office, blissfully unaware of the role she would play in the country's next impeachment drama.

Oblivious to the scandal that awaits her, she's at times eerily prescient about the glory: She tells her boss at the committee, future White House counsel Bernard Nussbaum, that the chubby hayseed she's dating is going to be president some day. Nussbaum and her other Washington friends, understandably, don't believe her. Her pal Sara Ehrman would later confide that she drove Hillary to Arkansas, to start her life with Bill Clinton, hoping the long ride would give her a chance to talk her friend out of career suicide. Of course she failed, and the rest is American history.

But that choice is the central mystery of Hillary's life. Why did this brainy Yale feminist, witness to key turning points in the revolutionary 1960s and '70s, who came of age during the heyday of the women's movement, follow her philandering boyfriend to Arkansas and put her own promising career on hold? All these years later, it seems less like love than a monstrous failure of nerve, and Hillary Clinton's 20-plus (count 'em) biographers, not just Sheehy and Olsen, have not been able to explain it. For feminists like me who came a half-generation behind her, the choice has always seemed not just retro, but lazy, as though she wanted the perks of power without the sacrifices getting elected required.

And yet she sacrificed plenty, lashing herself to a self-destructive womanizer who risked both their futures on furtive and flagrant sex with countless females. As a governor's wife, then as first lady, she's had as much scrutiny, criticism and ridicule as her spouse, with almost none of the power; little credit but lots of blame. Clinton's 1980 gubernatorial loss was attributed to her frumpy clothes, Yale snobbiness and failure to take her husband's name; likewise Whitewater, with more reason, was seen as her fault more than his. And more than a few pundits and stand-up comedians have, without any reason, blamed the president's compulsive tomcatting on what they see as her steely sexlessness.

Who can forget her humbling during the 1992 campaign, after she messed up with her catty "I suppose I could have stayed home and baked cookies" remark, looking again like that snooty feminist who 12 years earlier cost her husband the governor's race? She left the political stage briefly and came back looking more wifely, sitting for an interview with NBC's Jane Pauley in a big-skirted coral dress that she could have borrowed from Donna Reed. She looked like she'd been drinking or crying -- the '50s housewife's two safe harbors -- and she seemed less demure than drugged. Her life has been a blur of hairdos and makeovers ever since. Her inability to settle on a look and make peace with herself points to the single thing that best explains her "choice": a fundamental lack of self-knowledge and self-assurance that prevented her from defining her personal and political views and offering them up to the public for approval.

Next page | Did Hugh Rodham "sexually undermine" his daughter?