Living History by Hillary Rodham Clinton

 Hillary Clinton’s book Living History might be better titled, Diary of a Mad First Lady for Hillary Rodham Clinton is certainly that.  She is an intelligent woman who, had she had the presence of mind not to throw her lot in with a charlatan, would have likely done very well on her own.  That she somehow thought her star could rise with Bill’s was her tragic downfall.  

When she and Bill Clinton met during their law school years at Yale, it was clear that he planned to go into politics.  Hillary, through her mentor Marian Wright Edelman, looked to be on track to undertake what Hillary characterizes as her life-long advocacy for children’s rights (to which she later added women’s rights).  She and Bill lived together, traveled together and campaigned for McGovern together. Hillary Rodham was busy with research projects, writing articles and clerking.  She led a voter registration drive in Texas and was a member of the impeachment staff investigating Richard Nixon. She appeared to be making her own way. 

Hillary says that Bill Clinton was determined to marry her. Yet it was she who trailed him to Fayetteville, AK.  After all she wrote, if the relationship was to succeed someone had to “give ground.” It must not have occurred to her to ask why it wasn’t him. 

Soon after marriage, Bill became Attorney General in Arkansas and Mrs. Clinton became a member of the Rose law firm. Not that she wanted to work for such a prestigious firm. She had always “resisted” private law but now she felt it made sense because Bill’s salary as AG was so paltry. When he became governor it was the same problem.  With a salary of just $35,000 a year she felt the need to “build up a nest egg.”  That’s when Mrs. Clinton began dabbling in commodities and she and Bill invested in Whitewater Estates. 

At page 76, the chapter entitled Little Rock, is when questions about Hillary Clinton’s emotional intelligence really kick in.  Hillary Rodham Clinton seems to have gotten the short end of the stick when it comes to self-awareness and good judgment about herself and others.  In short, Hillary Clinton doesn’t ever seem able to figure anything out.  On the one hand, she tells us she’s sharp as a whip, a self-assured take-charge type.  In the next paragraph she is mystified and aflutter with conflict. As a single woman, she was dedicated to children’s rights advocacy and following her heart to Bill, but she was “utterly confused” about where her life was headed.  As a married woman, she was worried about making ends meet though “we lived in the Governor’s Mansion and had an official expense account.”  When the Clintons got involved with Jim McDougal, they knew he had “reassuring” credentials and a “solid reputation.”(pg. 87) After all, Bill Clinton had known McDougal for ten years.  Later, Hillary just couldn’t understand how she and Bill misjudged him.   

When she became the nation’s First Lady, her troubles multiplied. Right off the bat, President Clinton named his wife chair of the President’s Task Force on National Health Care Reform. Both the issue and Hillary were immediately controversial. Again, Mrs. Clinton seems to have had no idea what lay ahead.   She recounts that, after her appointment, then-governor of New York Mario Cuomo approached her asking what she had done to make her husband so mad. Hillary drew a blank.  What was Cuomo talking about?  Cuomo replied that her husband would “have to be awfully upset about something to put you in charge of such a thankless job.”  The slap in the face didn’t register with Hillary. She barreled ahead. 

Hillary claims she was quite comfortable with the non-traditional role she planned to take as First Lady.  “To me, there was nothing incongruous about my interests and activities.” She liked improving health care just as much as she liked working on table settings (paraphrase)!   In the next sentence she writes, “…through my own inexperience, I contributed to some of the conflicting perceptions about me.”  It took her “awhile to figure out” that not everyone would see things her way.  At one point she complains that the governorship didn’t properly prepare her and Bill for the national stage. (pg. 141) 

In addition to a seeming inability to understand herself and those around her, Mrs. Clinton is always in crisis mode.  She characterizes her life as one muddled dilemma after another. It’s not clear whether this is dramatic posturing on her part or whether it’s an accurate reflection of a woman constantly in conflict.  Hillary isn’t exactly a liar. She’s a dissembler. She prevaricates.  She deceives herself first and seems to think others will follow suit.  

Amidst the fury over her role in health care reform, Hillary describes herself as a First Lady who would lead the way in an “era of changing gender roles.”  She would help accustom people to seeing women occupy positions of power.  Some two years and 120 pages later, however, she depicts herself in the middle of a maelstrom, a good wife trying to support her husband.  She suggests that it was her staff who inspired her to be a pioneering female role model.    

It happened after the crushing mid-term elections that ushered in a Republican Congress.  Hillary went into full crisis-mode behavior.  As she met with her all-female staff (pg. 261), she describes her despair in the face of the election results.  “Fighting back tears, my voice cracking, I poured out apologies.  I was sorry if I had let everyone down and contributed to our losses.  It wouldn’t happen again.”  She was “considering” leaving her political work behind, she was cancelling appearances, she didn’t want to hurt her husband’s administration.  Hillary claims that silence fell over the group.  Then, her loyal posse gave it to her straight.  They brought her out of her stormy crisis and into the sunshine of a new day.  Now she understood. She couldn’t quit.  “Too many other people, especially women, were counting on me.”  Pg. 261 

The book continues with contradictions and elaborations that alternately depict Hillary as confident leader or struggling victim. As the confident leader, it is Hillary who calls Dick Morris to discuss strategy.  It is Hillary who enlightens when normal minds are stumped.  It is Hillary who is forever at Bill’s side being “a helpful partner for him.”  It is “Bill and I” who consider policy.  In an almost delusional passage, Hillary tries to convince us that she was even involved in the Mid-East peace negotiations.  She writes that she often took calls from Leah Rabin and Queen Noor of Jordan when their respective husbands---that is, the Prime Minister of Israel and the King of Jordan---wanted to get information to the President through “informal channels.” (pg.315) Meaning her? Embarrassing. 

As the victim, Mrs. Clinton devotes a considerable number of pages to defending herself and her husband against the scandals and accusations that hounded them during Clinton’s eight years in office. In fact, other than welfare reform and a few scattered chapters on foreign policy, the Clinton years seem nothing but scandal---Vince Foster, Travelgate, Whitewater, her commodities trading, the McDougals.  She aggressively lambasts her adversaries and covers for herself and Bill.  She casts herself as victim of the political right wing and as loyal advisor and soulmate to the man she loves.  Can you imagine?  And we haven’t even gotten to Monica Lewinsky. 

Up until page 439, the chapter entitled ‘Soldiering On,’ Hillary Clinton explains away every other instance of her husband’s serial sexual exploitation and degradation of women.  Monica Lewinsky is the affair she finally couldn’t re-write.  Once again, Mrs. Clinton can’t understand how it all happened. She is in crisis.  When Bill finally told the truth, she was “gulping for air...crying and yelling….”  She couldn’t believe “he would do anything to endanger our marriage and our family.” (Huge eye roll.)   In the end, she says she stood by him because he was the President and, as President, he had done nothing wrong.  

The book rollercoasters on.  In one bizarre chapter, ‘Conversations with Eleanor,’ she describes her mystical, reverential connection to Eleanor Roosevelt.  In similar fashion in another chapter, she recounts an afternoon spent with Jackie Kennedy in Jackie’s NYC apartment.  With the sycophantic adulation of an outsider courting the in-crowd, Hillary portrays herself and Jackie as kindred spirits whose souls meshed into a perfect friendship.  It’s pathetic really. 

There are a few chapters that read more normally such as those that cover her travels to Central Europe, Africa and South Asia; the content is fairly interesting.  Her final chapters are devoted to her rancor about the 2000 election that Gore lost and her campaign for senator of New York.  Regarding the former, she lays out a no-holds-barred aggressive attack on the courts and the Republicans.  Regarding the latter, it’s mostly self-congratulatory fluff about everyone wanting her to run for the Senate.  

Hillary Rodham Clinton is a tragic figure.  Her decision to marry Bill Clinton led to one failure after another, and, in the end, to a demise that even she didn’t deserve.  One has to feel for her. After the humiliations she suffered as First Lady, she scrambled and scraped only to get a dreary stint as a senator. Then she lost a presidential nomination to a younger black man who outdid her in both arrogance and posturing. Obediently accepting it all, she settled for fourth fiddle as his Secretary of State but only as the final springboard that would certainly garner her the well-deserved gold ring of the presidency.  Alas.  She lost out again, this time to a smart-aleck white guy who treated her as badly as her husband always had. 

Hillary Rodham Clinton is a humiliated wife, an alternately exploited and dismissed political appendage to her deviously self-absorbed and emotionally shallow husband.  She is a remnant discarded by the Democrat Party and the feminist movement whose mascot she briefly was. For better or for worse, she has written about all of it in this book.