The End of History and the First Lady

Who is Hillary, and what is she? In a pair of recent volumes about our first lady, the view-points differ, but points of consensus emerge.

Barbara Olson is a conservative lawyer who got to know Mrs. Clinton at second hand while serving as counsel to the House committee investigating the FBI and the Travelgate scandals. Gail Sheehy is a professional writer, the prophet of numerous works of pop psychology such as the classic 1976 Passages, and a liberal who warms to the Clinton agenda, if not to the Clintons.

In Hell to Pay, Olson gives us a Mrs. Clinton who is a monster of ego, a tough gutter-fighter, a certified liar — and a Marxist who wants to seize power to foist her theories on the world and the country. In Hillary’s Choice, on the other hand, Sheehy gives us a Hillary Clinton who is instead a monster of ego, a tough gutter-fighter, a certified liar — and not a Marxist, though she wants to seize power anyhow, partly because she is in her menopausal Flaming Fifties and it is (as Passages put it) her time of life.

Both books agree that her finances stank; that she lied about the cattle trades, which were really a payoff; that she caused the billing records to vanish, then surface; that she ordered the firing of the staff of the travel office, and then lied about it; that she recruited Jack Palladino to track down, blackmail, and threaten old girlfriends of Mr. Clinton (and paid him out of federal campaign funds, collected from tax-payers); and orchestrated the war room attacks that brutally slandered the people who got in her way. Both books agree that she is one very tough cookie, a terrific defense attorney on her own behalf, and her husband’s, which was her main role in his career and his administration. Both also prove her a bad politician, responsible for most of the couple’s legal and policy setbacks.

But where Olson has written a terse, coherent, factual brief against Mrs. Clinton, Gail Sheehy has written two books, awkwardly cobbled together: The first is a reporter’s book, a compilation of stories and quotations painting the Clintons as borderline psychopaths, while the second is an extension of Sheehy’s Passages oeuvre, an empathetic account of a first couple beset by life’s crises. Where Olson sees an autocrat, hellbent on power, Sheehy gives us a couple of middle-aged yuppies, molded by damage incurred via childhood trauma, battling the silent artillery of time: lost hopes and dreams, lost parents and friends, and, worst of all, lost hormones and muscle tone.

As a reporter, Sheehy has a keen eye for the killer anecdote. But as the author of sloppy, soupy, sappy books of advanced psychodrivel, she is given to quoting her theories as if they mean something. Her view of the Clintons frequently shifts between the two: They are examples of the vaguely criminal oddballs thrown up now and then by electoral politics, and they are also stand-ins for us all, working their hard way through life’s many changes, searching for meaning, and love.

Olson largely bypasses the topic of Mr. Clinton. But Sheehy has assembled an array of quotations that paint a credible picture of the president as a certified nut case, a liar, a lecher, a sadist, and someone afflicted with multiple personality disorder. “It appears there is more than one person in him,” she quotes a “mental health professional” too high-placed to identify. “When he’s caught and lies, it’s as if a third person did it. Because when he’s in that altered state, he may feel like a different person.” As Sheehy explains, “It’s not him!” An astonishing number of statements, from ex-friends and co-workers, attests that he is passive in crisis (when his wife tends to take over), sullen and inert without crowd stimulation. He has no concern for anything beyond himself. “His attention is focused on himself a lot.” “He can also be very caring — as long as it doesn’t cost him very much.” “He is emotionally unavailable. He lives on campaign junk love and casual sex.”

Sheehy doesn’t care much about the fact of impeachment — or the implications of a commander in chief who obstructs justice and lies, under oath, to the country — but she does care about why it all happened: It was another of those pesky midlife crises, brought on by age-related stress. No boy any longer, Clinton was “hurtling toward fifty” (he has since hurtled past it), his sight going, his hearing going, his hair turning “wintry gray.” His mother had died a year and a half before he first set his eyes on the garrulous intern. His daughter Chelsea was also about to leave home. “Who now would love him unconditionally?” Sheehy inquires. “Who would play hearts with him in the wee hours, when insomnia would not let go its grip on his unquiet mind?” Who, indeed? Then, worst of all, he fell down and hurt himself, and was put in a wheelchair. “Overnight, he was hobbled like an old man . . . [with] all the accouterments of decay and dependence. . . . Was his own flesh suddenly a grave?” “Sex is a way of countering this death fear he has from his father,” intones yet another mental health expert. And so Bill split off, yet another midlife crisis, encountered in an altered state.

Sheehy sees both Clintons as having been traumatized: Hillary by her father, who “undermined her sexuality”; Bill by his mother, who, among other failings, did not undermine his quite enough. As such, they made, as Sheehy describes, the weirdest public marriage since the Duke and Duchess of Windsor, another sick tale of an eternal child taken in hand by a stern disciplinarian. Hillary’s defining choice, as explained by Sheehy, was the decision she made in 1975, when she left the East Coast for Arkansas, trading the career she could have had for the greater scope as the wife of a successful big-time politician. Throughout their marriage, she made the same choice time and time again to stay with her husband (and excuse, and defend, him).

“She is angry. Not all of the time, but most of the time,” were Sheehy’s first notes on meeting Hillary in the 1992 campaign. And angry at whom? She “has never held Bill accountable,” a source told Sheehy. “She is in a perpetual state of suspended anger because of all that she has absorbed.” Always, she would channel her rage from her husband’s transgressions to those who stood to profit from them, becoming his primary champion. In an odd way, she may have come to welcome his failings, since she stood to gain from them twice: When she saved him, he gave her both political power and attention. “Why does Hillary often look her most glowing when her husband has shamed her?” asks Sheehy, who answers her question: “Every time he gets caught, Clinton concentrates his sexual magnetism on his wife, for a change.”

On the other hand, when he has power, her hold becomes weak. When he won a four-year term as governor in 1986, “his reward to himself was to kick over the traces.” Said Dick Morris, “he told both Hillary and Betsey [Wright, his other female keeper] in effect, ‘get lost.'” Again, after the 1992 triumph, he let himself go, meeting a female friend in his basement office in Little Rock at five in the morning three or four times before moving to Washington.

In the soap-operatic Hillary’s Choice, Sheehy presents political lives without politics, the presidency as Days of Our Lives. Hillary’s management of Bill’s political life after his loss of office in 1980 is ascribed in part to that passage in everyone’s life when “Some inner aspect that has been left out is likely to insist on being recognized.” Bill let her take charge, because his “reality as a child was completely defined by a woman,” his hell-raising mother. Hillary blames it all on the “abuse excuse” — “that he was scarred by the abuse he suffered” as his mother and grandmother fought over him when he was a child of four.

Bill was scarred again in 1987, when Hillary “desperately” wanted him to run for president, and tough Mama Betsey said no. But he ran four years later, and all went more smoothly: “Gore was smart enough to adopt the role of the Better Brother. He began building a bond with Bill Clinton that seemed to caulk some of the great empty spaces inside the fatherless man.” Well, not quite all of them. The Troopergate scandal blew up the first year. “Hillary gave him hell for months. . . . He couldn’t get near her. So he didn’t do anything to advance health care. . . . That was one of the key reasons the health care project died.”

The Republican takeover of Congress in 1994 threw the Clintons off balance. Normal people may lose their looks and their waistlines but losing Congress along with them is a midlife crisis of exceptional consequence.

Understandably, this rattled the Clintons, who responded in prime boomer fashion: “Inspirational New Age authors were invited . . . to Camp David to help them.” Among them was Jean Houston, a psychic and mystic, who told Hillary she was “burdened with five thousand years of . . . women’s subservience,” and urged her to talk more with the deceased Eleanor Roosevelt. Marianne Williamson, “a Jewish charismatic spiritualist . . . who presided over one of Liz Taylor’s weddings,” came to visit. So did Tony Robbins, the televised hawker of empowerment videos.

But Hillary had to “undergo a ‘little death’ of the inappropriate identity she assumed was hers for the asking, and begin to search anew,” transcending the costs of her failed former choices and unhealthy attachment to Bill. Thus, according to Sheehy, Mrs. Clinton’s planned run for the Senate has been empowered by two different life changes: the “zest” she now feels through the menopause passage, and the “crossover” passage itself. Sheehy even explains the choice of New York as a venue: “Hillary’s father had refused to give her permission to go to rotten Gotham” when she was a girl. And now her marriage can get even better, as Bill can turn into her nurturing partner.

How many choices did Hillary have? As legend would say, she had legion: lawyer, advocate, activist, Supreme Court justice, senator, even commander in chief. “Hillary could — and should — be our first woman president,” Sheehy was told by an Arkansas journalist, who rehashed an old theory. “I had images in my mind that she could be our first woman president,” said Betsey Wright, who met Hillary in the 1972 campaign for McGovern, and was let down when she married our Bill. Talk about making her attorney general after the 1992 election did not impress Hillary’s brother. “Attorney general is only local lawmaking,” he told Sheehy dismissively. “There’s treaty negotiations she could do. There’s labor stuff. There’s secretary of state.”

Hillary herself considered running for governor in 1989, when the marriage was more than usually troubled, and Bill appeared ready to drop out of politics. She was crushed to discover that voters still viewed her, not as a dynamic political leader, but simply as Bill Clinton’s wife. It was after this, sources say, that they repaired their marriage, and the run in 1992 was decided on. Even then, Hillary seemed to see it as the prelude to the truly great happening. “Eight years of Bill, eight years of Hill, that was the dream,” says Sheehy. Bill himself said Hillary could have been senator.

But events in New York and elsewhere since Sheehy and Olson finished their books have led to a new kind of Hillary question: What if she can’t do it? In February 1999, as the impeachment affair ground to its conclusion, Hillary Clinton’s approval ratings nationwide soared, granting her a substantial lead in polls over Rudy Giuliani, her putative rival in the Senate race in New York. Since then, as she has struck out on her own, her approval ratings have sunk to their lowest point since the 1996 election, and she lags four to twelve points behind Giuliani. In one of the most pro-Clinton states in the country, with her backlog of sympathy, with Air Force One, with the White House attack-spin machine, with the power to go abroad on foreign junkets, with the power to control events, she seems to be losing: Giuliani may manage to lose this election, but it looks like one Mrs. Clinton won’t win. If she can’t win there, when can she? And what becomes of her myth?

Hillary Clinton came to the White House as the first careerist first lady with an advanced degree in a field touching on politics. There is no doubt she could have had an impressive career as a lawyer or a lesser career as an activist-advocate, like Marian Wright Edelman, her earliest patron. Her gifts as a lawyer are open and obvious. But it has since become clear that her political instincts are terrible, and that, while she can light fires among true believers, she has trouble convincing those not already on her side. It is not that Hillary lacks brains and talents; her problem is that the kind of brains and talent she has do not lead to the kind of career that she covets. Good lawyers get rich, but are not often famous outside their profession. Mrs. Edelman has steady work, but is a minor player, and does not get to ride on Air Force One.

For the career that she wanted, Hillary had no choice at all but to hitch herself to a vote-getting machine named Bill, and then get him into her debt. Since she left the House Water-gate panel, her public career has come entirely from her husband. Her sole contributions to history concern saving her husband’s candidacy in January 1992, losing the House and Senate for the Democrats in 1994, and saving her husband’s presidency in 1998. A Hillary backer told Sheehy, “How frustrating it must be to have your career diminished because your man — your bumblin’, head-in-his-zipper husband — was literally screwing things up.” But this wishful thinking mis-states things completely. Her husband is her career in public, her only achievement and monument.

Near the end of Hillary’s Choice, Sheehy describes a day in the life of Hillary Clinton — March 3, 1999 — in which she lunched at midday at a New York fund-raiser where she received wild cheers from an assembly of well-to-do women who had paid $ 10,000 each to bask in the glow of her presence. That night, she went to a dinner at the East Side home of Roger Altman, at which everyone present avoided all mention of what everyone else in the country was talking about: the interview that very hour, in which Monica Lewinsky told all on television.

Sheehy treats this as an ironic contradiction. She does not understand that these events are interconnected: The Monica scandal brought on the emotional cheers. Hillary Clinton, who reached fame and power in 1992 as Bill Clinton’s wife — as first lady, as health care czarina — reached superstardom in 1998 and 1999 as the abused wife of Bill Clinton. Not as a policy maker, but as a dramatic soap-opera figure, the Sue Ellen Ewing of national politics. She was interesting, not for her ideas or herself, but for her predicament. And when it receded, so did her charms.

In 1989, Hillary Clinton, who wanted to emerge as her own public woman, found herself defined as the wife of Bill Clinton. Now, ten years later, she is trying again, and she is still defined as the wife of Bill Clinton, a designation commensurate with her achievements, and one that she never will shake. For years, the feminist line — repeated by Sheehy — is that Hillary Rodham had a choice between two paths to power: the marriage path through Bill Clinton, and the one she could have taken herself. Now at last the myth is exploded.

To get to the White House, to lead the network news when she chose to, to play god in the Third World (and to feminist audiences), she had to choose Clinton and then put up with whatever he handed her. There was no autonomous, feminist road to power. Given her limits, her greed, and her hunger, Hillary Clinton had no choice at all.

A frequent contributor to THE WEEKLY STANDARD, Noemie Emery is a writer in Alexandria, Virginia.