A WOMAN IN CHARGE: THE LIFE OF HILLARY RODHAM CLINTON
BY CARL BERNSTEIN
KNOPF, 640 PAGES, $27.95
CARL Bernstein’s “A Woman in Charge” begs a basic question: Does a market-saturation point exist for Hillary Clinton anecdotes seeking to prove the irrelevant claim that she is ambitious and calculating, two traits that go with politics like peanut butter with jelly?
Anyone who has spent three seconds in Washington – a hotbed of narcissistic overachievers – can recognize the bizarre double standard to which Clinton is constantly held. But like many previous efforts to analyze the former first lady, U.S. senator and presidential candidate, Bernstein’s book rehashes the standard litany of Hillary-bashing complaints: She’s calculating; she’s ambitious; she’s arrogant. (Never mind that the people making the accusations – politicians, reporters and political operatives – possess those characteristics in spades.)
Many people may forget that the Clintons and their staff were once outsiders. Bernstein, a legendary Washington observer, aptly captures Mrs. Clinton’s sense of destiny bumping up against the mob of self-important swells and press corps that enforces Washington’s rituals with the zeal of fraternity hazers.
He details Mrs. Clinton’s disdain for an inbred Capitol culture she believed harmed the country and the price paid by the young Clinton administration for her refusal to stroke Washington’s fragile egos. While her supporters regarded this as evidence of her idealistic commitment to fixing the country’s problems, her detractors found it damning proof of her arrogance and “messianic” sense of purpose.
While Mrs. Clinton’s opponents have found it easy to caricature her as a reflexive liberal, Bernstein provides some balance. For starters, he spends considerable time on her traditional, Midwestern upbringing and how it continues to guide her.
He describes her as a “moderate, very much a facilitator” and says “radicalism and fervent ideology held little appeal” for her. He neatly rebuts the right’s attempts to construe her early legal writings in support of abused children as an “attack on the family.”
And she’s religious. Bernstein writes that during her Yale Law School years, Clinton “carried her Bible almost everywhere, marking in it and underlining as she read.” In the White House years, unbeknownst to many, she attended a prayer group that included Republicans Susan Baker (wife of James) and Joanne Kemp (wife of Jack).
Despite the pre-release publicity, little here will be new to anyone who has followed the Clintons. For the rest, the book catalogues the stomach-churning missteps and miscalculations that marked the Clinton administration’s early days: the walling off of the West Wing from the press, the Zoe Baird nomination, the $200 haircut on the tarmac, the Health Care Task Force, the gays-in-the-military misstep, the Travel Office firings. Channeling his inner Dick Morris, Bernstein manages to pin nearly everything on the first lady.
Later on, there was Whitewater, Lewinsky and Mrs. Clinton’s withdrawal from the front lines of the administration.
Bernstein’s book travels a harrowing path of development from an idealistic young Hillary Rodham to senator and presidential candidate. She has no doubt learned many hard lessons that will be a credit to her in her current campaign, and perhaps in her return to the White House.
Kirsten Powers is a Fox News political analyst; she served in the Clinton administration from 1993 to 1998.