BETTING ON BILL

...By a wife...

...Weighing a Senate run at just past fifty years old, the first lady Hillary Clinton is just about where the lawyer-activist Hillary Rodham might have found herself had she not decided to work through Bill Clinton...

...One suspects she is tempted, like her husband, to quote Nicolai Rubashov in Darkness at Noon: "What a mess we have made of our golden generation"— and of ourselves...

...Milton thinks, as do other biographers that Hillary loved Bill when they married, and indeed still may do so...

...For the first time, Hillary could not wholly blame other people for the damage her husband had done...

...There are no signs this bothered Hillary at all...

...Clinton as bright as she thinks she is...

...And damage control eventually became her main focus, her main source of value, and surely the thing for which she will be cited in history: attacking his critics, defaming his victims, always defending her man...

...At the end of his first year in office, the Clintons were hit by the Paula Jones charges (his license) and the Whitewater scandals (her arrogance...

...The Clinton marriage may have been the reason they got to the White House, but it's also the reason that their administration has been mired in scandal and gotten little done...

...With Bill the vote-getter came Bill the unbuttoned roisterer whose endless sexual exploits constantly threatened to upend their political future...

...The great gamble of Hillary's life was her decision to submerge her political life in her husband's, forgoing the future she might have had as a lawyer or possibly an elected official for the derivative power she could have as the wife of a powerful man...

...Together, they set themselves up for the fall...

...Through Edelman, Hillary was hired in 1977 to work on a report published by the Carnegie Council on Children, which Milton calls "a blueprint for undermining the authority of parents whose values the authors considered outmoded...

...And so her introduction to the American people came in January 1992, on Super Bowl Sunday, when she appeared on 60 Minutes to lie about her husband's affair with Gennifer Flowers...

...But the aid that poor people actually wanted—help with their landlord disputes, child custody cases, domestic abuse, and the like—was dismissed as "uninformed demand" that must take second place to harassing the establishment, increasing "people's sense of grievance and entitlement," and expanding welfare rolls...

...Milton concedes that Hillary might not have known of all that was undertaken during her time at the Children's Defense Fund and the Legal Services Corporation...

...Clinton's Life BY NOEMIE EMERY When a woman with ser- vants spends the week- end cleaning out her closets, it usually is not a good sign," Joyce Milton begins her new biography, The First Partner: Hillary Rodham Clinton, the first in what promises to be a torrent of post-Monica Hillary books...

...It's true that in this case, she has been daring, resourceful, ferocious, and canny: changing the course of presidential history when she led the 1992 counter attack against Gennifer Flowers, and again in January 1998 when she stepped in front of the speeding train bearing down on her husband and gave him the chance to escape...

...If the bet comes off, will she think it's all been worth it...

...She mishandled the health care proposal (her arrogance), which was one of the key factors in the 1994 midterm election of a Republican Congress that four years later would examine the Monica Lewinsky affair (his license...

...What Hillary thought of it remains a mystery, as she has never said a public word—which brings us to the great theme of Hillary Clinton's life: For all her activist passion, whenever her principles have come into conflict with what is politically good for Bill Clinton, she has always put her husband first...

...Her main appeal to voters is that of a woman in a novel by the likes of Danielle Steele—a woman wronged who rises from the ashes, gets a job as a salesclerk, and ends up running the company...

...And there is the great drama of Hillary...

...Hillary had almost worked herself around to believing that Bill was the sexual harassment victim, beset by predatory females who were being used by his enemies to bring him down...

...Instead of remaking the government, she has been driven back to traditional wifely activities: giving advice in private, defending her attacked spouse, and making nice to the wounded...

...Said a classmate in high school, "I always felt that Hillary thought she knew what was best, and that's what everybody should do...

...But his terms have been tarnished, and her efforts to become a policy maker have failed...

...without Hillary's arrogance, there would have been no means to force any accounting...

...She is no more than Bill Clinton's keeper, defined by the terms of their marriage...

...And her most vivid moment in the administration came in January 1998, when she appeared on the Today show and Good Morning America to lie once again about his relations with an intern barely older than her daughter...

...Hillary Clinton came to Washington in 1992 not only determined to become co-president, but with a complex political agenda of her own: "Health care is just a short-term objective," her deputy chief of staff had confided to the press...

...There are no important legal cases she has tried and won...

...Well, yes and no...

...The buzz about her is celebrity buzz...

...Denial had become her life project...

...But once it was admitted in the case of Monica, everything changed...

...And genial Bill was a better bet to win voters' hearts than the more rigid and hard-edged Hillary...

...Bette Davis couldn't have played it better...

...No laws bear her imprint, and she's done nothing symbolic to match the gesture Eleanor Roosevelt made in 1939 defending Marian Anderson when the Daughters of the American Revolution refused to let the great contralto perform in Constitution Hall...

...But the tactics of the first lady's health care plan and other "reform" projects come straight out of the Children's Defense Fund playbook, and her attempts to defend her president husband are presaged by the maneuvers of the Legal Services Corporation...

...Hillary Clinton is now a tabloid queen, a personality puzzle, and her high approval ratings, when she does have them, are not about her few accomplishments but about her oh-so-public private life...

...There are also stories that she believed the Juanita Broad-drick rape charges...

...The carefully structured mechanism of denial was shattered...

...Hillary had a razor-like mind," Joyce Milton observes, and quotes someone else saying that she is "very good at communicating her intelligence" and possibly at amplifying it...

...As Milton reveals, she has a long history of trying to use a specific cause that sounds laudable—the condition of children, legal rights for the poor, universal health care—as the wedge for general assaults on the culture...

...The woman who hoped to be seen as a serious feminist mover and shaker stands most widely known as a put-upon consort...

...This is the key to the great Clinton drama...

...The first part of the gamble was that with her help he could become president—and she won that bet...

...She did make her husband president and became a famous first lady...

...But Clinton's talent came at a price...

...Linked as they were, they could not afford to crack down on each other, and too often the Clinton years seemed a combination of his discipline and her political skills...

...but that the marriage was inextricably entwined in their public ambitions—the traditional kind of political marriage, the union of jockey and horse...

...Hillary at once sprang to the defense of her husband, manning the war room, bracing the staff, appearing on television talk shows...

...It was only the first in a long series of trade-offs that would eventually bring her to the White House—and to scandal, impeachment, and the cover of Vogue magazine...

...Thus Mrs...

...Is Mrs...

...Clinton bonded early with Marian Wright Edelman, who would later admit that her Children's Defense Fund was largely designed to use feelings for children to impose an entitlement program...

...As a way of coping, she took to displacing her anger onto others—onto his women and onto those, like Ken Starr, who tried to hold him accountable—so that even his misdeeds tended to bind them together...

...The bargains they make and gambles they accept in pursuit of ambition...

...It's fitting that a woman who hungered for fame as a policy maker should be introduced in these pages performing domestic chores, for the path she chose to power—marriage to an electable male politician—has fixed A frequent contributor to The Weekly Standard, Noemie Emery is a writer living in Alexandria, Virginia...

...What people give up, to get something they hope will be better...

...her forever in our minds as the very model of an ill-done-by wife who decides to stand by her man...

...As Milton says, "Hillary was said to be bitterly angry . . . though it is hard to say whether she was more upset about his infidelity or his sheer ineptitude in concealing it...

...And when the horse crossed the finish line, so would the rider...

...The people who proclaim her brilliance cannot point with conviction to any one brilliant thing she has done—except save her husband...

...But the terms of the run would have been different...

...She has a high degree of a certain specialized intelligence—which is different from general genius and does not always translate into other fields...

...It's not about marriage or power or gender, but all about trade-offs and deals...

...As a lawyer, she might have been outstanding—Milton quotes a school friend as saying, "She was a big star at Yale"—but she turned down a legal career for derivative, spousal power, life in Little Rock, and desultory work at the Rose Law Firm on things like Castle Grande...

...The second part of the gamble was that once he was in the White House, she could change the role of first lady into a kind of co-president, wielding executive power without the usual annoying and time-wasting checks—and this is the bet that she lost...

...The relation is always circular: Without Bill's excesses, there would have been no scandal...

...The woman, of course, is Hillary Clinton, the servants are the staff of the White House, and the weekend was the one in January 1998 when Bill Clinton had spent a grim Saturday being deposed by lawyers in the Paula Jones lawsuit, kicking off the strangest year ever in American politics...

...She would force herself to pose beside him in the Rose Garden on the day of impeachment, but she had nothing to say when he was acquitted, as if she could no longer be bothered...

...Yet when the state troopers came out with their charges in 1993, "Hillary told a friend that the accounts were all lies...

...What they can, and cannot, bear to lose...

...The things they hand off, and the things that they cling to...

...It enraged the Hillary branch of the party...

...Similarly, the Legal Services Corporation, whose board Hillary chaired in the late 1970s, had as its ostensible mission free legal aid to the indigent...

...Indebted to her support, he didn't dare correct her political errors, letting her egregious mishandling of the health care bill go unchecked...

...It was the Lewinsky affair that revealed the Clintons' bargain for all to see...

...A first lady has instant, world-wide celebrity...

...Did she believe what she said...

...But it wasn't a hopeless bet to start with...

...Reports emerged periodically of violent fights in the White House over his strayings, but since he knew that she would never walk out, her ravings were meaning-less—and her constant public excuses for him encouraged him to go on...

...The standard reading of the Clintons is that they complement one another's strengths: her discipline and his political talent...

...Was the gamble of Hillary Clinton worth it...

...But it is just as easy to read them as a follie a deux—the classic lethal pairing of two flawed, gifted people who draw out one another's weaknesses...

...Almost immediately, Hillary's political energies were directed to damage control...

...Milton claims that Governor Clinton was carrying on five different affairs in 1989, with many late-night phone calls and nocturnal absences...

...For all the intensity of her political belief in entitlements and centralized power, it comes as a shock to realize that the administration Hillary Clinton fought so hard to elect and maintain will be praised in the end for one thing: a welfare reform act that empowered the states, effectively checked the entitlement culture, and enabled her husband to claim that the "era of big government is over...

...Whatever the wifely Hillary might have felt about a philandering spouse, the political Hillary could not break with her front man...

...Campaign workers who happened to overhear her and Bill discussing the 'bitches' who were making her life miserable were shocked by the level of vitriol," Milton says of this tactic...

...As Milton writes, "By the late 1970's, LSC training programs were teaching harassment techniques," filing nuisance lawsuits, "digging up dirt on opponents" by interviewing their ex-wives and unearthing "juicy tidbits" from court records...

...Today, Hillary Clinton seems to be attempting one last gamble, trying to barter the celebrity buzz she owns as a wife and victim for one last stab at political power as Senator Moynihan's successor in New York...

...But her mind is unsubtle and poor at the abstractions necessary for politics...

...She became Bill Clinton's wife at least in part for the fast track to political power, but found in doing so she had no time to wield that power to make policy...

...By now, as the Clintons' joint political project nears its conclusion, their marriage may be seriously damaged as well...

...her old patron, Peter Edelman, resigned from his government job and penned a magazine article that called the act the most immoral thing that Bill Clinton, or possibly anyone, had ever committed...

...Each time, she did for him the one thing that could not be done by a judge, a lawyer, an elected official, or an aide, but only by a wife...

...And what if she fails...