The End of History and the First Lady
EMERY, NOEMIE
The End of History and the First Lady The Passage of Hillary Clinton By Noemie Emery Who is Hillary, and what is she? In a pair of recent volumes about our first lady, the viewpoints differ, but...
...Who, indeed...
...His attention is focused on himself a lot...
...Understandably, this rattled the Clintons, who responded in prime boomer fashion: "Inspirational New Age authors were invited . . . to Camp David to help them...
...Throughout their marriage, she made the same choice time and time again to stay with her husband (and excuse, and defend, him...
...Attorney general is only local lawmaking," he told Sheehy dismissively...
...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...
...His mother had died a year and a half before he first set his eyes on the garrulous intern...
...with] all the accouterments of decay and dependence...
...Not all of the time, but most of the time," were Sheehy's first notes on meeting Hillary in the 1992 campaign...
...Bill himself said Hillary could have been senator...
...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...
...She "has never held Bill accountable," a source told Sheehy...
...When he's caught and lies, it's as if a third person did it...
...Overnight, he was hobbled like an old man...
...There was no autonomous, feminist road to power...
...Always, she would channel her rage from her husband's transgressions to those who stood to profit from them, becoming his primary champion...
...As a reporter, Sheehy has a keen eye for the killer anecdote...
...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...
...asks Sheehy, who answers her question: "Every time he gets caught, Clinton concentrates his sexual magnetism on his wife, for a change...
...He has no concern for anything beyond himself...
...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...
...There's treaty negotiations she could do...
...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...
...It is not that Hillary lacks brains and talents...
...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...
...He lives on campaign junk love and casual sex...
...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...
...In Hillary's Choice, on the other hand, Sheehy gives us a Hillary Clinton who is instead a monster A frequent contributor to The Weekly Standard, Noemie Emery is a writer in Alexandria, Virginia...
...She is in a perpetual state of suspended anger because of all that she has absorbed...
...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...
...And what becomes of her myth...
...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...
...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...
...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...
...She is angry...
...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...
...He couldn't get near her...
...Olson largely bypasses the topic of Mr...
...her problem is that the kind of brains and talent she has do not lead to the kind of career that she covets...
...The Republican takeover of Congress in 1994 threw the Clintons off balance...
...when insomnia would not let go its grip on his unquiet mind...
...Clinton at second hand while serving as counsel to the House committee investigating the FBI and the Travelgate scandals...
...It appears there is more than one person in him," she quotes a "mental health professional" too high-placed to identify...
...Normal people may lose their looks and their waistlines but losing Congress along with them is a midlife crisis of exceptional consequence...
...Well, not quite all of them...
...He began building a bond with Bill Clinton that seemed to caulk some of the great empty spaces inside the fatherless man...
...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 the soap-operatic Hillary's Choice, Sheehy presents political lives without politics, the presidency as Days of Our Lives...
...She does not understand that these events are interconnected: The Monica scandal brought on the emotional cheers...
...But as the author of sloppy, soupy, sappy books of advanced psychodrivel, she is given to quoting her theories as if they mean something...
...Clinton won't win...
...The Troop-ergate scandal blew up the first year...
...In a pair of recent volumes about our first lady, the viewpoints differ, but points of consensus emerge...
...and orchestrated the war room attacks that brutally slandered the people who got in her way...
...Bill by his mother, who, among other failings, did not undermine his quite enough...
...Both books agree that her finances stank...
...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...
...There's labor stuff...
...Barbara Olson is a conservative lawyer who got to know Mrs...
...He is emotionally unavailable...
...As Sheehy explains, "It's not him...
...Talk about making her attorney general after the 1992 election did not impress Hillary's brother...
...Hillary Clinton came to the White House as the first careerist first lady with an advanced degree in a field touching on politics...
...It was after this, sources say, that they repaired their marriage, and the run in 1992 was decided on...
...On the other hand, when he has power, her hold becomes weak...
...Given her limits, her greed, and her hunger, Hillary Clinton had no choice at all...
...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...
...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...
...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...
...That was one of the key reasons the health care project died...
...Sex is a way of countering this death fear he has from his father," intones yet another mental health expert...
...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...
...Because when he's in that altered state, he may feel like a different person...
...Bill let her take charge, because his "reality as a child was completely defined by a woman," his hell-raising mother...
...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...
...He can also be very caring—as long as it doesn't cost him very much...
...And when it receded, so did her charms...
...She was crushed to discover that voters still viewed her, not as a dynamic political leader, but simply as Bill Clinton's wife...
...Both also prove her a bad politician, responsible for most of the couple's legal and policy setbacks...
...Then, worst of all, he fell down and hurt himself, and was put in a wheelchair...
...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...
...So he didn't do anything to advance health care...
...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...
...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 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...
...that she caused the billing records to vanish, then surface...
...So did Tony Rob-bins, the televised hawker of empowerment videos...
...And so Bill split off, yet another midlife crisis, encountered in an altered state...
...In 1989, Hillary Clinton, who wanted to emerge as her own public woman, found herself defined as the wife of Bill Clinton...
...There's secretary of state...
...That night, she went to a dinner at the East Side home of Roger Alt-man, 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...
...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...
...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...
...that she recruited Jack Palladino to track down, blackmail, and threaten old girlfriends of Mr...
...Was his own flesh suddenly a grave...
...If she can't win there, when can she...
...But this wishful thinking misstates things completely...
...In Hell to Pay, Olson gives us a 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...
...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...
...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...
...Sheehy inquires...
...Her gifts as a lawyer are open and obvious...
...Who now would love him unconditionally...
...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...
...Now at last the myth is exploded...
...Not as a policy maker, but as a dramatic soap-opera figure, the Sue Ellen Ewing of national politics...
...Good lawyers get rich, but are not often famous outside their profession...
...Edelman has steady work, but is a minor player, and does not get to ride on Air Force One...
...Marianne Williamson, "a Jewish charismatic spiritualist . . . who presided over one of Liz Taylor's weddings," came to visit...
...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...
...Sheehy treats this as an ironic contradiction...
...Hillary gave him hell for months...
...Thus, according to Sheehy, Mrs...
...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...
...His daughter Chelsea was also about to leave home...
...But he ran four years later, and all went more smoothly: "Gore was smart enough to adopt the role of the Better Brother...
...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...
...And angry at whom...
...Bill was scarred again in 1987, when Hillary "desperately" wanted him to run for president, and tough Mama Betsey said no...
...And now her marriage can get even better, as Bill can turn into her nurturing partner...
...Clinton (and paid him out of federal campaign funds, collected from taxpayers...
...When he won a four-year term as governor in 1986, "his reward to himself was to kick over the traces...
...that she ordered the firing of the staff of the travel office, and then lied about it...
...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...
...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...
...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...
...She was interesting, not for her ideas or herself, but for her predicament...
...But where Olson has written a terse, coherent, factual brief against Mrs...
...As legend would say, she had legion: lawyer, advocate, activist, Supreme Court justice, senator, even commander in chief...
...that she lied about the cattle trades, which were really a payoff...
...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...
...Since she left the House Watergate panel, her public career has come entirely from her husband...
...Sheehy sees both Clintons as having been traumatized: Hillary by her father, who "undermined her sexuality...
...Her husband is her career in public, her only achievement and monument...
...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...
...Why does Hillary often look her most glowing when her husband has shamed her...
...Eight years of Bill, eight years of Hill, that was the dream," says Sheehy...
...How many choices did Hillary have...
...Who would play hearts with him in the wee hours, In the soap-operatic Hillary's Choice, Sheehy presents political lives without politics, the presidency as Days of Our Lives...
...Even then, Hillary seemed to see it as the prelude to the truly great happening...
Vol. 5 • January 2000 • No. 16
