Hillary's History
O'ROURKE, P.J.
If you plan not to read this summer, Living History is just the book. Hillary Clinton's new memoir is more than 100,000 pages long. At least I think it is. There are only 562 page numbers, but you...
...Otherwise, how to explain such sentences as, "The dominant architecture was Soviet-style socialist realism," or "Tom and I spent late nights wrestling over the fine points of legal interpretation" (a euphemism sure to be taken up by the British tabloid press), or this description of a 1992 bus trip campaigning: "Bill, Al, Tipper and I spent hours talking, eating, waving out the window...
...Let's take a deep one...
...The money will allow them, per Dante, to visit the fifth cornice of purgatory, where avarice is atoned, whenever they can get family leave from the ninth circle of hell where they'll be eternally tortured for spreading false doctrine...
...She has lunch with Jackie Onassis, who "cautioned me that Bill, like President Kennedy, had a personal magnetism that inspired strong feelings in people...
...The purchasers of Living History can count themselves benefited, also...
...That was when my hair got me in more trouble...
...The free market is a good thing...
...Of course, a couple of people had to...
...I do not begrudge Hillary and her publisher their profits...
...And that is, ultimately, what makes Living History such a good nonread...
...Conference on Women speech: "It is a violation of human rights when women are doused with gasoline, set on fire and burned to death because their marriage dowries are deemed too small...
...We wanted to be comfortable, and, under the sun's heat, I was glad for the hats and cotton clothes I had packed...
...Hillary hasn't been behind the wheel since 1996...
...She tries to give us the genesis of her world-view, but the anecdote runs out of control:One snowy night during my freshman year, Margaret Clapp, then President of the college, arrived unexpectedly at my dorm...
...I was raised to love my God and my country, to help others, to protect and defend the democratic ideals that have inspired and guided free people for more than 200 years," a slap in the face to those of us who were raised to say please and thank you and not track mud into the house...
...In China, at the 1995 United Nations Fourth World Conference on Women, "The serious and stony-faced delegates suddenly leaped from their seats to give me a standing ovation...
...We must understand her ability to commune with the strong, intelligent women of past generations: "So, what would Mrs...
...While Bill talked about social change," says Hillary, "I embodied it," to loud hosannas and wild exaltations...
...And understand her hair: "Thus began my lifelong hair struggles...
...Has Living History been dumbed down for its intended reader...
...I cajoled my lead [Secret Service] agent, Don Flynn, into sitting beside me...
...We are informed, for instance, that Jackie Onassis was once, herself, a first lady and later married a Greek shipping magnate...
...Conservatives, including most of the Founding Fathers, have always worried that the price of a democratic system would be a mediocre nation...
...Heavy...
...Hillary failed the District of Columbia bar examination, but she passed in Arkansas—and "in the first jury trial I handled on my own, I defended a canning company against a plaintiff who found the rear end of a rat in the can of pork and beans he opened for dinner one night...
...So, starting on page 440, that nothing happens, and by page 472 (that is to say immediately, given the high-speed laser-printing prolixity of Living History), Hillary is announcing, "Life moved on, and I moved with it...
...I decided that night that I had found the place where I belonged...
...And when they had a cat and dog, "I had to set up a separate correspondence unit . . . to answer their mail...
...Any number of Clinton friends and supporters told us it was nothing...
...Unlike ordinary humans, Hillary had a choice about that move...
...I hesitate to think there was a logical explanation, but Hillary does say, "Ireland invigorated and inspired me, and I wished we could bottle up the good feelings and take them back home...
...put together could not have foreseen, in their gloomiest moments, the rise of Clinton-style über-mediocrity—with its soaring commonplaces, its pumped trifling, its platinum-grade triviality...
...Plus, there's a bonus...
...He has so much information running through his head at any given moment that he doesn't always notice where he's going...
...One senses profound superficialities here...
...Delegates rushed to touch me, shout words of appreciation and thank me for coming...
...We must recognize Hillary's principled outspoken feminism as elucidated in her U.N...
...You know, I used to work in a Howard Johnson's restaurant...
...And then there's me...
...You know the nothing I mean...
...They failed...
...The Alpha-dork husband, the super-twerp wife, and the hyper-wonk vice president—together with all their mega-weenie water carriers, such as vicious pit gerbil George Stephanopoulos and Eastern diamondback rattleworm Sidney Blumenthal—spent eight years trying to make America nothing to brag about...
...Neither can drive a car...
...She came into the dining room and asked for volunteers to help her gently shake the snow off the branches of the surrounding trees so that they wouldn't break under the weight...
...And Bill should never try...
...We learn how a chief executive walks to the podium to deliver a State of the Union speech: "The president greets members of both parties who, by tradition, sit on opposite sides of the aisle...
...We must listen to Hillary's insights...
...I didn't use makeup," declares Hillary, "and wore jeans and work shirts most of the time...
...It's been done before...
...Was Jackie talking about the grassy knoll or about a different kind of mons...
...Roosevelt have to say about my present predicament...
...Hillary has spent forty years with the pros on the fairways of prevarication, yet her gimmes lack audacity, her mulligans do not astonish, and her foot-played "improvements of lie" are no more subtle than "Whitewater never seemed real because it wasn't...
...Compared with Hillary Clinton, Bill is a big pile of humility...
...Vituperation is supposed to be another of Hillary's salient features...
...Don's knuckles were white as dice by the time we arrived...
...Yes, assuming its author read it...
...But she spritzes, rather than splashes, acid and then only on the dead, the powerless, and Ken Starr...
...So very much else...
...Hillary calls Bill's mother "Virginia Cassidy Blythe Clinton Dwire Kelley" and eulogizes her as "an American original—big-hearted, good humored, fun-loving"— by which she means a drunk...
...She never came out and said it, but she meant that he might be a target...
...Her argument to the jury that "rodent parts which had been sterilized might be considered edible in certain parts of the world" would not be of much use in a felony narcotics trial, despite the admirable multiculturalism of the sentiment...
...I was elected co-captain of the safety patrol...
...Living History arrived from the publisher with a seven-page executive summary (itself ferociously tedious) that indicates no one is intended to read this book...
...Clinton has led a busy, meddlesome life from an early age...
...We walked from tree to tree through knee-high snow under a clear sky filled with stars, led by a strong, intelligent woman alert to the surprises and vulnerabilities of nature...
...Nausea, however, is interesting compared with the actual symptoms of going-through-the-motions sickness induced by Living History...
...Hillary serves roasted eggplant soup and sweet potato puree to Jacques Chirac and doesn't get the joke when Chirac says, "Of course, I love many things American, including the food...
...Little wonder that when Hillary meets Queen Elizabeth, "She reminded me of my own mother...
...Living History traps us in the heated daydream of an earnest and lofty-minded high school student—the kind who belonged to the Methodist youth group, sat on the student council, was elected junior-class vice president, got appointed to the principal's Cultural Values Committee "to promote tolerance," and would go on to become president of student government at some college for girls...
...But the junior senator's insults are preferable to her compliments...
...I had given a lot of thought to how Chelsea and I should dress on the trip...
...Hillary's countercultural experience seems to have consisted of one visit, with another suburban girl, to Grant Park during the 1968 Democratic convention...
...However, it says something unflattering about our era that prominent political figures—who used to write declarations of independence, preambles to constitutions, Gettysburg addresses, and such—now use the alphabet only to make primitive artifacts, like the letter-inscribed tablet that Charlemagne is said to have put under his pillow each night, in the hope he'd wake up literate...
...We must watch Hillary learn: "I always knew that America matters to the rest of the world...
...But George Washington and William F. Buckley Jr...
...Not that the book isn't supposed to sell...
...In my own life I have been a wife, mother, daughter, sister, in-law, student, lawyer, children's rights activist, law professor, Methodist, political advisor, citizen and so much else...
...But it's beyond me how those reactionary pundits concluded that Hillary is representative of the 1960s generation...
...Not much, I thought...
...You remember how the popular kids at summer camp got together and made sure we had acne...
...Poor me...
...And understand her stupidity...
...And, as a result of nothing happening, nothing—as you may remember—happened...
...But until page 440 of her memoir, nothing happens...
...On page 402 we are presented with a rare, possibly unique, portrait of the likeable side of Robert Mugabe: "President Mugabe said little during my courtesy visit with him in the presidential residence in the capital, Harare...
...There is the junior associate— doubtless a strong, intelligent woman— at the law firm of Bland and Blander who slogged through every word to make sure nothing was actionable...
...vying with Hugh and Tony for one of the drumsticks or asking for more cranberries and water-melon pickle, two of his favorites from childhood...
...It was another hair crisis...
...After listening to Jiang Zemin explain that the Tibetans had been liberated by the Chinese, Hillary concludes, "I don't think Jiang . . . was being quite straight with me on Tibet...
...After all, life revolves around Hillary...
...Living History contains a surprise unmentioned, I believe, by other reviewers...
...With a wonderful young person like that, well, some people are bound to be jealous and just act mean...
...They could have had Hillary as their legal aid defender instead of merely their senator...
...I was no Miss Arkansas," but "no matter what else was going on in her life, Virginia got up early, glued on her false eyelashes and put on bright red lipstick, and sashayed out the door...
...In nearly twenty years of family life, the Clintons did not own a home or go to the mall without armed guards...
...He paid close attention to his young wife, Grace, while I made conversation with her, and he periodically broke into giggles for no apparent reason...
...The book does not contain even a dog-worthy return to the vomit of the Lewinsky scandal...
...There are only 562 page numbers, but you know how those Clintons lie...
...O'Rourke is a contributing editor to THE WEEKLY STANDARD...
...In fact, Hillary and her husband aren't representative of much of anything American...
...And I was glad for the scopolamine transdermal patch...
...Now, Hillary's stupidity is of a Monday's-homework-done-on-Friday-night, 1,400 on her SATs kind, but nonetheless stupid for all that...
...No fair consulting Freud...
...We must understand her sense of humor: "No one can make me laugh the way Bill does...
...In Chicago, at the 1996 Democratic Convention, "The crowd erupted into a frenzy of clapping, chanting, and foot-stomping...
...Boris Yeltsin "laughed our way through a day of public appearances and private meals with local dignitaries...
...Hillary points out that, during the Whitewater investigations, "public discourse was increasingly dominated by reactionary pundits and TV and radio personalities...
...Even Hillary's grief over the death of her dad is padded: "My father would not be at the table PJ...
...If they're going to throw the book at us, and the book is by Hillary, the republic will endure (and the Republicans will prevail...
...A mere ream of paper could not contain the padding that has gone into this tome...
...And then there are the fulsome tales of official junkets—unimportant, uninteresting, uneventful, and unending...
...As Hillary did...
...Hillary's friend Jean Houston "wraps herself up in brightly colored capes and caftans and dominates the room with her larger-than-life presence and crackling wit, . . . reciting poems, passages from great works of literature, historical facts and scientific data all in the same breath...
...my travels taught me how the rest of the world matters to America...
...Plumbing the shallows of Hillary is no easy matter, even for Hillary...
...And I understand it's selling nicely...
...In the crowd behind us, someone screamed profanities and threw a rock, which just missed us...
...My motions to urge the crowd to sit down were futile, so I just waved and let the cheers wash over me...
...And the stingy-mama-bird regurgitations of Whitewater excuses and evasions will leave the most adoring Hillary chick wanting more worm...
...I don't doubt that she wrote part of it, but no one seems to have read the final text...
...About Princess Di and Mother Teresa, for example: "Aside from the obvious differences, each of these women had a talent for spotlighting the most vulnerable and neglected people and using her celebrity in calculated ways to help others...
...Which must have been a sight, though nothing compared with the trip to Russia when Hillary and Mrs...
...But, except for us, Living History suffers the fate of modern poetry, with an authorship of many and an audience of none...
...Boring others is a form of aggression, and Hillary attacks her public with the weapon of brutal dullness...
...Aside from the obvious differences...
...Hillary— with the help of at least six ghostwriters—nails the goose of a manuscript to the barn floor and force-feeds it with lint...
...This was a big deal at our school...
...We need to work from primary sources...
...Damning stuff...
Vol. 8 • July 2003 • No. 42
