Hillary Rodham Clinton Living History
In spring 2001, Monica Lewinsky was interviewed for a TV special in New York. Asked whether she regretted that her affair with the president had wounded his wife, Lewinsky tossed her hair and replied: "I didn't think she would ever find out." But of course Hillary Clinton did find out, along with the rest of the sentient world. Post-September 11, post-Iraq, the American hysteria over a mere sex scandal seems like a relic of an insular and protected time. Nevertheless, as the unprecedented publication-day sales of Clinton's memoir of her White House years demonstrates, the private lives of political figures still open big. Curiosity about the way a first lady betrayed in front of the country feels, responds, and recovers compelled thousands to stand in line at bookstores.
It's doubtful that those sales will keep up as word of mouth on the book gets out. Living History is cautious, wary, and about as juicy as a banana. Those leaked revelations about Bill's last-minute confession of the Lewinsky affair fill only three pages of this 562-page book. Clinton's claim that she had no suspicion of her husband's infidelity strikes some as preposterous. She barely mentions Gennifer Flowers and Paula Jones, although she does note Bill's public admission during the first campaign that he had "caused pain in our marriage". After the Lewinsky crisis, she writes, she and the president had marital-counselling sessions "which forced us to ask and answer hard questions that years of non-stop campaigning had allowed us to postpone". For sure, but what exactly were those questions, and how could they be postponed for so long?
Hillary Clinton's avoidance of details has created new scepticism among American journalists and reviewers, who have already accused her of being dishonest and politically calculating in the way she presents her marriage. They are convinced that the marriage is a cynical façade, and that Clinton is recycling pious platitudes with an eye to the sympathy vote in her next campaign.
Moreover, the book dishes no gossip and settles no scores. Clinton has hardly a bad word to say about anyone; she seems to have three categories of acquaintance: friends, good friends and trusted friends. Her style is relentlessly upbeat, but her moral seriousness makes her sound humourless. (In fact, her highest praise is that someone makes her laugh, and "no one can make me laugh like Bill can".) The most intimate and revealing parts of the book come from her discussions of her parents. Her mother, Dorothy Howell Rodham, had been raised by strict grandparents, and gone to work as a mother's helper when she was 14; her father was a frugal Midwestern Republican with whom her adolescent relationship alternated between silence and quarrels. Bill Clinton's magnetism, ebullience, and ambition clearly brought something new and liberating into her life.
But why should Hillary Clinton be obliged to tell us all the secrets of her marriage and private life? Her unstated standard for the memoir seems to have been: "What would a male politician be expected to say?" Would he describe his party menus, heartaches, psychotherapy? Obviously not, and why should she? (Some reviews have mocked her handful of references to haircuts or inaugural ballgowns.) The title suggests both that she has been a public figure, living through history; and that her life in the past decade has been a form of history, a representative and symbolic life.
Indeed, the central theme in the book is Clinton's journey through the role of first lady, a role she came to understand as both surrogate and symbolic. To Michiko Kakutani, the powerful book critic of the New York Times, Clinton's analysis of this role seems grandiose and self-regarding; others have argued that Clinton abjures responsibility by discussing abstractions of identity or celebrity. But her gradual understanding of the vicariousness of her life, despite its visibility, is the true narrative of her memoir. That discovery makes the book a valuable feminist document. After the failure of health-care reform and the disastrous midterm elections that followed, Clinton was disheartened and unsure of what she should do. In conversations with the cultural anthropologist Mary Catherine Bateson (daughter of Margaret Mead), and writer Jean Houston, she acknowledged that the power of a first lady is "derivative, not independent"; adjusting to becoming "a full-time surrogate" was hard for her. At the same time, she came to understand that "the role of First Lady is deeply symbolic and that I had better figure out how to make the best of it at home and on the world stage".
If there was a tacit bargain in the Clinton White House marriage, that division of real and symbolic power was it. And Hillary Clinton did well with it in her travels, speeches, and books. Within the confines of that role, she became a staunch advocate of women's and children's rights in the United States and around the world. She weathered some of the nastiest abuse ever directed at a first lady. In the wake of the Lewinsky scandal, she could have basked in the symbolic role of the injured wife, and the dependent victim. Instead, she faced what she calls the two hardest decisions of her life: whether to stay in her marriage and whether to run for the US Senate. Moreover, she had to make them on her own, against the tide of popular opinion. Many Americans seemed to want her to walk out on Bill Clinton; her advisers and friends were almost unanimously against her running for public office in New York. Clinton had the courage to resist both kinds of pressure; and judging from the critical reception of the book, some women especially are still angry with her.
She does not attempt to explain her emotional decision to stay with Bill Clinton. She does try to explain her decision to run in New York. In March 1999, at an event promoting women in sports, a young athlete said to her: "Dare to compete, Mrs Clinton." Clinton was startled: "Her comment caught me off guard, so much that I left the event and began to think: Could I be afraid to do something I had urged countless other women to do? Why am I vacillating about taking on this race?" After all, the worst that could happen is to lose - a risk male politicians take all the time. In her turbulent race for the Senate, Clinton discovered that she was energised by "moving beyond my own role as a surrogate campaigner and allowing myself to operate on my own".
Hillary Clinton grew up with fierce political beliefs and an easily ridiculed faith in making a difference, in making the world a better place. Such beliefs and ideals rarely survive the harsh clashes and pragmatic realities of modern party politics. But what she found out was that trying to live her commitments as a full-time surrogate, having to channel her efforts through a derivative power, and having to pay for someone else's mistakes, was harder than facing the challenge of making her own mistakes, accepting her own failures, and operating on her own power. That is the real message of Living History.
· Elaine Showalter's books include Inventing Herself (Picador).
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