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July 20, 2003
Review: Humanizing Hillary
HILLARY Clinton’s runaway bestseller, Living History is a cleverly crafted memoir with multiple agendas. First, it is an attack on male chauvinism. When she spoke at her 1969 graduation ceremony — the first student invited to do so — she got a standing ovation as well as a preview of life-long antagonisms to come. In the words of Cardinal Richelieu, and she quotes, “Intellect in a woman is unbecoming.”
Then it is the story of a liberal of the 1960s generation — a time of tumultuous social and political change in America when the “personal is political” became the maxim for women’s rights movement. The memoir highlights her middle-class upbringing and her passion for women and children’s rights worldwide.
This memoir is also a travelogue. Mrs Clinton travelled to 78 nations as First Lady and there is an interesting account of her March 1995 visit to Pakistan: “When the sun rose over the Margalla Hills, I saw Islamabad for the first time...” More on the meanings of her travels later.
However, at the heart of Living History is the story of love and infidelity carefully packaged in a bland rendering of the Lewinsky scandal. It was at Yale, writes Mrs Clinton, that she met “the person who would cause my life to spin in directions I could never have imagined.” Enter Bill Clinton — a bearded student “looking more like a Viking than a Rhodes Scholar returning from Oxford”. They immediately fell in love and finally she agreed to marry him when he proposed to her while on a holiday in England’s Lake District.
As this daughter of a travelling salesman rose to become First Lady she came face to face with the deep-rooted wink-and-nod sexism of American politicians. This book reminds us of the infidelities that other powerful women like Katherine Graham, the late publisher of The Washington Post or Jackie Kennedy faced at the hands of their respective husbands. It is quite ironic to see the women’s movement propel these ladies to the pinnacle of power and yet get disempowered in the bedroom. But more to the point, Mrs Clinton does not tell all about her husband’s serial infidelities. She simplistically would have the readers believe that Monica Lewinsky was her husband’s one and only betrayal. Gennifer Flowers, Paula Jones, the tales troopers told are all conveniently dismissed as lies fabricated by political enemies from the conservative right.
It is true that the “vast right-wing conspiracy” against President Clinton that Mrs Clinton spoke of in 1998 has borne fruit since those very political enemies hold all the essential levers of power in Washington today. Yet, five years later, Senator Hillary Clinton is at home with her former adversaries who sought to impeach her husband. Both she and Mr Clinton faithfully represent the interests of the financial elite of which they are now its new members. Seen in this light by the left in America, hers is also a story of the putrefaction of liberalism and the betrayal of the historic constituents of the Democratic Party.
Of course, she will argue that she is a ‘radical centrist’ and therefore a New Democrat. Leaving this debate aside, her book is clearly an attempt to re-invent herself. Keen to banish her reputation of frosty arrogance and abrasive behaviour, the memoir delves into anecdotes that endear the author to its readers. Mixing a wide-eyed style of informal writing with gravitas, the book presents a new humanized, dumbed down Hillary. And that I believe is the fundamental agenda of the memoir on which her focus group worked quite diligently.
It is a very American thing to ask for forgiveness and be forgiven by exorcising your demons in public. Forget if it is also hypocritical to receive eight million dollars for washing your dirty linen in public. Clearly, the political objective here is to inoculate the author from any future backlash from the sordid scandals of her husband, should she later decide to run for President. Many believe that she will do so in 2008, soon enough to satisfy her ambitions long enough for family scandals to fade away.
An additional agenda of this memoir is, therefore, to sound like a manifesto as well as settle scores with the likes of independent counsel Ken Starr and Supreme Court Chief Justice William Rehnquist. By placing Rehnquist at the centre of the cabal to impeach the former President, Mrs Clinton is able, at the end of the book, to link the hotly disputed 2000 presidential election to the impeachment attempt of 1999.
Finally, Living History is not really about Hillary Clinton “the woman, the wife or the mother”. It is undeniably about Hillary Clinton the politician. She is a soulmate of the brilliant political animal known as Bill Clinton. She is his political wife: “Even after all these years,” she writes,” Bill is still the most interesting, energizing and fully alive person I have ever met.”
Standing by her man, in short, has proven to be Mrs Clinton’s smartest political move. The once demonized First Lady was elected to the US senate by skillfully presenting herself as part victimized woman and part loyal wife. At the very outset of her memoir, emphasizing her extensive worldwide travels, Mrs Clinton quotes a Kenyan proverb: “What you don’t learn from your mother, you learn from the world.”
Should we read this wisecrack in the context of a sitting neo-con President who is unbelievably ill-informed of the world? Actually when President Bush took power he had hardly set foot outside the continental USA. No wonder Senate Republicans have a “Stop Hillary Now” link on their website.
Reviewer’s email: javedamir@hotmail.com
Living History
By Hillary Rodham Clinton
Simon and Schuster. Available at Liberty Books (Pvt) Ltd, 3 Rafiq Plaza, M.R. Kayani Road, Saddar, Karachi
Tel: 021-5683026
Email: libooks@cyber.net.pk Website:
www.libertybooks.com
ISBN 0-7432-2224-5
562pp. $28
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