The Woman Who Would Be Queen ... Or President

What a story! A grinning little girl in a nice suburb. The usual patriarchal, dysfunctional family. She's eager to please a demanding daddy, and good at things. Never good enough, of course. By high school, she's well-armoured, not pretty, not plain, but bright, sharp, sensitive, sensible, proud in her armour. The boys call her "Miss Frigidaire." She's ambitious, goes to a posh women's college, begins to bloom. She's avidly yet cautiously political, works in both parties opposing the Vietnam War. She's avidly yet cautiously sexual, likes men she pleases, writes a first boyfriend wistful poems about "congregations" of daffodils swaying "to the preaching of the wind." She's liberal yet conservative, ordinary yet not.

She goes to law school, ready to have "influence." She meets her fate in the form of a winning young southerner, a fleshy quick Sisyphus forever pushing back his seedy origins with a wanton libido. They fall in love, marry, have a child, defer her dreams for his rise. Drawling, squat skyline, always a little mouldering, backwater, freewheeling Little Rock.

For 16 long local-celebrity, prepping-for-national-power, but gruelling, hardening, closing-up years. Fortunes up and down. He in and out of beds not hers. Long nights in the governor's mansion with his betrayal, his state police bodyguards attending it, snickering like everyone else they know who knows, somewhere out there in the sultry darkness. Days in a southern white-shoe law firm, a man she pleases, serving the big interests, making money and connections.

And in the end, she salvages her Sisyphus from himself, saves her dream, stores up political savvy, cynicism about the electorate, resentment, anger, hurt, self-righteousness, determination - all as thick and sticking as Arkansas River mud.

The White House at last. She claims her due as co-leader. But it's betrayal and salvage all over again, now of and from what she's become as well as with him. What she does is never, ever enough, it seems. But she is nothing if not armoured. She will do it on her own. The grinning little girl, the unreconciled, long-suffering, indomitable consort, is determined to be the first woman president of the United States. Moving, majestic, squalid, titillating, tragic. It hits us where we live - which, among other things, is an America, and world, they ruled and may again. And the beauty of it is that it's true. Well, current biography, anyway; some of it may turn out to be what actually happened.

The Clintons - no saga has absorbed and agitated us more than the personal-as-political drama of the United States' 42nd president and now its would-be 44th. At the start, I should declare my proximity to this weighty new book on Hillary Clinton. Carl Bernstein's publisher and editor are mine as well, and I became an admirer of his reporting some 35 years ago in his often brilliant, name-making journalism on Richard Nixon's Watergate scandal My criticism here, then, comes as much in sadness as in any reviewer's occupational pique.

We have been treated recently to such vacuous partisan schlock about the subject - for example, Edward Klein's juvenile screed The Truth About Hillary, the mocking opposite of its title - that A Woman in Charge, along with the rival Her Way, by Jeff Gerth and Dale Van Natta, are welcome new legitimate currency in a realm of political biography that was suffering the worst of Gresham's Law.

Bernstein has laboured conscientiously to give us a full and fair portrait of this remarkable figure now poised to be even more historic. His account seems exhaustive in giving her the benefit, or at least a rendering, of any positive side of what was clearly - and for a biographer, sometimes maddeningly - a life of mixed motives.

In dreamy poetry to her first beau, Geoff Shields, in dozens of other scenes drawn from her friends, he also gives us a Hillary more human than most of the genre ever captured. Yet he is no apologist. His portrayal of her self-righteousness, the cynical intertwining or religion and religiosity, is withering. His First Lady of Arkansas and then the United States emerges as repellently arrogant, self-righteous, even venomous, both effect and cause of her tortured yet effectively expedient tie to her haunted, haunting husband. The anti-iconic yields some of Bernstein's best lines, as in her "Jesuitical lying, evasion, and ... stonewalling."

But after eight years in the making, more than 200 interviews and 600-plus pages, there is a nagging sense that the author has given us only part of the life - much of that repeating or elaborating on what was already known - and little of the times, the sheer political-historical context, that would have conveyed and explained the rest of Hillary Rodham Clinton, and much of our era in the process.

Again and again, from a richly colourful and corrupt Arkansas to a Washington that so smugly looked down on it while matching it in venality and seediness, Bernstein raises questions about the deeper politics at work, the culture that the Clintons surrendered to, imbibed, grew so adept at playing, perpetuated and perpetuate.

Thus Bernstein devotes much attention to Hillary's vain attempt at "health reform" in the first months of the Clinton presidency, the fateful, blundering effort to create a new national health insurance system. Yet he slides past the heart of the matter - her out-of-the-question refusal to consider or even offer for national debate any single-payer system on the Canadian model, and her laboured, convoluted final plan that would have preserved the lethal grip of the private insurance conglomerates on U.S. medical care - in both cases tracing her political as well as intellectual bondage to an oligarchic political system.

Much of the book - perhaps inevitably, considering its sources drawn so preponderantly from the same culture, or the author's own apparent sociology of knowledge 30 years after his last book on U.S. politics - has the feel of a specimen pinned under glass with no sense of genus, habitat, genealogy or accounting for habit. Not even the dwelling on the agony of her mating seems repaid.

"My husband may have his faults, but he has never lied to me," Bernstein quotes Hillary earnestly telling a friend at the moment Bill's serial satyr's lies were all too painfully plain and the Senate was voting on his impeachment.

"That statement speaks for itself," Bernstein says tellingly, when it literally screams for an answer in deeper temperament and motive that none of the throng of sources, nor the biographer, could provide, and that bears so much on Hillary Clinton's qualities of character and personality in the world's most powerful office.

Bernstein lays to rest, as much of the country's conscious political dialogue already had, the poignant delusion that there is some closet radical Hillary, witch manqué of the mindless, crypto-sexist Right, waiting to break out in her own Oval Office.

But beyond the Clintons' endless, not-so-young and restless angst with each other, beyond a by-now-pedestrian appreciation of a decidedly conventional, ever-calculating, ever-compromising politician - whose parody of the system has been lavishly rewarded by her vast war chest, after all - this disappointing book manages no conceptual framework and little penetrating insight.

Who is this woman, why did she make the judgments she made, and what may we expect of her now? It may be soap opera, but not so much a mystery, after all. The crime in U.S. politics is the tyranny of money. Bernstein is one more Hound of the Baskervilles silent in the enveloping night.

Meanwhile, she seems closer than ever to being in charge. If her presidential run, as Bernstein suggests, is a kind of revenge for defeats and slights and humiliations in Bill's presidency, or simply what she planned and worked so hard in Arkansas to salvage all along, it is certainly working.

Feminists will rail about the betrayal of what they thought or wanted her to be, whatever she really was and is, while most Democratic women seem only too ready to vote for her in numbers at least enough to win the nomination. Anti-war critics will disdain her vote on the Iraq war and later evasions and equivocations, but no one questions the deeper reason for her, and her party's, historic forfeiture after 9/11: Who and what are they in the grip of in the gravest issue of our epoch?

Least of all do we know how the American male - however Democratic, Independent, anti-war or anti-Republican - will react at that fateful moment in the voting booth when confronted with this enormously freighted choice of a first woman as president.

Of one reality, at least, we may be certain: The barrage for and against her, knowing and unknowing, will continue, and where the alternative in November, 2008, may well be an even more problematic Republican, we are all in the line of fire at that once-grinning little girl.

Roger Morris, who served on the National Security Council under presidents Johnson and Nixon, is the award-winning author of Richard Milhous Nixon: The Rise of an American Politician and, in 1996, the bestselling Partners in Power: The Clintons and Their America. His Shadows of the Eagle, a history of U.S. covert intervention in the Middle East and South Asia, will be published in 2008.

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