The Missus - Review

National Review, June 14, 1999 by Dick Morris

Mr. Morris, a political commentator for Fox TV and a columnist for the New York Post and The Hill, was for more than 20 years an advisor to Bill Clinton.

The First Partner: Hillary Rodham Clinton, by Joyce Milton (Morrow, 448 pp. $27)

Not everyone will want to read Joyce Milton's First Partner: Hillary Rodham Clinton, but one person definitely should: Hillary Rodham Clinton. Before she decides to run for Senate from New York, Mrs. Clinton would do well to review some of the unflattering biographical data that have been uncovered about her. This information will undoubtedly be recalled by her opponent and his partisans in any electoral contest.

The country already knows all about the scandals relating to her and finds them exhausting: Whitewater, commodities trading, Castle Grande, Travelgate, Filegate, Webb Hubbell's job offers, Gennifer Flowers, Monica Lewinsky, and the rest. Thus far Mrs. Clinton has never clearly answered the critical questions about her role in any of these. Instead she hides behind attorneys, soundbites, and the White House gates. That won't work in a brutal New York Senate race.

This is not a sensational book. Milton's research is neither impressive nor creative, relying on newspapers and other previously published accounts. Still, the portrait of Hillary Clinton she constructs is seriously at odds with much of the First Lady's carefully maintained image as an independent, tough feminist, brilliant lawyer, and gifted strategist who would have been a successful political figure on her own merit. Most striking is Mrs. Clinton's lifelong capacity to reinvent herself-from her hair and eye color to her personal history. Milton chronicles these reinventions with devastating accuracy.

One example: A major component of Clinton mythology, central to HRC's dual identity as feminist New Woman and self-abnegating martyr, has always been the story of how, after graduating from Yale law school, she forsook a promising career as a top-paid lawyer in a big eastern law firm to move to Arkansas and marry Bill Clinton. But that is not exactly how it happened. Milton reminds us that although Miss Rodham finished her course work in law one year before her beau, she hung around Yale for another year, taking classes in child development. There is no evidence that she received offers from any law firms, big or small. After Bill Clinton graduated and returned to Arkansas, she went to Boston-not to a prestigious firm, but to the Children's Defense Fund. After a short stint on the Watergate Committee, she applied for a job at the University of Arkansas law school. Yet, for years, her alleged "sacrifice"-of power and money-has been continually cited by Clinton supporters, often to justify her involvement in shady financial deals.

A related legend is that of Hillary Clinton, killer litigator. Milton cites a 1992 investigation by The American Lawyer showing that Mrs. Clinton tried only five cases in her 15-year legal career. Not only that, Milton writes, for many years Mrs. Clinton was a part-time lawyer who frequently took leaves of absence to work in her husband's campaigns or to promote specific policy positions, as in education.

The First Partner makes clear that the notion frequently advanced by the Clinton spin machine-that Mrs. Clinton would have been a successful political figure without her extraordinary husband-is simply fiction. The Hillary Rodham of the 1970s was a very different person from the Hillary Clinton of the 1990s. She was not charismatic, she was abrasive. She was not conciliatory, she was dogmatic. Her style, her manner, even her appearance were off-putting-hardly the attributes of a winning candidate. Her later attempts to become a popular figure have ranged from unsuccessful to disastrous.

Milton makes another important point-that Bill Clinton has always been his wife's ticket upward and that by the time his infidelities became too obvious to overlook, she had too much invested in him to exit the marriage. Perhaps Milton is right to emphasize this. Reinvented during her husband's first term as the happily married First Lady, HRC played that role until it was interrupted by presidential biographer David Maraniss, Paula Jones, and Monica Lewinsky. Her current role is victim, wronged wife.

The chief lesson here is that there is very little about Mrs. Clinton that she will not either change or modify as the situation requires. We can expect a new "new Hillary Clinton" soon. For her presumed Senate run, perhaps she will reemerge as a reconciled Mrs. Clinton, husband by her side, or perhaps as a pointedly independent Hillary Rodham Clinton. Of course, another lesson of First Partner is that some things about a person never change. In her most recent makeover as the understanding wife, Mrs. Clinton has said that she believes in "reconciliation and forgiveness." Yet one constant in her life has been an amazing tenacity in holding grudges. What the future holds for Bill Clinton, if his wife ever gets her way with him, is a fascinating question.