Her Husband's Wife : The First Lady and her truth problem

National Review, Dec 20, 1999 by Carl M. Cannon

'WE talk," Hillary Rodham Clinton said of her husband in an interview in a new magazine, itself called Talk. "We talk in the solarium, in the bedroom, in the kitchen-it's just constant conversation."

A few weeks later, Mrs. Clinton found herself in a dicey situation over her husband's plan to release 16 convicted Puerto Rican militants from federal prisons, a move widely interpreted as designed to help his wife with New York's Puerto Rican activists. Oh, but this was not so, insisted Mrs. Clinton. Moreover, she maintained, she and the president had never discussed the issue-not once.

Could this possibly be true? It was certainly at odds with the picture she painted for Talk, and at the White House, aides looked at their shoes when you put this question to them. But there was more to come. As the criticism of the presidential clemency proposal mounted and Mrs. Clinton sought to distance herself from it, aides to the First Lady reported that she conveyed her disapproval to her life's mate-in a letter.

Such conflicting accounts are commonplace when it comes to the Clintons. On November 16, Hillary spokesman Howard Wolfson blurted out on Larry King Live that the president of the United States would be moving with Mrs. Clinton into her Chappaqua, N.Y., house after the first of the year. Now, for a sitting president to vacate the White House would be big news, and Mrs. Clinton was asked about this possibility. Replied the woman who boasted of the "constant conversation" that never stops, even in the bedroom: "I haven't really talked to him about that."

And two days before Thanksgiving, when she finally announced for the Senate, Mrs. Clinton said she hadn't told her husband about her impending statement-even while assuring her audience that the president would be campaigning for her. Go figure.

Among the questions that should be posed about Hillary Clinton, the Senate candidate, is a very basic one: Has a close proximity to Bill Clinton over the past 30 years infected her with her husband's indifference to truth- telling?

It seems to be a crucial vulnerability for her: Even those voters who give Mrs. Clinton high marks as a First Lady harbor doubts about her veracity. Asked in an Opinion Dynamics survey whether Mrs. Clinton really believed that her husband's infidelities could be traced to childhood "abuse"-she made that assertion in the Talk interview as well-only 22 percent thought Mrs. Clinton was "sincerely" trying to explain her husband's behavior. Asked if Mrs. Clinton was "truly a fan" of the Yankees, only 15 percent said yes, while 68 percent said the claim was "just politics."

Mrs. Clinton, of course, began her flirtation with a Senate run with that claim of a lifelong attachment to the Bronx Bombers, as well her hometown Chicago Cubs. It was vintage Hillary Clinton-self-serving and implausible, but impossible to disprove.

Here's another example: In a recent interview with First Lady historian Carl Sferrazza Anthony, Mrs. Clinton told a story of getting a job in an Alaska cannery the summer before she began at Yale Law School. But, alas, she was fired-she said-after questioning a manager about discolored fish. "They were really dark and spoiled," she told Anthony. "But I guess nobody wanted to know that." Anthony repeated the anecdote uncritically. But how would you check such a claim if you wanted to?

Mrs. Clinton related an even more dubious vignette in December 1997, while addressing a group of Boston high-school kids at a seminar against racism called "Team Harmony." After one African-American senior told of being cut off by a white student who said, "Listen you little nigger, this is not Dorchester," and a Jewish girl told of boys telling vile jokes about the Holocaust in her presence, Hillary said she had a story.

She said that during a break in the action of one of her junior-high- school soccer games, she turned to the goalie for the other team and remarked, "Boy, it's really cold." The other girl simply replied, "I wish people like you would freeze." Shocked, young Hillary Rodham asked why she would say such a thing when the other girl didn't even know her. "I don't have to know you to know I hate you," snapped the goalie.

Everybody at the event nodded sagely, but what was this-an example of reverse racism? That would have been a subtle, if un-Clintonian point. But no. On the plane ride home, Mrs. Clinton admitted to reporters that the goalie herself was white. Say what? The way the First Lady told it, the hateful girl was of Eastern European descent and looked upon Hillary as "some sort of uppity, wealthy, white-bread girl." The media reported this as though it made sense.

Mrs. Clinton's most famous bit of misdirection, of course, was her "vast right-wing conspiracy" rationalization for the Monica Lewinsky scandal (only 30 percent of those in the Opinion Dynamics poll believed that Hillary "truly believed" that when she said it). If some of Mrs. Clinton's most doubtful statements can be chalked up to defending her husband, it is worth remembering that her earliest deceptions were in her own behalf.