THE FIRST PARTNER: Hilary Rodham Clinton - Review

Washington Monthly, July, 1999 by Marjorie Williams

THE FIRST PARTNER: Hilary Rodham Clinton by Joyce Milton William Morrow & Co., $27

A new biography is another example of how lucky the Clintons are in their enemies

Joyce Milton's biography of Hillary Rodham Clinton beats to market several others that were commissioned in the wake of the Lewinsky scandal. The book business, in finding Hillary Rodham Clinton an ever-more-interesting subject, has mirrored the feelings of the public at large, which rewards the first lady with rising approbation for every new evidence of her humiliation by her husband. The First Partner is of little help in boosting our understanding of this strange phenomenon. Mostly it's a further exhibit--as if any were needed!--of how lucky Bill and Hillary Clinton have been in their enemies.

The First Partner, the work of a right-wing writer, has the strange air of having been conceived and written about six years ago. It includes, of course, an account of last year's scandal; but mostly it's a book that woke up when Hillary first burst upon the scene and decided that America must be saved from the demons of centralized planning that Hillary was plotting to unleash upon the land. Even granting, for the sake of argument, Milton's contention that Hillary came to Washington hell-bent on pursuing an agenda more liberal than her husband's, it seems strange for Milton to care so much. For one thing, the first lady's biggest effort in the direction of federal gigantism, her health care reform plan, collapsed more than five years ago. And Milton's approach ignores the obvious point that, in neutering his own presidency for the sake of his dalliances in the Oval Office, Clinton necessarily neutered Hillary's supposed co-presidency, too, leaving her only the weird consolations of being the wronged wife.

Hillary Clinton can be criticized for many things--in particular, helping her husband embitter an entire year, perhaps an entire era, of our politics in the service of his perjuries. As soon as she decided to take the offensive on his behalf, she became socially, if not legally, as culpable as he for embroiling the country in his year-long deception. The question of how this smart, driven woman got herself there--especially, what story she has told herself about her life and her marriage--is indeed an interesting one.

And Milton essentially grasps this version of Hillary's sins. But the sins she seems most interested in are of a kind that seem anachronistic--both because we're now so near the end of Clinton's sputtering presidency, and because our politics have mostly (happily) evolved past the battles over socialism and communism in which Milton labors to place Hillary Rodham Clinton.

She makes heavy weather, for example, out of Hillary's summer law school internship with Oakland lawyer Robert Treuhaft, the avowed communist who was married to the late Jessica Mitford. "While it is easy to see why a young, idealistic law student might have gone to work for Treuhaft in 1972," Milton intones, "one would also hope that she would eventually come to see that communism was not just a colorful variant of leftish idealism. Unfortunately, Hillary has never said or written a single word to indicate that she has." Then again, she's never said or written a single word to indicate that she hasn't. Ah, but there's all that collectivist rhetoric; there was Hillary's extensive involvement in the legal services movement; there's her career-long push for day care regulated and subsidized by the federal government.

It's entirely legitimate for a conservative to quarrel with Clinton's writings and proposals, which certainly do show a proclivity to believe in the power of Big Government. But when was the last time you heard a writer describe a contemporary figure, without a trace of irony, as a "fellow traveler"? This is what Milton calls Spelman College president Johnnetta Cole, who was appointed in 1992 to head the Clinton transitions education planning. In criticizing Lani Guinier, the president's one-time nominee to head the civil rights division of the Justice Department--whose writings offer a conservative a really lively chance to engage the left's assumptions about race--Milton devotes equal time to Guinier's father, who was a "functionary," in her loaded word, in the American Labor Party in the late '30s and early '40s.

One can argue that the first lady's likely run for the U.S. Senate makes her views and associations more salient than ever. But a senate race, especially under the beady eye of the New York media, is its own sort of corrective to extremist views--as is the senate itself, should Hillary win the seat. The possibility that she will go on to have a long political career of her own doesn't fully account for Milton's alarums, which marry anti-Communist fervor with the anger of those who have argued that as first lady, Clinton has been unaccountable for her influence on public policy. There's a lot of justice to the view that the Clintons blurred the boundaries of her role in ways that are unacceptable; it's all to the good if the first lady steps forward and becomes answerable for her own views. But to believe, as Milton does, that we're in some real "danger" of seeing "Hillary and her allies ... push through a comprehensive government program" for universal day care is close to delusional.