A lady's hidden scorn: Hillary as Dorian Gray

0 Comments | Insight on the News, March 23, 1998 | by Suzanne Fields

A joke circulating in Washington -- one of hundreds about the Monica Lewinsky scandal -- is that Hillary Rodham Clinton has taken over the job of choosing the White House interns and her first recruit was the former Lorena Bobbitt.

For anyone who has been on Mars, Bobbitt (now known by her maiden name, Lorena Gallo) is the woman in Manassas, Va., who was so angered by her husband's drunken infidelities and abuse that she bobbed his major organ and threw it out the window of her car. She quickly became the patron saint of humiliated women.

But Mrs. Clinton has denied herself the emotions of a wounded wife. Unlike her husband, who boyishly bites his lower lip to invite sympathy, the first lady seems to be emboldened and animated by anger, aiming her venom at Kenneth Starr and the "vast right-wing conspiracy" rather than toward her husband or even Lewinsky.

Instead of dropping her eyes in facing the public, she stares right into the camera and inspires more fear than pity. Whether this is a triumph or defeat of feminism depends on what's more important to the beholder, the political or the personal.

All the life signs suggest that Hillary made her pact with the devil a long time ago, and she'll take the political power, thank you very much. When Bill Clinton campaigned in 1992, he told crowds that, if elected, the American people would get two for the price of one: "Buy one, get one free."

That backfired: He was accused of seeking to establish a "co-presidency." He changed the rhetoric if not the tactics. Hillary, as we all know, vetted if not vetoed Cabinet appointments. One of Bill's first acts as president was to appoint his wife to direct the health-care task force. This failed for many reasons, among them Hillary's abuse of power, especially when she illegally closed her meetings to the public, and Ira Magaziner lied to the court about it after someone inevitably sued. Her behind-the-scenes dominance has been observed in several books about her husband's first four years in office. Through all this, only rarely has her public face betrayed even a tremor of vulnerability.

Like everyone else, I haven't a clue about how she does it. But she's a tough act not to admire from a power point of view. He may be the "Comeback Kid"' but she's a cat with at least nine lives, looking unscathed as she emerges from each disaster and fiasco -- Gennifer Flowers; Paula Corbin Jones; the suicide of her good friend Vince Foster; the health-care task force; the firing of the White House Travel Office employees; the cattle futures, when she made a cool $100,000 as a commodities trader simply by skimming through the Wall Street Journal; the discovery of the Whitewater billing records in her private quarters; the appearance (the first for a first lady) before a grand jury; and now the humiliation that accompanies the Lewinsky allegations, including the news of the young intern's 37 visits to the White House after she was believed safely exiled to the Pentagon, the gifts, the late-night messages, the allegations of oral sex... and the jokes. Most of all, those raunchy jokes.

Perhaps there's a picture of Hillary Clinton, like that of Dorian Gray, hidden somewhere in the White House attic, revealing her agonies writ large so she can look unfazed in public, dancing with her husband on a secluded beach (with the photographers tipped off to snap their cameras at just the right moment), or when she attacks the independent counsel instead of snapping at her husband.

Women who seek just a touch of feline ferocity directed at the cheatin' husband should have been there on the morning the Lewinsky scandal hit the newspapers. Hillary, reports the American Spectator, was up early that morning to read the news clips before taking a train to Baltimore for a speech at Goucher College.

The president called three times during the 35-minute train trip. Three times the first lady told her assistant, who had the cellular phone, that she wouldn't take the president's call.

That night, after the Clintons hosted a dinner for the White House Endowment Fund, the president slept in a guest room, alone.

Another friend relates still another sad Hillary moment. When she read that the president had given "that woman" -- Lewinsky -- a copy of Walt Whitman's Leaves of Grass, the first lady turned to an aide and said with a bitterness every woman could understand: "He gave me the same book after our second date."