HILLARY CLINTON: Her Way by Jeff Gerth and Don Van Natta Jr

J Murray £20 pp448

A WOMAN IN CHARGE: The Life of Hillary Rodham Clinton by Carl Bernstein

Hutchinson £25 pp640

Hillary's other man

Carl Bernstein on the tragedy that scarred Hillary's White House years

• Hillary's impossible men, starting with her father

• The pain of being Hillary

BACKGROUND

• It’s now or never

Man v God

Christopher Hitchens is an evangelical secularist, an atheist warlord. Religion, he writes, is 'violent and allied to racism'

Related Internet Links

• Comment central/Hillary

Related Links

• On the edge of a crack-up

I have, if not a dream, a reverie. In this alternative reading, the bright and tough-minded young Hillary Rodham stays close to her conservative parents in Illinois, becomes an attorney specialising in (let’s say) environmental law, marries a wealthy Chicago businessman who admires her pluck and intellect, survives the discredit of the Republican party under Richard Nixon, and is elected the junior republican senator from her home state about six years after the last American soldier leaves Vietnam. She would long ago have had the chance to become the first female president of the United States. Instead of which, she moved vaguely “left” in her college years, hooked up with a Rhodes scholar but obvious scallywag who made her move to an obscure Southern state, put in some gruelling time as his wife and helpmeet, hoped to see him run in 1988, was almost shattered by discovering the private reasons that made it impossible for him to do so, bit her lip for another four years, then lived eight rather distraught years in the White House, and has spent all her subsequent life trying to catch up to the electoral cycle that she missed the first time around. These days she is finally running for the top job, with the most tight-lipped and rehearsed smile in America, and she knows that it’s now or never.

There is tragedy and comedy in this story, but tragedy and comedy are almost entirely lacking in the two vast tomes that have now appeared, both haunting and highlighting her campaign. Here it all is again: the familiar and dreary tale that lays bare the banality of most modern politics. Zigzagging after the opinion polls, desperate for money and not supremely choosy about how to acquire it, consumed with ambition, Hillary Clinton picks up and drops the “Rodham” by turns, as she comes to realise that her husband cares for nobody but himself. I am not an admirer of her current spin doctors, but there was some justice in the comment made by Philippe Reines, her Senate spokesman, who has dismissed both these books not as “cash for trash” – the old charge against the truth-telling women who exposed Bill Clinton’s sordid amours – but as “cash for rehash”. These studies are not trash, but what they contain is indeed largely old news. And yet that’s partly the point.

The candidate herself seems determined to redisprove Scott Fitzgerald’s much-exploded dictum that there are no second acts in American lives. Unfortunately for her, this involves both taking the credit for her husband’s administration, while avoiding the less adorable aspects of the couple’s political and personal relationship. Thus, Jeff Gerth and Don Van Natta suggest – correctly in my view – that her relatively hawkish position on Iraq is to be explained by the fairly hard line that Clinton and Al Gore (then) took on Saddam Hussein, while Carl Bernstein argues persuasively that, in the Arkansas years, Hillary sought advice about divorce, personally interviewed one woman she thought might be sleeping with her husband and had to be talked out of making a run for the governorship on her own account as a means of getting back at him.

Gerth and Van Natta also claim two sources for the story that Bill and Hillary agreed on a strategy of two terms as president for him, to be followed in due course by two terms as president for her. One of the sources has since retracted, but the authors are not the sort of reporters to make a mistake on this scale (they’re both from the New York Times stable), and I find the allegation convincing in that, given the distraught self-centredness that dominated this dysfunctional marriage, it is easy to imagine such a crazy pact being made. It would also help explain the annoying sense of entitlement that Mrs Clinton’s campaign displays. She’s suffered for this, she’s sacrificed for it, she’s endured humiliation in her quest for it. She’s already earned it, in fact.

The words “control freak” were freely used, even by Clinton sympathisers, to describe the then-First Lady while she was in the White House. This is nothing to the state of affairs now described by Gerth and Van Natta, who have interviewed those who attend strategy sessions at the senator’s Washington home. “Visitors are asked to check their bags, cameras and cellphones at the door, pictures are taken by an authorised photographer.” Nothing must be left to chance. It’s not difficult to guess where this obsessive attention to detail has come from. Bernstein has her telling a close female friend back in the 1990s that, with Bill safely in the White House, she could at last relax about his uncontrollable infidelities. The cares of office and the vigilance of the press corps would keep him in bounds. To describe this as an optimistic view of the case would be an understatement. The related problem (that in the meanwhile Mrs Clinton knowingly smeared truth-telling females as liars and helped to have them discredited) is receiving less attention than it might. We used to hear that “lying about sex” was more or less okay. Grant that if you like – but what about lying about women? Mrs Clinton’s popularity among female voters is by no means as great as she might like to think, and it’s not difficult to see why.

Some damaging things are said in these books. Health care is already a huge question in the Democratic primaries, with John Edwards making most of the running on what used to be Mrs Clinton’s pet subject, and now comes Bob Boorstin, who worked for her at the crucial time, to tell Bernstein: “I find her to be among the most self-righteous people I’ve ever known in my life. And it’s her great flaw: it’s what killed health care.” Gore is not quoted, but it’s an open secret that he cannot stand her and that, if he chooses to run again, it will be partly because of her excruciating personality. This is a lot of baggage to be toting and – to return to those spin doctors – “rehash” is only another term for baggage.

On the offensive

Hillary Clinton’s first exposure to mass scrutiny in 1992 was a disaster, and, as Gerth and Van Natta reveal, it took a Hollywood star to help clean up the mess. She told CBS viewers at the height of the Gennifer Flowers scandal: ‘I’m not sitting here, some little woman standing by my man like Tammy Wynette.’ As the storm broke, Hillary’s aides phoned Wynette to broker a personal apology, but the singer wouldn’t take the call. She relented only when the actor Burt Reynolds said, ‘You have to talk to her.’

Available at Sunday Times Books First prices of £18 (Gerth) and £23 (inc p&p) on 0870 165 8585 and timesonline.co.uk/booksfirst

Explore Books

• Book Extracts

• Book Reviews

• Books Group

• Audio Books

Times Recommends

• Superfreakonomics by Steven D Levitt and Stephen J Dubner
• The Times picks the 50 best paperbacks of 2009
• Vincent van Gogh’s letters show the soul of the artist