Election day 1994 was a disaster for the Democratic party – and for Hillary and Bill Clinton. Republicans would now control both houses of the US Congress, claiming their first Senate majority in eight years and first House majority since 1954. The Democrats lost an astounding 52 seats in the House, and eight in the Senate.

There had been historic losses in other elections. But this was a different kind of repudiation in that it was tied to the president and his wife. The Clintons could see that the country, not just Washington, was on the verge of a new political age, much of it informed by antagonism to them.

For the first time, the southern states sent more Republicans to Congress than Democrats. Equally important, these were deeply conservative (by their own definition) Republicans, far to the right of those who had come to power with Ronald Reagan in the previous Republican wave of 1980.

Bill recognised the practical implications of the loss: the Republican control of Congress would not only threaten to scupper the Clintons’ agenda, but it would also embolden the Clintons’ enemies – including the new chairmen of several important House and Senate committees with jurisdiction to investigate any aspect of the presidency, or his and Hillary’s past.

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Hillary knew she had mishandled her portfolio in trying to get healthcare legislation through Congress and had inspired anger, and that both had helped bring the Democrats down.

“My view is Hillary Clinton destroyed the Democratic party,” said Lawrence O’Donnell, aide to Senator Pat Moynihan. the august Democratic chairman of the Senate Finance Committee. Her most prominent difficulty, he judged, was arrogance. “When your purpose is to pass legislation,” said O’Donnell, “you don’t set up war rooms and you don’t believe that you are going to vanquish the opposition.”

Hillary’s emotional state was now as fragile as it had ever been. The cumulative effect of her father’s recent death, the suicide of her close friend and White House counsel Vince Foster, the appointment of a special prosecutor to investigate the Clintons’ Whitewater land deal, the failed healthcare programme, and now a repudiation by the voters was devastating. She was overwhelmed.

“I don’t know whether she was seeing a doctor or not” – she wasn’t, as far as is known – “but she was depressed,” said David Gergen, who was counsel to the president. “Deeply depressed. I just felt she went into a downward spiral.” This was a near universal view in the White House.

Bill’s state, in the short run, was equally bad. Gergen thought it took about two or three months for him to come out of his depression. But for Hillary “it was a matter of many [more] months. I think she still must be scarred by that”, he said several years later, before she had decided to seek election to the Senate.

“What was clear was not only her policy advice had failed, but she was politically at fault . . . Bill no longer asked her for political guidance after that.”

As the president and first lady sank into a fog of depression, one of the strangest episodes of modern American governance proceeded from it: the ascendancy of Dick Morris as presidential regent. Morris had been the Clintons’ political adviser during their Arkansas years, and Hillary had called him in again after the collapse of her healthcare ambitions. For the next several months he virtually took over the White House. And for the period from 1994 to 1996 he was the real power in the Clinton administration after the president.

“Morris replaced [Hillary] as consigliere though that may be a little simplistic,” said Gergen. “There was a real passage of power away from her and to Morris. And to some degree the president felt he was also liberated afterward from having to be deferential to Hillary. He took healthcare as a defeat, but because it was her defeat it was okay . . . He still needed her emotional support, but there had been a time in which he felt that he had to be very deferential.” No longer. Morris was unambiguous about Clinton’s attitude toward his wife at this point: in terms of the co-presidency, it was over – “he pushed her aside”.

Despite her confident manner, said Morris, Hillary could “lose her bearings when things didn’t go right. Her strong and resolute leadership has a brittle quality to it; when her basic assumptions are proven wrong, they undermine her resolve. Hillary has less flexibility, less give than Bill. When her way works, she does very well. But when it doesn’t – as in 1994 – it can paralyse her”.

As a girl and then as a woman, Hillary has almost always been desperate to be a passionate participant and at the centre of events: familial, generational, experiential, political, historical. Call it ambition, call it the desire to make the world a better place – she has been driven. Rarely has she stepped aside voluntarily into passivity. Introspection has not been her strong suit; faith in the Lord, and in herself, is.

Three pillars have held her up through one crisis after another in a life creased by personal difficulties and public and private battles: her religious faith, her powerful urge toward both service and its accompanying sense (for good or ill) of self-importance, and a fierce desire for privacy and secrecy. It is the last of these that seems to cast a larger and larger shadow over who she really is.

Increasingly, what Hillary serves up for public consumption, especially since setting her sights on the Senate and the presidency, is usually elaborately prepared or relatively soulless. This is the true shame.

Hillary is neither the demon of the right’s perception nor a feminist saint, nor is she particularly emblematic of her time – perhaps more old fashioned than modern. She is an intelligent woman endowed with energy, enthusiasm, humour, tempestuousness, inner strength, spontaneity in private, lethal (almost) powers of retribution, real-life lines that come from deep wounds, and the language skills of a sailor (and of a minister), all evidence of her passion – which, down deep, is perhaps her most enduring and even endearing trait.

As Hillary has continued to speak from the protective shell of her own making, and packaged herself for the widest possible consumption, she has misrepresented not just facts but often her essential self.

Great politicians have always been marked by the consistency of their core beliefs, their strength of character in advocacy, and the self-knowledge that informs bold leadership. Almost always, Hillary has stood for good things. Yet there is often a disconnect between her convictions and words, and her actions. This is where Hillary disappoints.

But the jury remains out. She still has time to prove her case, to effectuate those things that make her special, not fear them or camouflage them. We would all be the better for it, because what lies within may have the potential to change the world, if onlya little.

© Carl Bernstein 2007 Extracted from A Woman in Charge: The Life of Hillary Rodham Clinton, by Carl Bernstein, published by Hutchinson at £25. It is available for £23 including postage from The Sunday Times BooksFirst on 0870 165 8585

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