THE PHRASE “the aristocracy of exposure” was coined recently by Tina Brown for her Diana biography, but it could apply equally to that other eclipsing wife, Hillary Rodham Clinton.

As her electoral machine rolls across the States, Hillary can rely on the celebrity-aristocratic credentials awarded to her by the American People for standing by her man, stepping over him, and marching on.

What Carl Bernstein’s A Woman in Charge makes clear is that without Bill’s intellectual charisma, Hillary would not be where she is now, but without her down-to-earth focus and management, he would not have had a sniff at the presidency. And their relationship (with its famous ups and downs) is not extraneous. The marriage is political to its core.

“Bill Clinton had become her biggest booster as, roles now reversed, the gears of the Clinton apparat shifted and another Clinton sought the presidency,” Bernstein writes. “He was now a constant presence in the background as her counsel, consultant, strategist, and, finally, the elemental part of her process as a woman in charge.”

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

• Watergate’s invisible man strikes back

• Hillary can't live with him - can't live without him

BACKGROUND

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Perhaps Bernstein, who won a Pulitzer with Bob Woodward for the Nixon-Watergate investigation, is sensitive to the public exposure of marriage: his own former wife, Nora Ephron, wrote Heartburn, a novel and a film lampooning his sins. But his solid research, interviewing 200 of Hillary’s friends and enemies, shows that Clinton’s early suggestion of a co-presidency in the primaries, the idea that you could “buy one get one free”, was the truth.

For those of us who have failed to read the other 40-plus books on Hillary Clinton, Bernstein's eight-year effort merits attention, not just because the Clintons may become the 42nd and 44th presidents of the US, but also because it is a window on the juicy years of political ferment and feminism, in the days before compromise, cuckolding and celebrity.

Although balanced, A Woman in Charge has been derided by Clinton’s campaign managers as “cash for rehash”. However it provides some fascinating insight into Hillary’s political growth – and reveals that the Clintons contemplated divorce in 1989 after Bill became involved with a smart Arkansas businesswoman. The litany of infidelity – right from the start – is exhausting to read, and would have ripped apart any less politically ambitious couple.

As someone who covered the 1992 US election, met Hillary a couple of times at vast gatherings, and lived in Washington in the Lewinsky-smeared dying days of the Clinton regime, what interested me most was her early development. The super-spun, super-coiffed, soulless operator of today was a teenager obsessed with politics, any politics. She attended rallies for Martin Luther King Jr, went door-to-door campaigning in the Chicago slums for the right-wing Barry Goldwater, and was taken down coal mines by her father, a demanding, dominant Republican, who wanted to show her how the other half lived.

Bernstein says that Hillary’s Methodism is central to understanding her: Wesley’s line: “Do all the good you can, by all the means you can, in all the ways you can . . .” was her mantra, later tempered by governmental expediency. She started as a student Republican at Wellesley, but in the 1968 protests her ideas had changed so much that her radical graduation address featured in Life magazine. By the time she met Bill at Yale, she had crossed to the Democrats.

She followed him back to Arkansas, and irritated the “hill-billies” by keeping her maiden name, Rodham. She worked with Vince Foster (her great friend who committed suicide) at the Rose Law firm, where, one employee recalls: “She was a comic figure as a lady lawyer. Her hair was fried into an Orphan Annie perm. She had one large eyebrow across her forehead that looked like a giant caterpillar.”

Hillary’s thick glasses and dowdy hippyish clothes were much derided. She took to contact lenses at the age of 33, and the rest is duckling-to-swan history. The Washington years are covered lengthily, but much is old news. The “bimbo eruptions”, Hillary’s failure on health reform, Whitewater, impeachment. Through it all, Bernstein says, “she was her husband’s ultimate character reference”.

Annoyingly, the book shudders to a halt in 2001, with barely a chapter on Hillary’s Senate career and almost no discussion of her turnaround on the Iraq War. Bernstein writes that in the Senate “she kept her head down and deferred to the institution and the town and its ways – until the critical moment when she recognised it was time to raise her head, after which she outsmarted and outwitted just about everybody in the Senate chamber and the press in a New York minute, and made herself so outsized that the people who lived and breathed the capital’s old rules didn’t know what had hit them”.

The story is just beginning. This may be one of two volumes. And if Hillary wins, the question arises: will the former President be known as the First Gentleman, or, given his reputation, the First Ladies’ Man?

Hutchinson, £25; 628pp

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

Seven years later, Bill Clinton was trying to figure out what to do with his life. She, meanwhile, was trying to become president. After a single term in the Senate, she had transformed herself from the first lady-cuckold to the most talked about and important leader of her party, the most polarising politician in the land, a senator like no other, a celebrity like no other, taking the country on another wild Clintonian ride as she became close to omnipresent in what passed for socio-political dominance – on TV, in arguments every night at dinner tables all over America, in the foreign press, among her Senate colleagues, in the precincts of the supposed vast right-wing conspiracy that had tried to kill Clintonism. By the time of her overwhelming reelection to the senate in 2006, she had inspired a nonstop national and international dialogue about herself – her politics, her business acumen, her future, her morals, her sexuality, her religion, her looks, her marriage (still). Single-handily, she had reanimated the enemies of Clintonism to new heights of fear and frenzy. The public attention drawn to her personality, abetted by a press whose hunger she fed unabatedly, at times exceeded even that of the incumbent president . . . George W. Bush, winner of the first presidential election in American history to be decided not by the electorate but by the judiciary, had prevailed following a campaign promising voters that he would restore honour and traditional American values to the White House after its desecration by the Clintons. Plural.

Yet, as the disastrous presidency of her husband’s successor neared expiration, Hillary Clinton, in a nation besotted with celebrity, had come to a prominence unique in her time – settling in a rarefied place never populated even by FDR, Princess Diana, Ike, Oprah, or Eleanor Roosevelt as, in a great cacophony, people from every station at walk of life . . . screamed at one another about her.

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