This is more than a chipper piece of uplift about public service, as one might suppose from the book’s soupy title. Although neither freighted with significant new disclosures nor memorable in its style, Sally Bedell Smith’s account is cumulatively devastating as she picks her way through the Clintons’ eight-year sojourn at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue, with flashbacks to their Arkansas years. These are low people.

Now, politics offer many sagas of lowness acting in the service of decent achievement. Richard Nixon was a low character but presided over the creation of the Environmental Protection Agency and the passage, in 1973, of the Endangered Species Act, the single most significant piece of legislation in American environmental history. Bill and Hillary professed noble intentions endlessly. Page upon page in Bedell Smith’s book, even amid scandal and impeachment, has them raptly discussing constructive “public policy”. If mere information were the key to political success, the Clintons would have rivalled FDR and Eleanor. In the White House, Bedell Smith writes, “The Clintons added bookshelves to accommodate their collection of some 5,000 volumes. The night tables flanking their queen-sized bed had phones with separate lines and were piled high with magazines, galleys, position papers, and books flagged with multi-coloured Postit notes.”

Bill “typically had a half-dozen books going at any one time”. His briefing primers “ran to more than 100 pages”. He “liked to devour the Department of Agriculture’s acreage-planted reports”. He would jolt officials out of deep sleeps “to discuss policy questions.” Bill’s friend David Leopoulos “believed that ‘the job of the presidency’ was all that Bill and Hillary talked about”. Their daughter Chelsea “engaged in shoptalk as well and often took part in Bill and Hillary’s spirited exchanges about the issues of the day”.

But the gabfests went round and round in circles because, early in Little Rock, Arkansas, the couple had learnt conclusively that 100 worthy position papers weigh less in the balance of forces than a single phone call from the CEO of Georgia Pacific or Wal-Mart. In tune with the decay of liberalism in the 1970 and 1980s, their political lives were permanently schizo-phrenic: on the one hand, rhetorical ardour for reform as expressed in Hillary’s speeches as a board member of her friend Marian Wright Edelman’s Children’s Defence Fund; on the other, as Bedell Smith convincingly displays, time after time, the chill betrayal: in this instance, Hillary being the one who ordered Bill to sign the Republicans’ welfare bill, thus betraying Edelman’s life’s work and everything Hillary claimed she stood for.

The book echoes with the stunned gasps of astounded friends, long-term political supporters and lovers as the Clintons’ knives sank between their shoulder blades: Harold Ickes, tossed overboard in 1997 after playing a leading role in saving the Clintons during the Whitewater scandals and getting Bill reelected; Webster Hubbell, loyally silent and left to rot in federal prison when Clinton could have pardoned him; Vincent Foster, Hillary’s bulwark as he hid her billing records and other compromising documents, and helped her dodge subpoenas and evade inquiries into her scandalous commodity trades. He was fending off six separate investigations into the First Lady’s affairs and, not long after she blamed the whole Travel-gate mess on him, finally broke under the strain and shot himself. For the last month of his life, she refused to communicate with her old friend, even though their offices were 30ft apart. “You lie about what happens,” Liz Moynihan, the wife of Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan, told Hillary when the latter was embarking on her successful run for the Senate. “You mislead people.” Bedell Smith has scores of examples of these traits, along with abundant illustrations of Mrs Clinton’s obsession with secrecy.

Hillary was a methodical conniver, albeit a disastrous one in the way she managed to alienate all potential allies and, with her monumentally ill-conceived health-care programme, squandered the new administration’s political capital. Bill by contrast was compulsive in the fervid disorder of his White House routines. The most vivid of Bedell Smith’s pages portray a man operating well beyond the norms of rational or civilised behaviour. His Georgetown professor had told him great men could do without sleep, so he tried to get by on four hours a night. His eyes would glaze in important meetings. Jolted awake, he would abuse his subordinates in endless, profanity-laden tirades. (As recounted by Bedell Smith, both he and Hillary are relentlessly foul-mouthed.) “Some aides,” Bedell Smith writes, “thought his eruptions were pathological . . . Years later, Bill explained that he was able to live ‘parallel lives’, which he described as ‘an external life that takes its natural course and an internal life where the secrets are hidden’. He traced his identity as a ‘secret keeper’ to his troubled upbringing, when he hid the chaos of his household behind a sunny persona. He had difficulty, he said, ‘letting anyone into the deepest recesses of my internal life. It was dark down there’. He admitted that over the years his own anger ‘had grown deeper and stronger’.”

Since the seedtime of his pathologies (his early childhood) is outside her ambit, Bedell Smith can display only the later consequences of his psychic injuries and vindictive fury at the world, starting with petty aggression towards his fellow humans expressed by being chronically late for every appointment. As president he kept everyone waiting, including a group of elderly concentration-camp survivors, who huddled for two-and-a-half hours in a tent during a rainstorm until they finally left. Terrified of open conflict and desperate for approval, he drove his staff mad by vacillation in reaching any decision, followed by abrupt switches in direction.

The Clintons’ burning sense of injury and persecution furnished them with the permanent alibi of dark forces thwarting their efforts to put America on a decent path. Bedell Smith’s laconic collage of dysfunc-tion in those first three months makes it clear enough. The Clintons, touted to this day as supremely qualified, were simply not up to the job.

The second half of For Love of Politics is largely devoted to the familiar landscape of Bill’s sexual treacheries, most notably in his affair with Monica Lewinsky, whose physical intimacies were avidly charted by Special Prosecutor Kenneth Starr and are retold yet again by Bedell Smith, who does not quite fathom that the scandal had its benign consequence: paralysis. She refers mournfully to the injuries inflicted on the Clintons’ political programme by the exposure of the affair and the Clintons’ struggle against impeachment. But were it not for Lewinsky and that first seductive glance and provocative display of her underwear, the Clintons would have pressed ahead with the “reform” of Social Security, giving Wall Street and the mutual funds access to the pension system’s trust funds.

Of course the back-to-the-future resonance of this book is the possibility that in less than a year Mrs Clinton could be giving her first state of the union address to Congress. We can draw from Bedell Smith many anecdotes attesting to Hillary’s penchant for secrecy and lying, also her lack of any consistent political principle. The presumptive impact on her of her husband’s pathological and unremitting betrayals leaves the author slightly at a loss, as do her deep character flaws. One has the impression that Bedell Smith liked the Clintons a lot less than she thought she would by the time she finished this book. Leave the last thought to Nixon, who was invited to the White House in March 1993. As Bill remembered it, Nixon said, “A lot of life was just hanging on.” It is what Hillary now advertises as “experience”. As a political manifesto it’s not uplifting, nor is it encouraging as a biographical intimation of what we may expect.

For the love of politics: The Clintons in the White House by Sally Bedell Smith

Aurum £25 pp572

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