As First Lady of Arkansas, First Lady of the United States, U.S. Senator from New York, U.S. Secretary of State, candidate for Democratic party presidential nomination in 2008 and presidential candidate this year, Hillary Clinton has faced more scrutiny and coverage over the decades than practically any other public figure in the U.S. Few have been as polarising a figure as Clinton, and much of the writing about her is either deeply admiring or unsparingly critical. Those who admire her have focussed on Clinton’s amazing ability to fight her way back despite scandal after scandal and setback after setback, while those who are critical of her focus on the scandals and setbacks themselves. Neither perspective is wrong, of course, but both tell only a part of the Clinton picture. “There are two kinds of books about Clinton,” wrote reviewer Elizabeth Kolbert in The New Yorker in 2007. “The first tries to prove that she’s really much worse than you think she is, the second that she’s really no worse than you think she is.”
Hillarographies
Since 2007, there have been more books on Clinton, but few that fully illuminate her as the ambitious and perseverant, cold but passionate, and awkward but self-assured person who emerges if you were to put both “kinds of books” together.
So, where does one start? The latest book, which came out early this year, by financial journalist Karen Blumenthal, titled Hillary: A Biography of Hillary Rodham Clinton (Bloomsbury), is a good place to begin. While Blumenthal’s work falls in the ‘admiring’ category, it is the most comprehensive compilation of all the books about Clinton and her responses to them in interviews over the years. However, where it fails is in scrutinising those responses, especially on allegations of financial wrongdoing. There are other Hillarographies like Carl Bernstein’s A Woman in Charge: The Life of Hillary Rodham Clinton (Knopf, 2007), in which the journalist who helped expose President Richard Nixon in the Watergate scandal seems reluctant to put Clinton through the same kind of wringer. What he does capture, however, are Clinton’s leadership skills through a series of interviews with powerful people who worked with her.
Then there are Clinton’s memoirs themselves: Living History (Headline, 2003) about her life up till her nomination run against Barack Obama, and Hard Choices (Simon & Schuster, 2014), in which she speaks of her time in the Obama administration as Secretary of State. Living History has some insights into Clinton the person, but Hard Choices has none at all and seems to be an extended application letter for the country’s top job.
The unsparingly critical
Equally numerous are the authors who seek to take Clinton down, and can be easily identified from their titles. Leading the pack is Edward Klein, former editor-in-chief of The New York Times Magazine and foreign editor of Newsweek magazine, who wrote a series on Clinton that included Guilty as Sin: Uncovering New Evidence of Corruption and How Hillary Clinton and the Democrats Derailed the FBI Investigation (Regnery Publishing, 2016) and Unlikeable: The Problem with Hillary (Regnery Publishing, 2015). He also wrote the famous The Truth About Hillary: What She Knew, When She Knew It, and How Far She'll Go to Become President (Sentinel HC, 2005) in which he accused Clinton of being a “soulless liar” and poked holes in everything — from her marriage to Bill Clinton, to her cover-ups of his affairs, to financial irregularities in office and out of it. And then there is the biography by the Secret Service officer Gary Byrnes, Crisis of Character: A White House Secret Service Officer Discloses His Firsthand Experience with Hillary, Bill, and How They Operate (Centre Street, 2016), that Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump has referred to often in his campaign this year. It is not as much a literary work as a litany of allegations that would be very hard to corroborate, and falls in the “What the Butler Saw” category of writing.
Perhaps the biography that goes closer to the bone than any other is an older one written by Vanity Fair correspondent Gail Sheehy, Hillary’s Choice (Pocket Books, 1999), which draws heavily on the author’s own interviews with Clinton as well as rather detailed conversations with her mother Dorothy Rodham. Sheehy is able to draw from them as well as other associates of Clinton a more comprehensive picture of what makes Clinton mad and what makes her tick. She discovers many nuggets, like Clinton’s dependence on her religious faith, but also Clinton’s lack of patience with frailties, acknowledging in a letter in 1965 to her classmate John Peavoy that “unthinking emotion” was “pitiful” to her.
Many more chapters
The truth is, Clinton is the subject of dozens of books already, yet this is just the beginning, given that she is the likely winner of November’s presidential election. Even if she doesn’t win, despite what the polls show, history will bear out that she doesn’t give up easily. The next chapter of the next book on Hillary is already being written.
suhasini.h@thehindu.co.in
