Commentary: Hillary's Magnum Opus

NEW YORK, July 10 (UPI) -- My GOODNESS Hillary can talk.

How did everybody except me finish this book two days after

it came out? I've been lugging "Living History" around for three weeks now, schlepping all 562 pages of it onto the subway, dragging it to the beach, dozing off at night with the health care chapter open on my chest.

Hillary reminds me of my mother. I have to guard against tuning her out, because she tells a story the way you talk to an eight-year-old child. She's sort of the ultimate den mother, telling all us Cub Scouts that if we spent more time studying for our merit badges instead of popping one another with rubber bands, the world would be a better place. When some gritty reality intrudes -- like, say, genocide in Rwanda or oral sex in the Oval Office --she comes up with JUST the right euphemisms that would be acceptable in a speech at the East Lansing Book Fair.

In fact, the whole book reads like a speech. Sometimes entire passages will even DESCRIBE a speech. Whereas most people have nightmares about waking up naked in Times Square, Hillary has nightmares about failing to hit the right talking points in her speeches. In what she counts as the biggest political forum of her life -- addressing the United Nations Fourth World Conference on Women in Beijing -- she stays up night after night, drafting and redrafting and asking people like Madeleine Albright for advice. Here's their thrilling exchange:

"'What do you want to accomplish?' Madeleine had asked me earlier.

"'I want to push the envelope as far as I can on behalf of women and girls,' I said."

Okay, now here's the scary part: I think she really talks and thinks that way. I don't think this is just some kind of dressed-up speechwriter's version of a backroom conversation. I think that's exactly what she said, in all its dull generalized naivete, and I think she really meant something by it.

The book is a snoozer, in other words, because Hillary herself is by nature an idealistic wide-eyed girl raring to work for the Peace Corps -- or, to bring her into the 21st century, to work for some non-governmental organization dedicated to bringing about reproductive rights for women in Zambia. She's the girl in junior high who loved writing book reports and spent her weekends working as a candy-striper at the V.A. Hospital.

I kept hoping she would tell a dirty joke or something, but in my heart I knew it would never happen. She's relentless in that sort of "Don't we live in marvelous times?" way pioneered by "The Greatest Generation." You have to occasionally put the book down so you won't be overwhelmed by the Seven Sisters school-spirit pie-eyed optimism of it all. (She was class president at Wellesley, and she could almost be the prototype of the Wellesley overachiever, able to serve the perfect hors d'oeuvres to the pleated-skirt committee charged with distributing Thanksgiving turkeys to the slum neighborhoods. Madeleine Albright also went to Wellesley, but I have the impression she was the student agitating for coed rugby.)

Simon & Schuster did an expert job hyping this book as something it's not when they leaked the Monica Lewinsky chapter to the press, especially the line "I wanted to wring Bill's neck." See what I mean about the words of your mother? It's such a schoolmarm cliche that you have to guess at the emotion roiling behind it. That's what the women of America are hoping to find here --gut-spilling chronicles of her sleepless teary nights as she fought with her womanizer husband, like Tina Turner or -- her own preferred comparison --Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis. (She sought out the friendship of Jackie and asked for White House child-rearing advice, but I kept thinking Rosalynn Carter or Ladybird Johnson would be the better Democratic first lady role models. Jackie's life was fairly rarefied, whereas the other two were southerners as well as kindred political spirits. Hillary flits back and forth between having a sort of awe of the jet set while affecting a "just folks" background.)

But Hillary is not really the teary-eyed hand-wringing sort anyway, or at least not within the pages of a memoir. I get the impression that the few passages about her emotional low points were more or less forced on her by advisers who are fighting an Iron Maiden caricature. This started with her championing of the national health care system, for which she was pilloried as a meddling wife, and it's been reinforced over the years by anecdotes implying that she's a hard-edged bitch. She's almost forced to inject humanizing details into her narrative just to fight against the political cartoonists.

The fact is she's neither more nor less feminine than the average American upper middle class suburban woman who married in the early seventies, a time when it was fashionable to keep your maiden name, share the housekeeping with your husband, and work a Type A job. Hillary was a corporate lawyer who made a quick hundred thousand by short-selling commodities, so obviously she wasn't sitting around waiting for her husband to come home from the office. On the other hand, she was already on the fast track when she met Bill Clinton -- working on the legal staff of the Nixon impeachment committee, helping draft child care legislation -- but she gave up her own goals, at least for a while, in order to move to Arkansas and become a political wife for the man she loved. She frets about her hair-do -- it's a constant theme throughout the book -- and enthuses about her husband's good looks (she describes his long fingers in loving detail) and says she feels better about doing her job when she knows she looks fabulous (like, say, after a Vogue photo shoot). She can be one of the boys, and she can be one of the girls. What's so strange about that?

Since I'm the last person in America to review this book, I might as well point out that in my opinion most of the reviews have been unfair. This is a political biography by a policy wonk, and there's nothing wrong with that. She's been slammed for everything from being "corny" (don't you want a little corn in your elected official?) to being paranoid about her political opponents (what OTHER First Family has been pursued six years by a special prosecutor who was hand-picked by their enemies?) to not coming clean about her marriage.

First of all, she's not REQUIRED to come clean about her marriage. We already know more about her marriage than about, say, Laura Bush's marriage because she's led a more public life than any first lady since Dolly Madison, and that's carried over into her career as a U.S. senator. What more do you want? Transcripts of their marriage counseling sessions? (Yes, they had marriage counseling after the Lewinsky scandal.)

She tells us what we need to know: she was devastated, she had a hard time dealing with it, and slowly she decided to forgive her husband. What's strange is that she seems a little defensive about this choice, as though it's offensive to feminists (and maybe it is). Haven't millions of women forgiven much worse? The final image in the book is of her and Bill waltzing alone in the White House on the day before they turned the residence over to the Bushes.

Like most of the book, it's a scene plucked out of the fifties. Dad acts up and has to go to the doghouse. Mom sulks until he gets down on his knees and brings roses. Sis knows they'll eventually get over it. Normally I would say it doesn't have the ring of truth, but with Hillary you never know. She's one of those women who watches "Oprah." Her memoir -- formal, restrained, effusive when talking about abstract concepts like world peace and women's rights, elliptical when discussing the secrets of the boudoir or the breakfast table -- may be exactly what it appears to be: the Junior League version of history. It will be perfect on the waiting-room coffee table at Wellesley.

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John Bloom writes a number of columns for UPI and may be contacted at [email protected] or through his Web site at joebobbriggs.com. Snail mail: P.O. Box 2002, Dallas, Texas 75221.