Hillary's blast from the boomers' past

WASHINGTON, June 11 (UPI) -- In third form English at Horace Mann School for Boys we were assigned to read Ulysses by James Joyce, as controversial a book in the United States in those days as perhaps President William Jefferson Clinton's behavior became five decades later.

At the end of the course, you could stand a volume used in that class on the book's spine and it would open to one section which 14-year-old boys of that day thought was quite juicy. Many of us in that class actually never read the whole book, obsessed by that one section and willing to use crib notes for the final report.

I suspect the same thing is true of Hillary Rodham Clinton's "Living History," as the reviews and talk shows roll in,

Many of those readers hurried to find out find out how she dealt with Monica Lewinski, Gennifer Flowers and Paula Jones, for which the publisher has graciously provided an index.

Those sections, incidentally, do not, in my opinion, turn out to be juicy. Mrs. Clinton long ago formed an armor around her soul that was not breached by special prosecutor Kenneth Starr, grocery store tabloids or even, I think, by Bill Clinton, and I suspect that her real thoughts on life and times will be only shared with Chelsea Clinton, if ever shared at all.

So Living History is not a kiss and tell book. Like most political memoirs it is also careful to mention every single person she can think favorably of, perhaps with the eye to someday asking them for a campaign contribution. And Mrs. Clinton continues to fail to control her affection for platitudes when she is talking about public policy.

Nor do I think it is a great inside the White House book with new revealing anecdotes about foreign leaders and what was happening behind the scenes during critical events. There is some of that to be sure, and some of it will be historically valuable, but it is not what is most valuable in this memoir.

As I was finishing the book Tuesday, the Washington Post ran a story about Mrs. Clinton's book under a story on its Style Page about the baby boomers. Suddenly it crystalized: this is a story, occasionally even a moving story, of her generation. It is the story of the boomers, that extraordinary generation born out of World War II who would create the revolution of the 1960s, pushing aside conventions in race, sex, marriage, drugs, motherhood and religion.

William Jefferson and Hillary Rodham Clinton were boomers, the first generation to have sophisticated educations financed by parents or endowments, with birth control pills to ward off early pregnancies and the leisure to take internships and Rhodes Scholarships.

Unlike World War II, the deferment system gave the men of this time a choice of whether to go or not to go to the Vietnam War, but later the crisis of how to explain their decision. Clinton ends up with the tortured letter to the chief of the University of Arkansas ROTC program, withdrawing to take the draft lottery and the compulsion Hillary recalls "to talk incessantly about the Vietnam War, the draft and the contradictory obligations we felt as young Americans who loved our country and opposed that particular war."

Four high school classmates of Clinton's, Mrs. Clinton reports, died in the conflict, a fact if remembered 35 years later must have crossed his mind more than once. Like Clinton, President George W. Bush was wrestling with these times, ending up obtaining an opening in the Texas Air National Guard and learning to fly. Neither man went to Vietnam.

Mrs. Clinton is part of the first real generation of women entering the professional world in competition with men. It was a delicate and complicated new voyage, and often nothing in their upbringing or their families prepared them. Her father is the strong figure in the family, a Republican so staunch and so rigid that her mother only reveals secretly to Hillary that she voted for President John F. Kennedy.

Like many of their generation, neither Bill nor Hillary considered entering business. This was the generation of the Best and the Brightest, as David Halberstam would call it in his book; they were the heirs to Franklin Delano Roosevelt and Lyndon Baines Johnson. Whether Republican or Democrat, government was the tool to deal with the world's problems.

Hillary Clinton went to Wellesley, on to Yale Law School with Washington internships and political actions in between.

The women of this era were challenged with peculiar choices. After going to Washington after law school she works on the House Judiciary Committee impeachment investigation of President Richard Nixon, a very coveted assignment in its day that could have easily been turned into an associate's job in a fancy Washington or New York law firm. But, as she says in her book, she "followed" her heart to Arkansas, to help the tall young man with the lovely hands she'd met at Yale four years before.

If there were difficulties then, she does not foreshadow them in her book, but the clash of cultures still must have been great. Hillary Rodham grew up in a family as carefully structured as 1950s suburbia could make it, where stabilities and standards were still taught and kept.

She went to Arkansas, one of the poorest of the border and southern states, to marry a man who hadn't known his father in a family barely held together by his mother, a glib and engaging man of whom she even now writes "he's the best company, I know." As many women of this time, she tries to keep her identity, to pursue her profession in a law firm and keep her maiden name.

Also like many accomplished women in her time, she throws herself into Chelsea, the one clearly great accomplishment of their union. The talk show hosts never seem to ask the right question: it is not how Hillary Clinton, a woman in her fifties, reacted to Bill Clinton's sexual betrayal with Monica Lewinski; it is how the parents of Chelsea Clinton reacted to his having an affair with a young intern barely out of her teens and how he proposed to tell his daughter about this betrayal.

Arkansas was not ready for a first lady who used her own name, and she finally relents, she said, and becomes Hillary Rodham Clinton, after a score of family and friends, including Vernon Jordan, urge her to change. It is revealing that she claims Bill Clinton never asked her to change.

Maybe Bill Clinton wasn't ready for a modern marriage, where a wife is a true partner and not the mousy ornament so often found in the living rooms of political marriages.