A Review of Bill & Hillary

By JODI KANTOR


Published: September 28, 2012


How far can a presidential marriage go in explaining a presidency?


BILL AND HILLARY



The Politics of the Personal



By William H. Chafe



387 pp. Farrar, Straus & Giroux. $28

.Not far, according to most couples who occupy the White House. Life and history are smoother for them if everyone abides by the press-office fiction that the president’s spouse is more soothing accessory than sharp-eyed adviser or moral force. So while we stare endlessly at first couples, we rarely glimpse the strange vastness of their marriages: how a private conversation between two people, ­lying in the same bedroom where Abraham Lincoln slept, can influence an entire nation. We forget that our leaders, tossed in the maelstrom of the modern presidency, rely on their spouses as few of us ever need to, and that even first ladies who are not policy wonks still influence their husbands’ aspirations and judgments. Biographers can be complicit, often consigning wives to cameos, sometimes because the full story is just too hard to see.



The great exceptions to this rule are Bill and Hillary Clinton, who offered themselves to the nation as a package deal from the start. No one has ever doubted the influence of the Clinton marriage, but in his new book, “Bill and Hillary,” the historian William H. Chafe ups the ante, arguing that the entire Clinton presidency was powered by the psychodynamics of the Clinton union.



In his telling, Bill was a brilliant mess, Hillary gave him discipline and from this sinner-rescuer complex, the drama unfolded. “The history — good and bad — of the Clinton administration reflects the degree to which their internal dynamics shaped the choices they made at every turn,” he writes. The Clinton marriage, he argues, played a large part in Bill Clinton’s loss of the Arkansas governorship in 1980, his decision to run for the presidency in 1992, the first-term scandals and even the partisanship that hardened over Washington. That’s before the author even gets to Monica Lewinsky.



Chafe’s eagerness to talk about psychology, emotion and the political potency of marriage is refreshing, but it’s hard to say exactly why he wrote this book — an amplification of a familiar view of the Clintons, with little new reporting — and I read it worrying that he was hurting his cause by going slightly overboard. If the Clinton marriage is the key to understanding Bill’s presidency, then why have the Obamas, with a very different relationship, repeated a good chunk of the Arkansans’ history (overly ambitious first-year agenda, including a health care plan that lacked sufficient support; vicious Republican attacks; devastating midterm ­losses)?



Chafe is also prone to blame-­Hillary-ism, repeatedly depicting her as seizing upon her husband’s mistakes for her own gain: “Hillary was an enabler who actually acquired power, and husbandly affection,” when she came to Bill’s aid. But by running for the Senate after the Lewinsky scandal, was she cynically taking advantage of her husband’s sins? Or was she finally correcting an imbalance in her marriage — the assumption that her own enormous talent, ambition and vision had to flow through her spouse? Her decision to play the principal and not the wife is a turning point for the history of women in American politics, and yet Chafe — like many before him — reduces it to payback for Bill’s affairs.



But any Clinton book is by definition a wild, perplexing tale, and “Bill and Hillary” is worth reading as a reminder that the title characters — now mellow ­grandparents-in-waiting — did many things that today seem almost too outlandish to be true. Chafe largely synthesizes prior books by Joe Klein, Gail Sheehy, David Maraniss and Carl Bernstein, but the episodes he recounts still have the power to startle, especially in the midst of an election with two unusually temperate contenders.



Some memorable bits: Two years before running for president in 1992, Bill Clinton fell in love with a beautiful businesswoman named Mary Jo Jenkins and asked his wife for a divorce. (She refused.) In the tangle of scandals that plagued the early Clinton White House, the first lady came alarmingly close to being indicted on a charge of obstruction of justice. After huge losses in the 1994 midterms, the Clintons installed a secret adviser — code name “Charlie,” real name Dick Morris — to steer West Wing decisions unbeknown to the rest of the staff. (Surely any president to contemplate such bizarre covert action now would pause and think: “Jeez, this would look terrible in the next installment of ‘Game Change.’ I’d better not.”)



Though Chafe never mentions it, his story suggests that the Clintons recognize even more in the Obama saga than we know. In 1993, Hillary Clinton tried to soften her image before Congress by introducing herself “as a mother, a wife, a daughter, a sister, a woman.” Fifteen years later, Michelle Obama, another blunt Ivy League-educated lawyer, recast her own image by introducing herself at the Democratic convention in Denver in almost exactly the same words.



Asked in 1994 to explain the nastiness of her critics, Hillary Clinton called them men who found women’s newfound opportunities hard to take. “It’s not me, personally, they hate — it’s the change I represent,” she told Gail Sheehy. Years later, Barack Obama said much the same thing to David Remnick about the backlash to the election of a black man. “It signifies change, . . . and there are going to be folks who don’t want to promote that understanding because they’re afraid of the future,” he said.



The action of Chafe’s book ends in 2000, with one Clinton leaving the White House and the other heading to the Senate. I wish the author had used the passage of time since then as his ally, juxtaposing Hillary present with Hillary past. In a delicious twist, the initially tin-eared first lady who offended half of Washington became, of all things, an immensely successful diplomat. Is she so good now precisely because she was so bad back then?



fter the White House, most presidential marriages retreat back into mundane privacy; the couples who once debated deployment levels and Congressional strategy start worrying again about who will walk the dog. Not the Clintons, whose marriage has kept radiating through our national life. In the spring of 2008, I followed Hillary Clinton around North Carolina and Indiana as she mounted the last, nearly hopeless stand of her presidential campaign. In thawing fields and parks, huge crowds of women gathered to cheer her even though she was almost sure to lose.



When I asked them why they had come, many said a surprising name: Monica. They had watched Hillary Clinton endure a humiliating trial, then heal and thrive. Now she was about to be humiliated again, losing to a man with more charisma and less experience, and they would not let her go through that alone. Thanks to Bill Clinton’s old indiscretions, the race for the Democratic presidential nomination lasted longer than anyone thought it would.



Two years later, a Clinton marriage stole the spotlight again, when Chelsea Clinton’s wedding became a national preoccupation. The celebrations seemed to offer some final, long-sought resolution to the drama of Bill and Hillary’s union. All of that cheating and shame would end badly, we had suspected. And yet we saw proud, long-married parents and a ­wholesome-looking young couple in a summer garden: not the close of one of Shakespeare’s tragedies, but one of his happy endings, and perhaps the most riveting Clinton comeback of all.