Hillary and Bill Clinton: Brilliant and ambitious

Washington, May 26: Two new books on Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton of New York offer fresh and often critical portraits of the Democratic presidential candidate that depict a tortured relationship with her husband and her past and challenge the image she has presented on the campaign trail.

The Hillary Clinton who emerges from the pages of the books comes across as a complicated, sometimes compromised figure who tolerated Bill Clinton’s brazen infidelity, pursued her policy and political goals with methodical drive, and occasionally skirted along the edge of the truth along the way.

The books portray her as alternately brilliant and controlling, ambitious and victimised.

The Clinton campaign has nervously awaited publication of the books for fear they would include a bombshell revelation or, at the very least, revive memories of less-savoury moments in the couple’s rise to power. The books, both by long-time journalists and both obtained by The Washington Post on Thursday, include a number of assertions and anecdotes that could confront her campaign with unwelcome questions.

A Woman in Charge: The Life of Hillary Rodham Clinton, by Carl Bernstein, reports that Hillary as First Lady was terrified she would be prosecuted, took over her own legal and political defence, and decided not to be forthcoming with investigators because she was convinced she was unfairly targeted.

While in Arkansas, according to Bernstein, she personally interviewed one woman alleged to have had an affair with her husband, contemplated divorce and thought about running for governor out of anger at her husband’s indiscretions.

Her Way: The Hopes and Ambitions of Hillary Rodham Clinton, by Jeff Gerth and Don Van Natta Jr, reports that during her husband’s 1992 campaign, a team she oversaw hired a private investigator to undermine Gennifer Flowers “until she is destroyed”.

Flowers had said publicly that she had an affair with Bill Clinton while he was governor of Arkansas.

The book also suggests that Hillary Clinton did not read the National Intelligence Estimate on Iraq in 2002 before voting to authorise war. And it includes a third-hand report that the Clintons had a secret plan after the 1992 election in which he would have eight years as President and then she would have eight years.

The Clinton camp hopes to brush off the books as mainly rehashing old news. “Is it possible to be quoted yawning?” asked Philippe Reines, her Senate spokesman. If past books on Clinton were “cash for trash”, he added: “These books are nothing more than cash for rehash.”

Howard Wolfson, a campaign spokesman, pointed to previous reports on some of the elements in the books to make the point that there was nothing new. “The news here is that it took three reporters nearly a decade to find no news,” he said. He added: “Two overwhelming Senate victories in the toughest media market in the country demonstrated that voters have put these issues behind them.”

Unlike many harsh books about Hillary written by ideological enemies, the two new volumes come from long-established writers backed by major publishing houses and could be harder to dismiss.

Bernstein won national fame with partner Bob Woodward at The Post for breaking open the Watergate scandal, while Gerth and Van Natta have spent years as investigative reporters for the New York Times.

Their publishers have engaged in a race to the bookstores, moving up publication dates as the presidential campaign heats up. Alfred A. Knopf has printed 275,000 copies of Bernstein’s Woman in Charge, which will be available on June 5; Little, Brown and Co plans to put 175,000 copies of Her Way on sale on June 8.

Bernstein re-examines the most sensational aspects of Clinton’s life — namely her decisions to marry and remain married to Bill Clinton. She waited two years before deciding to become his wife and move to Arkansas, and Bernstein points to a little-known factor that may have contributed. Hillary failed the bar exam after law school, something she hid from her best friends for 30 years until disclosing it in passing in her autobiography, Living History.