Posted on 03/09/2003 12:56:56 PM PST by Liz
Hell to Pay : The Unfolding Story of Hillary Rodham Clinton by Barbara Olson
Hell to Pay is yet another book on Hillary Rodham Clinton, this time from a conservative lawyer who served as the Republican chief counsel for the congressional committee investigating the Clintons' involvement in "Travelgate" and "Filegate."
Barbara Olson traces the now familiar biographies of the president and first lady, contending that Mrs. Clinton is someone with dangerously liberal, even radical, political beliefs who "now seeks to foment revolutionary changes from the uniform of a pink suit." (Olson plays the theme heavily: each chapter of Hell to Pay begins with quotes from Saul Alinsky's Rules for Radicals, which influenced the young Hillary Rodham.)
There are some interesting new tidbits scattered throughout the book, like the fact that after law school Hillary Rodham tried to become a Marine Corps officer but was turned down; or that she told her high school paper her ambition after high school was "to marry a senator and settle down in Georgetown."
Olson, attempting to dissect the mystery of the Clinton partnership, writes, "Most self-respecting women would have left" after Clinton's repeated infidelities. "Hillary chose to stay. She behaves as both a desperate lover, and like a frantic campaign manager protecting a flawed candidate....
Hillary, it seems, long ago accepted Bill Clinton as someone who could advance her goals, as a necessary complement to her intellectual cold-blooded pursuit of power." As the Clinton presidency draws to a close, that pursuit has taken her beyond the White House toward a bid for her own U.S. Senate seat.
Olson predicts the Senate won't be enough, just the next step toward becoming the first woman president: "Hillary Clinton seeks nothing less than an office that will give her a platform from which to exercise real power and real world leadership." While Olson admits that "Bill Clinton has always excited the greatest passion not among his supporters, but among his detractors," the same could certainly be said of his wife--whose supporters will probably consider Hell to Pay a rehash of a too-familiar story, but whose detractors will no doubt savor every page. --Linda Killian - Amazon.com Hardcover - 344 pages 1 edition (November 1999) Regnery Pub; ISBN: 0895262746
Hillary's Choice by Gail Sheehy
Vanity Fair writer Gail Sheehy's engrossing biography of Hillary Clinton is a refreshing departure from the political hit jobs that have appeared elsewhere in print. That's not to say Hillary's Choice is a pro-Clinton book--Hillary herself would probably bristle at reading it, and her husband ("The story of the Clinton presidency has always been the story of the Clinton marriage," writes Sheehy) comes off as a bright but demented cad.
Yet Hillary's Choice is broadly sympathetic and often nonjudgmental at crucial moments. Sheehy writes very little about public policy, but includes plenty of pop psychologizing.
She suggests that the president is a sex addict afflicted by what "a highly qualified mental health professional who works too close to the White House to be identified" calls "dissociative identities"--what used to be known as "multiple personalities ... a sum of various identities that have been split off at some time in the past." And the president gets away with so much in his personal life because Hillary has become his unwitting enabler: "Every addict or alcoholic needs one.
The enabler is usually an intimate of the addicted person who allows him to persist in self-destructive behavior by making excuses or helping him avoid the consequences of his actions." That describes Sheehy's Hillary perfectly: a woman apparently ignorant of her husband's several flings in the White House before Monica Lewinsky came along, and then willfully deceived by the president's lies until just hours before his momentous grand-jury testimony.
Theirs is a mother-son relationship in which true love must negotiate its way through astonishingly difficult periods. That's not a formula for how marriage ought to work, but it has nevertheless helped this ultimate power couple achieve enormous success.
Hillary's Choice is full of on-the-record and background interviews, all assembled in an absorbing narrative. Writes Sheehy: "The saga of Bill and Hillary, with its echoes of Eleanor and Franklin, or Tracy and Hepburn with undertones of Bonnie and Clyde, is animated by melodrama, high passion, narrow escapes, and knock-down-drag-outs." And it comes alive in this biography of the most enigmatic woman of our time. --John J. Miller - Amazon.com
Paperback: 416 pages Ballantine Books (Trd Pap); ISBN: 0345436563; (August 15, 2000)
BOOKS BY AND ABOUT HILLARY
Hillary's Turn: Inside Her Improbable, Victorious Senate Campaign by Michael Tomasky Hardcover - 320 pages 1st edition (February 15, 2001) Free Press; ISBN: 0684873028
An Invitation To the White House by Hillary Rodham Clinton, et al (Hardcover - November 2000)
The Case Against Hillary Clinton by Peggy Noonan (Hardcover - April 2000)
She Took A Village by Alan Gottlieb Paperback: 178 pages Merril Press; ISBN: 0936783192; (May 1, 1998)
It Takes a Village and Other Lessons Children Teach Us by Hillary Rodham Clinton (Audio Cassette - June 1999)
The Girls in the Van: Covering Hillary by Beth J. Harpaz (Hardcover - October 2001)
The First Partner Hillary Rodham Clinton: A Biography by Joyce Milton (Paperback - May 2000)
Witness to Genocide: The Children of Rwanda: Drawings by Child Survivors of the Rwandan Genocide of 1994 by Richard A. Salem (Editor), Hillary Rodham Clinton (Paperback)
Hillary Rodham Clinton: A First Lady for Our Time by Donnie Radcliffe (Hardcover - September 1993)
The Clintons of Arkansas: An Introduction by Those Who Know Them Best by Ernest Dumas (Editor) (Paperback - April 1993)
Hillary Clinton: The Inside Story by Judith Warner (Mass Market Paperback - August 1999)
The Rhetoric of First Lady Hillary Rodham Clinton: Crisis Management Discourse (Praeger Series in Political Communication) by Colleen Elizabeth Kelley (Hardcover)
The Hillary Factor: The Story of America's First Lady by Rex Nelson, Philip Martin (Paperback - November 1993)
The First Lady: A Comprehensive View of Hillary Rodham Clinton by Peter Flaherty, et al (Paperback - October 1996)
Now, in the oddest twist of all, Clintonista journalist Gail Sheehy (who's penned a glowing new Hillary bio, "Hillary's Choice") claims it was Mrs. Clinton, and not her horndog hubby, who ordered the Kosovo bombing in the first place.Incredibly, Sheey asserts that Hillary ended an 8-month pout (she'd been giving Bill the silent treatment because of Monica) by phoning the big guy and instructing him to start the bombing. The very next morning, Sheey says, he passed the recommendation on to Nato.
NYC GOP Chick reporting for Clinton-hating duty!
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