Posted on 06/14/2003 11:12:06 AM PDT by Durmundstrang
A sense of weary obligation tells us we should say something about Hillary — the Book! But whenever we start… nothing happens. The big problem with reviewing an embarrassing book is that it embarrasses the reviewer, too. When an author invades her own privacy, and her family’s, she obliges the reader to invade it, too.
God, we’ll be happy when the hype is over and comment unnecessary. But something tell us this will never end. If both Clintons left politics tomorrow, they’d never leave memoirland, where old scandals never cease being replayed — with a different ending for every different taste.
Like eyewitnesses to a car wreck, each memoirist offers a different version of the same crash. Memory turns out to be the most malleable of human faculties, and perhaps the most creative. Which may be why tributes alternate with exposés on the ever expanding shelf of Clinton books. Just to look at the ever longer, ever less interesting, ever more self-serving rows of them is depressing.
We don’t even feel comfortable referring to Miss Hillary’s latest make-over (Lady Macbeth does Julie Andrews!) as a book. Not everything between hard covers deserves the dignity of the word Book. But if this isn’t a book, what is it?
A campaign biography for 2008? The confessions of a saint? A treasure trove for opposition researchers and Hillary-bashers? A money-maker and gigantic bore? Bad soap opera plus today’s talking points? A tell not-quite-all? A classic of bourgeois lit, a potboiler, a starched bore? Or just the literary equivalent of the spam that sits there waiting every morning, like a cobra, for you to open your e-mail?
What this book isn’t is the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth. Not that anyone who has followed the author’s various metamorphoses, from academic caterpillar to laminated moth, would expect it to be. It was the plain, bespectacled, wild-eyed Sixties radical she was when she first came to Arkansas who set our heart afire; that girl was honest. As for what she has become, well, there is a simple test of honesty in any memoir by a Clinton: Look in the index for Dale, Billy. Remember that name? He was the victim-in-chief of the Travelgate caper.
Not only does Miss Hillary minimize her role in that affair, she minimizes the affair itself — which cost Billy Dale, who had worked in the White House travel office since the Kennedy administration, not just his job but his life savings, his good name, two years of legal Hell, and, until a jury acquitted him within two hours of hearing the hoked-up charges against him, his peace.
After all that, Hillary Clinton is still smearing the guy, and implying his guilt after his acquittal. How’s that for fair? And this she calls history. Our author doesn’t even try to square her version of the Travel Office affair with the soul-cleansing account that David Watkins, one of the White House aides who had to take the blame for it, wrote to his boss, Mack McLarty:
Once this made it onto the First Lady’s agenda, Vince Foster became involved, and he and Harry Thomason regularly informed me of her attention to the Travel Office situation — as well as her insistence that the situation be resolved immediately by replacing the Travel Office staff…. At that meeting you [Mr. McLarty] explained that this was on the First Lady’s ‘ radar screen. ’… We both knew that there would be hell to pay if, after our failure in the Secret Service situation earlier, we failed to take swift and decisive action in conformity with the First Lady’s wishes.
You’d never guess any of this from Hillary Clinton’s brief, dismissive mention of the whole affair and monumental injustice. She can’t bring herself to mention Billy Dale by name even as she assassinates his character once again, but she does say she heard he tried to reach a plea bargain with the prosecution — as if that proved his guilt. That poodle won’t hunt. As an experienced attorney herself, Hillary Clinton knows very well why an innocent man would be tempted to reach a plea bargain — to avoid the harassment of prosecution, the ordeal of a trial, and the immense legal costs involved in both. In the end, Billy Dale went through it all and emerged vindicated. But Hillary Clinton is still out to get him. So when you hear her refer to the politics of personal destruction, you can believe she knows whereof she speaks. And so, alas, does Billy Dale.
As for the book as a whole, it’s probably anything you want it to be, much like a Clinton running for public office. The Clintons are our own collective Rorschach test, and our opinion about their testimony, whether under oath or on the printed page, may say more about our own character than the Clintons’. Only in that sense can it be said that the books they produce are revealing. Which may explain why they make anyone who values his privacy squirm.
The last word you might use to describe the Clintons or their books is comfortable. And it’s when they’re trying to be terribly tasteful, as in this book, that they’re most tasteless, and leave us most uncomfortable of all. Like a guest who arrives with a pile of baggage that needs to be both fumigated and overlooked. The poor host is confronted with the choice of appearing either nosy or indifferent, and in the end settles for just being embarrassed.
This was the line that made me laugh openly.
Overall this is great, except when he tries to make our reaction to the Clintons the most important thing.
Primary purpose - It's a smokescreen to give cover to an eight million dollar bribe.
And they'll be the very last people to get it.
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