We follow [HILLARY RODHAM CLINTON] from campus politics to her association with leading children's rights activist Marian Edelman and the Children's Defense Fund. Edelman, a fervent believer in the transfer of wealth from rich to poor, warmed to the young, passionately ambitious law student, and became one of Hillary's many guides and mentors.

Saturday, June 19, 1999

HILLARY RODHAM CLINTON: The First Partner

By Joyce Milton

Morrow, 406 pages, $40

Joyce Milton's biography of Hillary Rodham Clinton can be summed up in six words: "Hillary Rodham Clinton is a crook."

If Milton, a respected biographer of the Rosenbergs, Charlie Chaplin and Charles Lindbergh, is right, it is a great shame. One longs to like Hillary Clinton. She's everything women of her generation want in a leader: crackerjack smart, on the side of the right and the good, a feminist child-advocate and willing to be both politician and banner-carrier, no matter how much she is vilified. Until last year, she appeared to have an interesting marriage to a powerful man while managing to retain her own identity. She has a perfect, seemingly happy child, she's dedicated and hard-working and, except for stumpy legs, she's very attractive.

She would be an ideal first woman U.S. president, except for one thing: On the evidence of this biography, her association with the truth seems even more tenuous than her husband's.

Hillary Rodham Clinton: The First Partner is not psychobiography. It is extremely readable, measured, persuasive and reasoned. Although Milton flags Clinton's slightly abusive relationship with her father, whose wholehearted approval she was never granted, she is more interested in Clinton's thinking, activism and the assessable results of that activism, all of which she has documented in a most meticulous way. Hillary Rodham Clinton has led a very public life, much of it a matter of record.

According to Milton, she matured along with the extreme left wing of the Democratic Party. This process was not a happy accommodation with reality. The First Partnerdetails how the U.S. left evolved from a haphazard group of campus radicals into thousands of conflicting constituencies, each preoccupied with its own goals, determined to redress the inequities of poverty and race by creating a massive social-welfare state. This historical analysis is the underlying strength of the book. One's only qualifier is that Milton is clearly no fan of the left, although she claims no political association, and insists she was hoping for a much prettier and more admirable picture.

We follow Hillary from campus politics to her association with leading children's rights activist Marian Edelman and the Children's Defense Fund. Edelman, a fervent believer in the transfer of wealth from rich to poor, warmed to the young, passionately ambitious law student, and became one of Hillary's many guides and mentors. Milton cracks down on Hillary's work on the Watergate committee, charging her and her associates with being so determined to get rid of Richard Nixon that they hid evidence and lied. She attacks the Legal Services Corp., a Washington-based organization of which Hillary became chairwoman in 1981. The LSC's goal was to "empower the poor" by "increasing people's sense of grievance and entitlement," using legal action to expand the welfare rolls and get as many people as possible on food stamps and disability.

Milton's case is clear: Because of Hillary's sense that social reform was necessary, she and many of her cohorts decided that creating an overarching welfare state was their first principle, and an end to be achieved by any means necessary. They became masterful at subverting the law, at technocratic interpretation, at delay, obfuscation, red herrings, spinning the press, demonizing their opponents, muckraking and harassing -- all skills we have become familiar with while watching the First Couple.

Nor does Milton shrink from a stringent analysis of the marriage. She reports that from the very beginning, Hillary was aware of Bill's weakness, and decided to put up with it for the sake of their career. No surprises there. What is surprising is just how predatory he is. Even on the dawn of the morning they left for Washington, troopers were apparently smuggling in one last extra-friendly gal. More horrifying is how accommodating Hillary was and just how deeply this "unimportant" vice affected almost every political decision the couple made.

"Everything from health care to balancing the budget to declaring war to welfare reform was strongly influenced by Bill's need to placate Hillary. Every woman demanded a concession and there were hundreds, according to Milton's informants. She was appointed (despite her lack of experience in Washington) to lead the health-care task force as a pay-off for Gennifer Flowers. Monica Lewinsky paved the way for her Senate campaign. Every bimbo meant another foreign trip, another appointment, another funding of an associate's pet project. Bill's women have made Hillary's career.

The problem with biographies that follow on the news so closely is that the work lacks the perspective that can only come with time. The results of Bill Clinton's presidency are not clear and won't be for years.

Hillary seems bent on a winning a Senate seat, probably leading to a presidential run herself. This is a needed book, given her current saintly status; we must respect "the people." Many Americans actively distrust her. After reading The First Partner ,one can only honour these feelings. She has never taken one authentic action in her entire life and isn't about to start now. Even divorcing Bill would be a political move to win over the feminists and left-wingers of New York State. Hillary Clinton: Fear her.

  

Contributing reviewer Elizabeth Nickson lives and writes on Salt Spring Island, B.C.