A Woman in Charge revisits in revealing and compelling detail the spiritual and fleshly perils that shaped The Journey. Early buzz on the book has predictably stressed new salacious content—a report that Bill, involved with a divorcée named Marilyn Jo Jenkins, was prepared to bail out of the marriage in 1989, after having ruled out a 1988 Presidential run on bimbo-eruption grounds.
But the more salient and persuasive part of the book is Mr. Bernstein’s case that Hillary was the great unacknowledged legislator of the Clinton era. In addition to her prominent, disastrous tour atop the White House’s health-care-reform task force, she also managed all sorts of behind-the-scenes doings, large and small. She made hiring recommendations, from the U.S. Attorney General down to the infamous sacking of the White House travel-office staff. She coordinated campaign-based political strategies and put key executive-action items at the top of the White House agenda—e.g., timing the executive order reversing the Reagan-era ban on abortion counseling for the 20th anniversary of the Supreme Court’s Roe v. Wade decision, even if it confirmed all the darkest forebodings of Pat Buchanan–style culture warriors on the right. She quarterbacked legal strategies for long stretches, as the White House kept accumulating new scandals, largely via its own inattentive management style.
This is all, indeed, trailblazing stuff for a First Lady—especially since, as Mr. Bernstein takes pains to remind us, Hillary Clinton attained a higher summit of executive power than any woman ever in America.
And with what result? The dispiriting policy record of the Clinton years—and particularly Hillary’s role in the Clinton team’s many disappointments—cuts very much against the storyline that Mr. Bernstein wants to emphasize. To the extent that this is the saga of an ever-evolving, experiential woman-in-charge, it’s also a litany of blunders—strategic, legal and political. Mr. Bernstein acknowledges as much in the book’s prologue: He lists an impressive array of Hillary-authored snafus, then observes, “For the first time in American history, a president’s wife sent her husband’s presidency off the rails.”
This low point sets up a rising narrative arc: Propelled by the “engine of Hillary’s evolution and of her enormous capacity for change,” the embattled First Lady revived her political fortunes—and rescued her husband’s flailing, scandal-plagued Presidency in the process. By standing firmly (if angrily) by her “co-president” and marshaling a demoralized White House staff for one last battle to save him from his Lewinsky-obsessed persecutors, Hillary performed a crowning work of spiritual self-reinvention. Mr. Bernstein argues that in view of the bloody path behind her, “Hillary’s ascent after her husband’s presidency seems all the more remarkable.”
Does it? There’s no question that Hillary has placed herself in the front rank of Democratic power politics, and carved out a distinguished career as the junior Senator from New York. Yet it’s hard to see how this marks a dramatic postscript to the Hillary Gospel of Change. If anything, her post–White House prominence seems the vindication of something at least as fundamental to her character as her soft-focus spirituality: her diehard yuppie credentialism, the firm conviction that she has been marked as a moral leader to a generation—and a gender—by virtue of her membership in the caring class.
The popular, if misleading, shorthand for this sort of conviction is “entitlement,” and although Mr. Bernstein makes free use of the term, he gets the dynamics precisely backward. When she was diligently shielding the health-care panels from public view and industry participation, Mr. Bernstein argues, Hillary’s “sense of entitlement” was identical with “the idea that the goal was so worthy that extraordinary procedures could be justified.” But the larger contours of Hillary’s career clearly suggest that she thought nothing of mobilizing “extraordinary procedures” to protect her bona fides and bring her lofty moral aims before the bar of history.
Take her deeply puzzling reluctance to grant the Whitewater special counsel’s office access to her billing records from the Rose Law firm in the 1980’s. When the missing records mysteriously reappeared, they didn’t feature any damning information—just the sort of round-robin cronyism that was very much the everyday business of putting real-estate deals together in a state like Arkansas. But one White House attorney suggests to Mr. Bernstein that that may have been precisely the point: “Maybe she just didn’t want people to know that this is what her life was … small-time stuff, too …. The billing records are embarrassing, maybe for what they show about how she spent her time, which was not in any kind of high-minded or incredibly intellectual pursuit of the law, which is sort of her reputation. A lot of people [on the White House legal team] thought that.” The records answered resoundingly in the negative a question that Hillary had asked in a letter to a high-school friend: “Am I really not unique after all?” How could she reconcile the records with the boast she’d made to her Yale Law classmates: “I’m not interested in corporate law. My life is too short to spend it making money for some big anonymous firm.”
The White House lawyer’s speculation chimes with Hillary’s capacious moral self-regard and professional vanity. She did not, for instance, let it become publicly known that she failed the District of Columbia bar exams until nearly 30 years after the fact, even though fail-rates in D.C. were around 50 percent, and no great stigma is attached to flubbing the exam the first time out.
