The New York Times 10/13/1996 By James B. Stewart
The Seduction of Hillary Rodham
By David Brock
Illustrated. 452 pp. New York:
The Free Press. $26.
If conflict lies at the heart of great drama, then surely Hillary Rodham Clinton is one of the great characters of our age. She is the embodiment of conflicts that all but define our time: marriage versus career; motherhood versus profession; truth versus expedience; power versus accountability; image versus reality. In her fateful decision to tether her fortunes to William Jefferson Clinton can be seen the origins of a plot that, as it accelerates into and beyond Nov. 5, has all the hallmarks of triumph and tragedy.
Recognizing this, David Brock places Hillary Clinton at the center of his investigative biography, ”The Seduction of Hillary Rodham.” Mr. Brock is best known for ”The Real Anita Hill,” his best-selling expose of Clarence Thomas’s accuser, and his lurid account of Bill Clinton’s sexual escapades in The American Spectator. He has been lionized by many conservatives as an antidote to the allegedly liberal national media, and his new book has been eagerly awaited by anti-Clinton zealots still looking for the elusive silver bullet that might halt the White House re-election juggernaut.
They are in for a shock. They will not only be disappointed; they will be infuriated. While almost perfunctorily placing his story within the lines of conservative politics, Mr. Brock seems to have found in ”St. Hillary” a means to attempt his own redemption as a journalist. In substance and style, he distances himself from the polemicist of ”The Real Anita Hill.” He has tried to do his subject justice in the broadest sense.
At times he goes too far. On the most controversial questions that swirl around the First Lady, Mr. Brock’s conclusions echo her apologists. Whitewater? Hillary Rodham Clinton was a mere passive investor, ”no different from many talented and ambitious people who have little interest in or aptitude for finance.” Castle Grande, the fraud-laced real estate deal linked to her by the billing records that surfaced mysteriously in the White House? Hillary’s was a mere ”cameo role,” and ”nothing in Hillary’s past indicates that she would knowingly participate in a sham deal.” And what about those billing records? Despite the presence of the First Lady’s fingerprints, Mr. Brock says the possibility that Carolyn Huber, the White House aide who discovered them, actually left them in the family’s private quarters ”cannot be ruled out” — a claim that lacks any supporting evidence and unfairly impugns Ms. Huber, who testified to the contrary.
Perhaps most startling of all, Mr. Brock dismisses or rationalizes the sometimes powerful evidence that Hillary Rodham Clinton has lied — about everything from her successful commodities trading to her role in the travel office firings — by invoking a relativism rooted in Republican precedents. ”Why should she be judged so much more harshly than anyone else in similar circumstances?” he asks. ”What about President Bush’s suspicious Iran-Contra notes? . . . Or the stock deal that earned Senator Alfonse D’Amato $37,000 in one day?” Complaining that ”serious wrongdoing is confused with trivial oversight,” he goes so far as to call for the abolition of the independent counsel to ”scale back the rampant and overgrown ethics machinery.” Almost reluctantly, it seems, Mr. Brock reminds us that ”even moral or historical imperatives cannot place one above the law.” All of this would be far more persuasive if he revealed any significant new information. But in virtually every case he relies on the published record, which, while voluminous, leaves numerous questions unanswered. (This problem pervades the book, given the evident and not surprising unwillingness of people close to his subject to speak to someone with Mr. Brock’s reputation.) This isn’t to say that Hillary Clinton is guilty of any crime, simply that with Kenneth Starr’s investigation still under way, it seems prudent to keep an open mind. At this juncture, it takes a large leap of faith to exonerate her.
The merit in Mr. Brock’s book is to be found elsewhere. His own faith in the First Lady seems rooted both in the many exemplary qualities he perceives in her and in the degree to which he empathizes with her as a victim of her husband. Clearly the President is the seducer of the title — Mr. Brock quotes a former White House aide, David Watkins, calling Bill Clinton ”the greatest seducer who ever lived” — and to the degree Hillary Clinton has been forced to compromise the high moral and ethical standards she brought both to their political partnership and their marriage, Mr. Brock blames Bill Clinton. Indeed, his characterization of the President is consistently scathing, at times approaching an ad hominem attack. He quotes John Robert Starr, the conservative columnist and managing editor of The Arkansas Democrat: ”The difference between Bill and Hillary is that deep down Hillary is a good person.”
This sentiment finds its fullest expression in Mr. Brock’s detailed account of Bill Clinton’s marital infidelities, which, if true, suggests that he is promiscuous to a degree unrivaled even by the libidinous J.F.K. In a passage sure to excite tabloid interest, Mr. Brock passes on that in 1981 Mrs. Clinton went so far as to hire a private investigator to report to her on her husband’s extramarital affairs. The investigator, Ivan Duda, found about eight possibilities, including one with a woman who worked with Mrs. Clinton at the Rose law firm. ”That one really hurt and made her furious,” Mr. Duda tells Mr. Brock.
Like many such anecdotes about Bill Clinton (and there are plenty in this book), it’s hard to know if it’s true. Mr. Brock discloses that Mr. Duda’s license was revoked by a board appointed by Mr. Clinton, potentially giving him a bias. Many such sources, from the state troopers who protected the Governor to various women themselves, like Paula Jones, have questionable credibility, a fact that, as Mr. Brock notes, has often been invoked by Clinton supporters. Why Mr. Brock believes some sources but not others (such as Jim and Susan McDougal) is never clear. But the sheer accumulation of such incidents reported by Mr. Brock, at least some supported by multiple witnesses, suggests that Hillary Clinton at some point had to accommodate herself to a humiliating fact of life that would have sent many, if not most, women to divorce court — a step that she herself contemplated on more than one occasion, Mr. Brock reports.
In this accommodation, according to Mr. Brock’s thesis, can be seen the essential ”seduction” of Hillary Rodham: not only did she compromise the integrity of her marriage, and by implication show a willingness to compromise all else that she once held inviolate; she was drawn into her husband’s extramarital affairs as a virtual co-conspirator. She not only defended and protected him in the wake of Gennifer Flowers’s tabloid allegations of a 12-year affair, but helped mount a campaign to threaten other women who might come forward. Mr. Brock reports that the Clinton campaign paid the noted San Francisco private investigator Jack Palladino about $100,000 to investigate and intimidate women linked to the Governor, including a former Miss Arkansas.
Mr. Brock concludes that ”the aggressively defensive strategy Hillary used to contain the womanizing allegations would necessarily pervade campaign responses to every other scandal that was to follow, including Whitewater. . . . It is easy to see why Hillary could not accept the advice of aides who urged a policy of openness and full disclosure. . . . Hillary did not know where such a policy of openness would lead. Her years of consciously avoiding the facts would now paralyze her.”
In absorbing detail, Mr. Brock recounts Hillary Rodham’s transformation from campus radical to Watergate investigator, legal services activist, Rose law firm partner, Governor’s wife and, ultimately, co-Presidential candidate and First Lady. In her early years Mr. Brock uncovers numerous ties to left-wing, even Communist causes, that will no doubt prove grist for the conservative mill. But he rightly seems more interested in how such youthful leanings and idealism were ground down by what he calls the ”mob culture” of one-party Arkansas. In any event, he shows scant evidence that any truly radical ideas have accompanied her into the White House, despite the faith in big government inherent in her grandiose health care plan and her largely successful effort to staff the Federal Government not with her husband’s ”new Democrats,” but her own like-minded appointees. What does seem to have survived in the First Lady, Mr. Brock argues, is the social activism of liberal Methodism, an activism safely rooted within the Establishment, and the ends-justify-the-means rationalizations of Saul Alinsky, a radical political organizer and author of ”Reveille for Radicals,” whom she met in Chicago during the tumultuous summer of 1968, before her senior year at Wellesley. It is the latter, he suggests, that underlies her otherwise puzzling handling of matters like Whitewater and the travel office.
One can only imagine how she feels today, having attained the White House, the goal that always lay at the heart of the Faustian bargain she seems to have forged when she committed herself, on more than one occasion, to Bill Clinton. For as Mr. Brock tells her story, it has always been Hillary, not Bill, who was motivated by a ”pristine vision of a good society anchored in profound moral conviction.” For Bill, lacking any such compass or vision, it was enough simply to be elected President. But being First Lady cannot have been enough for Hillary, who, as reported in The New Yorker by Connie Bruck, may have contemplated succeeding her husband as President. As she ponders the emotional toll of her marriage, surveys the wreckage of her health care plan, contemplates the effect of the welfare bill on the children she so clearly cares for, compares the abruptly halted ascendancy of the philandering, amoral Dick Morris to her own banishment to distant women’s conferences, and watches her former Whitewater partner Susan McDougal led to prison in shackles, one can only marvel at her fortitude. When all is said and done, can it possibly have been worth it?
Stripped of its conservative political baggage, premature attempts to exonerate her in matters that remain under investigation, and unsupported slurs against the President, much of what Mr. Brock says in ”The Seduction of Hillary Rodham” rings true. Given his own constituency, it has no doubt taken courage for him to reach the conclusions he does. While it might seem ironic coming from the writer who once called Anita Hill ”a bit nutty, and a bit slutty,” Mr. Brock is right that Hillary Clinton has been demonized at times by misogynists and right-wing fanatics. No doubt the liberal press has at times held her to impossibly high ideals. She has often been a lightning rod for criticism that, Mr. Brock makes clear, would more appropriately be leveled at her husband. Conversely, Bill’s achievements are in many cases Hillary’s. Seeing her at the Democratic Convention in Chicago, eloquently defending her husband and gazing lovingly at their daughter Chelsea, it isn’t hard to see why Mr. Brock’s heart went out to her. In contrast to her flaws — he cites intellectual rigidity, elitism, moral vanity and poor judgment — it is her noble ambitions, her manifest virtues and her suffering that make her story so achingly poignant.
http://www.nytimes.com/1996/10/13/books/innocence-betrayed.html?pagewanted=1