Memoir: If you've been watching Hillary Clinton's television appearances as she promoted her memoir, Living History, this week you may have noticed she laughs a lot, and loudly. She laughed her way through a Barbara Walters NBC interview on Monday and through another with Larry King on Tuesday. Living History is reviewed by Conor O'Clery.
Her merriment may have something to do with the fact that her book sold 200,000 copies in the United States on its first day, making it the bestselling non- fiction work in history.
With guaranteed royalties of $8 million she attracted more publicity in a week than all nine Democratic candidates in the last year, and without making a single stump speech. Her book is a reintroduction of the author to the US, a mid-career memoir from a composed and experienced politician with her sights on the highest office in the land. It is full of polished anecdotes, carefully aimed sideswipes at political enemies, and platitudes about policy. She showers praise on friends, and expresses awe at meeting great leaders such as Nelson Mandela.
This one would expect from any political biography. The personal drama at the heart of the book - the bit everyone got to read first because of a most convenient leak six days before publication that ensured maximum publicity - is how she coped with the very public humiliation of her husband's affair with the intern. Everyone knows by now her reaction to the president's confession of "inappropriate behaviour" with Monica Lewinsky seven months after it hit the newspapers:
I could hardly breathe. Gulping for air I started yelling and crying at him, 'What do you mean? What are you saying? Why did you lie to me?'
Instead of satisfying critics who believe she was never fooled, this account has been greeted with scepticism. Indeed it might well become the standard text for politicians expressing themselves as "shocked, shocked" at being deceived, like Capitaine Louis Renault in Casablanca, and perhaps George Bush will one day pen his reaction at being told there never were any Iraqi weapons of mass destruction ("gulping for air, I started yelling, etc").
The account of her struggle to keep the marriage together after the betrayal is her one major sacrifice to the gods of prurience. But don't expect pages of introspection, nor the inside story on other scandals, such as the Gennifer Flowers episode during the 1992 primary campaign. This is dismissed in one paragraph:
Bill called to warn me about an upcoming tabloid story in which a woman named Gennifer Flowers claimed she had a 12-year affair with him. He told me it wasn't true.
It was thereafter a "situation to be dealt with". There is no hint of the (more convincing) scene in the movie version of Primary Colors, Joe Klein's account of the 1992 campaign, when Hillary, played by Emma Thompson, slaps Bill's (John Travolta's) face in fury when the tabloid story breaks.
After the Lewinsky scandal, Hillary and her husband underwent counselling, "which forced us to ask and answer hard questions that years of non-stop campaigning had allowed us to postpone". This is one of the more revealing insights we are given into the world's most public marriage and there is no reason to doubt it. She evidently coped with her "force of nature" husband by ignoring and denying what he was getting up to, in order to protect a union that challenged both and took them to the dizzying heights of the White House and to the forefront of the great political wars of the 1990s.
Hillary Clinton stood by her man but she is no accidental politician trailing in the wake of a powerful spouse. From her early days she was a political activist who would have achieved high office one way or another. The account of her middle-class, mid-Western childhood is one of the most vivid and sympathetic parts of the book, perhaps because it contains no hostages to fortune. The characters come alive, like the granny from hell, "a weak and self-indulgent woman wrapped up in television soap operas".
Hillary Rodham began her political career as a teenage Republican volunteer knocking on doors in Chicago before getting caught up in the anti-war movement of the early 1970s and developing more liberal views. She gave the student commencement speech at Wellesley College and graduated from Yale as one of the brightest legal brains in the country. She was a match for the powerful intellect of Bill Clinton, whom she met at college, "bearded like a Viking", but turned down his first proposal of marriage when holidaying in the English Lake District. She was desperately in love with him, she recalls, but utterly confused abut her life and future. She saw him as a "force of nature" and wondered "whether I'd be up to living through his seasons".
After they married she continued to call herself Hillary Rodham, even after Bill Clinton was elected governor of Arkansas in 1978, an act of independence which was to mark her down in later years as a target for conservatives. From the time they arrived in the White House she was crucified by right-wing ideologues such as radio talk-show host Rush Limbaugh, because as first lady she had dared to involve herself in policy that didn't fit their agenda.
Things did go badly wrong and Bill and Hillary Clinton made many mis-steps. Some of her explanations of controversies are not wholly convincing: for example, the one involving the firing of the White House travel staff and replacing them, temporarily, with an Arkansas travel company owned by a distant cousin of the president (which I recall kept sending me bills for expenses I never incurred when travelling with Clinton during the 1992 campaign).
Since the book was published, some commentators with an axe to grind, such as Vanity Fair columnist Christopher Hitchens, have been complaining that she takes no blame for anything. On the contrary. Hillary Clinton admits to many of the mistakes that contributed to her biggest failure, the rejection by Congress of healthcare reform, which her husband delegated to her. She agrees that the resentment of the White House press corps at her aloofness was justified. She apologises tearfully to a strategy group in the White House for letting everyone down after Republicans seized Congress in 1994.
She comments with humour on her gaffes with hairstyle and clothes, and chides herself for remarks that came to haunt her, such as her comment in the 1992 campaign that she "could have stayed home and baked cookies" rather than follow her legal profession, words taken taken as an insult to homemakers across the nation.
When a radio interviewer asked her if a photograph surreptitiously taken of her and Bill dancing on a beach in the Virgin Islands was posed, she replied: "Just name me any 50-year-old woman who would knowingly pose in her bathing-suit - with her back pointed towards the camera?" Well, Cher, or Jane Fonda or Tina Turner perhaps, "but not me".
She emerges as a complex and fascinating woman, an ambitious politician who loved posing for Vogue magazine and changing her hairstyles, and a protective and loving mother of their daughter, Chelsea. In time, she modelled herself on Eleanor Roosevelt, a formidable White House presence who, like Hillary Clinton, faced considerable adversity.
"A woman is like a teabag," she recalls Eleanor Roosevelt saying. "You never know how strong she is until she's in hot water."
We are also given an intriguing insight into how people in political life tolerate their enemies socially. As first lady, Hillary sat arch-tormentor Newt Gingrich beside herself at a White House dinner. She invited to a White House function Richard Mellon Scaife, the man at the heart of the "vast right-wing conspiracy" who pumped millions into an anti-Clinton vendetta, and who, astonishingly, queued in the reception line to shake her hand. (There were also some surprising omissions: I often wondered why the Clintons never invited the ageing Eugene McCarthy, who was her anti-war idol in the 1960s, to any White House event).
Forall its limitations, the book is not boring, though I could have done without the detailed travel accounts, culled from the official diary, which flesh out the 562 pages. If the author is the hero of the book, special prosecutor Kenneth Starr is the anti-hero. No gilt-edged White House invitation for him. This thoroughly unpleasant man, with his obsession with sexual detail, became the Clintons' arch-enemy. The unleashing on the nation of his lurid report with raw grand jury testimony that should have been kept confidential had parents all across the US scrambling to explain new words to curious children.
"I have not read the Starr report," Hillary Clinton writes sniffily, "but I've been told the word sex (or some variation of it) appears 581 times."
In the end, the expensive, time-consuming and distressing investigations cleared her of any wrongdoing.
The book puts all that behind her. Another act in the drama is about to start. In her TV interviews this week, Hillary Clinton laughed off the idea that she would run for president next.
But it is pretty certain that she will have the last laugh.
Conor O'Clery is North America Editor of The Irish Times
Living History. By Hillary Rodham Clinton, Headline, 562pp, £20