A 'Zone of Privacy' With Calculated Polish (disses Hil's book)

Two leitmotifs run through Hillary Rodham Clinton's wildly hyped new memoir, "Living History."

One has to do with her changing hairstyles, which are discussed in detail at least a half dozen times, as they morphed with Madonna-like frequency from long to short, from frizzy to hair-banded to carefully coiffed.

The other has to do with Mrs. Clinton's penchant for blaming enemies, from political opponents to a "vast right-wing conspiracy," for her and her husband's failures and travails.

The first underscores the chameleonlike quality she's always shared with her husband, the belief, as he once put it, that character "is a journey, not a destination." The second underscores both the highly partisan atmosphere of the 1990's and the Clintons' reluctance to assume full responsibility for their own mistakes and evasions.

Mrs. Clinton, who has repeatedly invoked a "zone of privacy" around her and her family, talks in this book about noticing Bill Clinton's narrow wrists and tapered fingers when she first met him at Yale Law School in the early 1970's; about wanting "to wring Bill's neck" after he admitted to her that he'd had "an inappropriate intimacy" with Monica Lewinsky; about subsequently going into "regular marital counseling to determine whether or not we were going to salvage our marriage."

With the exception of such revelations (most of which were publicized in a leak to The Associated Press last week and in Mrs. Clinton's interview with Barbara Walters, which was broadcast on ABC on Sunday), "Living History" is a mishmash of pious platitudes about policy (not unlike those found in the author's earlier book "It Takes a Village"); robotic asides about her official duties in Washington (not unlike those found in her Martha Stewart-esque book "An Invitation to the White House"); and by now familiar accounts of Hillary Rodham Clinton's metamorphosis over the years from Goldwater girl to liberal student activist to high-powered lawyer to first lady to senator from New York.

Overall the book has the overprocessed taste of a stump speech, the calculated polish of a string of anecdotes to be delivered on a television chat show.

Mrs. Clinton is fond of talking about herself in lofty terms as a symbolic figure. "While Bill talked about social change, I embodied it." Her 562-page book is in many ways an artifact of the curious age in which we live: an age in which confession and "sharing" have become talking points for public figures, and scandal translates instantly into celebrity. An age in which tough, talented women can ascend to high political office but often experience their greatest popularity when they are perceived as less-threatening victims.

The book struggles to turn the author's many contradictions — the policy wonk who poses for Vogue; the self-righteous "politics of meaning" crusader who made a quick $100,000 in the commodities market; the big-picture reformer who has begun to position herself as a centrist — into a narrative of maturation and reconciliation.

It is a book that purports to deal with the many controversies and scandals in Bill Clinton's campaigns and presidency, presumably to get these issues behind her before she contemplates running for the White House herself. Yet the book skates over the problems the Clinton administration faced in its rocky debut and in the impeachment crisis and skims over details of matters like Whitewater and "travelgate" while expending a startling amount of space on her trips abroad and her personal appearance.

Some of her asides can be funny, like recounting how she and an aide worked out "a system of hand gestures, like those of a coach and a pitcher, so that I would know when to smooth my hair down or wipe the lipstick off my teeth." Many, however, feel more like women's magazine filler. We learn that Bill was flummoxed when Hillary had her hair permed in 1974, but we do not learn why billing records from the Rose Law Firm, included in the independent counsel's subpoenas, mysteriously surfaced in the White House, after having been missing for months. We learn that Mrs. Clinton and her daughter, Chelsea, wore long, flowing tunics over loose pants during a trip to India and Pakistan, but we never learn about President Clinton's controversial last-minute pardons.

The Gennifer Flowers episode is dealt with in a highly cursory manner. Of a newspaper article in which Ms. Flowers claimed that she had had a 12-year affair with Bill Clinton, Mrs. Clinton writes that her husband "told me it wasn't true." Later in the Monica Lewinsky mess in August 1998, before Mr. Clinton told his wife of his involvement with that intern, their adviser Robert S. Barnett tells Mrs. Clinton that "you have to face the fact that something about this might be true." She reports that her response was, "My husband may have his faults, but he has never lied to me."

Though Mrs. Clinton admits that she made missteps with her health-care plan (its failure contributed to the Republicans' taking control of both the House and Senate in 1994 for the first time in 40 years), she tends to attribute many of her and her husband's difficulties before and during his presidency to "the politics of personal destruction."

She blames negative ads and a broken promise from the Carter White House for insuring her husband's failure to recapture the Arkansas governor's mansion in 1980. She shrugs off travelgate as "the first manifestation of an obsession for investigation that persisted into the next millennium." And she characterizes Whitewater as "a limitless investigation of our lives" the purpose of which was "to discredit the president and the administration and slow down its momentum."

Later Mrs. Clinton's anger at Kenneth W. Starr overrode her anger at her husband over Monica Lewinsky. "And the more I believed Starr was abusing his power," she writes, "the more I sympathized with Bill — at least politically."

In these pages Mrs. Clinton observes that it was she, not her husband, who decided not to turn over Whitewater documents to the press, and that it was she who strenuously argued against appointing an independent counsel. This book ratifies the dynamic between the Clintons depicted in the press and in memoirs by White House officials, that Bill Clinton was the more indecisive, forgiving one, while Hillary was the more combative, organized one.

He was the optimist; she was the worrier. He was a garrulous, boyish multitasker; she was the highly focused worker who kept her own counsel. The Monica Lewinsky imbroglio made her feel more isolated: "I also worried," she writes, "that the armor I had acquired might distance me from my true emotions, that I might turn into the brittle caricature some critics accused me of being."

The least self-conscious portions of this book deal with Mrs. Clinton's childhood and her memories of her mother, a closet Democrat, and her father, a "rock-ribbed, up-by-your-bootstraps, conservative Republican" who warned Hillary about the perils of waste. "To this day," she writes, "I put uneaten olives back in the jar, wrap up the tiniest pieces of cheese."

In this book's opening chapters she writes about growing up in a Chicago suburb where going to McDonald's was reserved for "special occasions," where neighborhood kids thought it was fun to pedal through the haze of town trucks spraying DDT in the summer twilight, where she and her brothers spent more time playing board games (like Monopoly and Clue) and card games than watching television.

These sections have a homey immediacy lacking in the rest of "Living History," which for all its roller-coaster drama — all the political scandals, marital woes and startling comebacks and reinventions — radiates the faintly stale air (particularly unnerving in the audio versions of the memoir) of being the carefully rehearsed and elided statements of a professional pol intent on turning a book tour into the first leg of another campaign.

I think that chef-d'oeuvre was created by Registered. I did the dress...

Designs on designs... Although a reliable source had previously warned me about the wife's designs on the people's designs -- she had apparently acquired the nasty habit of pilfering from the White House drapery fund -- when I created the following metaphoric musing a year before the clintons "moved," I never imagined that she would -- that they would -- in real life -- in real time -- actually swipe the sofa. Smaller objects neatly tuck-able in nuncupative deals & unnumbered Swiss accounts, without question... BUT THE SOFA??
Jan. 1, 2000

hillary's "interior" design scheme
(an animated how-to)

by Mia T
copyright Mia T 2000

The White House Booty

Letters .. thanked Lee and Joy Ficks for their 1993 donation of a kitchen set to the White House. Joy Ficks said she was surprised to hear the Clintons are keeping the kitchen set as a personal gift.

White House Gifts List

• $19,900 two sofas, an easy chair and an ottoman from Steve Mittman,
New York.

• $3,650 kitchen table and four chairs from Lee Ficks, Cincinnati.

• $2,843 sofa from Brad Noe, High Point, N.C.

• $1,170 lamps from Stuart Schiller, Hialeah, Fla.

• $1,000 needlepoint rug from David Martinous, Little Rock.

Following are gifts the Clintons received in 2000 and are paying for:

• $9,433 china cabinet, chandelier and a copy of President Lincoln's
Cooper Union speech from Walter and Selma Kaye, New York.

• $7,375 two coffee tables and two chairs from Denise Rich, New York.

• $7,000 dining room table, server and golf club from Mr. and Mrs. Ron
Dozoretz, Washington.

• $6,282 two carpets from Glen Eden Carpets, Calhoun, Ga.

• $5,000 rug from Martin Patrick Evans, Chicago.

• $5,000 china from Mr. and Mrs. Bill Brandt, Winnetka, Ill.

• $4,994 flatware from Ghada Irani, Los Angeles.

• $4,992 china from Iris Cantor, New York.

• $4,967 flatware, Edith Wasserman, Beverly Hills, Calif.

• $4,967 flatware, Mr. and Mrs. Morris Pynoos, Beverly Hills, Calif.

• $4,787 china from Mary Steenburgen and Ted Danson, Los Angeles.

• $4,920 china from Mr. and Mrs. Steven Spielberg, Universal City,
Calif.

• $3,000 painting from Joan Tumpson, Miami.

• $2,993 televisions and DVD player from Paul Goldenberg, La Habra,
Calif.

• $2,400 dining room chairs from Arthur Athis, Los Angeles.

• $2,110 china and jacket from Jill and Ken Iscol, Pound Ridge, N.Y.

• $1,588 flatware from Myra Greenspun, Green Valley, Nev.

• $595 pantsuit and sweater, Margaret O'Leary, San Francisco.

• $524 golf driver and golf balls from Richard Helmstetter, Carlsbad,
Calif.

• $500 antique book on George Washington, Mr. and Mrs. Bud Yorkin, Los
Angeles.

• $499 golf driver from Ely Callaway, Carlsbad, Calif.

• $450 leather jacket from Vin Gupta, Omaha.

• $350 golf driver, Jack Nicholson, Beverly Hills, Calif.

• $350 framed tapestry, Mr. and Mrs. Vo Viet Thanh, Vietnam.

• $340 two sweaters from Robin Carnahan and Nina Canci, St. Louis.

• $300 flatware from Colette D'Etremont, New Brunswick, Canada.

• $300 painting of Buddy, Brian B. Ready, Chappaqua, N.Y.

Chair Lift

Among the gifts that former president Bill Clinton says he is keeping as
personal presents he accepted last year are $28,000 worth of furnishings
that documents and interviews indicate were given to the National Park
Service in 1993 as part of the permanent White House collection...

Two of the furniture makers whose donations Clinton took with him on
leaving the White House last month say they gave them to the White House
as part of a widely publicized, $396,000 redecoration of the executive
mansion and not to Clinton personally.

"When we've been asked to donate, it was always hyphenated with the
words, " 'White House,' " New York manufacturer Steve Mittman said of
his family-owned business, which gave two sofas, an easy chair and an
ottoman, worth $19,900 and listed by Clinton as part of the gifts he
took with him. "To us, it was not a donation to a particular person."

Gifts Were Not Meant for Clintons, Some Donors Say

Sen. Clinton made another assertion - one that is equally misleading.
She contends she was not obliged to report the first Leiber bag she received "because it was received before the Clintons entered the White House."
But this bag, valued at $3,500, was received after the election and during the transition and therefore obviously was related to the Clinton presidency.

HILLARY'S STORY ON HER WHITE HOUSE GIFTS IS FULL OF (LOOP)HOLES, Dick Morris
But he said the Socks purse was given to Clinton during the transition in late 1992, before her husband took office...

HILLARY: I RETURNED GIFTS TO THE NATIONAL ARCHIVE

TRANSLATION: An earlier example of the clinton post-election/pre-swearing-in klepto-bribery scheme...

MORE: HILLARY: I RETURNED GIFTS TO THE NATIONAL ARCHIVE [SOCKS BAGS BAG]

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