Book shows Clinton specializes in denial

Orlando Sentinel ^ | 6/11/03 | Kathleen Parker

[LdSentinal]

By coincidence two parallel fictions ran simultaneously in my household Sunday night. In the kitchen, I caught snippets of Hillary Clinton and Barbara Walters musing over the New York senator's new book, while my male associates gathered in another room to indulge their apparently insatiable appetite for The Godfather.

Dazzling performances all 'round on a theme that's nearly become an American leitmotif: denial.

Hillary, whose $8 million memoir Living History hit bookstores Monday, is telling Walters how she felt on the morning of Aug. 15, 1998, when Bill woke her up to confess his affair with that woman, Monica Lewinsky:

"I was just beside myself with anger and disappointment," she says, surely confusing that memory with the time the tooth fairy left her a dime instead of a quarter.