Hillary's more wonk than writer
David Kipen, Chronicle Book CriticThursday, June 12, 2003
Nobody scouring Hillary Clinton's cautious but admirable new memoir for revelations appears to have stuck around for the acknowledgments.On page 529, Clinton somewhat shockingly identifies her longtime right arm, Lissa Muscatine, as "[r]esponsible for many of the words in my speeches as first lady and in this book."
How's that again? Responsible for many of the words... ...in this book? If somebody else was responsible for many of the words, then what exactly was Clinton responsible for? The pictures? The typesetting? Hiring Lissa Muscatine?
Maybe in a culture where policy assistants routinely ghostwrite not just their bosses' speeches but even their signed op-ed pieces, where lazy pundits ridicule plagiarists for stealing other people's words but seem to think buying other people's words is standard operating procedure, this sort of thing flies.
Certainly, Clinton wouldn't be the first person to staff out part, or even all, of her autobiography. But for anybody still naive enough to consider written language the purest, unfudgeable fingerprint of a human soul, the admission rankles.
Whoever really wrote "Living History," it's not exactly a knock on Clinton to observe that the book reads as if written by a committee...
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