Free Republic

The school of literary criticism known as reception theory holds that a text should be studied in light of its effect on its contemporaries, that a reader should be aware of the “horizon of expectations” in which a text is produced. I was reminded of this the other day as I observed, in amusement, fascination, and occasional pity, the reaction of the so-called mainstream media to Alana Goodman’s lengthy and rock-solid report on “The Hillary Papers.” This trove of previously unexamined transcriptions of conversations between Hillary Clinton and her best friend Diane Blair had been collecting dust at the University...

FEBRUARY 14, 2014 Hillary, Relentless and Shameless By The Editors The phrase “Clinton fatigue” entered the political lexicon during the previous century; by this point, we surely must have entered the age of Chronic Clinton-Fatigue Syndrome. But the recent making public of the so-called Hillary Papers — the notes kept by her close friend Diane Blair during Mrs. Clinton’s tumultuous White House years, as reported by the Washington Free Beacon — shed additional light on the character of the “co-presidents” who just will not go away. It transpires to nobody’s great surprise that Mrs. Clinton was more than a passive...

In February of 1998, in the midst of the Monica Lewinsky scandal, I interviewed Diane Blair about her dear friend Hillary Clinton. Blair was ill then, suffering from cancer, but she was vehement about two things: that Hillary was a dynamite friend–smart, funny, thoughtful and loyal–and that the Clintons had a real marriage. She told me a story about the two of them getting into a wild, screaming fight over some obscure policy issue, a fight so intense that she was beginning to get embarrassed and thought about making for the door…when Bill took Hillary’s face in his hands, looked...

“The Hillary Papers” — a large archive of previously unpublished documents allegedly kept by Hillary Clinton’s friend and adviser Diane Blair — are seeing the light of day through a report The Washington Free Beacon posted Sunday night. The archive paints Clinton, a former U.S. senator, U.S. secretary of state, and possible 2016 presidential candidate, as a ‘strong, ambitious, and ruthless Democratic operative,” the Free Beacon concluded. “The Hillary Papers” include “correspondence, diaries, interviews, strategy memos, and contemporaneous accounts of conversations with the Clintons ranging from the mid-1970s to the turn of the millennium.”

On May 12, 1992, Stan Greenberg and Celinda Lake, top pollsters for Bill Clinton’s presidential campaign, issued a confidential memo. The memo’s subject was “Research on Hillary Clinton.” Voters admired the strength of the Arkansas first couple, the pollsters wrote. However, “they also fear that only someone too politically ambitious, too strong, and too ruthless could survive such controversy so well.”