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In fairness, Clinton gives good celebrity. We watch her pal around with a galaxy of stars, including Barbra Streisand, Stevie Wonder, Elie Wiesel, Princess Di, Jackie Kennedy, Mother Teresa, Walter Cronkite, Nelson Mandela, Tony Blair and Cherie Blair. In recounting her formative years and her White House days, she charms with stories that have a whiff of the personal. Readers learn that Chelsea was conceived during "vacation in Bermuda, proving once again the importance of regular time off"; that in 1992 a campaign aide first blurted out the moniker "Hillaryland" -- used to describe Hillary's den of offices and loyalists -- when answering the phone in Little Rock and discovered to his embarrassment, Clinton herself on the line; and that as first lady, she was inundated with caseloads of Dr Pepper because she once requested a can. Despite all these apparent intimacies, Clinton offers disappointingly pedestrian accounts of critical moments she participated in, such as the health-care reform debacle during her husband's first term. Someone who has witnessed as much history as she has should be able to offer more revealing insights about her role and the times. A master of the self-justifying concession, Clinton vaguely acknowledges some "missteps" with health care, the biggest one being the noble flaw of "trying to do to much, too fast," but attributes much of her failure to her vicious, well-funded enemies. Clinton continues to play the blame game after describing her surprise when Bill admits that he has been lying to her -- and the world -- for eight months, that he had been "intimate" with "that woman," Monica Lewinsky. Implicitly denying that she was her husband's co-conspirator in deceiving the public from January to August 1998, Clinton characterizes his belated confession as "the most devastating, shocking and hurtful experience of my life." In these adventures in Hillaryland, Clinton's infidelity with Monica Lewinsky comes out of nowhere. Clinton blithely dismisses both Gennifer Flowers and Paula Jones, and never mentions the many other women linked with her husband. While Clinton's account of what she knew and when she knew it may strain credibility, the book does explain that other great Hillary mystery: why she stayed with him. A combination of love and hate seems to motivate and often blind her. Hillary Rodham Clinton loves her husband. To her, the young Bill Clinton was a "Viking," a "force of nature." It began as a marriage of inconvenience, with Hillary Rodham spurning the legal elites of the Northeast to follow her man to Arkansas. Even now, as she still nurses some pain, she gushes about continuing her 30-year "conversation" with her "best friend." For all that passion, during the depths of the Lewinsky crisis, Clinton's hatred toward their enemies, and especially for the special prosecutor Kenneth Starr, bolstered her love for Bill. "I viewed the independent counsel's assault on the Presidency as an ever escalating political war, and I was on Bill's side," she writes. "My fury at those who had deliberately sabotaged him helped me" work toward "forgiving Bill." To Hillary Clinton, this was political "war." By 1998, having "endured more than six years of baseless claims," she would believe almost anything bad about her enemies and nothing critical about herself, her husband or their allies. Her often-understandable frustration prevents an honest accounting of the many Clinton failures. She does not distinguish between New York Times reporters and right-wing hatchetmen, sincere concerns about presidential obstruction of justice and her enemies' obvious excesses. She does not explain how this administration brought so much trouble upon itself; better to blame Ken Starr and his fellow zealots. Throughout, Clinton remains convinced of her own virtue, sure, as too many partisans today are, that the nobility of her goals and the venality of the other side justifies her, her husband and their allies. In fact, unlike earlier incarnations, this Hillary seems quite serene, sure that despite occasional human imperfections, she and the Democrats retain their monopoly on virtue. Here, then, is the book's most important contribution to our understanding of the Clinton years and the reason the tome too often feels obtuse: While most political memoirs are self-justifying and all first lady memoirs have been prissy and sanitized, Clinton's grand unifying theory about the Clinton administration -- blaming so much on the "politics of personal destruction" -- eliminates the introspection necessary for penetrating insight (or for good writing). Clinton is indeed still living history, still shaping history, but her perspective produces a limited and unforgiving history. More dangerous than an "unexamined life" is a life examined superficially and pronounced exemplary. Dashes of self-doubt, self-criticism, humility, would have made this memoir more human, more revealing, more compelling. Then again, those traits might have helped save the Clinton presidency too.
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