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Bernstein's Hillary: A Complex Character Ronald Kessler When Carl Bernstein was writing his book on Hillary Clinton, most of us thought that the politically liberal author would write a puff piece on her. Wrong. Bernstein's "A Woman in Charge," which just hit the New York Times non-fiction bestseller list, is as devastating and comprehensive a portrait of the Democratic presidential candidate as I have seen. [Editor's Note: Get Carl Bernstein's new book "A Woman in Charge" at a great price - go here now.]
Not because the book offers insightful analysis of her character. It doesn't. Not because the book slams her liberal views. Bernstein displays his own liberal views by suggesting that, despite her monumental character flaws, Hillary could do good in the world. Instead, the book exhibits magnificent reporting that uncovers hundreds of damaging new facts, providing a roadmap to how Hillary Clinton would operate as president. As Bernstein tells me, "As I got into the reporting and started peeling away the skin of the onion, she became less and less a caricature and much more a human being, with strengths and vulnerabilities and very admirable attributes and some repugnant ones as well." In "A Woman in Charge," Bernstein portrays Hillary's Task Force on National Health Care Reform as a Rube Goldberg machine. The task force was divided into 34 working groups. Each was supposed to debate seven issues and come up with recommendations at seven different meetings.
"Hillary spent hundreds of hours in such meetings, taking notes on every issue, and trying to absorb the numbing detail," Bernstein writes. "But for all of that, she was floundering." Even though Hillary was not introducing any new ideas, she ran the operation with "military-like secrecy unprecedented for a peacetime domestic program." The White House rebuffed requests by the press to identify the 500 consultants on the task force or provide details on what they were working on. Hillary "tended to view anyone who criticized her plan, even constructively, as an enemy," Bernstein writes. When the plan ran into opposition in Congress, Hillary refused to make any changes. She told allies the White House would "demonize" members of Congress and of the medical establishment who tried to alter the plan.
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"That was it for me in terms of Hillary Clinton." then Sen. Bill Bradley is quoted as saying. "You don't tell members of the Senate you are going to demonize them. It was obviously so basic to who she is. The arrogance. The assumption that people with questions are enemies. The disdain. The hypocrisy." This from a liberal Democrat.
When her husband's economic advisors pushed for cutting taxes, the deficit, and government programs, Hillary became increasingly dismissive of their efforts. Catering to the desires of Wall Street would be to lose the soul of the Clinton presidency, she thought. Hillary took her frustrations out on her husband. "What side are they on?" she asked. "These guys are going to derail you ... You didn't get elected to do Wall Street economics." As Bernstein portrays her, Hillary was in an almost perpetual state of anger at something—her husband, his aides, their perceived enemies. Beneath the anger was a self-righteous belief that her way was the right way and almost everyone else was engaged in a conspiracy to undermine her quest for power. "I find her to be among the most self-righteous people I've ever known in my life," says Bob Boorstin, a Clinton campaign writer and deputy for media relations on Hillary's task force. Hillary's scheme to fire employees of the White House Travel Office began as a ploy to obtain favorable press. To be sure, management of the office was sloppy, but Hillary decided to portray its employees as dishonest. Like almost every one of her ideas, it backfired, creating yet more bad press and another blotch on Bill Clinton's record. Like most of Hillary's efforts, her handling of the Travel Office fiasco was a model of disorganization. Her approach was always "very ad hoc," Mark Fabiani, a member of the White House legal team, says, "It would be event-driven: scramble, marshal what people you could drag together."
During the endless investigations into Whitewater and the Travel Office, Fabiani says Hillary rationalized not being forthcoming by saying to herself, "If we do this, they're going to do this to me." Yet White House lawyers believed it was that same lack of forthrightness that got her into trouble in the first place over issues that, by themselves, were often trivial. Under Deputy White House Counsel Jane Sherburne, members of the White House legal team joked that, in deciding which course to take, the best approach was to ask themselves what Hillary would do—and then do the opposite. Almost always, Hillary's "instincts were wrong, backwards...," they thought. "And she never surrounded herself with people who would stand up to her, who were of a different mind." Obsessively secretive, Hillary opted to refuse to release records and covered up such items as her windfall of nearly $100,000 from $1,000 invested in cattle futures contracts, only to find that her efforts created more bad press. Eventually, the material had to be released anyway. Worse consequences flowed from Hillary's objection to Bill's lawyers' advice that he settle a lawsuit brought by Paula Jones, who said a state trooper brought her to Bill's hotel room, where he made a sexual advance. Initially, Jones only wanted Bill to confirm that, contrary to what his staff was saying publicly, she had met with Bill in a hotel room and had not engaged in "immoral conduct." Because Bill listened to Hillary and would not settle, the lawsuit proceeded. Jones would not have filed her lawsuit in the first place if Clinton and his staff had not derided her as "pathetic" and publicly characterized her claims that he propositioned her in the Excelsior Hotel as a "cheap political fund-raising trick." In the course of the litigation, Bill swore under oath that he had not had an "improper sexual relationship" with Monica Lewinsky, leading to his impeachment. In a similar vein, Betsey Wright, an aide charged with keeping secrets about Bill's girlfriends, says that the Arkansas state troopers who were on Bill's security detail might never have made public allegations about his philandering if Clinton had heeded her suggestion that he invite them for a friendly barbecue. Nothing came of her suggestion. As portrayed by Bernstein, Bill misleads everyone around him, including Wright, saying he only committed indiscretions in front of two troopers. While Clinton promised to pay her legal bills from a legal defense fund during the investigation by Ken Starr, Wright had to learn from reading a story in the New York Times that the fund only planned to pay Bill's and Hillary's fees. No doubt that contributed to her decision to go public with what she knew about the Clintons. One of the most startling tidbits was that, when Bill finally had to admit that he had lied to Hillary and to the public about his relationship with Monica Lewinsky after the White House intern testified about it before a grand jury, he asked their mutual friend Linda Bloodworth-Thomason if she would tell Hillary that he had lied. "She flatly declined," Bernstein writes. That night, family advisor Bob Barnett met with Hillary and suggested she would have to consider that some of what Bill had told her about Lewinsky was not true. Hillary later said she told him, "My husband may have his faults, but he has never lied to me." "That statement speaks for itself," Bernstein writes with typical understatement. By 1995 or 1996, Bill had finally figured out that listening to Hillary would doom his presidency. He "pushed her aside," his aide Dick Morris says. After that, Bill "did not speak to Hillary very much about anything..." Incredibly, Bernstein—whom I sat next to at the Washington Post during Watergate—manages to tell this tale with interviews that are almost entirely on the record, buttressed by 553 endnotes. They are laced together with the same graceful writing that made All the President's Men, his and Bob Woodward's Watergate tale, a great read. Engrossing as it is, readers will feel like taking a shower after finishing the 628-page Hillary book. The biography makes it clear that Bill and Hillary wallow in a cesspool of lies, self-deception, cover-ups, disloyalty, and outright stupidity. Mercifully confined to the final two pages, Bernstein's conclusions suggest he may be deluding himself. As outlined in the NewsMax article "Bay Buchanan: Hillary Clinton is Dangerous to Civil Liberties," Buchanan's book offers the best analytical insight into Hillary's character. Summing up, Bernstein writes, "Since her Arkansas years, Hillary Rodham Clinton has always had a difficult relationship with the truth." He adds that she has often "chosen to obfuscate, omit, and avoid." These are qualities one would not want when hiring an electrician or a plumber, let alone a president. Yet, in these concluding pages, Bernstein makes excuses for his subject. When it comes to telling the truth, Hillary is "hardly different from most conventional politicians," Bernstein tells us. He softens his damning reporting by saying she disappoints in relation to the higher standard she sets for herself. And, he says, "Hillary has stood for good things" and might yet make a good president. If indeed Hillary Clinton stands for good things, voters need to remember that Richard Nixon stood for some good things as well. In electing Nixon as president, we ignored his track record of deceit, paranoia, and sneakiness, as exemplified in part by his ethical violations that he addressed in his so-called Checkers Speech. As a result, we got Watergate, a subject Bernstein knows something about. If Bernstein seems to be in denial about how damaging his revelations are, Hillary is not. "One of the things that does disturb me is that the Clinton apparat and Hillary Clinton don't want people to read this book," Bernstein tells me. "And before it was out, and before they had a copy, they had already said that—really disingenuously—that it was all old news, and cash for trash—which the last I looked was pretty much what they said of Gennifer Flowers.
"I think that's unfortunate from their point of view. Because I think it's indicative of an attitude that might have been understandable in the midst of an investigation by an out-of-control special prosecutor, or in the midst of the Gennifer Flowers mess, but in a campaign for the presidency, that there is a disingenuousness is a disturbing look backwards." In part, Bernstein explains his refusal to condemn Hillary by suggesting that she is a lot better than George W. Bush. To be sure, he says, "There is secrecy, and there is a willingness to take some liberties with facts that are disturbing, especially to those who expect a higher standard of her." But, Bernstein tells me, "You've got to put some context around it. I mean for instance, we are coming out of one of the most disastrous, mendacious, catastrophic presidencies perhaps in our history, certainly in the last hundred years, including the Nixon presidency." Bernstein is on far firmer ground when he suggests that his purpose was not to editorialize but to lay out the facts. "What interests me is the notion that good reporting and biography are the same thing, the best obtainable version of the truth," Bernstein says. "You lay it out there, and you let people reach their own conclusions. That's what I tried to do here. I'm not too interested in what the effect is in terms of how the people of the country react to this information, so long as they see it and react." In the end, Bernstein says, the perceptions of those who read the book "will depend on the different values and world views and sensibilities of those doing the reading." That is exactly why "A Woman in Charge" is such an admirable piece of journalism. In contrast to so much of what we see in the press these days, in those few pages where Bernstein expresses an opinion, he does so honestly and openly. The rest of Bernstein's book is a triumph of investigative reporting.
Ronald Kessler is chief Washington correspondent of NewsMax.com. View his previous reports and get his dispatches sent to you free via e-mail. Go here now.
[Editor's Note: Get Carl Bernstein's new book "A Woman in Charge" at a great price - go here now.]
© NewsMax 2007. All rights reserved.
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