Author: Carl Bernstein

ISBN: 9780375407666

After perusing a review in a major daily newspaper of Carl Bernstein’s book about Hillary Clinton, I expected to read what is known in the trade as a “hatchet job” on her. Instead, the 554 pages of text read more like an extended puff piece, and far too long at that. It is not that Bernstein avoids the seamy aspects of Hillary’s character and career. He deals with those, but the trouble is that the reader has to wade through page after page of boring details about Hillary’s apparel at various functions, names of persons in attendance at those functions, what kind of music the bands played, and all sorts of other gossip. It caused me to wonder whether or not the publisher, Alfred A. Knopf, even bothered to assign an editor to the book. Bernstein certainly could have used one.

Nevertheless, if the reader can persevere he or she will find a picture of Hillary too often avoided in media articles and broadcasts: that of a duplicitous, treacherous, power-hungry politician willing to change her positions as readily as a chameleon changes colors and to debase herself in order to take advantage of her philandering husband’s position in politics and business. We learn from Bernstein that Bill Clinton’s publicized affairs with Gennifer Flowers and Paula Jones and Monica Lewinsky comprised just a limited example of his rapaciousness, that as Governor of Arkansas he used state troopers to bring dozens of women to him for sexual trysts, and that he used the White House to exploit many others, while Hillary tolerated the humiliation from all of it.

Bernstein allows Hillary to get away with excusing her debasement on the basis of what she describes as a love for Bill so deep that she could not bear to divorce him, even as Bernstein provides enough details to demonstrate that her excuse is preposterous, that she put up with all of Bill’s promiscuity in order to be part of the power structure he built. The way Bernstein handles the Monica Lewinsky affair is especially disappointing. He does not mention that Bill limited the young and impressionable White House intern to performing oral sex on him, or that he stuck a cigar up her vagina instead of his penis, or that he promised her or at least caused her to believe that he intended to dump Hillary and marry her. Without those sordid details described side by side with Hillary’s excuse for continuing to stick with Bill, the reader is bereft of insight into how and why Hillary was able to endure a humiliation compounded by the massive publicity. Instead, Bernstein repeats, without commenting on it, Hillary’s characterizing the widespread condemnation of Bill’s conduct and clamor for his impeachment as the product of “a right-wing conspiracy.” It seems to me that any journalist or biographer writing about the Lewinsky affair might at least have asked this question: How does “a right-wing conspiracy” explain public repugnance toward a U.S. president’s sex exploitation of a young female intern in a room of the White House and a feeling of Democrats as well as Republicans in the Congress that a president who engages in such reprehensible conduct does not deserve to be the leader of the nation?

There are also far too few details about Hillary’s role in the Rose law firm and the Whitewater Development Corporation scandal. Bernstein dismisses all of it as “overblown.” Really?  The story concerns a governor and his wife who were supported with contributions from a corrupt corporation and law firm that presented as flagrant a conflict of interest as one can imagine.

And what about the kind of clients that Hillary served in her legal career and the contributions of those clients to the Clintons’ political campaigns? Bernstein mentions that she was part of a law firm serving such gems of American enterprise as Tyson Foods, and he moves on to another subject without bothering to tell his readers that Arkansas-based Tyson, the largest meat-processing company in the world, polluted the state's rivers and streams and sold tainted meat obtained from slaughterhouses where animals were brutally tortured, while paying its workers substandard wages and exposing them to unhealthful work conditions. How did Hillary the righteous manage to defend and live off contributions from such a corrupt corporate monster while presenting herself as a protector of the environment and of workers’ rights and health? And how can you write an overly long book about a duplicitous politician without discussing such contradictions in her career?

Living off his work with Bob Woodward in the Nixon/Watergate scandal, Carl Bernstein enjoys a reputation as a fearless investigative journalist. In his book about Hillary Clinton he comes across as all too timid and much too protective of the reputation of the most prominent woman in modern American politics: a woman riding a rising wave of popularity as she seeks to become the president of the U.S. Bernstein had what seems to have been an unedited opportunity to provide the public with some characteristics of this woman that are the opposite of admirable and, in the final analysis, he blew it. 

The above review was contributed by:  Burton H. Wolfe: Burton is an award winning journalist and the author of hundreds of published articles and of books such The Hippies (New American Library), Hitler and the Nazis (Putnam), and Pileup on Death Row (Doubleday).  Wolfe publishes an occasional newsletter called "Burton Wolfe's Internet Rag" and maintains a web site.


Click Here To Purchase From Amazon A Woman In Charge