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Book
ReviewPositive
About Virtually EveryoneLiving history. Hillary Rodham Clinton, 2003. London:
Headline; ISBN 0 7472 5515 6 cloth, 562 pp., £20.00 cloth
SAGE Publications, Inc.2004DOI: 10.1177/09675507040120010603
HilaryDickinson
University of Greenwich
There
is a story of a Native American who was taken to see the ocean. Instead of
being awestruck by the majesty of the vast seas as the kindly white guide
had intended, it was the vast crowds on the beach at Long Island that astonished
him. Surely there could not be so many people in the world. Reading Hillary
Clinton's autobiography I feel like that Native American, baffled by quantities
of humans. Surely it is not possible to have so many aides, so many teams
of cherished helpers, so many good friends, such a gigantic social milieu; simply to know so many people. Three pages of acknowledgements are needed
to thank the people who helped her with the book, including three women who
each spent two years working closely with her on it. It is hardly surprising
that there is not much sense of an individual reflecting and interpreting
in the chronicle of events that the reader gets. Though Living history is
about world historical events it is a dullish read. With so many people to
talk about it is hard to manage pen- etrating characterization: `I was excited
to see Naina Yeltsin evolve in her role since we'd ... met in Tokyo .... In
1995 I had helped her secure a donation of nutritional formula Russia needed'
(p. 411); two Arkansas friends offer `personal support as well as helpful
perspectives on politics and history' (p. 259); the Hungarian president is
a `heroic figure' (p. 361) and `my talented domestic policy staff [seven names
listed] was invaluable' (p. 383). Rodham Clinton is positive about everyon
well not quite everyone. Kenneth Starr, prosecutor in the impeachment of Bill
Clinton, is not in the great cir- cle of friends. She says that of all the
world leaders she has met she disliked only tw~ or rather, dislike is my interpretation
as what she actually says is `only two have acted in ways that I found person-
ally disturbing: Robert Mugabe ... who giggled incessantly and inap- propriately
... and the Prime Minister of Slovakia' (p. 361). Rodham
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Clinton
has to be circumspect and keep her feelings carefully controlled: `Everything
you say is amplified' (p. 171). In a television interview after the media
story that alleged Bill Clinton's affair with Gennifer Flowers, Hillary Clinton
gave way to spontaneity in the remark that she was not `some little woman
standing by my man like Tammy Wynette' (p. 107) and aroused a media frenzy
of fury. Oh dear, she had to apologise and explain that she had not meant
like Tammy Wynette herself, but like the character in the song. The carapace
of professional self-control and bland affability that she has developed protects
her from media intrusiveness, and the Republican Party's penchant for dirty
tricks. It serves her particularly well when she comes to Bill Clinton's affair
with Monica Lewinsky. She cries and yells, was `dumbfounded, heartbroken and
outraged' (p. 466) but the reader is not allowed to penetrate to what a heart-
broken inner self might really be lik and why should she allow such intrusion?
She dries her tears and gets quickly on to discussing the Republican Party's
undeniable misuse of the Constitution in initiat- ing the impeachment of Bill
Clinton for having an affair. Impeach- ment is intended for `the most serious
of offenses' (p. 474). Rodham Clinton quotes from a letter signed by 400 historians
and sent to Congress, urging rejection of impeachment on the grounds that:
`The Framers explicitly reserved [impeachment] for high crimes and misdemeanors
in the exercise of executive power. Impeachment for anything else would, according
to James Madison, leave the Presi- dent to serve ``during the pleasure of
the Senate' ' thereby mangling the system of checks and balances that is our
chief safeguard against abuses of public power' (p. 486). In other words,
impeachment for lesser matters could lead to the president being ejected from
office by Congress whenever it disagreed with his policy. Added to this friv-
olous use of the process of impeachment the way in which it was pur- sued
was, according to Rodham Clinton, entirely inappropriate. For example, preliminary
information gathered should have been confi- dential but was made public by
Kenneth Starr and evidence was included from witnesses whose testimony was
not contested in cross-examination (p. 475). Politicians normally publish
their memoirs after they have retired from the political struggle; then they
have to toe no party line and please no voters. But Rodham Clinton is only
56 and is now senator for western New York. Madeleine Albright speaking on
Everywoman for the BBC World Service (10 November 2003) said that she could
see Rodham Clinton as the first woman president of the USA. With a political
future in front of her naturally Clinton is careful. Living history can be
read as an extended political manifesto. And she has
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a lot
to offer voters. There is the perfect American story of humble, but deserving,
beginnings followed by success as a result of intelli- gence, energy and honest
hard work. After the second world war her father started a small fabric business
in Chicago and the whole family helped with the silk-screen printing when
he branched out into design. At school she worked hard, joined its Cultural
Values Committee to promote tolerance, was encouraged to think about the needs
of others through involvement in the Methodist Church (religion has throughout
her life been a source of comfort and strength). In schooldays, like her father
and all but one of her class- mates, she was a Republican, a `Goldwater Girl'.
(Rodham Clinton thinks that her mother's views were more Democrat inclined,
but she kept them quiet.) As an undergraduate at Wellesley came first doubts
about the GOP (Grand old Party~ or as she explains it, the Republican Party
moved to the right with the nomination of Nixon (p. 36). At Yale Law School
her political interests developed and times were changing as Nixon escalated
the Vietnam War, and the Civil Rights movement flourished. Throughout her
career Hillary Clinton has consistently supported the interests and legal
rights of children, and then of women and human rights in general. In the
early 1970s at Yale there was a seminal meeting with Marian Edelman, the first
black woman admitted to the bar in Mississippi who `helped direct me into
lifelong advocacy for children' (p. 46). Another seminal meeting at Yale was
with fellow law student Bill Clinton. Early evidence of his persuasive powers
was that he argued to allow both of them in to the closed Yale Art Gallery
in exchange for picking up litter in the Gallery courtyard (p. 53). Bill Clinton
is something (though only something) of an exception to the flattish characterization
of most of those who appear in Living history; the reader can see his engaging
qualities, and it is clear that Hillary loved him (as he her) and probably
still loves him. Hillary's love for daughter Chelsea is also plain, as is
her desire to protect Chelsea from the media frenzied life of the president'
s family. After law school Hillary Rodham launched into her career of work
for human rights, and support for Democratic politics, at first inde- pendently
and then, after marriage, with Bill Clinton. She says, towards the end of
the book, that: `Throughout Bill's tenure I had traveled the world on behalf
of women's rights, human rights, re- ligious tolerance and democracy' (p.
500). That remark sums up both Rodham Clinton's strengths and weaknesses as
a politician. The weaknesses are what she leaves out. The undoubted good things
she promotes do not exist without an economic context, a social structure
and international relations that are based on more complex
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issues
than pleasant chats with world leaders. She might be talking about a different
world from that discussed by Joseph Stiglitz in Globalization and its discontents.
Stiglitz's concern is the effect on developing and ex-Communist countries
of the USA influenced International Monetary Fund (IMF). The IMF's conditions
for loaning money are total deregulation, abolition of tariffs and the con-
quest of inflation at all costs by high interest rate a recipe one might note
that the USA does not adopt within its own borders. Without developed markets
and a reliable banking system sudden deregulation tends to produce a gangster
economy, as in the former Soviet Union. A gangster economy then undermines
faith in democ- racy and any reform (Stiglitz, 2002: 159). Countries that
did not fol- low the IMF prescription (e.g., Malaysia and China) did better
than the many that did (Stiglitz, 2002: 156). Rodham Clinton never acknowledges
that the influence of the USA in the world could be anything but good, with
its sunny democracy all ready to export. For example, the Taliban in Afghanistan
and its crushing of women's rights and human rights in general is deplored,
but it is not mentioned that the USA government (not Clinton's government
admittedly) had supported the Taliban in the days of Soviet Communism. But
one should not underestimate the kind of difficulties Rodham Clinton faces
as a politician (Stiglitz, once chief economist at the World Bank has retreated
to academia and is now a professor at Columbia University), subject to personal
attacks and the imperfect operation of USA (as probably of any) democracy.
She and Bill Clinton struggled against vested interests of doctors and the
insurance industry to establish universal health care; that they did not manage
to do so is more an indication of the monumental task than their failings.
It was not easy for the British government to establish the National Health
Service in 1948, but they did not have an insurance industry as well as consultants
against them. Her sup- port for human rights, and particularly for women and
children's rights to always be included as part of human rights, has been
consist- ent. The UN Women's conference in China 1995 where Clinton gave a
major speech illustrates the conflictual context in which she has to operate.
The conference coincided with the arrest of Chinese human rights activists
so this raised doubts with Clinton and her advisers as to whether attending
the conference would provide tacit approval of China's policies. The Chinese
government, fearing criticism, con- stantly sought to know what she was going
to say, while she received other kinds of attack from the political right
and various religious right fearing an anti-family and anti-American jamboree.
She decided to go ahead and though the speech does not name offending
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countries,
it is not hard for the audience to fill them in. She lists very plainly (p.
305) offences against women, and in their opposites, the values she stands
for: It is a violation of human rights when babies are denied food, or drowned
... because they were born girls ... when women and girls are sold into the
slavery of prostitution ... when a leading cause of death worldwide among
women ... is the violence they are subjected to in their own homes by their
own relatives.... If there is one message that echoes forth from this conference,
let it be that women's rights are human rights. For those sociologically minded
readers who are wondering, Hillary meets Anthony Giddens on page 426 and on
page 428. REFERENCE
Stiglitz, J. 2002: Globalization and its discontents. London: Penguin.