The Case Against Hillary Clinton
Peggy Noonan
181 pages
ReganBooks
2003
There is a fabulous scene in the middle of The Case Against Hillary Clinton. It takes place in the sunset-splashed Hollywood hills, at a private gathering of America’s most powerful media moguls, brought together one afternoon to meet Clinton at Disney boss Michael Eisner’s palatial estate. The exchange between the first lady and her most valuable financial backers is riveting.
As the moguls gasp, splutter and violate political correctness by lighting up cigarettes in their duress, Clinton lets them have it. Having flattered them for their independence and creativity, she then accuses them of causing America’s cultural depravity by subjecting all but the country’s most carefully sheltered children — who, she points out, include most of their own — to ”vicious, sexualized and nihilistic material.”
Peggy Noonan explains that, by some reportorial miracle, she managed to tape the incendiary scene in its entirety, having been lucky enough to find herself in the Eisners’ kitchen that afternoon; she’d come there to visit a member of the domestic staff. However preposterous the explanation, the reader can’t help but wallow in the scene, enjoying eavesdropping at such a high level. It’s exhilarating to finally see and hear something new about a woman who must by now be vying with Princess Diana for the title of most exhaustively chronicled leading lady of our time. Finally, the reader thinks, here’s the goods, the insider stuff one expects to be delivered by a media personality as glamorous and well-connected as Noonan.
But alas, after 17 increasingly suspect pages Noonan breaks off the reverie and admits that she has invented the entire passage, having fallen prey to an Edmund Morris moment. Her reason is to show that such an exchange, in which Clinton bites the hand that feeds her political ambitions, could never really happen, ”because,” she argues, ”Hillary Clinton doesn’t feel she can put her country’s needs before her need for campaign contributions.”
This is the essential argument of the book: The Clintons are in public life not because they care about anything larger than themselves, but because they suffer from ”an illness of the ego” that makes them addicted to power. This at least is the point that Noonan, a truly gifted writer and well-known conservative commentator who came to prominence supplying many of Ronald Reagan’s most memorable lines, is hoping to hammer home. But inadvertently she ends up making another point entirely. The vividness of her writing as she takes off into the Hollywood scene and other flights of fancy, and the novelty of her imagination, serve to make the reader wish that she had taken the time to research such fresh material for real.
In fact, one begins to wonder why, if the case is so strong, she had to make so much of it up. The book dutifully re-examines all the previously known chestnuts of Hillary lore — the commodity trade profits, the Travelgate firings, the Filegate misdeeds, and the magically missing and then reappearing Rose law firm billing records, to mention just a few. But too many of these sections read like half-hearted clip jobs. One senses that Noonan is no more interested in this well-worn material than anyone else is at this date. If only instead of complaining about what she terms ”the unsolved mysteries of the Clinton White House” Noonan had taken the trouble to get to the bottom of just one, she might then have made a much stronger argument.
But one suspects that fundamentally the problem may be one of fuzzy thinking about the mission of this book, and indeed about whether such a single-minded harangue is really a suitable subject for a whole book at all. The Case Against Hillary Clinton was rushed out in time for Clinton’s Senate bid, and the urgency has taken a toll. The writing varies wildly in quality, from positively inspired, such as a deft description of Eleanor Roosevelt and her ”flutey voice,” to the gassy, such as 15-page passage about a childhood friend of Noonan”s from Long Island that reads like bad Bruce Springsteen (”Born in Mass-A-Pe-Qua!”).
Some of Noonan”s pretend reporting is hilarious, such as her stream-of-consciousness, inside-Hillary”s-head thoughts about Al Gore: ”He hates me anyway, thinks I”m selfish. Well welcome to the NFL, Robot Boy.” But the contrast between the wonderfully conceived and described imaginary scenes and the rather lifeless retelling of known events is striking.
If Noonan didn”t want to take the time to go through the exacting process of researching a real nonfiction book, perhaps she should instead have been encouraged to let herself go, and pen a completely fictional account of life in the Clinton White House. The tragicomic possibilities are obvious. But this mixed-up genre, part fantasy, part legal brief, ends up whetting the appetite for either one or the other, dessert or roast beef, but please not mixed together.
This genre problem may be a symptom of larger confusion stemming from the blurred lines these days between professional journalists, who are trained to strive for accuracy and fact, and the droves of other talented commentators, many of them political insiders and partisans like Noonan, who play by different rules. Noonan makes no pretense of journalistic objectivity. Nor does she consider herself bound by boring facts, like a mere reporter. Yet she’s writing about real people, real events and a very real Senate campaign on which she undoubtedly wants to have some real impact. Moreover, she comes with real journalistic credentials. She has been listed on Time‘s masthead as a contributor, and the Wall Street Journal, for which she writes with style and insight, calls her ”a contributing editor.”
In some ways the publication of this hybrid book raises questions about what the rules, if any, are in political commentary. In her defense, Noonan does not pretend that the book is anything more or less than a ”polemic.” And to be sure, there is an honored tradition in America of pamphleteers attacking high officials, even quite personally, as election times roll near. But much of this polemic is written in the manner of documentary journalism. At one point, for instance, Noonan quotes ”a political professional” who she says has known the Clintons for more than 20 years, but who remains conveniently unnamed. Noonan describes how this source takes out a psychiatric text to show that the First Couple suffers from ”Borderline Conditions and Pathological Narcissism.”
Who knows — maybe this explains everything from Hillary”s unusual choice of hat for the 1992 swearing-in onward. But is it fair or appropriate to use anonymous, non-scientific sources to make psychiatric evaluations of public figures in print? After Princess Diana was diagnosed by her chroniclers as ”borderline” nuts, it was inevitable that other famous female figures would get the same treatment.
What is too bad, though, is that Noonan, whose reputation was forged in the Reagan White House, tailors her polemic so narrowly to fit her partisan purposes. She admits that the Reagan White House had a few ”wiggy” moments, too, but can she really rail so self-righteously about Hillary”s supposed channeling of Eleanor Roosevelt without just as deeply examining Nancy Reagan”s reliance on astrologers, or Maureen Reagan”s conviction that the Lincoln bedroom was haunted by a ghost? Is it fair to cluck over Vince Foster”s suicide without mentioning that Reagan”s national security adviser also tried to take his life, after having been exposed bringing a cake baked in the shape of a key to Iranian mullahs, in the hope of freeing American hostages?
Clearly, Clinton is a great story, and her vacating of the White House to launch a Senate bid from a state she”s never before lived in invites skeptical scrutiny. But after a while you have to wonder about the level of outrage she provokes, and the intensity of feeling she stirs. Noonan, like many other Hillary bashers, seems incensed by the first lady’s ability to morph from Mom to Lady Macbeth, as if it’s hypocritical or unauthentic for a woman to play these and more roles at once. If this is the best case that can be made against her, based as it is partly on fantasy and partly on old headlines, bound together by armchair psychology, it’s hard to tell whom it says more about, Hillary Clinton or her critics. — Â