[In the following review, Hitchens offers a positive assessment of Hillary's Choice, noting Sheehy's “expertise.”]

The old joke goes like this, and appears on page 270 of Gail Sheehy's book, Hillary's Choice. The Clintons are motoring through Illinois and stop at a wayside gas station. The pump attendant recognizes Mrs Clinton as an old high-school date, and they chat briefly. As the couple drive on, Bill Clinton says: “Imagine if you'd married him. You could have been pumping gas.” “If I'd married him”, she replies glacially, “you'd be pumping gas and he'd be the President of the United States.” My own version of this involves imagining what might have happened if Hillary Rodham had remained the way she was in her early life: a stern Goldwater Republican from an affluent white suburb. It is easy to imagine her as a conservative Senator or even First Lady, starched and coiffed, standing up for family values and traditional decencies, and tireless in her committee work. As a girl, she seems to have been prissy and preachy and over-achieving, probably in an effort to please her cold and austere yet demanding father. Gail Sheehy's expertise lies in the charting of rites of passage; her portrayal of life du côté de chez Rodham shows us that Daddy is, and always has been, the problem. From the loosening hold of such a reactionary patriarch to the embrace of a juvenile delinquent is no great stretch.

On the day of their first inaugural in 1993, the day that should have been the most triumphantly pleasurable of their lives, the Clintons were seen and heard screeching obscenities at one another, and were shamefully late for what turned out to be an oath-breaking ceremony. Since then, there have been cut lips and black eyes and the noises of splintering crockery and furniture; a trailer-park family in the Executive Mansion. (Though “trailer-park”, nastily enough, is the epithet used by Clinton and Rodham apologists to describe the young women who have been bold enough to complain about the boss's attentions.) Under this regime, the Oval Office became a massage parlour, while Mr Lincoln's bedroom became a hot-sheet motel for fat-cat donors. The First Lady was complicit only in the second of these depredations and tried to be tight-lipped about the first. There was not, and never had been, any possibility of admitting her error and going home to Mother and Father.

Because she crankishly described the entirely truthful massage-parlour allegations as the fruit of “a vast right-wing conspiracy” against her man, Mrs Clinton is now the most hated (and feared) woman since Eleanor Roosevelt on the American Right. Conservatives across the nation who find it hard to enthuse about Governor Bush or Senator McCain are eagerly raising money for Mayor Rudolph Giuliani of New York. And at least partly for this reason—and for these enemies—she is regarded by many liberals as the glass of fashion and the mould of form; the epitome of the “strong woman” and a living instance of the strides made by the emancipated 1960s generation.

Eleanor Roosevelt, interestingly enough, is the “role model” specifically cited by the First Lady herself, who in a moment of personal insecurity and New Age fatuity actually engaged a “counsellor” to help her “channel” the departed. We know from Gore Vidal that Mrs Roosevelt rather despised the seance mentality (“since we're going to be dead such a long time anyway, it's rather a waste of time chatting with all of them before we get there”). But, as he phrased her relationship with FDR: “Certainly, he hurt her mortally in their private relationship; worse, he often let her down in their public partnership. Yet she respected his cunning even when she deplored his tactics.” The comparison, in other words, may be a suggestive if not an accurate one. Like Mrs Roosevelt, Mrs Clinton when younger had to educate herself out of certain commonplace prejudices, including racial ones. (Sheehy tells us much about the Revd Don Jones, a Wesleyan minister who introduced the sheltered girl to “the social gospel” and Dr Martin Luther King.) Like Mrs Roosevelt, Mrs Clinton has had to struggle against a certain dowdiness which borders at times on the frumpish. There, though, most resemblances end. Mrs Roosevelt strove all the time to humanize her husband's policies, and to engage him in causes—such as anti-fascism or the abolition of Jim Crow—which were not politically popular. There is no hint of evidence that Mrs Clinton has ever attempted any such thing. Indeed, with the help of her sometime friend Dick Morris, evil genius of the black arts of polling and manipulation, she has most often reinforced her spouse's calculated and calibrated centrism.

It was Mrs Clinton who briskly broke off old friendships, with Lani Guinier when her nomination was foundering and with the Edelman family when the Children's Defense Fund was no longer politically convenient. It was Mrs Clinton, also, who acted as chief enforcer of loyalty around the White House, firing professional staff to make way for time-servers, hiring private detectives to control potentially inconvenient witnesses and helping amass secret files on political enemies. Finally, it was she who involved the couple in certain ambitious financial schemes back in Arkansas, which, lacking in acumen and perhaps in probity, unleashed the series of convoluted and frustrating investigations that confirmed her in her paranoia. Only in the matter of her husband's yobbish libido did her aptitude for control completely desert her. Even here, though, she has managed to convey the impression that it is no fault of his. In a recent interview with Tina Brown's Talk magazine, she laid the blame for a career of rude lunges, trashy liaisons and credible allegations of harassment and even rape on the bad blood that existed between “Bill's” mother and grandmother. When the President was put to the indignity of paying ＄850,000 to settle a sexual-harassment suit, the money had to be drawn from Mrs Clinton's personal rainy-day trust fund. He has since been fined ＄90,000 by a federal judge for deliberately lying in her court; I have the impression he'll have to find that money himself.

“They were careless people, Tom and Daisy”, wrote Fitzgerald in The Great Gatsby. “They smashed up things and creatures and then retreated back into their money or their vast carelessness, or whatever it was that kept them together, and let other people clean up the mess they had made.” Gail Sheehy has been studying her subject, including whatever it is that keeps them together, for a considerable time. (It was to her that Mrs Clinton made the spiteful suggestion, in 1992, that she look into rumours about a George Bush mistress. “I hear he has a Jennifer, too”, she said, having brazenly denied that Clinton had a Gennifer at all.) She betrays a certain lenience by her very decision to refer to the subject as “Hillary” and her husband as “Bill”. Thus, for example, we can tell from a sentence like: “Her marriage may actually be strengthened by the change of polarities as Hillary becomes more independent and Bill becomes more nurturing to her” that this is not what they call a very judgmental book.

An odd episode is recounted in many published accounts of Mrs Clinton's life, and appears in this one, too. In the early 1970s, on summer leave from Yale Law School and having just teamed up with her husband-to-be, she went to work for Jessica Mitford and Robert Treuhaft. At the time, they were helping to run the most radical law firm in the San Francisco Bay Area, with special emphasis on the beleaguered and bellicose Black Panther Party. Right-wing biographers have made the most of this, seeing a “hidden agenda” of cultural as well as political subversiveness, and George Bush's sleuths had the facts in 1992, but sat on them, once private polling had found that attacks on Clinton's wife struck the electorate as ungallant. I may be the only person who has interviewed both women on the subject.

Jessica Mitford recalled the rather intense young intern very well. (And we are speaking of a time which many California leftists have made strenuous efforts to forget.) She turned up, as many “concerned” young legal activists did in those days, and then she went back East. But not many years later, the dauntless “Decca” Mitford was involved in a Death Row case where the defendant had been extradited from California to Arkansas. “Now, didn't that nice Miss Rodham marry the governor of that state?” Mitford entrained for Little Rock, begged an invitation to tea at the gubernatorial mansion on the strength of an old friendship, and made her pitch. No dice. She was informed without sentiment that real-world and hardball rules now prevailed, and there would be no reprieve. “Pretty ghastly if you ask me”, was Decca Mitford's general verdict.

Back in Washington, I met the First Lady at a dinner party and did no more than say that I had run into an old mutual friend. Even in a roomful of liberals, she couldn't disown the connection swiftly enough. “Oh yes, I did work there once for a very short time.” Then a practised and joyless gleam of dentition and a change of subject. That was then. This is now. The conservatives who execrate her are as deluded as the liberals who think they have a friend in high places.

Mrs Clinton is none other than Mrs Lightfoot Lee, of the opening staves of Henry Adams's great Washington satirical pastiche Democracy:

In her own mind, however, she frowned on the idea of seeking for men. What she wished to see, she thought, was the clash of interests, the interests of forty millions of people and a whole continent, centering at Washington; guided, restrained, controlled, or unrestrained and uncontrollable, by men of ordinary mould; the tremendous forces of government, and the machinery of society, at work. What she wanted was POWER.

The capitals are Adams's. The authoritarian interest in “the political process” as a machine is drawn from life and observation. Mrs Clinton's nemesis of a father no longer, perhaps, needs to be appeased. She and her fans, however, might bear in mind that for Mrs Lightfoot Lee to get really started, she had to become a widow.