Who is the Real Hillary?
If you want to understand the woman who would be president, don't bother to read the latest avalanche of recycled biographies - just ask her interns.
I will begin with two Hillary Clinton scoops of my own. Early last summer, I went to a party she was giving at her house - hidden away off Massachusetts Avenue, a stone's throw from the British embassy - and took the opportunity to introduce her to a teenage boy who I knew was going to intern for her later in the summer. She gave the kid about five seconds of her time, beaming at him before moving on to the next hand to shake.
Probably six weeks later, having not so much as set eyes on her since, the boy was walking down a Senate corridor when Hillary approached in the opposite direction. Meeting his eyes, she greeted him without hesitating: "Good to see you again, Pete." Then, three weeks after that, the same kid and zillions of other Hillary interns gathered in a small, overheated office to have their photographs taken with the senator. Suddenly, overcome by the heat, the boy collapsed almost literally into her arms. He came round a couple of seconds later, lying on his back and seeing the face of (possibly) America's 44th president peering anxiously down at him, proffering her bottle of water. "She was really kind, sort of motherly," he told me later.
OK, so these are hardly scoops. But they highlight two little-known facets of America's most famous woman - of which more later - and, above all, they are brand-new, in that they are Hillary anecdotes that have never seen print before. I have thus just about revealed more than the avalanche of Hillary Clinton books that is sweeping America.
And here is the take on the big "scoop" by Carl Bernstein that Hillary failed her DC bar exam...where had we heard that before...
In one of his many publicity appearances, Bernstein told NBC viewers on 1 June about "another great secret that she kept for 30 years", as though his book is crammed with such exciting revelations. What the US media then dutifully described as this revelatory "nugget" was that Clinton had failed her DC Bar exams; this failure, Bernstein suggested, was a turning point both for Hillary herself and for history, because it propelled her towards a new life in Arkansas with Bill rather than to the career in Washington that she had wanted.
Oh yeah? The great scoop sounded a little familiar to me, so I went to my bookshelves, and soon found why. The answer lay on page 64 of a book called Living History that was published four years ago, and written by . . . er, Hillary Clinton.
Also some great dissing of Dan Burton and David Bossie who he calls
"an especially egregious dolt " Overall a good read!
http://www.newstatesman.com/200706180025
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