© National Journal Group Inc.
Friday, Aug. 17, 2007

This is the fifth in a series of reviews on books written by the 2008 presidential contenders. See the archives for earlier reviews, and check back in the next few weeks for a look at Sam Brownback's "From Power To Purpose." By Hillary Rodham Clinton ISBN 0-7432-2224-5 Simon & Schuster 576 pp. Purchase This Book

Hillary Rodham Clinton's household name may have helped catapult her to the top of the polls in the race to become the Democratic nominee for president, but the former first lady feels that her notoriety is misleading. When it gets right down to it, people know who she is, but few people really know her.

That's not to say gallons of ink haven't been spilled to try to size up the New York senator; the Washington Post and its readers devoted quite a bit of coverage just to how she was dressed on the Senate floor this summer. The New York Times reportedly has assigned no fewer than five reporters to cover her, and in June, the Gray Lady looked for insight into the candidate by way of her hobbies. Reporters from both publications have offered lengthy accounts of her in dirt-digging biographies.

Her personal story is out there, but it was published way back in 2003 in her autobiography, "Living History." It strikes a very delicate balance of confident determination and surprisingly humorous self-deprecation.

She touches on her own "scars" from the Clinton administration's highly publicized failure to pass universal health care in 1993, which ran deep for her personally. Her father's early 1993 stroke and death was an eye-opening and painful experience for her, and it kept her away from the White House for days at a time just after moving in. She used the time she spent waiting during his stay in a Little Rock hospital to learn more about issues in the health care system by asking a wide array of people there for their thoughts.

She gives credit to the right by conceding that her side was just plain outmaneuvered on the issue. But should she occupy the Oval Office next, the playbook on health care reform will look quite different than the one from 1993.

Chelsea Clinton, who's been mentioned recently by people anxious to see her show up on her mother's campaign trail, is a constant fixture in the book. It was no secret in the 1990s that the Clintons demanded that the press leave their only child alone, and in the book she writes that former first lady Jackie Kennedy advised her to take that stance. And even if the public didn't know it back then, Chelsea's mere presence in the White House factored into many of her mother's decisions.

Clinton even addresses her attire in the book -- a source of media fixation during her years in the White House. Even in the thick of the Whitewater controversy of 1994, the media were obsessed. They concluded that her choice of a pink sweater for a related press conference was a calculated move designed to "soften her image" (sound familiar?), and the event was dubbed the "Pink Press Conference." Her defense: "I didn't calculate what I would wear to this event -- my choice of clothes is almost always a last-minute decision."

What may be most interesting to readers unfamiliar with the nuts and bolts of Clinton is her maturation process prior to meeting her husband. As early as junior high, she snuck out to downtown Chicago to assist Republicans investigating voter fraud allegations after the 1960 presidential election. After breaking with her Republican father while in college and concluding that she was actually a Democrat, she went downtown to watch the demonstrations taking place during the 1968 Democratic National Convention.

Clinton delves into her time at Yale Law School, some of the projects she got took on to work on behalf of children and her time in Washington on the legal team working for President Richard Nixon's impeachment -- all parts of her life from before she married Bill Clinton.

The former president does, of course, play the biggest supporting role in her life story, from the problems he inflicted on their marriage to the scores of state trips they took abroad. She does take the opportunity to address skeptics about her feelings following the Monica Lewinsky scandal, and she recounts myriad details from those international trips that show she's had plenty of experience meeting world leaders.

Although Clinton doesn't fail to mention the doubts she initially had about running for Senate and never broaches the idea of becoming a presidential candidate, the narrative is laid out in such a way that suggests she may be right for the job. At the very least, the book's last sentence, set in her last day living in the White House -- "Then I said good-bye to the house where I had spent eight years living history" -- evokes that same nostalgic tone she's been invoking on the campaign trail. She knows that should she become the next president or even the Democratic nominee, she will earn an even bigger place in the history books.

--Erin McPike, NationalJournal.com