Robert Dallek: Dares to criticize book on Hillary by ex-NYT reporters in the NYT
... In “Her Way: The Hopes and Ambitions of Hillary Rodham Clinton,” Jeff Gerth, a former reporter for The New York Times, and Don Van Natta Jr., an investigative reporter at the paper, have written what will become mandatory reading for Mrs. Clinton’s opponents.
Mr. Gerth and Mr. Van Natta see themselves as relating the unvarnished truth about Senator Clinton. “Never before has such a high-profile candidate occupied the spotlight for so long without the public’s learning the facts about so much that is crucial to finally understanding her,” they write. Mrs. Clinton; her husband, Bill; and their supporters have told a flattering story about the couple. “Now it is time for another,” less laudatory version....
The book is almost uniformly negative and overly focused on what they consider the Clintons’ scandalous past and the darker aspects of Mrs. Clinton’s personality. Her ambition, for example, is seen as an unattractive compulsion that, at times, has led her into untoward behavior. They assert that the Clintons had a longstanding deal to win the presidency, first for Bill and then for Hillary, a secret pact of ambition.
The evidence of such a pact — interviews that have already been challenged in the press — is less than convincing. Moreover, that the Clintons are ambitious and hunger for the public spotlight is obvious. But does this make them different from anyone else in politics, including two of our most notable presidents, Lincoln and Franklin D. Roosevelt?
The book’s greatest flaw is its flogging of all the Clinton scandals, not simply because they are so familiar and ultimately came to so little, but also because they give us insufficient clues to what sort of president Mrs. Clinton might be. It would have been more instructive to learn something new about why her health reform initiative failed or to explain in some detail why she was overwhelmingly re-elected by New York voters and has been, as even some Republican senators acknowledge, an effective senator.
The third of the book devoted to Mrs. Clinton’s Senate career is no endorsement of her presidential aspirations. They describe her as someone who has operated outside Senate rules and as having been careless in voting for the Iraq war without reading “the complete intelligence reports.”
Should Hillary Clinton’s personal limitations — her inclination to shade the truth in the service of her ambition, what former Senator Bill Bradley called her “arrogance,” “disdain,” and “hypocrisy” — disqualify her for the presidency?
It is surely preferable to have our most upright citizens sitting in the White House, but history repeatedly shows that presidents with character flaws have not necessarily been less competent leaders, especially in times of crisis, than those with a stronger moral compass: John F. Kennedy’s womanizing hardly precluded his effective management of the Cuban missile crisis, and Richard M. Nixon’s affinity for cutting political and legal corners did not prevent him from some exceptional foreign policy achievements, most notably the transformation of relations with China....
Read entire article at Robert Dallek in a book review in the NYT
Mr. Gerth and Mr. Van Natta see themselves as relating the unvarnished truth about Senator Clinton. “Never before has such a high-profile candidate occupied the spotlight for so long without the public’s learning the facts about so much that is crucial to finally understanding her,” they write. Mrs. Clinton; her husband, Bill; and their supporters have told a flattering story about the couple. “Now it is time for another,” less laudatory version....
The book is almost uniformly negative and overly focused on what they consider the Clintons’ scandalous past and the darker aspects of Mrs. Clinton’s personality. Her ambition, for example, is seen as an unattractive compulsion that, at times, has led her into untoward behavior. They assert that the Clintons had a longstanding deal to win the presidency, first for Bill and then for Hillary, a secret pact of ambition.
The evidence of such a pact — interviews that have already been challenged in the press — is less than convincing. Moreover, that the Clintons are ambitious and hunger for the public spotlight is obvious. But does this make them different from anyone else in politics, including two of our most notable presidents, Lincoln and Franklin D. Roosevelt?
The book’s greatest flaw is its flogging of all the Clinton scandals, not simply because they are so familiar and ultimately came to so little, but also because they give us insufficient clues to what sort of president Mrs. Clinton might be. It would have been more instructive to learn something new about why her health reform initiative failed or to explain in some detail why she was overwhelmingly re-elected by New York voters and has been, as even some Republican senators acknowledge, an effective senator.
The third of the book devoted to Mrs. Clinton’s Senate career is no endorsement of her presidential aspirations. They describe her as someone who has operated outside Senate rules and as having been careless in voting for the Iraq war without reading “the complete intelligence reports.”
Should Hillary Clinton’s personal limitations — her inclination to shade the truth in the service of her ambition, what former Senator Bill Bradley called her “arrogance,” “disdain,” and “hypocrisy” — disqualify her for the presidency?
It is surely preferable to have our most upright citizens sitting in the White House, but history repeatedly shows that presidents with character flaws have not necessarily been less competent leaders, especially in times of crisis, than those with a stronger moral compass: John F. Kennedy’s womanizing hardly precluded his effective management of the Cuban missile crisis, and Richard M. Nixon’s affinity for cutting political and legal corners did not prevent him from some exceptional foreign policy achievements, most notably the transformation of relations with China....