HILLARY'S CHOICE--Book Description

Can the most controversial First Lady in American history remake herself, again?

The author of the American classic, Passages, illuminates the life changes of a public woman known the world over, but rendered here in her full humanity for the first time. From her childhood with a father who was impossible to please, to her life as the ambitious political wife who faced a public impossible to please, Hillary Clinton has persevered. Now, the first First Lady to have faced down a federal Grand Jury and survived her husband's Presidential impeachment is undergoing a race for redemption as she runs on her own for United States Senator.

This epic journey of a modern American woman is also the story of a marriage and the drama of presidency. Why did she choose to abandon her own promising career and raise Bill Clinton to be president? Why did she stay with him through repeated betrayals and even through the Monica scandal? Why did she choose to run for the Senate from a state in which she has never lived?

Hillary's Choice is extensively updated with saturation reporting on the New York Senate race÷a grand opera, both comic and tragic. Sheehy shows the exciting chrysalis of Hillary's transformation from political wife to independent woman.

The Opera Isn't Over Until the New Kid Sings!

   The show should have been a walk for Hillary from the day in mid May 2000 when Mayor Rudy Giuliani dropped out as her challenger. But this opera had a surprise fourth act. The understudy for the male lead, Congressman Rick Lazio, a young gladiator who had been waiting in the wings for two years to jump into this role, was ready with a boffo entrance speech. He made it clear he intended to paint Hillary as liberal, liberal, liberal, even, as he put it, "far left." Her ambition, he promised, would also be an issue (unlike his). He smiled disarmingly and showed off a classic Republican profile for a statewide New York candidate: the clean-cut ethnic with a solidly suburban Catholic family, a mostly moderate voting record which appealed to independents, plus past altar boy service to Newt Gingrich which endeared him to conservatives, and enough boyish charm to get women to tune into his message just to relive memories of their first prom date. Right out of the box Lazio went on the attack. Laughably, Hillary's camp, inventors of the War Room, slapped the wrist of the new kid for being "insulting." The native Long Islander made much of being a native son. He also came to the race with a record, which the Clinton camp immediately picked apart to exaggerate those votes that could paint him as a right-wing extremist. But the greater problem Hillary would have in challenging Lazio's record was the evident fact that she didn't have one. Or rather, she lacked the sort of record a typical male politician would have built for himself. Thirty years of performing public service with non-profit organizations and backing up a husband 's political life doesn't count for much in a high-stakes electoral battle, not even against a 42-year-old with fewer than eight years in the U.S. House of Representatives. And with the exit of Rudy, Hillary had lost the greatest asset in their battle- the bully was gone.

   The Rudy-haters were suddenly bereft. From impassioned blacks who would have fallen over themselves to get to the polls and stomp their nemesis, to Manhattanites who know a Machiavellian mayor drunk on power when they see one, to upstate Republicans who felt snubbed by a city-bound candidate whom they never trusted anyway, the hardened political ground was suddenly fluid, roiling with aftershocks, with all the cards on the table thrown up in the air to come down in an unpredictable disorder. From a contest where only a tiny slice of voters had described themselves in polls as undecided, now just about every voting bloc - blacks, Hispanics, women, Jews, gays, suburbanites, the elderly - was up for grabs.

   Within the first week of this puppyish newcomer bounding on stage, before half the population even knew who he was, Lazio drew dead even with the hardworking Hillary. Now it would be a fight for the middle. A regular Democrat vs. Republican horse race. So eager was this boychik to catch up with Hillary, who was ten years his senior, the day before his unanimous nomination at an upbeat convention of New York State Republicans he fell on his face - literally. Marching in a Memorial Day Parade, he tripped and split his lip, requiring eight stitches. It was another reminder that Rudy's exit had not eased the competitive pressure on Hillary. Rick Lazio was every bit as ambitious as she, and much hungrier for the job than Rudy.

   "It's definitely not a cakewalk for her," was the sober assessment of New York's former Democratic governor, Mario Cuomo. "I think Rick Lazio is going to be Hillary Clinton's worst nightmare," predicted Fred Brown, president of the New York State Black Republicans Council. Unlike the divisive Giuliani, he said, Mr. Lazio would "destroy the myth" that blacks and Hispanics would automatically favor Mrs. Clinton.

   "She's as confident as I've ever seen her," insisted a friend and supporter after schmoozing with Hillary at two events in late May. The First Lady said she pretty much really understood the lay of the land by that time, not just on an intellectual level but on a hands-on level. She professed to find Lazio an easier candidate for her to define. It was much clearer in her mind, she said, how to run against a true Republican rather than "a quasi-Republican like Giuliani." In fact, Lazio's positions, like Giuliani's, were not that different from hers. They were both broadly pro-choice, although Lazio championed more restrictions on a woman's right to choose. They both supported further gun restrictions, but Hillary made a strong case for licensing and registering gun owners just like car owners. Still exceedingly cautious, she intended to stick with the more conventional issues of education, health care, and abortion rights, on which her positions were favored in the polls. No matter what she said or did, however, in 18 months she had never garnered more in the polls than 45 percent of the vote.

   The promise of summer and fall of 2000 was greater support from the Democratic party. As their official nominee, the DNC and state party organization would start pumping huge amounts of soft money into the promotion of Hillary, and Judith Hope promised to double the magnitude of their phone bank on the First Lady's behalf. Mrs. Clinton would also be confident enough in her own voice by then to roll out the biggest cannon of all: President Bill Clinton, who, judging by his job approval ratings (which had peaked at 73 percent during his impeachment and held almost steady at 60 percent ever since) and his shamelessly stupendous fundraising abilities, the man could run in New York tomorrow and save for the Constitution be reelected by a landslide.

   Having resisted spelling out anything like a post-presidential agenda for himself, Bill Clinton couldn't help quarterbacking his wife's campaign to fill the gathering void in his own political life. A man who cannot sit still, Clinton had smashed the record for foreign trips by a sitting President, traveling to 72 countries by the middle of his last year in office, as compared to Ronald Reagan who visited 24 nations in his two terms. Indeed, his exhausted speechwriters said he was ever more the energizer bunny in his last year, mounting an average of three speeches a day and flying around the country to make executive orders protecting the nation's wilderness areas and coastal waters from polluters. As his last years became divisible into last months, Bill Clinton spoke often and wistfully about how he much he would miss working in the Oval Office, relaxing at Camp David, hearing the flourishes of the Marine Band, and how he would love to run for the Presidency forever. One of the youngest of the nation's chief executives to be forcibly retired, at the age of fifty-four, Clinton continued to deflect questions of what he intended to do with the rest of his life. He phlegmatically mentioned he would write a book but said he didn't know how he would otherwise earn a living. Although he had the gall to represent his impeachment as good for the country, describing it as "one of the major chapters in my defeat of the revolution Mr. Gingrich led, "it could end up restricting his earning power.

   Eight months before his exit from national office, the Arkansas Supreme Court's disciplinary committee recommended that he be disbarred. His defenders blamed the same old right-wing conspiracy. The Southeastern Legal Foundation, which brought one of the complaints, was indeed partly funded by Clinton's eternal pursuer, Richard Mellon Scaife. But Susan Webber Wright, the judge who found him in contempt of court and fined him $90,686, had filed an earlier complaint. And having cut off Arkansas by registering to vote in his wife's adopted state, he wasn't going to see a Clinton library built any time soon.

   What options was he considering? I continually asked people close to the Clintons. "I would venture he's given it almost no thought," said one of his former press secretaries. "That's way too scary. He'll drive off that bridge when he comes to it."

   With a blank slate before him after January 20, 2001, Clinton will be more dependent than ever on the kindness of Hillary. His former press secretary Mike McCurry was asked by a student audience at Northwestern University what President Clinton will be doing in twenty years. McCurry barked out the obvious answer:
"Whatever Hillary wants him to do!"

The Road Not Yet Traveled

    Thirty years before, Hillary ruminated that she might spend her life solving other people's problems while completely defaulting on solving her own. As a young woman she wrote, "I wonder who is me. I wonder if I'll ever meet her. If I did, I think we'd get along famously."

   In her early adulthood, Hillary's choice was to set her life course by following the man she loved. She married a politician and chose to go down his road. Now she knows where that road ends - draped in the tattered cloak of Bill Clinton's legacy and wandering off into middle-aged oblivion. But the other road, the one less-traveled by - the Hillary Rodham road - is still open to her. She certainly has the energy and the pluck. The passion for public service still smolders inside her. And now it is sparked by the need for redemption, even revenge. Having thrashed her way through the dark wood of our contemporary political jungle and survived a thousand cuts, she has perhaps developed the rhinoceros skin that her patron saint, Eleanor Roosevelt, said was necessary for women in politics. Hillary has always tried to follow Eleanor Roosevelt's ruthless intention to have an impact on her century. And what was it her friend Sara Ehrman had told her years before, when she had announced her headstrong choice to marry Bill Clinton? "Yes, but remember, Hillary. Eleanor Roosevelt only became powerful when she stopped caring about her marriage."

   No matter what happens in the future, she is already a different person. Hillary has come through the little death of midlife and stood up against scorn. As she tries on her own political form, she is dreaming not only of a different life but of a different world. Her ambitions are broader than a change in personal identity. Standing in the ruins of Al-Badi Palace in Morocco in March 1999, swathed in a coppery sunset, Hillary gave a long, heartfelt address on human rights: "We can alter the direction of the planet when we follow leaders who speak of peace and work against war, who serve their people by healing divisions, not creating them." She wound up exhorting her audience of royals, ministers, and ambassadors - and herself - to "alter the direction of this planet by dreaming of a different direction that we can all take in our own lives."

   Traveling this road, Hillary Rodham may at last meet herself. And perhaps they will get along famously.