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Much missing in Clinton book
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On the day Hillary Clinton returned to Capitol Hill after losing the 2008 Democratic nomination for president, her staff donned sweatbands and gym shorts and staged a pingpong tournament in her office to cheer her up.
Frustrated at the way Barack Obama had left her in the technological dust, she turned herself into a digitally charged secretary of state, championing the use of Twitter for diplomacy and once telling a group of technology executives, “Use me like an app.”
Though she appeared to glide above domestic politics at the State Department, she always kept one eye on the field.
She did not spill the beans to her husband about the planned raid on Osama bin Laden’s compound; the former president found out about it from a late-night call from President Obama (“Hillary probably told you,” the president said to a clueless Bill Clinton).
Those are among the best moments in “HRC,” an account of Hillary Clinton’s time as secretary of state by Jonathan Allen, formerly at Politico, and Amie Parnes, at the Washington newspaper The Hill.
Books on contemporary political figures rarely have pinpoint timing, but this one does. Clinton will publish a memoir of her years at State this June, a book likely to be a carefully baked and heavily frosted cake. The fights about her tenure as the country’s top diplomat have been raging for months.
Allen and Parnes appear to enter just in time to deliver much needed shots of new information about a figure who can seem at once overly familiar and permanently mysterious. Few contemporary subjects are as formidable as Hillary Clinton in her 22nd year of international fame, and anyone who can haul us even a few more miles up the mountain of understanding deserves our thanks and respect.
Allen and Parnes bring us only a short distance. Their Clinton is the stock version, Democratic edition: gracious in defeat and fearless in negotiation, almost perfectly in sync with Obama, rarely making wrong bets despite choices of bewildering complexity. If not for the death of Ambassador Christopher Stevens in Benghazi — a tragedy that, according to a Senate Intelligence Committee report , lower-level aides might have prevented if they had given him more protection — she might, in the authors’ view, have had a nearly unblemished record.
But Allen and Parnes are so distracted by staff-on-staff relationships that sometimes Clinton slips out of the frame entirely. Pity the reader who buys “HRC” wanting to know how her job as secretary of state altered her view of American power, and ends up instead reading about whether Thomas Donilon of the White House had “a little bit of a crush” on her.
Perhaps Clinton was every bit as committed, tireless and sincere as they say, but it’s not easy to trust their account since they don’t appear to have spoken to anyone with much distance. One of the administration’s biggest first-term diplomatic failures — its abortive attempt to force Israel’s hand on settlements — is hardly mentioned.
Allen and Parnes are primarily political reporters, not foreign affairs experts, and probably their most persuasive accomplishment is to show, backed by impressive detail, the ways in which Clinton never really abandoned domestic politics. It may be too much to say she’s been planning her next race since the moment the last one ended, but she hasn’t neglected it either.
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