Rewriting History
By Dick Morris with Eileen McGann
Regan Books, 2004
Reviewed by Paul Dorsey

Still hope for Hillary

A political consultant slaps the former first lady around for fibbing in her memoir, but he likes her, he really does.

The Nation
July 18, 2004
I spent a lot of time while reading this book trying to figure out why it was written. It’s ostensibly an attack on the veracity of Hillary Clinton’s 2003 memoir, “Living History”, by a political analyst who worked on several of her husband’s campaigns and thus got to know her fairly well.
Dick Morris is a political analyst for America’s right-wing Fox News and a columnist for the right-wing New York Post, but that didn’t stop the Clintons from leaning heavily on him for help getting into and then back into the Arkansas governor’s mansion.
He also had a hand in putting them in the White House, but most of this book stems from the governorship years, and there’s one key moment, recalled well into the narrative, that sticks out as the book’s possible real raison d’etre.
In 1990, furious at how close the gubernatorial race was turning out, Clinton knocked Morris down and raised a fist as though to strike him, but caught himself and profusely apologised.
Morris declined the advice of his wife and co-author Eileen to press charges, but writes, “Our relationship was never the same”, even though he returned to his advisory role four years later because “the allure of power, prestige, money and everything else was too great”.
Morris managed to parry subsequent press queries about the 1990 incident, and he admits he sanitised it in his previous book, “Behind the Oval Office”. His whole point in raising the matter here, he says, is that Hillary not only misrepresented the incident in “Living History” but failed to mention that she’d coached Morris to tell the press “it never happened”, which, Morris says, is the classic Hillary defence.
So what? Well, the problem is that Hillary looks for all the world like the frontrunner for the presidency in 2008, and if she lies through her teeth in her official biography, what’s she going to do in the Oval Office?
Exposing Hillary’s arsenal of fibs, deceits and cover-ups, “Rewriting History” is a voyage to the dark side of Hillary’s moon, though Morris is at great pains to remind us that “some of what [is concealed] is not dark, only unseen, not sinister, just covered up”. The exposures are gentle, the sarcasm chiding, and there’s always an encouraging out offered – “maybe” she’ll change her ways, “maybe” she already has.
There is in fact a lot of pity here, and little vitriol. I expected a good ol’ Republican-style bashing, but Morris is no Ann Coulter or Rush Limbaugh, and he’s surprisingly critical of Republican presidents, including the incumbent.
Though probably meant to reassure the reader that this is a balanced account of Hillary’s shortcomings, not hate literature, Morris’ velvet-glove approach leaves him interminably grasping at straws. The first half of the book is maddeningly banal. I lost count of the number of times he reminds us that she frequently changes her hairstyle or its colour.
He often stretches for the muck. Is this particularly damning?: “As we began to work together during Hillary’s early White House years, I suggested that she presented too perfect an image to believe. ‘You come across as too fully formed, with no doubts, faults or shortcomings,’ I told her. ‘People can’t trust your presentation of yourself.’”
Morris notes that Eleanor Roosevelt was “insecure about her appearance and felt awkward about public speaking”.
“ ‘I’ll think about it,’ she promised. A few days later, I asked her about it again. ‘I really can’t think of anything’.”
You’re waiting for damnation, and for much of the book, all you get is this mediocrity.
Then, Hillary’s “three narrow escapes” from the much-publicised “scandals” of the early years – resurrected here, you see, only because Hillary covered them in her book.
Morris accuses her of covering up or stonewalling in each case, “when simple disclosure would have resolved what were anyway minor scandals”.
Hillary writes, for example, that her suspicious dealings in commodities back in Arkansas were “examined ad infinitum” and “like many investors at the time, I’d been fortunate”. Not so, Morris counters, there was no official investigation because the statute of limitations had lapsed and, besides, “I watched them try to cover it up” (by not releasing tax returns for the two crucial years).
What else?
She was ambitious. She was keen to join her husband’s cabinet, but an anti-nepotism law meant she could only serve as special advisor, and rather than advise on government waste, as Morris urged her, she chose healthcare, leaving herself dangerously vulnerable to attack from Congress.
She’s hardly the housewife. Hillary “says almost nothing [in her book] about how she proposed, vetted, killed or approved most of Bill’s major appointments”, writes Morris, instead going to great lengths to convince readers she was busy tending to chores in the presidential residence.
Hillary, full of “Darwinian adaptations”:
* hides behind feminism whenever she’s attacked;
* isn’t anti-Semitic, but stereotypes Jews;
* hides the radical leftism of her college days, when she helped defend several Black Panthers on murder and torture charges;
* doesn’t comment on the US$190,000 in gifts she solicited between her election to the Senate and her swearing-in;
* hauled off $360,000 worth of items donated to the White House, some of which were later returned, after she blamed “clerical errors”;
* hired detectives to block Bill’s 26 “bimbo eruptions”, often through “thug work”, and still refers to the accusations of Gennifer Flowers, whom Bill admitted bedding, “a whale of a tale”.
There’s much more: the true origins of Buddy the dog, the “Gandhi ran a St Louis gas station” joke, how the Illinois-born, Massachusetts-educated Arkansas-and-DC resident had the chutzpah to call herself “made in New York” for the Senate run, and that business about her and hubby watching a video and cleaning closets after he confessed to the Flowers affair (when everyone knows she was out to KILL BILL).
She is, Morris writes, simpler, more ruthless, less subtle and more ideological than her husband, the consummate politician.
And four years hence, she could very well be swept back into the White House by what Morris calls “the perfect storm”.
“The Republican Party is running out of white people,” he says in an engaging passage about the new US demographics that are a blessing for any Democrat, let alone the mega-famous former first lady.
Bottom line, says Morris, is Hillary could turn out to be another Nixon, or another Robert Kennedy. Like Nixon, she’s “susceptible to temptation, paranoia and scandal [and has] allowed her fierce political instincts to darken her perspective”. But like Bobby Kennedy after JFK’s assassination, she could “repent” her ferocious ways and “became a very good person”.
“As the decade unfolds, in the quiet of her Senate seat,” Morris writes, “Hillary will have the chance to become the person she can still become … Our current political landscape badly needs Hillary’s perspective and her passionate idealism.”