American Evita
By Christopher Anderson
William Morrow, 2004
Reviewed by Paul Dorsey

In-Evita-ble

And for our next exhibit, a vicious Hillary bashing that shows up Dick Morris’ earlier-reviewed “Rewriting History” for the limp pulp it is.

The Nation
Published on August 22, 2004
In the Kill Bill and Hatchet Hillary wing of the ever-growing Clinton library, this one’s a barrel of bile for Bill and the missus (though Chelsea’s handled with sympathetic canoodling).
Christopher Anderson is a still-youngish former People editor and Time contributor whose assembly line has produced books on George and Laura Bush, Princess Diana and her sons, Hepburn and Tracy and Jacqueline, Caroline and John Kennedy Jr.
He’s an archives mouse with a Hollywood nose and here, while admitting up front that Hillary Clinton is adored as much as she’s hated, dives into a sustained slashing frenzy that coats every calendar entry of the woman’s career in gore other than Albert’s.
The problem, alas, is credibility.
The book opens on the Clintons’ last day in the White House, with a small party at which Hillary suggests playing a little joke on incoming tenant George W Bush: removing the letter W from the West Wing typewriters. What happened next was widely reported in the media.
“Others went much further,” Anderson writes, “pouring coffee into file cabinets, overturning desks, leaving X-rated messages on voice-mail machines, soiling carpets, tinkering with computers and drawing obscene pictures on office walls.”
At this point, people who haven’t read Al Franken’s 2003 bestseller “Lies and the Lying Liars Who Tell Them” are shaking their heads in sad recollection.
As Franken reported, only Bush’s campaign pledge to “change the tone” in Washington partisanship prevented his press secretary Ari Fleischer from detailing the “$200,000 worth of damage” to gape-mouthed reporters who’d been fed the leak.
Unfortunately for Fleischer, some dumb congressman sparked a House investigation and the Bush team had to admit that, well, in fact, there’d been no damage at all. It was just a myth.
At least that’s Franken’s version, and he is a liberal, after all. Who to believe? The Nation will get right on it.
Meanwhile, it would have been appropriate for Anderson to at least acknowledge there’s a discrepancy in the matter, but he’s too busy hurling himself against the still-swinging gates of the Clinton governor’s residence and White House: Travelgate, Filegate, Troopergate, Monicagate …
The book’s catchy title is based on a lame premise, since by the time he met the Eva who would become Evita, Argentina’s Juan Peron was already a military tough guy with strong support among the downtrodden who eventually made him president – with little if any help from his wife.
But Anderson makes a meal of it when it comes to “The Plan”, a little scheme the Clintons cooked up a long time ago that’s only half-implemented thus far. Having secured the White House for Bill, Senator Hillary would have her crack at the presidency later – “a combined total of 16 years during which the Clintons would share power in the Oval Office” – and then she would put Bill on the Supreme Court.
When Hillary was still a girl, interestingly, that’s where her mama predicted she’d end up. But Bill’s philandering screwed up The Plan’s grand denouement anyway. Maybe.
The jacket blurb suggests there’s something here about JFK Jr “almost” threatening Hillary’s Senate plans. The text supports no such claim.
But the blurb certainly hits the nail on the head (and the text melts it with repeated hammering) with its promise of juicy revelations on Hillary’s relationship with her old Arkansas business partner and later White House deputy counsel Vince Foster.
A pair of Arkansas state troopers, who say they drove the French-kissing pair to a mountain retreat, were “amazed about how public they were about their affair”, and one saw Mrs Clinton’s bum and boob groped by the devoted friend who would kill himself in 1993.
Hot stuff! Add to that Hillary’s comically redundant damage control (Bill is constantly out walking his willy), the pardons that were granted to truly despicable criminals, the cynical self-serving in the dust of 9/11 and the upstaging of this year’s Democratic nominees (since Hillary wants a clean shot at the prize in 2008), and it steams up like a really meaty stew.
Trouble is, quite apart from the four pages of “important sources, many speaking here for the first time” that are impossible to sort out, are there enough credible victuals here to fill you?