First in His Class: A Biography Of Bill Clinton

"It was an effort to write about the first member of my generation—the post-war baby boom generation—to make it to the White House. It’s a biography of Bill Clinton, but you can’t write about him without writing about Hillary. From the time they first met at Yale Law School, in 1971, they saw that together they could get places that they could not get to apart. She has been an essential part of his rise, and vice versa. “There is always that tension between family and career.” For all politicians, just as for all human beings, there’s a tension between ambition and idealism. The Clintons are a kind of exaggeration of that tension. Hillary has built up an encrusted defensiveness over her more than forty years with Bill Clinton, largely in defense of him and their rise together and, in great part, because of his own personal vulnerabilities. Over the course of that period, in defense of him and in defense of their partnership, she’s been less than transparent out of the belief that her ends justified her means. He is a gifted politician and he also is a great campaign strategist, but none of his skills seem to be transferable to her. She doesn’t have his fluidity or his ability to make everyone who is listening think that he’s talking to them. On the contrary, he has said many things that have not helped her. It’s a curious thing. In part, her political career is possible because he became president. And yet, since then, I don’t know how much of a help he has been."