Men (22 page)

In his preface to the paperback edition of
The Truth About Hillary
, Klein does attempt to weasel out of some of his more incendiary allegations, claiming mysteriously that the “exaggerated rumors” about the hardcover edition—that it claimed Hillary's a lesbian and Bill raped his wife—“were blatantly untrue.” Huh? Because this is indeed the book that has Bill Clinton, on a Bermuda vacation in 1979, telling some guys in the hotel bar that he was going back to his room to “rape my wife,” and this was how daughter Chelsea was conceived. Perhaps Klein means that he just quoted a lot of imaginary gossip rather than asserting such allegations himself. True, it's his rhetorical strategy throughout the book to employ others as mouthpieces for his sleazier innuendos, as when he imagines the West Wing staff gathered around the water cooler asking one another:

Was it true they slept in separate beds?

Were there any telltale signs on the presidential sheets that they ever had sex with each other?

For that matter, did the Big Girl have any interest in sex with a man?

Or, as was widely rumored, was she a lesbian?

The italics are Klein's. If it's a handy truism that constant sexual innuendos mask a discomfort with sex, then Klein is one uptight dude.

But there's just so much sexual baggage among these guys generally, not to mention rather mixed feelings about the female body itself. When Klein writes of Hillary's lower regions that though she's “a small-boned woman from the waist up, she was squat and lumpy from the waist down, with wide hips, calves, and ankles,” the blatant bodily aversion in the phrase “squat and lumpy” isn't just a disagreement with her health care plan. Klein's concentration on Clinton's physical appearance is so microscopic that you fully expect to turn the page and find an index of her moles, accompanied by a close reading of what they indicate about her moral insufficiencies.

None of this is exactly a testimonial to his deep self-acuity. Or very attractive propensities in a man, it must be said. Though maybe he's unconsciously identifying when he writes that Hillary had “always thought of herself as an ugly duckling,” and particularly hated her body, which caused her to neglect her personal appearance as a young woman, and go around dressed like a hippie in shapeless clothes, and with hair that looked like it hadn't been washed for a month. Or secretly commiserating about her feeling “so hopelessly unattractive that she did not bother to shave her legs and underarms, and deliberately dressed badly so she would not have to compete with more attractive women in a contest she could not possibly win.” I feel compelled to note, if we're going down this path, that—having seen a few photos of the author—this is a man who can't have felt entirely secure about his competitive mettle on this score either.

Hillary's physicality really does loom large for her biographers. Tyrrell too spends many passages mocking her youthful hairdos, down to the thick eyebrows, which once “would have collected coal dust in a Welsh mining village.” In other words, she's an overly
hairy
woman, in addition to everything else. Hairdo, eyebrows—thankfully we're not privy to data on the condition of her bikini line. Tyrrell sounds like an aspirant for the Vidal Sassoon endowed chair on the Clinton-hating Right when he concludes that Hillary's “search for the perfect hairstyle has finally been resolved into a neatly elegant businesswoman's coiffure” and that she “seems to have turned her hair into a major strength.” He also concedes that Hillary “flirts well” and has evolved into “a handsome woman.” Klein gets in a few digs on this point himself, as you'd expect, benevolently mentioning that Hillary's the kind of homely woman whose looks have improved with age, then trotting out an anonymous medical expert to testify that she's been “Botoxed to the hilt.”

You get the feeling that outsized female personalities both repel and attract Klein: note that his previous biographical subject was Jacqueline Onassis, another woman with a charismatic straying husband, by the way. Klein is one of those guys who snidely notes the cubic poundage of any oversized woman in the vicinity: Monica Lewinsky (who “had gained a lot of weight” and “was bursting the seams of her thin, sleeveless summer dress”), Bill Clinton's deputy chief of staff Evelyn Lieberman (“overweight”), and his Arkansas chief of staff Betsey Wright (“heavyset”), not to mention Hillary herself, whom Klein refers to throughout his book by the nickname “the Big Girl.” But hold on—it turns out there's a gynecological explanation for those lumpy legs and ankles, since Klein quotes yet another “anonymous medical authority,” who speculates that Hillary may have contracted an obstetric infection after giving birth to Chelsea that resulted in chronic lymphedema, a condition that causes “gross swelling in the legs and feet.” Forgetting that this diagnosis is utterly speculative (and as far as I can tell, nowhere else confirmed), Klein goes on to inform us that lymphedema contributed to Hillary's pre-existing self-image issues, observing that she tried to cover up the alleged lumpiness with wide-legged pants. (Was she supposed to wear leggings on the campaign trail?) You have to give Klein credit: it's not every biographer who approaches his subject with calipers and a speculum. It's a clammy job, but I guess someone had to do it.

No, Hillary doesn't elicit the best in her foes. On the sexual creepiness meter, Klein gets some stiff competition from Carl Limbacher, who writes for the far-right news outlet NewsMax and is the author of
Hillary's Scheme: Inside the Next Clinton's Ruthless Agenda to Take the White House
. Here's another biographer a little too keen to nose out the truth about Hillary's sexuality. In fact, Limbacher comes up with an even darker picture than Klein's if that's possible: Bill Clinton is a predator, Hillary digs it, and this is the key that unlocks her character. If Hillary didn't literally hold down the victims while Bill did the deed, she was complicit nonetheless—“a victimizer who actually enabled her husband's predations,” since “a woman with half the intellect of Hillary Clinton would understand that she's married to a ravenous sexual predator at best—a brutal serial rapist at worst.” At least he compliments her intellect. I'm dying to know what Limbacher imagines Hillary's wearing when he fantasizes about her in the henchwoman-to-rape role—her
Ilsa, She Wolf of the SS
outfit or the navy-blue pantsuit.

But Hillary really only stuck with Bill because he was her springboard to power—or wait, maybe it was because “her state of denial was so extreme as to suggest some sort of psychological impairment.” Then he says that Hillary had to suppress evidence of Bill's sex life, especially any suspicion that he liked rough sex, as some of his accusers implied, because this might “raise questions about her own private peccadilloes.” It's not entirely clear what “peccadilloes” Limbacher is referring to, though elsewhere he says insinuatingly that Vince Foster was Hillary's “intimate friend.” He forgets to offer any evidence.

*   *   *

As we see, the problem for Hillary's biographers isn't that a woman's aspiring to be president—none of them mount an actual argument against women as presidential candidates. The problem is that Hillary's a
deformed
woman. She's a sadist, a victim, asexual, a dyke—maybe all at once. Taking the measure of Hillary's perverted femininity also preoccupies John Podhoretz in
Can She Be Stopped: Hillary Clinton Will Be the Next President of the United States Unless …
On the one hand, Podhoretz
wants
to like Hillary, even though he finds her tough to warm up to as a woman: she never figured out what to do with her hair and clothes, in his diagnosis, she isn't a raving beauty, and her manner is almost pathologically unsexy. Interestingly, Podhoretz, who tries to present himself as a reasonable guy (in this group the bar is set pretty low), thinks this anti-feminine quality may actually work in her favor: being “neither girlish nor womanly” with a “hard to describe style” could be the perfect blend for the first woman president, he muses, since a president has to be a little scary, not seem emotional—basically she should be an unlikable bitch. “And Hillary is a bitch.”
3
Feigning worry that saying this kind of thing makes him sound sexist—while clearly admiring himself for saying it—he explains that a woman presidential candidate needs to show she can be manly, and if any woman politician can pass for a tough guy, it's Hillary. This scares him, though in a sweaty, enthralled sort of way. Call him Mr. Conflicted.

If Podhoretz is all over the map about Hillary, no doubt he has his reasons. As with his fellow biographers, we have reason to believe that his own intimate relations are not without their complications, especially when it comes to women and politics. For one thing he's a neocon currently married to a northern liberal, as he himself reveals in the Hillary bio. However, those who pay attention to such things may recall his previous marriage to a more like-minded Beltway conservative following a whirlwind ten-day courtship, during which Podhoretz declared his love for his new amour in his
Weekly Standard
column (“In her calm, there is the permanence I seek”). Unfortunately, the permanence proved short-lived—the relationship unraveled rather publicly after a brief three months.

But maybe inner maelstroms come with the territory when Mom is the ultra-conservative doyenne and fiery anti-feminist Midge Decter, author of numerous books denouncing the women's movement and the dupes who fell for it. And Dad is the notoriously pugnacious neocon Norman. When Podhoretz says, incoherently, that Hillary had an “easy path due in part to feminism,” he sounds like the dutiful son, channeling Midge. What mother could ask for more? But things can't have been easy for John: between the powerhouse mom, his own romantic impetuosities and flip-flops, and the politically strange-bedfellows current marriage (though I'm sure they're a lovely couple), Podhoretz has more than his share of family baggage when it comes to love and politics. As has Hillary herself, needless to say—in a better world the two of them could have a fascinating heart-to-heart on the subject.

Instead, Podhoretz spends a good chunk of his book proffering weird advice to Hillary on how to position herself to win the election, even while bashing her senseless at every turn. Example: to avoid being upstaged by Bill, Hillary should treat him “as though he were her
father
—there to provide her with emotional support and little else.” Here we pause to note that Podhoretz is someone whose career has always been upstaged by
his
more famous father. How can the reader keep her footing amidst this mad swirl of relatives, husbands, ambitions, and projections?

By the way, R. Emmett Tyrrell has some free advice for Hillary too: she should get herself a divorce, and pronto. Since Bill is not only goatish but also “ithyphallic” (I had to look that up too), Hillary could present herself to women voters as “a victim of the male penile imperative,” then start dating again. I imagine Tyrrell is so pro-divorce because his own life improved so dramatically following one, especially on the penile imperative front. His fans will doubtless recall Tyrrell's bubbly reports about life as a swinging bachelor, picking up “terrific co-eds” at various right-wing think-tank shindigs, and not returning home alone. Yes, conservatives do score, as Tyrrell—who charges Hillary with having been too self-disclosing in her memoir
Living History
—makes sure to let us know. His preference is for the “soignée” and “physiologically well-appointed,” though unfortunately one of his soignée dates is mistaken for a hooker when he drops by a conservative gathering at the Lehrman Institute on his way to Au Club, a then-happening Manhattan nightspot. (A friend explains to Tyrrell that when a conservative shows up somewhere with a beautiful woman, he's usually paying by the hour.)

Tyrrell has actually been quite the gallant about aging female Republicans in the past, waxing lyrical about right-wing sex kitten Phyllis Schlafly's foxiness and Nancy Reagan's large beautiful eyes, both of whom are perhaps a quarter century his senior—to which one can only say, “You go, Bob.”

But could he ever go for a Democrat? As most agree, Hillary's aging well, and Tyrrell hasn't been
entirely
critical. On the plus side, she reminds him of Madame Mao, the “white boned demon” who was never more dangerous than when wearing a seductive guise, and Tyrrell is on record as a man who likes a seductive guise. However, in an exceedingly strange passage toward the end of the book, we learn that Hillary's ultimate dream is to be commandant of a “national Cambodian re-education camp for anyone caught wearing an Adam Smith necktie or scarf.” Or perhaps it's also an extermination camp, since he adds: “Welcome to Camp Hillary. Please remove your glasses and deposit them on the heap. (Was that a flash of gold I saw in your teeth?)” Yes, it's off to the killing fields for Tyrrell and his kind—having received her political education at the feet of Pol Pot, it's definitely curtains for the bourgeois enemy once Hillary takes the reins. I think Tyrrell means all this to be witty. He concludes by telling readers he's “taking the high road, since hatred is an acid on the soul.”

Here we've entered the realm of male hysteria, where reason and intellect go to die, though Tyrrell can be a hoot for those who find this kind of thing entertaining.

Speaking of male hysteria brings us to the peculiar case of Tyrrell's protégé at the
American Spectator
, David Brock, and his biography
The Seduction of Hillary Rodham
. Except in this case the acorn
does
fall far from the tree. After Brook received a million-dollar book advance to write a smear job on Hillary similar to the one he'd previously performed on Clarence Thomas accuser Anita Hill (Brock was famously the author of the “a bit nutty and a bit slutty” line about Hill), a strange thing happened when he tried to plunge the dagger again. Somehow he couldn't. Sure there was the stuff about the sixties radicalism that Hillary never really abandoned, including a catty analysis of her college wardrobe. And like the rest, he spends countless pages enumerating her bodily crimes and misdemeanors: given her thick legs, she adopted the sort of “loose-fitting, flowing pants favored by the Viet Cong” (just call her Ho Chi Rodham); along with these, she sported white socks and sandals (here, even I must protest), wore no makeup, piled her hair on top of her head, and “came from the ‘look-like-shit school of feminism.'” Even once ensconced in the professional world, she cut a “comic figure” with her hair fried into an Orphan Annie perm and a “huge eyebrow across her forehead that looked like a giant caterpillar.”