Hillary's Choice

by Gail Sheehy

This is the story of a woman and a marriage, both so famous the world over, we think we know everything there is to know. But Hillary's Choice renders America's First Lady fully human for the first time.
        
Gail Sheehy uncovers the lifelong imprint of Hillary's drillmaster father and the frustrated mother who taught her to bottle up her emotions and who took subversive pleasure in teaching her only daughter how to fight like a man. We listen in as Hillary describes, in letters to a college pen pal, her dreams of becoming a star and her depression when trying to choose an identity. And we meet her first love, the handsome Georgetown man who melted her midwestern puritanism but lost her to the more ambitious Bill Clinton.
        
We see the arc of Hillary's life through her headstrong as a Yale Law School graduate who chooses to marry an Arkansas boy, thinking she will get him elected to Con-gress and take him back to Washington; as a professional wife who chooses to abandon her own career dream so she can raise a "boy" to be a president; as a woman betrayed once too often who finally confronts her husband and makes the deal that will determine their future.
        
Sheehy has been observing Hillary Clinton for seven years, talking to her informally and writing about her in Vanity Fair . The biographical portrait that emerges is a tour de force of hard reporting shaped by the intimate contour of the author's unique insights.  
        
The story of the Clinton presidency has always been the story of the Clinton marriage. Delving deep into a relationship that is both supportive and destructive, Sheehy answers the constantly asked question "Why does she stay with him?" How has Hillary preserved her spirit through repeated cycles of Clinton's seduction, betrayal, and repentance? Sheehy peels back the layers of public masks and private denials, showing through one vivid scene after another how Hillary became addicted to Bill, and how desperately Bill depended on Hillary to teach him how to fight and to bring him back again and again from the political dead. Power and shame shift violently from Hillary to Bill and back again as Sheehy deconstructs their embattled co-presidency.
        
Hillary's Choice reveals much   the one serious threat to the Clinton marriage, when Bill fell in love with a woman unlike any of his others; Hillary's symbiotic relationship with political guru Dick Morris; the real reason Clinton couldn't help Hillary pass health care reform; the source of Hillary's crippling hostility toward the press; how Hillary escaped the snare of Ken Starr; how she endured, and capitalized on, the miseries of the Monica year; why she polarizes women; and why she chose to seek her own political voice.
        
Hillary's Choice brings this tempestuous tale up to date, following Hillary's rebirth as a newly confident woman in her "Flaming Fifties" who is ready to take control of her life. The Clintons' startling role reversal in middle life maintains the Will Hillary succeed as a retail politician with Bill in the wings as her strategist? Will their marriage survive his postpresidential blues and her possible rejection by her new neighbors in New York?
        
Gail Sheehy's saturation reporting and candid interviews with hundreds of people--many of them fresh sources with intimate knowledge of Hillary--flesh out the complexities and contradictions that drive one of the most extraordinary political figures of our time.

Genres: Biography, Politics, Nonfiction, History, Biography Memoir, Womens

416 pages, Hardcover

First published December 12, 1991

About the author

Gail Sheehy is an American writer and lecturer, most notable for her books on life and the life cycle. She is also a contributor to the magazine Vanity Fair.

Her fifth book, Passages, has been called "a road map of adult life". Several of her books continue the theme of passages through life's stages, including menopause and what she calls "Second Adulthood", including Pathfinders, Spirit of Survival, and Menopause: The Silent Passage. Her latest book, Sex and the Seasoned Woman, reveals a hidden cultural phenomenon: a surge of vitality in women's sex and love lives after age fifty. She has also authored a biography of Hillary Rodham Clinton titled Hillary's Choice. Her novel Middletown, America is being adapted as a TV miniseries. (from Wikipedia)

Reviews

[T R · Rating 3 out of 5]

Thou not fan of Hillary Clinton the politician, I now have better understanding and appreciation of her after reading this book today! Instead of looking at all her faults, I found her life to be very inspiring. She choose the kind of life that matches her God given skills and intelligence, thus enabling her to accomplish feats that could have been humanly impossible for any woman. The author gave a very objective run down of her life from the moment she was born to how she became one of the most powerful personality in the world today.

[Mary · Rating 4 out of 5]

I chose to read this to get some background knowledge of Hillary to prepare for this election cycle. Gail Sheehy's book, published in 1999, is very even-handed and readable though dated since it does not cover the making of Hillary as a politician since her election to the Senate. Hillary's letters to a friend during her college years provided the most introspective material. Unfortunately this kind of personal voice is lacking in the rest of the book. The Arkansas years are well-done and provide good background for the White House years. Sheehy stumbles by both condemning the troopers who served up sensational stories of Bill's sexual antics and then using troopers as sources for her own coverage of similar escapades.

[Shawna · Rating 3 out of 5]

Well written and documented as well as interesting and (hopefully) fair. Hillary and Bill seem both to be emotionally impaired. They don't know how to be happy. They appear to be quite arrogant but seem to mean well in many ways. They are their own worst enemies.

[Marjie Smith · Rating 3 out of 5]

An interesting look at a strong, determined and brilliant woman with a knack for reconstructing herself to achieve her goals. It is also a candid look at the marriage of Hillary and Bill Clinton and how two bright but emotionally scarred young lawyers set their sights on the presidency and did whatever it took to get there. For Hillary, doing what it took, meant enduring the constant humiliation of an unfaithful husband who considered sex a reward for good behavior. The book traces Hillary’s aloof, emotionless and cerebral approach to a cold, critical tyrant of a father and Bill’s inability to deal with confrontation or to treat people well to the manipulative behavior and addiction to approval to growing up in an insecure and abusive home with no real male role models. In the end, Hillary tires of bailing out her husband and starts working towards her own future.

[Toni · Rating 3 out of 5]

I picked this book up shortly after it was published and it sat on the shelf until the summer of 2010. I never was a fan of Hillary and always wondered why she stayed with Bill for all these years even before the Monica issue. I’m very glad I bought this book all those years ago.

I found this book very interesting and it put several things in a better perspective. It almost should have been a requirement for people to read when Hillary was running for President. I think she would have gotten a lot more support if people had understood her more and knew what makes her tick. I'm glad that I finally took the time to read this book and see that one of her goals/dreams really did come true after the 2008 Presidential election.

[Terri · Rating 5 out of 5]

I bought this book years ago when I picked up a bunch of books by Gail Sheehy. I love her writing and knew it would be a good read. Written in 1999, it tells the story of Hillary's life up until the time she ran for election for New York senator and right before they left the White House. The focus is on her relationship with Bill Clinton and her own ambitions. It is a very personal, revealing up close look at their lives. I feel I understand her a lot better now. Glad I finally decided it seemed like time to read it. Have already read It Takes A Village. Next up, Hard Choices. Excited to read all about her years as Secretary of State and the 100+ countries she visited as well as her vision from where she is now all these years later.

[Hillary · Rating 3 out of 5]

Just one anecdote to illustrate the tone of this book.
Bill and Hillary pull up to a gas station, Hillary sees someone she went to highschool with working there, they have a nice little chat to catch up, Bill and Hillary get back into the limo and Bill says to Hillary “See Hill, you could have done a lot worse than me” (Note, this was not long after the Monica scandal), Hillary says to Bill “Bill if I would have married him, he would be President of the United States right now.”

It seems that everything about Hillary is calculated, this book tries to emphasize this all the way through, especially with the title, emphasis on the word CHOICE

[Faith Justice · Rating 3 out of 5]

Very interesting read. Reinforced my belief we elected the wrong Clinton back in 1992. Hillary has her faults and blind spots, but don't we all? This book gives a picture of a woman with enormous energy, intelligence and ability coupled with a fierce sense of social justice. I hope she doesn't "retire" after she leaves the Secretary of State position, but she sure deserves a vacation!

[Stephanie Irvine · Rating 4 out of 5]

I learned a lot about Hillary from this book. It starts with her childhood and ends after the Monica scandal. Hillary is amazing. She's had such a vast array of incredible experiences and has done so much with her life. She's smart, driven and tireless.

[Norah · Rating 3 out of 5]

-Hillary's disciplined upbringing clearly influenced her political perspective and decisive nature.

[Ashleigh · Rating 4 out of 5]

One of the better accounts of her life. I would say it's pretty balanced compared to the Hillary love-her vs. hate-her accounts that are out now.

[Christine · Rating 4 out of 5]

I've decided I should become more informed of the political forerunners for the presidency. I've learned more about the complexities of her and what makes her so motivated.

[Elise · Rating 4 out of 5]

Whatever your views on hillary, she's led a very interesting life. I'm trying to read the biographies of the prominant/important white house contenders and this is one of the first I tried.

[Amanda]

This was really interesting. I'm liking Hillary more and Bill less:(

[Cws]

92C

[Erika Floyd · Rating 2 out of 5]

"You cannot know Hillary Rodham Clinton without reading this book"-Lynn Scher, ABC News (Back cover quote)

[BMR, LCSW · Rating 4 out of 5]

This book is (partly) why I cannot imagine ever voting for Hillary Clinton...

[Alex]

Hillary's Choice by Gail Sheehy (2000)

[Toesnorth's mom]

interesting

[Margaret]

Read this years ago...which is why I am reluctant to read her own book.

[Kimberly · Rating 4 out of 5]

The author was informative with enough flair to hold the reader’s interest. I could relate to Hillary’s journey more than I expected.

Notebook:

The challenge in writing a biographical portrait was to delve behind the masks of a public woman notoriously obsessive about guarding her own privacy and that of those close to her.

The thrill was to discover the unknown Hillary Rodham who existed before Bill, and the interlocking between Hillary and Bill Clinton over the course of their turbulent history.

The Rodhams emphasized self-reliance: no hands, no help, except perhaps from God or Goldwater.

“I wanted my children to be able to keep their equilibrium,” Dorothy told me, explaining how she had used a carpenter’s level as a visual tool for instruction. She showed it to Hillary and her brothers with the bubble dead center. “Imagine having this carpenter’s level inside you,” she told them. “You try to keep that bubble in the center. Sometimes it will go way up here,” she said, tipping the instrument to show how the bubble could drift, “and you have to bring it back.”

Hillary and her father watched the Republican convention on television, but when that upstart John Kennedy turned on the charm at the Democratic convention, Hugh Rodham pulled the plug on the family TV.

Jones represented a radical change for the sleepy First Methodist Church of Park Ridge.
“We hadn’t been exposed to diversity. Don wanted us to think about where other kinds of people were coming from and to understand their problems.”

After hearing Dr. King, Hillary Rodham was eager to try out her own oratorical and political skills.

She really lit up when a heated debate got started, especially if it concerned issues that had a practical impact on the world: racial issues, the Vietnam War, civil rights.

Before she left Wellesley, she was successful in almost all of her efforts.

Karen Williamson remembers that a lot of her classmates thought that if ever in their lifetime a woman became president, they knew who it would be. It would be Hillary Rodham.

Even Hillary the “moral Methodist” ran up against Sixties radicalism. Over Christmas vacation she had felt so alienated from Park Ridge and her parents’ home and “the entire unreality of middle-class America” that she had to admit her perspective was shifting.

Wellesley girls were expected by graduation to produce—not plans to become lawyers or doctors or writers or artists or business or political leaders—but “a ring by spring.”

For Hillary, her college years were not just a utopian phase where she was at liberty to explore herself and the world. This was where she first found the identity that would guide her life.

“Up until 1968, Yale and most law schools took four or five women and four or five blacks. All the rest were white guys.”

Hillary set her cap for finding a “movement” law firm to work for the next summer. Treuhaft’s firm was the only office in Oakland that represented the working poor.

“I’m a heart liberal, but a mind conservative.”

Completing her mutation from Republican to liberal Democrat, Hillary wangled herself an assignment in Texas, working to register voters for the Democratic National Committee in San Antonio.

Hillary then went to the Law Students’ Civil Rights Research Council and secured a grant that had enabled her to spend the summer of 1970 in Washington working on behalf of poor families, some of them in migrant labor camps.

“She was amongst the first legal scholars to address the question of children’s rights.”

‘If you ever learn when to talk and when to keep quiet, there is nothing you can’t achieve.’

Hillary Clinton’s first book, It Takes a Village, shows her appreciation of the complicated emotional havoc that adults must deal with when recovering from a disordered childhood.

After a year of trying on Arkansas life, she had told Bill she wanted to see what all her friends were doing that she might be missing. Off she went on a tour of Boston, New York, Washington, and Chicago to size up her future possibilities in bigger ponds.

She had moved to Fayetteville, she saw it as “a leap of faith. I just knew I wanted to be part of changing the world.”

“She doesn’t expose much of her feelings. Some people take that as being rude and standoffish.”

Their friends called the Clintons “soul mates,” acknowledging that they confide fully in nobody else, not even family, only in each other.

Her pet project as First Lady was educational reform, which was to grow into the signature of the entire Clinton reign in Arkansas.

In some parts of the state, teachers were earning less than $10,000 a year and qualified for food stamps. More than 90 percent of the state’s residents lacked a college degree.

Arkansas was eventually funneling seventy cents of every tax dollar into educational programs.

Hillary acted as Bill’s conscience. She was a self-appointed Jiminy Cricket perched on his shoulder,

Chelsea was a good part of the glue that kept the Clintons’ marriage together whenever the corrosion of betrayal and false repentance threatened to take it apart.

Hillary expressed a fervent concern that corporate America was running amok and subverting bedrock American values.

She talked about the excesses of yuppie materialism, hyperindividualism, and narcissism that were overshadowing concern for the public good.

The heartsick governor confided that he loved both Hillary and Marilyn Jo. Corporal Ferguson later testified that Clinton had told him, “It’s tough to be in love with both your wife and another woman.”

Hillary’s addiction is Bill. He is her only rebellion, the one thing she can’t logically explain.

“Honey, you have here a young man from Oxford and Yale with twelve years of successful service as Arkansas governor, and you have a graduate of Harvard and Vanderbilt with sixteen years of successful service in Congress and the Senate, and they’re both married to women who just may be better and smarter than their men are.”

“You used to date that guy? Just think what it would be like if you had married him,” Clinton says smugly. Hillary shrugs. “If I’d married him, you’d be pumping gas, and he’d be President.”

The investigation led by Starr was to last five years and ultimately cost taxpayers close to $50 million.

“She understands as well as anyone I have ever met that we are all put here for a purpose,” said her pastor. “She knows that she has been given many gifts and graces and she has greater obligations than ordinary people.”

Hillary Clinton was thinking big. She wanted the federal government to guarantee health insurance to every American.

Hillary’s uncompromising style, an asset in the courtroom, proved contrary to the craft of capital politics, where compromise is a necessity.

Her book, It Takes a Village was a heartfelt manifesto meant to encourage broad support within communities for raising a child. No one knew better than Hillary how vital it was to have teachers and mentors as a counterforce to the limitations a child might be unable to escape at home.

The First Lady lambasted China’s Communist government for suppressing free speech and the right to assemble at the grassroots women’s forum in Hairu.

Hillary Rodham Clinton was becoming known not merely as the First Lady of the United States but as the First Woman of the World.

By this time she had learned to look at the world the way men of power do: never allow the public to see your wounds, and in the face of all obstacles hold on to your life strategy in service of a larger agenda.

The enabler is usually an intimate of the addicted person who allows him to persist in self-destructive behavior by making excuses or helping him avoid the consequences of his actions.

“Hillary’s clearly made a decision. She’s going to rise or fall with him. So she’s going to stand with him.”

Champions play with pain, they don’t sit it out. “Hillary was able to do this,” her mother told me, “because she had a commitment to her daughter—somebody outside of her own problems that she was being strong and positive for.”

“It’s her nature. Hillary is a loner. She’s an extremely strong and independent person and I think extremely spiritual.”

Once more, Hillary was faced with a choice: strike out on her own or bet on Bill? How many times had she faced the same choice? Scores of times? Only now she was fifty.

“You know that forgiveness has nothing to do with human logic,” he said. “Forgiveness has strictly to do with grace. And that’s God’s gift.”

Was she intimidating? McDermott sighs assent. “If I was going to war, I’d want her covering my rear. She’s never going to run from a fight.”

Bill Clinton clutched his wife’s hand and didn’t let go. The silent but eloquent evidence of his need for support from the woman who had provided it so many times in the past was, for many, the most memorable of the day’s unforgettable images. She was his only sanctuary.

The “pity press” made Hillary Rodham squirm beyond almost anything else. Hillary as victim? Her whole mission worldwide has been to empower women to shuck off the victim role and stand up for themselves.

The sixty-second time she had made a trip abroad since her husband had become President, and twenty of those journeys had been without him. Already, she had exceeded the number of countries visited by Eleanor Roosevelt over her lifetime.

“There is a role reversal now. He is more strategy and behind the scenes, thinking like a campaign manager. Now she is the person in the arena. Just like she used to guide him, he can now guide her.”

Now Hillary was the surveyor of their future, and she was prepared to gamble it all on a move to New York State.

“She needs to sit in kitchens and living rooms and just listen.”

She married a politician and chose to go down his road. Now she knows where that road ends—draped in the tattered cloak of Bill Clinton’s legacy and wandering off into middle-aged oblivion. But the other road, the one less traveled—the Hillary Rodham road—is still open to her.

Hillary gave a long and heartfelt address on human rights: “We can alter the direction of this planet when it comes to how we treat one another. We can alter the direction of the planet when we follow leaders who speak of peace and work against war, who serve their people by healing divisions, not creating them.”

[Carol Macarthur · Rating 5 out of 5]

Sheehy's book is documented well. It tells the story of a complex woman whose choices have both limited and enhanced her life. Good read!

[Carole Sustak · Rating 5 out of 5]

Great insight of Hillary Rodham Clinton

I'm so glad read this book at this time. Although I have known that Hillary is the most qualified candidate in this election of 2016, I have held reservations about her as a person. This book provides a very honest and gut wrenching view of the trials and tribulations of Hillary, not just as the wife of Bill Clinton, but as the daughter of Hugh Rodham. I strongly recommend this book!

[Phyllis Fredericksen · Rating 4 out of 5]

I picked this up at a book sale because I like the author and wanted to read more about Hillary. This book deals with Hillary's early years, her marriage to Bill and the beginnings g of her run for Senator from New York. Not exactly even-sided, the author does tackle Bill's many affairs and explores why Hillary stayed with him. I found it to be very interesting. Mrs. Clinton comes off as a strong person and very intellegent.

[Eleanore B. Robins · Rating 5 out of 5]

Can We Trust Her?

During this Election cycle, I am studying past history of the candidates. Sheehy has written a defining book about Ms Clinton. She has done an excellent job gaining information from those who knew Clinton. The info has been put forth in an easily understood book. I think many should read this and then make your own decision

[Gerry Durisin · Rating 3 out of 5]

Interesting, but the author is too prone to psychological interpretations based on questionable knowledge. Hillary’s made some choices, all right, and only time will tell whether they were worth the cost.

[Karen-Leigh · Rating 3 out of 5]

Very well written introduction to Hillary Clinton. If I were not on her side before I read it, I would certainly be in her corner after reading this book which ends in 1999. I feel that every voter in the USA should read this book before the election.

[Krista Morrow]

Ugh finally done. Tried reading several times-certainly wordy. Although a good book to read right now. Offers a lot of insight about Hilary, stays mostly neutral. Worth a read during election time-form your own opinion with knowledge!!!