An Invitation to the White House

Dear Marjorie and Brent,

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I'd like to extend my sincere sympathy to you, Marjorie, for all those times you had to put on a long dress and a straight face and cover those fancy dinners at the White House. (Of course, wouldn't it be nice for Slate's readers to have the chance to read your "Night of the Smiling Swedes" story?) One thing I'd love to know and that I certainly didn't learn from Hillary's book is: Does anything ever go spectacularly wrong? Are there moments of unintentional farce in some of these carefully orchestrated evenings?

I've been pondering the theory that both of you float about Hillary's writing this book as an effort to cook up an alternative history for her years at the White House, one without Monica or Whitewater or Filegate or Vince Foster in it. I think that Brent's point that even people like Hillary yearn for happy and cozy home lives, sometimes involving baking and floral arrangement, is a very good one and explains, perhaps, her desire to present herself as the June Cleaver of Pennsylvania Avenue. (We can rule out financial motivation: She's donated her fee, she says, to the White House refurbishment fund.) Interestingly enough, the publisher took care not to release the book until after the senatorial election--though it's unclear if this was because Hillary didn't want to be accused of taking unfair advantage of her position by using the book to fish for votes or because she was afraid the voters would find the book unsenatorial. (I'd have to go with the second reason.)

I wonder if we're being too hard on Hillary's effort to recast the White House years. True, this book hardly tells the whole fascinating story of the endless Wagnerian opera that is the Clinton marriage, and it certainly leaves a big gaping hole where all the sordid details would go. But I don't think that that makes Hillary's descriptions of the parties and receptions and Good Works that took place at the White House over the past eight years a big fat lie, either.

I think it's impossible to understand someone else's marriage, and I think people in relationships as long and fraught as the Clintons' make all sorts of emotional arrangements and accommodations that no one else can possibly comprehend. I also think that it's possible to construct any number of seemingly contradictory narratives about partnerships like theirs and have them all be true in their ways. The book about the Clintons as parents of Chelsea, for instance, would be different from this book or from the book about life in the private quarters after Hillary discovered her love-rat husband had been getting blow jobs in the Oval Office. It's always struck me (and maybe I'm just projecting) that Hillary and Bill truly do have a rare and enviable rapport in many respects, that each found in the other something that seems all too unusual: a deeply sympathetic mind. Not that many couples love to stay up late into the evening chatting about Medicare, famine, and early education with politicians, heads of state, and policy wonks, but I think the Clintons really do. (Remember all those stories about how they'd raid the fridge in the governor's mansion in Arkansas and eat leftovers at 2 a.m. with their old politico friends?) There are so many pictures in this book of Bill and Hillary smiling at each other (albeit, as Marjorie mentions, while dressed in formal outfits or in undignified costumes) with such closeness and seeming affection that I'd hate to think every single one of them was put on merely for public consumption. It is that genuinely engaged side of their marriage that, to me, makes the Monica debacle such a tragedy for them.

I was worried (and now I am projecting) that Hillary wouldn't be elected senator and that the crashing and burning of her own ambitions would lead to ugly scenes, a terrible case of post-retirement syndrome, and the inevitable breakup of her marriage. I thought her winning would salvage it when she finally got to do something on her own. But when I'm reminded by Brent of how deliberately she ignored Bill on election night, then I worry all over again. What do you think: Can this marriage be saved?

Finally, I completely agree with Brent that it's disturbing, and disappointing, to see that most of the black people in this book are doing things like singing or vacuuming. I wasn't too thrilled, either, to be reminded that what I assume to be my tax dollars are going toward the wages of a White House staff of 90, including three full-time calligraphers.

This has been lots of fun, even though the lady sitting next to me on the subway was not pleased when I inadvertently whacked her in the arm with Hillary's very heavy book.

Yours,
Sarah

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This week, our critics examine An Invitation to the White House, Hillary Rodham Clinton's scrapbook of her husband's time in office.

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