An Invitation to the White House

Dear Sarah and Brent,

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I have to agree with Brent that it's a white Christmas they're dreaming of on Pennsylvania Avenue. I'm especially struck by this in light of the fact that we wouldn't all be talking about Volusia County at all were it not for the extraordinary turnout of Florida's black voters; we'd all be standing outside the ranch gates in Texas waiting for the president-elect to name his attorney general. But if you think the Clinton White House has been deficient in diversity, wait until you get a load of Bush II. Somewhere in Austin they're already polishing up all the perky blondes who will make the wheels whir for the next four years.

To Sarah, I really liked your meditation on the Clinton marriage (even if it was mean of you to suggest linking to the embarrassments of my past. Did I say the Washington Post? I meant the Valdosta Gazette.). I couldn't agree more with you, Sarah, that a) the Clinton marriage, like all marriages, is basically unknowable territory to all except the two people who are in it; and b) there is something real there--something big, and maybe even something more sustaining than most twosomes have to get them through 40 or 50 years together.

But my description of the book as alternative history is subtly different from Brent's. I think I disagree that this is Hillary's effort to paint a happy domestic picture. For all the family snapshots and the warm, Bill-and-I prose, this is almost completely a ceremonial book. I read it much more as an effort to firm up the Clintons' public credentials as having successfully risen to the occasion of the presidency. Boiling somewhere amid all the resentments that these last eight years have induced in the Clintons is their outrage at the right-wing implication that they are somehow not fit. Illegitimate. A jumped-up pair of pretenders who never grasped the sanctity of the roles they'd been chosen for. I think that's the bill of particulars that Hillary is answering here. (Oh yeah? Well how about those little tiny half-moons of wallpaper I suggested cutting out to paste above the swag on the border that runs around the top of the Blue Room, to make it look swaggier? How about that bitchin' pastry chef I hired?)

I don't mean to sound cynical about this. It means, when you think about it, that this book is just one more way that Hillary is continuing to cast her lot with Bill and with the marriage. Why work so hard to redeem an institution (the public face of the marriage) if you're about to flee it?

To the question of whether this marriage can be saved, then, I vote a hearty--if ever-mystified--yes.

What I wonder is when I will stop being weary of everything having to do with Hillary, her marriage, her Role, her Meaning, and start being mildly curious about what swath she may cut through the U.S. Senate. Brent's description of Hillary's star turn for the Times editorial board does arouse my interest in her again. But I feel the need for extensive palate-clearing before I can begin. Still, if nothing else, this book tells us that after the tedium of planning receptions for the thousands of "special" people who swarm through the White House, hearings on milk price supports will be catnip to the junior senator from New York.

Feeling at home with history,
Marjorie

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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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