EVERY biography of a presidential candidate implicitly poses the same question: Is the past prologue? Biographers comb through the contenders' lives trying to find signs of the president they might become in the decisions they've made and the experiences they've accumulated. They seek hints of the future by examining shards of the past.
Any biographer undertaking that effort with Hillary Rodham Clinton, the Democratic U.S. senator from New York and former first lady now seeking her party's presidential nomination, faces two unusually large hurdles. One is the volume of words already written about her, a melange of fact, fantasy and ideological projection across the spectrum in nearly four dozen books and countless newspaper and magazine profiles. The other is more fundamental. In Clinton's case, it's not clear whether the past really is prologue to a possible presidency -- or, more precisely, in a life marked by distinct phases, it's not clear which past might be the prologue.
Two new biographies navigate these challenges with widely varying degrees of skill and success. Of the two, "A Woman in Charge" by Carl Bernstein of Watergate fame is by far the more engaging and illuminating; it stands as a model of contemporary political biography. But "Her Way" from accomplished investigative reporters Jeff Gerth and Don Van Natta Jr., though not as sophisticated or revealing, helps plug the one major gap in Bernstein's book by exploring Clinton's Senate career, which he inexplicably glosses over in a few perfunctory pages.
Despite that notable flaw of omission, Bernstein has produced an excellent book: thorough, balanced, judicious and deeply reported. In unmannered and accessible prose, he offers a three-dimensional portrait of a person with enduring strengths (discipline, tenacity, a sustaining religious faith) and weaknesses (excessive secrecy, a tendency to self-righteousness and a habit of nursing grudges); he could have easily called his study "A Woman in Full." After Bernstein, it is difficult to imagine the need for another book on the first five decades of Clinton's life.
Gerth and Van Natta, for instance, add little to Clinton's self-portrait (in her memoirs and elsewhere) of her youthful home life in what they call the "pleasant and secure environment" of Park Ridge, a Chicago suburb. But Bernstein shows how much air-brushing was required to paint that Norman Rockwell picture. Bernstein is withering in his portrayal of Clinton's father, Hugh Rodham, "a sour, unfulfilled man whose children suffered his relentless, demeaning sarcasm ... endured his embarrassing parsimony, and silently accepted his humiliation and verbal abuse of their mother." \o7 \f7
