The Difficulties of Being Hillary

Thumb-sucking, Shana, is not what's needed."

So said my employer, Katharine Graham, back in Watergate days when I was a Newsweek columnist. The congressional investigation was playing on TV all day every day and the country was hooked. Me, too. I watched the hearings gavel to gavel, then mused about them--thumb-sucked--in print. Graham would have preferred reporting. But it was thumb-sucking that gave me the sole scoop of my ink-stained life. What were the blue-gloved burglars really after? It was simple if you noodled it long enough. Nixon the paranoid pragmatist wanted to know what dirt the Democrats had on him. I was the first writer to suggest this, thereby answering one of Watergate's last unanswered questions.

The unanswered Hillary question is not simple. What she is really after, no one knows. The first lady talks to reporters very selectively these days, and she won't talk to Playboy at all. "Not in this lifetime!" she exclaimed when this magazine suggested a Playboy Interview. I mention the matter only to be clear that what follows was written without the cooperation of Mrs. Clinton or her staff. Call it thumb-sucking of the first water.

Hillary Rodham Clinton and her modern marriage are what the women's movement was all about. She is what women of my generation, and many more of hers, marched and picketed and fought for 30 years to make possible. She is a fully independent woman, a wife who is her husband's equal in every respect, a female free to develop her full potential. She is feminism's finest flower to date, and now that she has become America's first lady, she is also a role model to millions. For the next 30 years, at least, little girls all over the world will devote themselves to trying to become like her.

Yet her presence in the White House makes many Americans uncomfortable. Even feminists, of both sexes, are edgy. How widespread the anxiety is, nobody knows. Many who fear her don't admit it. One large group--doctors and nurses and other health care professionals--mistrust her because she is a lawyer, their traditional enemy. Men generally don't like her, and I suspect many are scared to death of her. For one thing, her marriage doesn't fit any of the old patterns. When Bill was a candidate, that didn't matter. It may even have helped. But now that his wife is first lady, she arouses ambivalent emotions in people who are still scared of equality. Practically everybody, though we may not admit it, is still scared of equality.

Hillary was never a traditional political wife, blankly smiling, raptly listening, helmeted in hair spray. In Arkansas, and later on the campaign trail, her style was different, open, refreshing. Then Bill got elected and things had to change. The first lady's role is drenched in sexism. Symbolically, a president's wife still wears a bustle. But Hillary Rodham Clinton, new woman incarnate, prefers slacks and a headband. That's why she looked so odd at the Inauguration. It wasn't just her hat, which the press made such fun of. Hillary in any hat would have looked funny. New women don't wear hats. That's why there are no more custom milliners. Women wear headbands. It's easier. Hillary doesn't really give much of a damn about coiffure or couture, so long as everything is clean and reasonably becoming. Nobody does anymore, except women like Nancy Reagan. And not too many of those are left in 1994 America.

Of the current pack of political wives, Hillary seems most like a real woman in the gender sense. She is not harsh like Elizabeth Dole, not a cheerleader like Tipper Gore, not a club woman like Barbara Bush. She's intelligent, she looks good and she's always astoundingly well-prepared. To steel herself for her new responsibilities, she read 43 first lady biographies.

As a matter of fact, Bill Clinton doesn't fit the presidential model, either. To me, one of the most interesting things about him is that he is the one world leader who presents himself as a strong man completely unthreatened by the equally strong woman standing beside him. The last one of those I remember was Marshal Tito.

So the Clintons as a couple will take some getting used to. They're new and different and, he at 47 and she at 46 years old, younger than the six presidential couples immediately before them--the Bushes, Reagans, Carters, Fords, Nixons and Johnsons. They're a lot younger than the Eisenhowers, Trumans and Roosevelts. The White House has never known anything like the Clintons. But 1994 America is like them. Most American wives work. Most people today wear casual clothes, go to the movies, eat pizza. In age, taste and class, the Clintons mirror middle America to a remarkable degree.

In the White House the Clintons' style may take time to adjust to, but we have three more years. Hillary has a chance to draw some lines in the sand. The U.S. was the last big country to provide Social Security. Now it is the only major country that does not provide health care to all its people. So even if Hillary's health care plan is at best a compromise, a mere foot in the door, she may still go down in history as the great agent of change she longs to be. Most people believe that to accomplish this, the present plan will have to be scrapped in favor of some sort of single-payer system. But if Mrs. Clinton becomes convinced she got off on the wrong foot, she is the one politician I can think of who may have the guts to admit it and be willing to rethink and start over.

Other difficulties have to do with the Clintons' nature as a couple, and particularly with Hillary's unusual background. Who is she, and how did she get that way?

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Hillary Rodham's father was a conservative Midwestern Republican, a small-business owner who dealt in textiles. Her happy suburban childhood with two brothers resembled a Hallmark card. Picture big houses, rolling lawns, a near-zero crime rate and actual gas lamps lighting the street corners.

From first grade through Yale Law School, Hillary was a leader, popular and attractive, good in sports and an excellent student. After each new triumph, her father, Hugh Rodham, told her the same thing: "You did well. But could you do better?" According to Clinton mythology, this question endowed Hillary with the kind of aggression and will to excel that boys acquire through sports and other male conditioning, but that most girls lack.

Girls of my generation, and most girls of Hillary's generation, were brought up to believe that striving too hard to win is "unfeminine." Our brothers may have been made anxious by failure, but we were made anxious by success. As a result, girls like us grew up lacking the taste for combat--really a matter of training--that is necessary to succeed in this hyperaggressive and competitive society. And make no mistake: Success is required. With the demise of communism, the new acceptance of same-sex couples and political correctness of all kinds, the only un-American thing left is failure.

So far as one can tell, Hillary Rodham Clinton has never failed at anything. School and college friends are unanimous: She is so special, so gifted, she could have been an astronaut or a senator or anything else she wanted. Hillary had more choices than any woman in America, they say. If she fails in the next three years, it will be the first failure of her life.

In high school outside Chicago, she was a student leader and Goldwater Girl, and when she graduated in 1965 she was voted the girl most likely to succeed. She arrived at Wellesley College in pleated skirts and knee socks and, still a freshman, was voted president of the Young Republicans. But it was the seething Sixties, and 18-year-old Hillary Rodham was the right age to break out. Soon she was wearing horn-rimmed glasses and granny dresses and campaigning for Eugene McCarthy. Always serious about her Methodist religion, she was profoundly affected by the Vietnam war and the assassinations of Dr. Martin Luther King and Bobby Kennedy. She studied and wrote papers on the Black Panthers, the Weathermen, poverty and racism. By graduation in 1969 she was president of student government and, more important, chosen by her classmates as the first student ever to speak at a Wellesley commencement. Life printed an excerpt, alongside her picture. She had ad-libbed her speech's key line: "The challenge now is to practice politics as the art of making what appears to be impossible possible." It's the same message she preaches today.

At Yale Law School, she met an Arkansas boy on scholarship who was working three part-time jobs. Both had been early high achievers. The same year that Bill Clinton was a senator in Boys' Nation and got to shake hands with President Kennedy, Hillary was thrilled to shake hands with Dr. Martin Luther King. Both were passionate about Vietnam and civil rights. In her free time, Hillary was teaching reading to black kids in Boston's Roxbury neighborhood under the direction of her mentor, Marian Wright Edelman, the first black woman in Mississippi to pass the bar and now head of the Children's Defense Fund. By graduation, she and Bill had lived together for two years and were passionately in love.

Bill went back to Arkansas, determined to get into politics. Hillary landed a coveted staff attorney position at the Children's Defense Fund in Cambridge, Massachusetts. A few months later she was invited to join the special impeachment staff being assembled by the House Judiciary Committee to investigate Watergate, one of only three women in the 43-lawyer crew that prepared the groundwork for the televised hearings that would hypnotize the nation.

Seven months later, Nixon abruptly resigned, and Hillary's job evaporated. She was at loose ends for the first time ever and, at 26, her life path made a sudden hairpin bend.

By now Bill had been courting her on and off for five years. He had always (continued on page 226) Hillary Clinton (continued from page 98) been reluctant--and she hesitant--to maroon a world-class lawyer and model new woman in a dismal place like Arkansas, the second poorest state in the union. Yet it was unthinkable for an aspiring politician such as Bill to leave the site of all his political and emotional roots.

Inside the paradigm new woman, it seems, there had always lurked an old-fashioned girl who was now signaling wildly to get out. The time had come to "follow my heart, not my head," Hillary has often said. She would move to Arkansas, marry Bill and practice law.

With Hillary at his side, Bill's career took off. A year after their marriage, he became Arkansas' youngest attorney general, and by the age of 32 he was the nation's youngest governor. Arkansans had never seen anybody like Bill's activist-lawyer wife. She set up one of the state's first rape-crisis centers, worked as a partner at a prestigious Little Rock law firm and won recognition as one of the nation's leading lawyers. New woman that she was, she proudly practiced law under her maiden name.

Unlike many early feminists, she even managed to keep her sense of humor. When a society reporter began her interview by asking Hillary what she preferred to be called, she said, "I'm the first lady, Bill is the first man and Zeke is the first dog."

Hillary loved Arkansas right away and soon was behaving nearly as down-home regular as Bill. She stood in line at the movies, drove her own Oldsmobile and cooked for guests in the kitchen of the governor's mansion. The young Clintons lived the same kind of life as their many close friends--among them the Mack McLartys and the Vincent Fosters--modern couples who were also coming to grips with the changing of the country's rules that governed relationships between men and women. It didn't matter that Bill was the governor of Arkansas.

But Arkansans can be as backward as the people of Dogpatch about certain matters, and once their governor ran into some political difficulties, voters began to see him as "arrogant" and "out of touch." They increasingly focused on his "pushy" wife and her stubborn use of her maiden name. "What's wrong with your marriage?" they would ask Bill. "Doesn't your wife love you?" Eight percent of them pledged to throw Clinton out of office for no other reason than that he'd "allowed" his wife to keep her maiden name--even after Chelsea was born! This was flouting Scripture, they believed.

It is easy to see the hand of the religious right in all this. They played that hand so effectively that in 1980, the year Chelsea was born, her father was defeated for reelection.

The next couple of years were bad times for Bill. He couldn't get over losing. He went around the state obsessively apologizing to constituents for having let them down, and sometimes he wept openly. Ever since law school, perhaps earlier, Bill Clinton had been aiming for the governorship, then the presidency. Suddenly he was nowhere, off the path, in the ditch. Meanwhile, Hillary's career was thriving. She was a beneficiary of the many new developments in attitudes toward women's rights and status. She divided her attention scrupulously between her legal work and Chelsea, who from birth has clearly been her mother's old-fashioned first priority.

By now the Clintons' marriage was in trouble. Betsey Wright, the governor's longtime chief of staff and campaign manager, said later that her boss had developed "a defective shit detector in personal relationships sometimes," and was "also careless about appearances." The reference was presumably to Gennifer Flowers and the numerous other women who hung around the good-looking ex-governor.

But friends and counselors rallied round. Also, the Clintons were not too proud to seek professional help, and their marriage survived. By the time that Bill resurfaced politically, Hillary had dropped the name Rodham, restyled her wild, frizzy hair, bought a smarter wardrobe and swapped her owlish glasses for contact lenses. She now spoke demurely, with a faint Southern accent. This makeover could not have been entirely comfortable for the former Ms. Rodham. Much later, Hillary confessed she never really understood the symbolic importance of her name change. Neither did Bill. Neither do I. But both Clintons are astute and ambitious political animals, and they're totally unsentimental about politics. Each does whatever must be done to survive. Two years after his defeat, Bill was reelected.

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Hillary Clinton's life is congruent with the development of feminism in the U.S. If you construct a time line of the history of feminism and make an overlay of Hillary's life, all sorts of matching points jump out. In 1963, for example, 15-year-old Hillary wrote to NASA asking what subjects to study to prepare for becoming an astronaut. NASA wrote back that no females need apply. That same year, Betty Friedan published The Feminine Mystique, the event that did the most to trigger the modern women's movement.

To see the many points where the time line and the overlay coincide, to see the pattern, you cannot be in the picture yourself. You must be an outside observer. And it helps to be a woman. Men don't really understand the women's movement. Even today, when so many men try to help women, they don't fully understand us. One cannot expect them to. Men and women are still different creatures, and I pray we stay that way. Homogeneity and unisex are "not what's needed," to use Katharine Graham's quaint but apt phrase.

Another point: To see the matching patterns clearly, it helps to be a fairly senior party, someone a generation older than Hillary, like me. So let me put thumb in mouth and try to describe my view.

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I watched the entire women's movement happen. I wrote about it, benefited from it, occasionally participated and occasionally suffered its backlash. In the years between Hillary's birth and her college graduation, I was married twice, divorced twice, adopted a daughter and moved my legal residence from New York to California and back again, all the while supporting myself as a reporter and writer, mostly for Life magazine.

Among the changes I've seen: Male chauvinist pigs, as we used to call them, have all but disappeared. The workplace as snake pit, or cockpit, has changed utterly. What is now anathematized as "sexual harassment" was in my day a simple given. Anita Hill's experience was commonplace. Any woman who worked got fondled, groped, propositioned, jumped. Most of it wasn't serious, just unpleasant.

Paradoxically, men and women in the old days may have had a better idea where we stood with one another. We spoke in code then. But everyone knew the code. Now the code is gone, abolished. We prefer to speak directly; we say, tell it like it is. Indeed, some people do speak much more openly than before. But others don't speak at all. Deprived of code and euphemism, they are struck dumb. Young women complain to me about this all the time.

Another thing: The changes I'm talking about may well have happened first in the Ozarks, as the Clintons' Arkansas friend Linda Bloodworth-Thomason maintains, and not in New York or Hollywood, where I spent those years. "Everything's up to date in Kansas City" was meant to be ironic when Oscar Hammerstein wrote the lyrics for Oklahoma! in 1943. Today, thanks mostly to television, Oscar is merely accurate.

The same year that Hillary wrote to NASA and Betty Friedan published her book, I was a staff writer at Life, the first woman to hold that job, and on the way to becoming the magazine's star turn. The following year I became Life's first woman columnist, a development deemed so remarkable in those dinosaur days that people began asking to interview me. The first was somebody called Pierre Burton, described to me by Life's public relations people as "the Johnny Carson of Canada."

We were standing poolside at the Ambassador Hotel in Los Angeles, cameras rolling, when he asked his first question, reading aloud from a company handout. "Miss Alexander, it says here that you were Life's first woman reporter, first woman staff writer and now first woman columnist. Don't you feel like the house nigger?"

Harsh days, those. But a lot has changed in 30 years. Few people today realize how different life for American women used to be. It was a more tranquil time, to be sure, but only because we had no idea how unequal we were until Friedan and her militant sisters began to spread the word. "Consciousness-raising," they called it. The law in some states 30 years ago said that a man's wife and children were part of his property, like his horse.

Political pressure from organized women gradually affected statutes governing marriage, divorce, child custody, child abuse, children's rights, adoption, abortion, rape, the sexual rights and freedoms of consenting adults, sexual harassment in the workplace, hours and conditions of work, obscenity and pornography, death and taxes. Today it's an entirely new world. The ordinary lives of all Americans have changed more profoundly in the past 30 years than in the century before. The paradox of the Clintons' perilous position today is that they themselves are both winners in the gender wars and in danger of becoming casualties of them.

Let's browse farther along the time line.

• 1964: The Feminine Mystique is a bestseller and is going into paperback. Outside the Convention Hall in Atlantic City, where stomping Democrats are nominating Lyndon Johnson, Gloria Steinem is leading a group of bra-burners protesting the absence of black and female delegates. Huddled in a basement pressroom, I am banging out a description of a Democratic rite in which a heroic, white-gloved Jacqueline Kennedy shook every hand in a 5000-strong reception line of invited guests. It took her five hours. Back in Park Ridge, Illinois that summer, Hillary is playing softball, which she loves and at which she excels. But the game is just for fun. No girls' high school athletic teams yet exist.

• 1966: Betty Friedan is scribbling a statement of purpose for the newly formed National Organization for Women on a paper napkin. NOW elects her its president and begins working to broaden enforcement of the Civil Rights Act so as to forbid discrimination against women as well as blacks. Hillary is at Wellesley, presiding over a student meeting called to protest the college's secret quota policy for blacks. I am interviewing Ronald Reagan, who is running for governor of California.

• 1971: Bill and Hillary are in law school. Along with Bella Abzug, Gloria Steinem, Betty Friedan, Shirley Chisholm, Liz Carpenter and others, I am working long hours to help organize the National Women's Political Caucus. I have some free time now, having just abandoned ship, or perhaps been pushed overboard, after 20 terrible months as the first female editor in 50 years of McCall's, the oldest and then the largest women's magazine in the world.

At the NWPC we sometimes called ourselves the Founding Mothers. But the Mothers' appalling political infighting reminded me of a basket of snakes. Not having been raised as gentlemen, women tend to fight dirty, or they did in those days, and I couldn't stand it. My first Newsweek column, filed from the 1972 McGovern convention in Miami, is an open letter to Betty Friedan resigning from the women's movement "to rejoin the human race."

• 1973: Bill and Hillary finish law school. After graduation, both eschew high-priced bids from Wall Street law firms and vow to devote their lives to public service. After years of agitation by the National Organization for Women, the National Association for Repeal of Abortion Laws and other women's organizations, the Supreme Court gives U.S. women the right to have legal abortions.

By now, sick of organized feminism, I move on from worrying about women to thumb-sucking about the explosion of sexual freedom in America. We're on an erotic binge, I write. "Pornography is sex fiction, and like science fiction it comes in all grades. Writing it becomes a problem of continually having to devise new sauces for old meats."

• 1975: Bill and Hillary marry, against the advice of many of her friends and mentors. An antifeminist backlash has swept the country and killed the Equal Rights Amendment. I have become a TV talking head, again one of few females, and do weekly "Point/Counterpoint" debates with Jack Kilpatrick on 60 Minutes.

• 1984: Now and the NWPC join forces to demand a woman on the national ticket. Friedan, as American feminism's founding mother, makes state visits to Pope John Paul II, Indira Gandhi, the women of Iran, Africa, Iceland and so on. Bill Clinton is well into his second term as governor of Arkansas and is already being mentioned as a presidential candidate. Hillary is first lady of Arkansas and senior litigating partner at her law firm, earning more than $200,000 a year. I've graduated from magazines to books and have published the stories of Patty Hearst, Jean Harris and, at last, a best-seller, Nutcracker, about a murderous mother.

• 1993: Women are finally equal in law and are beginning to become equal in wages. Betty Friedan is receiving rave reviews for her magnum opus, The Fountain of Age. The Clintons are in the White House. I am in hell trying to write about them for Playboy, but at least I can now get into the movies for half price.

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The Clintons' road from Little Rock to the White House has not been smooth. Even worse than the skirmishes with rival politicians have been their off-and-on troubles with the media. Here are just a few of the harrowing episodes:

• Gennifer Flowers goes public. Hillary's response saves her husband's candidacy. The crisis begins a full week before the crucial 60 Minutes interview, when someone at a New Hampshire campaign rally asks whether she thinks marital fidelity should be a campaign issue. "In any marriage, there are issues that come up between two people that I think are their business," she says. The crowd applauds.

• In New Hampshire, Hillary grows cynical. In a bitter moment she refers to herself and Bill as the "freak show" and later tells a group of editors that she feels like someone "standing in the middle of a firing range."

• The up-front Clinton strategy works, and not long afterward, the Washington press votes Clinton most electable among the candidates.

• Bill tells the press, "If she would run, I would gladly withdraw." At fund-raisers, this idea grows and becomes a campaign refrain: "Buy one, get one free."

• By the time the campaign ends, Hillary vows to keep the press at arm's length. She stops giving long interviews, stops the daily press banter, answers press questions monosyllabically or in the fewest possible words, even goes out of her way to avoid saying "I."

• In a feeding frenzy by Inauguration time, the press attacks her hat. Reporters make fun of her friends, her clothes, her hair, her hairdresser. They were kinder to Nancy Reagan. They trash the Clintons' Arkansas friends and even urge them in headlines to go home.

• Reporters confect Hairgate. Yes, they make it up. On investigation, it turns out the only plane delayed by Clinton at Los Angeles International Airport was Air Force One. But the press gets so carried away with the phony story that Clinton winds up apologizing to reporters for something he has not done. Then Travelgate erupts, a teapot tempest blown out of all proportion.

• The press describes White House domestic tantrums, in one of which Hillary allegedly hurls a lamp at Bill.

• Reporters speculate about Hillary's sex life and sexual orientation. Rumors of lesbianism, citing "confirmed sources," are freely printed.

• One paper, The Wall Street Journal, both shoots down Lani Guinier, probably Clinton's best nominee, and contributes to Vincent Foster's suicidal blues. After Foster's death, the press suggests that he and Hillary were longtime lovers. The Times of London mentions the rumor of "a passionate affair." The Village Voice cites "reputable Washington journalists" and "impeccable Arkansas sources" for the story.

• Hillary occasionally gets a gratuitous trashing dressed up as a puff piece--not a hatchet job but a scalpel job. Cleverest is a Sunday New York Times Magazine cover story depicting her as Saint Joan. It lists all her good points--intellect, honesty, good judgment, lifelong commitment to social issues--and concludes that they add up to no good.

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More has been written about Mrs. Clinton at this stage of the game than about any other first lady in history. The reason is simple. The Clintons are something new, and they make wonderful copy.

Nonetheless, when the reading is over, you find the rewards surprisingly scant. You have a huge pile of facts but little by way of interpretation. As the nation's most dedicated Hillary watcher, Frank Marafiote, editor and publisher of The Hillary Clinton Quarterly, has observed, "The more we see of her, the more enigmatic she is."

This is no accident. Before the election, Mrs. Clinton was caricatured both as a wife who couldn't hold her husband and as the pushy ringmaster of the Clinton circus. Since moving to the White House, first lady press opportunities have been minimal. Schedules are rarely issued, there is no special press plane when she travels and there are no photo ops in the Rose Garden. Most interviews are 20-minute sessions in the back of her limo as she rides from one appointment to the next. She is very, very careful. The stories in Time, Newsweek, Vanity Fair, Mirabella and other publications tell the same anecdotes: She is churchgoing, hardworking and still scrambles Chelsea's eggs.

Hillary's elusiveness now is a striking contrast to her carefree behavior as first lady of Arkansas. Searing encounters with the press during the campaign made her the wary, hidden woman she is today. This lady has been too much for burning and by now doubtless agrees with Mother Teresa that "facing the press is more difficult than bathing a leper."

Yet when she has something to say, she says it directly, up front and clearly, as she has done on health care. This quality is what I appreciate most about her.

Asked about her marriage on 60 Minutes, for example, she said, "I'm not sitting here, some little woman standing by my man like Tammy Wynette. I'm sitting here because I love him, and I honor what he's been through and we've been through together. And you know, if that's not enough for people, then, heck, don't vote for him."

Admitting to a troubled marriage and demonstrating a willingness to work things through and stay together if at all possible is an embodiment of family values, not a flouting. Bill's approval rating rose at once.

When rival presidential candidate Jerry Brown asked whether Hillary's law practice didn't constitute a conflict of interest in a state where her husband was governor, she had a quick answer. "I suppose I could have stayed home and baked cookies and had teas," she said. "The work that I have done ... has been aimed ... to assure that women can make the choices ... whether it's full-time career, full-time motherhood or some combination." Few papers published more than the reference to baking cookies.

From the beginning, Hillary has spent far more time with Chelsea than feminist theory prescribes. Children of working mothers need "quality time," the theory goes. Hillary knows better. Children need "routine time" and plenty of it, and she has been scrupulous about finding it. When Chelsea gets home from school, the first lady is said to vanish for several hours at least, no matter what else may be on the agenda. If this fact is correct, and not just White House press office propaganda, it's heroic, as every working mother knows.

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Millions of people admire Hillary. Her friends revere her as "a missionary," meaning that she is aware she has led a privileged life and now wants to "give something back." Bill Clinton has always called her his better half. Even conservative hit man Roger Ailes allows, "If there's a real crisis, I hope to God she takes over. At least she has the courage that I think he lacks." If they are all correct, what's the problem?

To put the matter baldly, while many other presidents have been strongly influenced, and even at times ruled, by their wives, Bill Clinton is the first president to be routinely thought of as pussy-whipped. That perception is probably the biggest of Hillary's difficulties: How can she help her husband without hurting him by helping him too much, too openly and thereby adding to his unfortunate barroom appellation?

Both Clintons are aggressive, brainy, experienced politicians with a commitment to making things better. They ran as virtual co-candidates, something that had never been done before in American politics. Could either one of them have done it alone? No, they had to do it as a couple. Yet we still don't know what kind of couple they are. Hillary won't let us see the precise nature of her marital partnership. And as she says, heck, why should she?

We all know that every stable, 18-year marriage makes many accommodations. What we don't know is the Clintons' deal with each other. What have been their trade-offs? How do they divide up responsibilities? What are their no-nos? Because they are a new kind of couple in American political history, these questions are important if impertinent.

In some couples, the partners are together for mutual intimacy, support and loving warmth. Another type of couple is the partnership in which the two people are together for joint self-gain. Which kind are Hillary and Bill? The answer has to do with competition and ambition and what it is that she really wants--success on her own or success as Bill's partner. For if it is to be a viable partnership, they must have complementary roles; they cannot be clones.

If they have a newfangled, modern partnership, rather than mere intimacy, they must divide their roles and share their responsibilities. How do the Clintons play it? If she takes the more principled position, for example, and lets him be the pragmatist, the compromiser, her sense of self-worth could come from keeping him to the high road. That would both fulfill her sense of goodness and give her a worthy role.

But the whole point of feminism is to make it on one's own. It's not healthy to sit in the back of the bus. It is deforming of one's character. The irony here, and the terrible sadness, is that this splendidly gifted, dedicated, overachieving woman now has her hand on the topmost lever of power, but not in her own name.

Am I saying Hillary is trying to have it both ways? No, I'm saying she has to. She is caught in an impossible catch-22, a double bind. If only Hillary were not his wife!

Let's face it, thumb-sucking works only up to a point. What we really need to know if we are to evaluate this first couple is what we will never know: What kind of couple are they really? My hunch is that under the right circumstances Bill could be persuaded to open up and discuss it. He seems to be a let-it-all-hangout sort of fellow, what the shrinks call emotionally labile.

But Hillary? Uh-uh. "Not in this lifetime."

"Both Clintons are totally unsentimental about politics. Each does whatever must be done to survive."