Hillary's Higher Power

The Hillary Trap
By Laura Ingraham
Hyperion, 227 pp.

Hillary's Choice
By Gail Sheehy
Ballantine, 426 pp.

Hillary Clinton is like a Rorschach test: Everyone who looks at her sees a different person. She's an aggressive, brilliant lawyer; she should stay out of policy and stick to scheduling teas. She's smarter than her husband; she only uses her husband to get ahead. She's an aggrieved victim, a betrayed wife; she's prudish, too abrasive to be a good life partner. Nowhere is this clearer than in the raft of books we've seen this year on Hillary's life and public image.

Hillary's spirituality seems to blow along with her drifting personality. She's been pilloried as a wacky New Ager who tried to contact Eleanor Roosevelt in the Great Beyond; she's been pictured on the cover of The New York Times Magazine as a follower of Rabbi Michael Lerner and his politics of meaning; she's been tweaked as "St. Hillary" while at the same time depicted by her harshest critics as a soulless, almost Beelzebub-ish figure, constantly morphing to fit the latest focus group.

All this lives side-by-side with Hillary's lifelong commitment to the Methodist church, even though Bill's a Baptist. (This fits into the larger division of labor between her and Bill--the down-home Southern boy and the well-heeled, Wellesley-educated liberal.) "Our spiritual life as a family was spirited and constant," she wrote in "It Takes a Village," her 1996 book, of the role of religion in her childhood. "We talked with God, walked with God, ate, studied and argued with God."

Her religious constancy causes problems for Clinton-haters, who love to portray Hillary as the quintessential politician, attending to no higher guide than the latest polls. "She will do whatever works and be whoever she has to be to achieve her objectives," writes Peggy Noonan in her 2000 book "The Case Against Hillary Clinton." For Noonan, Hillary is a Faustian figure who married Bill Clinton only to bask in his glory. Noonan is convinced that Hillary made "a deal." A former Reagan speechwriter who has advertised her own upbringing as a Catholic, Noonan stops before mentioning Hillary's devotion to the church: Noonan's line of reasoning would demand she prove that Hillary's Christianity be as phony as her cookie-baking routine--window dressing for an empty soul.

Another complication for those who would paint Hillary as a pure cynic is her competing pedigree as a spiritualist. If Hillary isn't a sinister schemer, she's a flower child, hanging crystals and channeling dead First Ladies. In his 1996 book "The Choice," Bob Woodward described Hillary's work with New Age psychologist Jean Houston, "talking" with Gandhi and Eleanor Roosevelt. (Roosevelt, according to Woodward, told Hillary, "You have to do what you think is right.") Hillary says--and it's easy to believe her--that the session with Houston wasn't really a "seance" to call up Eleanor's spirit; it was just an "imaginative exercise" to get her thinking about role models.

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