THE HUNTING OF HILLARY
The Forty-Year Campaign to Destroy Hillary Clinton
By Michael D’Antonio
In the almost four years since Donald Trump won the presidency, those of us who weren’t in favor of that particular outcome can sometimes appear to have sorted into two equally vocal camps. The first group thinks that Hillary Clinton deserves some significant portion of blame for the election result because of the campaign she ran, or indeed for running at all, given the decades-old, baked-in political weaknesses she somehow persuaded the Democratic Party to ignore. The second group sees that kind of thinking as antifeminist and anti-establishment, and attributes the Clinton loss almost entirely to external forces: misogyny, conservative dark money, media manipulation, conspiracy theorists — the same forces that have unfairly dogged her throughout her years in public life. There are, of course, lots of people who fall somewhere in between those two poles, but Michael D’Antonio’s “The Hunting of Hillary: The Forty-Year Campaign to Destroy Hillary Clinton” is a document written firmly from the point of view of that second group.
D’Antonio, who won a Pulitzer Prize for local reporting in the 1980s as part of a Newsday team, has averaged nearly a book a year for the past 20, on subjects ranging from Donald Trump and Mike Pence to the space race. He is a fluid writer, responsible summarizer and diligent researcher. This volume is a comprehensive history of the way right-wing attacks have both replicated and morphed over the decades, and across technologies. The money of Richard Mellon Scaife gives way to that of Robert Mercer; Newt Gingrich cedes prominence to Roger Stone; Fox News grows from the example of Rush Limbaugh; local Arkansas opportunists seeking publicity and money are eclipsed by internet conspiracists.
But the book is most successful as a work within the terms of its chosen genre: Clinton defense. Just as the Clinton prosecution — in the manner of Edward Klein and Peter Schweizer — is a recognizable literary category (one to which D’Antonio rightly draws critical attention), so is Clinton defense. (The defense is less given to magical realism; D’Antonio writes factually and journalistically.) For instance, the book’s dramatic title seems to be a riff on Joe Conason and Gene Lyons’s 2000 book, “The Hunting of the President: The Ten-Year Campaign to Destroy Bill and Hillary Clinton,” which sought to catalog the “vast right-wing conspiracy” Hillary Clinton so famously blamed for trying to bring her and her husband down.
This book goes over a lot of familiar biographical terrain but is at its most interesting when it relates the details of the complicated, twisty scandals that have been hyped up and then boiled down into catchphrases: Whitewater, Benghazi, the email server. Still, anything that happened in Clinton’s career between the moments when she was most fervidly pursued by the right is skirted over quickly, unsatisfyingly.
“The Hunting of Hillary” is dedicated to “the 50.8 percent,” which I first guessed might be the percentage of the popular vote Clinton received in the 2016 election — but as I learned in the acknowledgments section is in fact the percentage of women in the United States. (Before he thanks the usual litany of editors, relatives and friends who helped with the book, D’Antonio spends several paragraphs acknowledging his own white male privilege and the negative reaction of his fellow white men to having that privilege pointed out: “These diversions prevent an empathetic reckoning with both the damage done to women and the many ways in which society is deprived when they are denied the equal opportunity to create and contribute.”)
D’Antonio does a certain amount of feminist-inflected analysis in his text, particularly in the early biographical chapters. (“Powerful women aren’t given much leeway. Express a little emotion — any emotion — and you risk being written off as unserious. Show too little, and you’re a bitch.”) It’s impossible to argue with the substance of this — misogyny is hypermagnetized toward Clinton, not to mention virtually every woman in politics or the public eye — but it’s a comment that’s certainly been made before. And in places, D’Antonio seems a little blinkered from noticing sexism that doesn’t target Clinton herself. He isn’t particularly generous or thoughtful in his assessment of the way the media treated women like Paula Jones or Monica Lewinsky, or Juanita Broaddrick, who made a credible accusation of rape against Bill Clinton that has, in recent years, become the subject of much feminist reconsideration.
Hillary Clinton’s notorious remark that she “could have stayed at home and baked cookies” offended plenty of women who weren’t on the right, but it is similarly glossed over. The fact of Bill Clinton’s unfaithfulness is mostly used as a launching point for discussing the right’s exploitation of it. D’Antonio can rarely bring himself to admit the couple have legitimate baggage.
It’s understandable that D’Antonio might shy away from anything that would seem to feed the trolls — more than three years after Clinton’s loss, in the midst of a world-historical pandemic and impending economic ruin, several of the most-shared “news” stories on Facebook in March involved Hillary Clinton’s emails — but there is little room in this book for considering that the Hillary Clinton story, in all its complicated richness and particularity, may not best be presented as a chapter from the Lives of the Martyrs.
