Maybe John Podhoretz will rest easier tomorrow morning, after this report from the Daily Telegraph, the most startling preview yet of Carl Bernstein’s warts-and-little-else biography of Hillary Rodham Clinton, has percolated through the political intelligentsia:
Hillary Clinton, the frontrunner to become the next US president, has suffered serious bouts of depression, according to a new book by one of the journalists who broke the Watergate scandal.
Carl Bernstein’s A Woman in Charge details how she showed “persistent signs of melancholy” when she was a student and quotes a White House adviser saying she was “deeply depressed” in 1994, a year after her husband, Bill, becamepresident. . . .
The book says Mrs Clinton’s “emotional state” was “as fragile as it had ever been” in late 1994 after her close friend Vince Foster had committed suicide, her father had died and her healthcare proposals had been rejected.
It quotes David Gergen, then a senior Clinton aide, as saying: “I don’t know whether she was seeing a doctor or not but she was depressed.”
Bernstein suggests that this was not a one-off. He says she experienced recurring “February depression” as a college student. The future Mrs Clinton confided in Don Jones, a Methodist minister, who became a “confessor, partner in Socratic dialogue, and spiritual adviser”, according to Bernstein.
“When depression struck, she turned to him, as she would for the next three decades, including the year of her husband’s impeachment.”
I have known fine people, people whom I would trust with my life and fortune, who have suffered from depression, sometimes severe. But none of them is trying to obtain the most stressful job in the world at an extraordinarily delicate moment in history. Entrusting a fragile psyche with the lives and fortunes of 300 million of my countrymen may lie beyond prudence.
Mr. Bernstein could, I realize, be motivated by Angry Left loathing for a politician who isn’t soft enough on Islamofascism, and his story could be more fiction than fact. If he cited the customary “sources who asked not to be identified”, I’d regard that as not at all unlikely. Here, however, the sources are named. It will be interesting to see whether they repudiate the quotes attributed to them – and whether anybody believes their denials. (And let me go on record as saying that I consider random fortune cookies as reliable as David Gergen.)
Senator Clinton’s campaign has never taken the commanding lead that I had expected. That the best known and best funded candidate could not break away from a pair of one-term Senators and a gaggle of vanity candidates was an ominous sign for her prospects. The question now is not John Podhoretz’s “Can She Be Stopped?” but “Will She Get Out of the Starting Gate?”
BTW, if this were a photo of Dan
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