Before Bill Clinton and Hillary Rodham exchanged their marriage vows, they exchanged their political vows. In the early 1970s, they agreed on an audacious goal for themselves: to remake the Democratic Party and capture the presidency for him within two decades.
This "20 year project" came out of the mouth of Bill Clinton. He said it to Leon Panetta, then his chief of staff, aboard Air Force One in the fall of 1996. Panetta had asked the president why he had depended on someone like Dick Morris for political advice. "You need to hear from the dark side, and Morris represented that," the president confided to Panetta. Morris was a crucial navigator to help Bill and Hillary "understand the Gingriches of the world," the president explained.
Clinton went on to say that Morris was part of a larger strategic plan conceived, he said, by Hillary and him more than two decades ago -- their "twenty-year project," Panetta explained to us.
Despite a recent denial by Senator Clinton's aides of her early political ambition, this on-the-record description has not been disputed.
Of course, it is no surprise that someone who wants to be president might have ambition. But I was struck that throughout her 2003 autobiography, Senator Clinton barely acknowledges a single ambitious impulse. She wants readers to believe her historic decision to run for the Senate was the result of popular demand. She insists that her decision was further nudged along by the whisper of a high school girl, who said into the then-first lady's ear: "Dare to compete, Mrs. Clinton. Dare to compete."
The largest chunk of our new book, Her Way, shines a spotlight on the six and a half years that Hillary Clinton has served in the Senate. This is the record that she hopes will catapult her to the presidency. We have discovered a treasure trove of new information about that record so it is hardly surprising that her senior aides and strategists have relentlessly attacked our book.
The other Hillary book being published this month devotes just 7 or 8 pages out of 600 to her life in the Senate. It's another reason that Her Way is the one book that Senator Clinton doesn't want you to read.