More to the point, anything that sheds light on the operations of this particular First Lady's mind, the quality or quirks of her intellect, her emotional needs and resources has a serious side even if it is also, or even mainly, entertaining. Partners in Power Roger Morris is as profligate with assessments as Woodward is miserly, and in his new book, they are all negative. It's a prosecutor's brief about the careers and extracurricular activities of Bill and Hillary Clinton before they ascended to the White House. By this account, Little Rock in the 1980s was a stew of corruption in which the young pair romped for fun and gain. Defenders of the Clintons, like Gene Lyons, a columnist for the Arkansas Democrat Gazette , note that Morris borrowed some of his more lurid charges from local Clinton bashers not known for their reliability in matters regarding the administration.
Many editors seem to have come to a similar judgment.
Morris, who quit the National Security Council in protest over the Vietnam War, may be annoyed that his book has been useful to right-wingers operating on the principle that the enemy of my enemy, etc. The Washington Times decided that Morris's conclusion that the young Clinton was a CIA informant while at Oxford was worthy of a six-column spread at the top of page one. The liberal establishment has been attacked for not giving Partners in Power the attention it warrants in this election year. Morris himself told The New York Post he saw a double standard in the way his Nixon critique was played up and his Clinton critique played down. I wish that the suggestion that ideology played a part in the scant attention given to Partners in Power was beyond belief.