What It’s Like To Actually Know Hillary Clinton

[DonViejo]

This article has been posted in the Hillary Clinton Group

In Arkansas, friends who met Clinton in the ’70s are tired of living the ’90s over and over again. The endless hunt for who Hillary Clinton really is. “Everything old is new again.”

posted on April 9, 2014 at 10:30pm EDT

Ruby Cramer
BuzzFeed Staff

When Ann Henry opened her hardback copy of Living History — a memoir by her old friend, Hillary Rodham Clinton — a faded magazine clipping fell out. The page, ripped from a 2003 edition of Newsweek, bears the headline “Say Goodbye to the Virago.” Henry has kept it tucked inside the book’s front flap for 11 years.

The column, written by Anna Quindlen, casts Clinton as the “damned if she does and damned if she doesn’t” leading woman, pilloried by the press, “expected to be tough as nails and warm as toast.” Quindlen, Henry thought, had nailed it.

“I actually looked up the definition of ‘virago,’” she said during an interview at her home in Fayetteville, Ark. “Well, there are two: One is a strong woman who has a vision, but the other is a harridan screaming bitch.”

Henry first met Clinton 40 years ago at a University of Arkansas reception for new law faculty at a Holiday Inn. Since that August day, Henry has watched with exasperation and resignation as Clinton, at the hands of reporters or right-wing critics, has been treated like the virago character again and again, she said.

In the Clintons’ home state, Henry isn’t alone. Friends bemoan what they describe as an unending fixation on the first family. No dispute, they say, is ever put to rest; no portrait, they say, is ever full enough, intimate enough, to give way to a satisfactory picture of the “real Hillary Clinton” the media has hunted, in books and magazines, articles and television interviews, for years.

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