Hillary's Disturbing Secrecy Problem

By Arianna Huffington, Huffington Post. Posted June 27, 2007.

I spent the weekend reading A Woman in Charge, Carl Bernstein's biography of Hillary Clinton (okay, I know I'm late) while being simultaneously bombarded with fresh evidence of the Bush/Cheney administration's pathological obsession with secrecy.

Historians will be debating for decades what the worst element of the Bush White House was -- but at the root of the entire cancerous structure is George Bush and Dick Cheney's shared fixation on secrecy. Their mutual contempt for the public's right to know knows no bounds -- witness the VP's absurd attempt to escape oversight by claiming he's not part of the executive branch, or the endless legal maneuvering to keep the administration's abuse of detainees hidden from scrutiny.

As a result, it's pretty safe to say the central question facing Democratic voters in the presidential primaries is: which candidate will be most effective at rolling back the Bush years? On issue after issue, the Democratic contenders are doing everything they can to highlight their differences with Bush.

But when it comes to the issue of secrecy and an administration operating in the shadows, there's an argument to be made that the candidate least likely to turn on the lights is Hillary Clinton. Her lifelong commitment to secrecy is one of the main themes of Bernstein's book.

"Hillary Rodham Clinton has always had a difficult relationship with the truth," writes Bernstein. "She has often chosen to obfuscate, omit, and avoid. It is an understatement by now that she has been known to apprehend truths about herself and the events of her life that others do not exactly share."

Or, as Bernstein summed it up on the Today Show, "This is a woman who led a camouflaged life and continues to."

It's not just that she's a private person. There are plenty of public servants who are zealous about guarding their personal lives and equally zealous about keeping their public lives -- and public policies -- transparent. But, like Bush and Cheney, Clinton seems devoted to secrecy for its own sake.

As Bernstein shows, what was most shocking about her handling of the health care fiasco during her husband's administration wasn't that she kept the plan secret from its critics, but that she kept it secret even from those who would have been champions of the plan had they known anything about it.

This passion for concealment is a pattern that, as Bernstein demonstrates, has been repeated throughout Clinton's life. It was there in the head-scratching decision to hide her college thesis from public view because it was about radical organizer Saul Alinsky. It was there in her refusal for 30 years to admit that she had failed the bar exam the first time she took it. It was there in the way she glossed over in her memoir her summer internship at the law firm of Treuhaft, Walker, and Burnstein -- one of the most renowned left-wing law firms in the nation. It was there in the way she handled the Whitewater and Travelgate investigations, which, as Bernstein told me, "ended up unnecessarily prolonging them."

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Find more Arianna at the Huffington Post.

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