The Hillary show

As former US diplomat and First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt aptly put it, "A woman is like a tea bag - you never know how strong she is until she gets in hot water." This axiom perfectly suits Hillary Clinton who, now in her 60th decade, is contending the Democrats' race along with Barack Obama to run for US President.

In A Woman in Charge, journalist and Pulitzer Prize winning author Carl Bernstein claims to have interviewed over 200 of Hillary's friends, aides, interns and former colleagues, research that enables him to give a detailed account of her major defeats and blunders from several perspectives.

Hillary Rodham was born in 1947 in Chicago to an emotionally frail mother who had been abandoned as a child and a bullying father. She was an ambitious girl who dreamt of becoming a child legal adviser, probably due to her mother's travail. Her childhood friends, including Betsy Ebeling, have claimed that Hillary's father was a sexist nuisance whose tyrannous ways could never have permitted Hillary to have a happy childhood. However, Hillary's pride and candour never allowed her to admit this as she always insisted that her father gave her a lot of love in his own way. Hillary's younger brothers, Hughie and Tony, were treated more harshly by their father. White House aides during Clinton's presidency have claimed that Hillary's younger brothers had demanded a piece of the cake when their sister was First Lady and were renowned for making scenes at the White House when they didn't have their way.

Bernstein's greatest efforts in writing Hillary Clinton's biography are in outlining a portrayal of the highly complex relationship between Hillary and Bill. The two met at Yale where both were studying law. Bill noticed her first and felt an immediate admiration towards her. She was nothing like the kind of women he was usually attracted to but her independent assertiveness was remarkable. Cue whirlwind romance.

Bill was not as ambitious as Hillary and was not raised to have huge aspirations. He planned to spend his life in Arkansas and maybe run for Congress there. Hillary, however, was always pushed to think big and the idea of spending her life in Arkansas egged her to refuse Bill's first offer of marriage. Bernstein also delineates their different litigation methods: Bill believed in the power of persuasion and his way of sweet talking people round any argument won those around him. Hillary stuck to attack and counter-attack and as a consequence people liked her much less than her husband.

Yet this combination led them to the presidential victory in 1992.

Yet Hillary's ambitious streak pushed her to ignore certain signals. A case in point was Whitewater which surfaced soon after Bill Clinton became President. This led Hillary to become the First Lady ever to be subpoenaed to testify before a Federal Grand jury. Hillary was also accused of removing the records of Whitewater the night the White House deputy counsel and Hillary's former Rose Law firm colleague Vince Foster committed suicide in 1993. Another dilemma that Hillary faced was the Travelgate scandal. The White House had fired a number of employees from the Travel House operation and this led to speculations that the real reason behind it was for Hillary and Bill to replace the office staff and give the White House travel business to Arkansas friends of theirs.

Hillary's biggest defeat was her failure of the Healthcare reform, which Bill had put her in charge of in 1993, and which put his reputation at stake to the point where he risked his second term. This reform failed to receive enough support for a floor vote. Apart from having to acknowledge failure, Hillary knew she had also lost some of Bill's credibility and this led her to depression at the beginning of his second term.

Bill's reputation as a ladies' man had always preceded him even as an overweight kid in Arkansas. His affair with Gennifer Flowers almost led him to divorce Hillary as he was so convinced to be in love with the lounge singer. Bernstein also follows Hillary's determined decision to run for the New York senate a year following The Lewinsky scandal. Bernstein gives an in-depth detail of Bill's lying, which went on for months. Twice in the book, Bernstein quotes the President's infamous statement "I did not have sex with that woman" and how he kept assuring Hilary that nothing "improper" happened. However, the affair was still beneficial to Hillary and Bernstein makes no secret of it. Hillary was put on a pedestal and seemed to be carrying an aura which Bill had lost.

The Lewinsky affair pitted Clinton against his wife and the only way for Hillary to recuperate from the blow was to run for the New York senate, a city she admitted from the start she knew nothing about. Nonetheless, it proved to be the first lap of a long race.

• Ms Gatt never understood why John F. Kennedy's affair with Marilyn Monroe never gained the hype reached by the scandal between Bill Clinton and Monica Lewinsky.

• A review copy of this title was supplied by Agenda Bookshop.