Bill and Hillary: The Marriage. By Christopher Andersen. Warner Books. 340pp. £7.99 in UK
Hillary's Choice. By Gail Sheehy. Simon & Schuster. 480pp. £18.99 in UK
Reading about what might be loosely termed the personal life of William Jefferson Clinton minds me to paraphrase that verse in Monto about Queen Victoria: "The prez he came to call on us/He wanted to have sex with all of us/I hope he doesn't fall on us/He'd prefer Sharon Stone."
"All of us" would refer only to the female half of the population, although, as Christopher Andersen recounts in his new book about the Clintons, when Bill was first seeking high office in Arkansas, two complementary vicious rumours went around. The first: Hillary was a lesbian; the second: Bill, therefore, was gay.
The very idea, writes Andersen, caused hilarity among Clinton's hard-pressed staff, who spent much of their time dealing with what would later be termed "bimbo eruptions" - keeping secret the fact that handsome and charming Bill wanted to have sex with any passably attractive woman he came across.
He had married an attractive woman in 1975, not that this was always obvious, with her unkempt hair, owlish glasses and disregard for fashionable dressing. For the ambitious Bill Clinton at least it was Hillary Rodham's qualities of intellect and character, rather than her looks, which drew him. And for Hillary? The answer Andersen presents in Bill and Hillary: The Marriage is at its core the romantic basic - she is, and always has been, mad about him.
There are no particularly startling insights in Andersen's book. It is a story that has been pretty well told, in dribs, drabs and big salacious slabs (The Starr Report!), since Clinton announced his candidacy for President. Yet it remains a fascinating tale, a compelling synthesis of the personal and political in the cut-throat world of US national politics, that almost amounts to classic tragedy.
Gail Sheehy, in her rather more impressive book Hillary's Choice, comes down also in favour of the true-love theory as a large part of why Hillary stays with him. She quotes Hillary's mother, Dorothy, telling her "Hillary was born an adult". One could conclude that the Rodham-Clinton relationship was in that case an attraction of opposites. Bill, conversely, is the eternal child: charming, cuddlesome, but thinking only of himself, wanting gratification instantly and failing to understand - even in the Oval Office - why he can't have it.
One new detail to me from Andersen's book was that Hillary, exasperated with Bill's inability to control his sex drive, hired a private eye as far back as 1982. Andersen quotes the man, Ivan Duda, as saying "She wanted me to get the dirt on Bill", not for her personal satisfaction, but so she could launch an operation to make sure that none of his conquests were going to talk. In a summary of the marriage, Duda says: "Hillary's main job as a wife is to protect Bill from himself " - to pretend, playact, deny, all in order to "cover his rear end".
Perhaps many wives (and husbands) can identify with that, but not many people could imagine the humiliation of having the whole world know that your husband may have cheated, royally and presidentially, even on your wedding day; even on the day of his ascending to the presidency; and even, Andersen claims, now, post-impeachment. But the answer to the question "why did she put up with it?" is a cinch compared to the really big one, "what is going on inside his head?" The book I await is the comprehensive psychological analysis of Bill Clinton and I might not get it until he writes his memoirs. Or is it possible that he is not introspective or self-analytical at all? This is, after all, the man who, when asked how it felt to be impeached, replied casually: "Not too bad".
In the meantime Gail Sheehy, whose association and research on Hillary goes back to the 1992 presidential campaign, provides an in-depth examination of his wife. Andersen's book recaps Clinton's childhood. If there is a gene for promiscuity then it appears he had it on both sides. His putative father, William Blythe, who died in a freak accident some months before he was born, was a philanderer and bigamist, whereas his mother, Virginia, who married several times, was also known to "share her affections" with a wide variety of men.
Andersen quotes Clinton as saying "I had to construct a whole life inside my mind" in response to the often chaotic scenes of his childhood. His mother also introduced her adored "Bubba" to the concept of boxing things off in his mind - the famed compartmentalisation which, we presume, has gotten him through ordeals that would destroy most people.
As a young man he carried index cards around with him, and would jot down the names and salient details of people he met, for future use. By the time he moved into the governor's mansion in Little Rock, Andersen says, there were tens of thousands of these cards. If we are to believe this Casanova-like tale, they might all have been women he had sex with.
Clinton is said to be obsessed with his place in history. If US presidents were to be summed up in one phrase, such as Woodrow Wilson - League of Nations: Richard Nixon - Watergate, it is pretty certain that Bill Clinton's epitaph would be: fellatio in the Oval Office. One feels that Hillary deserves a better deal, as Sheehy, in her somewhat adulatory book about her, points out. And if she wins the Senate seat for New York, this enigmatic and serious-minded woman may yet receive it.
Angela Long is an Irish Times journalist