Stripping Hillary

So the Times has gotten ahold of some letters Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton wrote to a friend while she was in college, and set Mark Leibovich to analyze them.

It's an exceedingly odd and cringe-inducing article--there's no awareness of how weird it is to parse the words of a college freshman, no sense of embarassment, no acknowledgement of invading her privacy (it's her letters, made public by the person she wrote to), no caveats--just straight-forward literary analysis, as if they were going over the text of her latest stump speech.

Which, come to think of it, I've never seen the Times do.

More than anything it's pathetic; there are insights in there, much like any biography would benefit from such primary source material--but the difference is the letters section would be placed in context within a long biography, whereas here we have a front page Times article making much out of her scribblings 40 years ago.

If they're going to go that route, they need to analyze the friend Hillary sent the letters to, what he was like, what the nature of their friendship was (reading between the lines he seemed to like her more than a friend, she not at all). These weren't meant for public consumption, so whatever peek of intimacy the Times gleans from them should be offset by an understanding that they were tailored words.

But none of that's there; the words are quoted at face value, as if they speak for themselves.

I conclude the guy Hillary wrote to was a bit of a prat--there's no acknowledgement by him or the Times that what he's doing, in releasing her side of a two-way conversation, isn't right.

He's even quoted as saying:

Mr. Peavoy’s letters to Ms. Rodham are lost to posterity, unless she happened to keep them, which he doubts. He said he wished he had kept copies himself. “They are windows into a time and a place and a journey of self-discovery,” he said in an interview. “This was what college students did before Facebook.”

Oh yes, what a loss that we weren't able to read your words too, John Peavoy.

At least wait until she's dead; apparently he missed the day at school where they taught manners and how to be a gentleman.

And thank you for placing this within a wider cultural context--of course that's why you made the letters available and the Times printed them, it's almost your duty in this Facebook age to remind us all of that archaic form of communication you used to utilize.

If you wind up reading the article, you're struck by how the Times tries to torture conclusions out of her words; it's quite sad, actually--and of course, Clinton comes across all the better for it.

This is why a lot of good and qualified people refuse to run for office; who wants stuff like this considered fair game?

There's gotta be room for people to form themselves without thinking it could all be dredged up years later--and in this particular case, the Times should really question dealing with the kind of person who lets you read another person's private letters without their consent.

The Times may argue it's an unvarnished, unspun look into the life of a famously tightly-controlled politician.

Odd; that's what the tabloids say about their ambush snapshots of celebrities.

Era photo of Hillary Rodham from a fan site.