Carl Bernstein is on CNN now being interviewed by Wolf Blitzer ...
People were confused by the nightmare of her childhood, the beatings and the humiliations.
Hillary's book is basically a lie.
Please watch CNN now! This is the most realistic portrayal in America. Without any influences!
The transcript is available now on CNN.com. Here is the Bernstein interview:
I'm Wolf Blitzer. You're in THE SITUATION ROOM.
He's been paying very close attention to American presidents since Watergate. Now the Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Carl Bernstein has written a new book about a presidential candidate. It's called "A Woman in Charge," the life of Hillary Rodham Clinton. I sat down with Carl Bernstein just a short while ago.
Let's talk a little bit about what makes Hillary Clinton tick and I want to read a passage from the book, on page 554.
As Hillary has continued to speak from the protective shell of her own making, and packaged herself for the widest possible consumption, she has misrepresented not just facts but often her essential self.
Give me an example or two.
CARL BERNSTEIN, AUTHOR, "A WOMAN IN CHARGE": Her own book. Her own book, "Living History," which is supposed to be an autobiographical account of her life, beginning in her childhood, is at variance with the rendition of events by those who were closest to her and around her at the time. Her best friend from childhood, Betsy Evelyn, told me in great length, as you read in the book, about how abusive her father was of her mother, how he humiliated her.
And Hillary, in "Living History", describes an almost idyllic father knows best suburban childhood. It was anything but. Her father was a sour, unfulfilled man, a martinet, beat the kids. She, in fact, in her own book talks about he didn't like to spare the rod. And we don't know the extent to which he beat the children. She says in her book that she thought it was sometimes used excessively and she tried to intervene on behalf of her brother. She doesn't say at all anything...
BLITZER: So how did that impact her as an adult?
BERNSTEIN: I'm not a psychologist or a psychiatrist, but obviously she grew in a house in which her mother was humiliated constantly or continually by her husband. People who came to the house, including Hillary's first boyfriend, Jeff Shields, who I talked to, wondered why Hillary's mother did not leave the marriage.
Her mother, Dorothy Rodham, counseled Hillary, counseled her brother Tony -- people in this family do not get divorced. So one of the...
BLITZER: So that's an example, you're saying, of where she was --
BERNSTEIN: Yes. Again, her book -- and I say that in a footnote, actually, or an end note to the book, her book is full of omissions, obfuscations. It's not mendacious. It's a self-portrait as she would like to see herself, but it has very little to do with -- with the full reality of her life. And what's so sad about it is she's better than her own book. She's more interesting than her own book. It's a great story.
BLITZER: Let's talk about her marriage. This is what you write on page 117: "Their friends observed a remarkable chemistry. 'She's the only one that gets up in the morning with a dark cloud over her head, and he gets up with the bright sun,' said a photojournalist who followed the Clinton in Arkansas and Washington."
"As the day goes on, he falls into a funk, and she's the one who will refocus him. It's one of those things if you'd never met them, neither of them would have reached the heights that they did."
BERNSTEIN: No question.
BLITZER: That they made each other better.
BERNSTEIN: They made each other whole.
She has been the constant of his process since they were in college, in law school together, and he has been the constant of her process, particularly now. He was in the foreground when he was president, and she was the manager. She was the disciplinarian.
Now that role has reversed, but they are linked and complementary in their roles. They each have their areas of expertise, as you know, when you read the book. It talks about how his area of expertise going into the presidency was economics, hers was social policy. That's one reason she got the job of health care.
But they work together as a team, sometimes well and sometimes really badly.
BLITZER: And then you write this: "He wanted in 1989 to end his marriage. Hillary refused. She would fight to keep her marriage and her family together. She had put too much of her own heart and mind and soul into her partnership with Bill to abandon it. She had invested too much."
I don't want you to go through the whole story right now, but how serious was the possibility that the two of them were about to get divorced?
BERNSTEIN: This basic information came from Betsy Wright, Bill Clinton's chief of staff in the gubernatorial years who witnessed his acting out in this affair that he had with a woman named Marilyn Jo Jenkins. Witnessed his exits, coming, going. And finally, Bill told Betsy Wright that he had wanted to leave the marriage, that Hillary, in Betsy Wright's words to me, would not give him a pass.
I talked also to Diane Blaire, Hillary's closest friend of her life, probably, who said that Hillary had come to her around this time in 1989, 1990, and said, "What am I going to do if I'm on my own with Chelsea? I don't know how much money we have."
It's -- and gradually the story was pieced together by Betsy Wright.
BLITZER: But they survived that crisis in their marriage.
BERNSTEIN: Well, again, Bill then decided, according to Betsy Wright, that he wanted to stay in the marriage with Hillary for many reasons, not the least of which was Chelsea, and that he would try to make the marriage work, and that they had had discussions about what those conditions would be to continue in the marriage.
BLITZER: Did she cooperate with you at all in the writing of this book?
BERNSTEIN: She -- not in the writing of the book. Not at all.
BLITZER: Did she give you any interviews?
BERNSTEIN: No, she did not. And she was good in the beginning about telling their friends, if you want to talk to him, it's all right with me, if you want to.
And she had told me, as had Bill Clinton, that she would talk to me for the book. And then in the end, after, oh, five, six times in which people working with her said she would talk to me, she said no.
And this gets back to something basic. The Clintons, but especially Hillary, Hillary has never wanted anyone else to tell her story except herself.
She is very much a camouflaged woman. She's hidden behind that camouflage.