During their eight years in the White House, Bill and Hillary Clinton worked together more closely than the public ever knew. Their intertwined personal and professional lives had far-reaching consequences — for politics, domestic policy, and international affairs — and their marital troubles became a national soap opera. Based on unparalleled access to scores of Clinton insiders — cabinet officers, top administration officials, close personal friends — and skilled analysis of a vast written record, including previously unavailable private papers, For Love of Politics is the first book to explain the dynamics of Bill and Hillary's relationship, showing that they are two halves of a unique whole and that it is impossible to understand one Clinton without factoring in the other.

Sally Bedell Smith, acclaimed author of Grace and Power: The Private World of the Kennedy White House, offers intimate scenes from the Clinton marriage, with new details and insights into how a passion for politics sustained Bill and Hillary through one crisis after another. With clarity and depth, Smith examines the origins of an unconventional copresidency, explains the impact of the Clintons' tensions as well as their talents, and reveals how Hillary shifted from openly exercising power in the first two years to acting as a hidden hand, advising her husband on a range of foreign and domestic issues as well as decisions on hiring and firing.

Smith describes for the first time the inner workings of a White House with an unprecedented three forces to be reckoned with — Bill, Hillary, and Al Gore — and shows how the First Lady's rivalry with the Vice President played out in the West Wing and even more profoundly during the 2000 campaign. As Hillary seeks to follow in her husband's footsteps, this riveting book will leave readers marveling at what they never knew about Bill's intensely covered presidency — and wondering what it would be like to have two presidents, both named Clinton, living in the White House.

"There's a bedtime story for girls of a certain age. It's called Hillary and the Horrible, Ghastly, Unconscionable Secrets and Lies of Men. We've heard it before, but somehow we never tire of it. The moral is that men find women less attractive in direct proportion to the strength of our careers. Every last one of our husbands might run off with the baby sitter. To blunt a biblical fact of life --... Washington Post Book Review (read the entire Washington Post review) men are different from women, and some are more different than others — we like explanations that lay the blame for Bill Clinton's infidelity at least partly on his wife. A successful wife to Bill Clinton would have had to be a full-time, full-service, round-the-clock succubus, but that doesn't give Hillary a pass.

Sally Bedell Smith retells the Clinton marital tale with a twist that soothes the chord of unease it strikes in American women. Her premise is in the title: Hillary stayed with Bill 'For Love of Politics.' Smith has some juicy new interviews with West Wing wags confirming that Hillary's a cold fish who has her husband by the short hairs. Just like the 'bimbos' we already know about, but on a much more ambitious scale, in this analysis the leading Democratic presidential candidate has emotionally blackmailed her husband into helping her get the best job a girl from Park Ridge, Ill., could ever dream of. She stood by her man, but not like forlorn little Tammy Wynette. Standing by Bill kept her in the game she loved more than the man. One 'old friend' even told Smith that Bill's peculiarities had their roots in 'the difficulties of being loved by (Hillary) and forgiven by her.'

Maybe I'm a clueless romantic at heart, but I always believed Hillary was truly in love with Bill — for a long time, if not still — and that he broke her heart. The bargain she made was internal: She pressed raw emotion into drive and focus. That seems perverse in the age of marital therapy and Dr. Phil's couch. There is something alien about the strange alchemy she performed when making, in the corny commonplace of her middle-class, Midwestern upbringing (an upbringing, by the way, that could not possibly have prepared her for the charming, faithless son of a woman who sobbed the day Elvis died), lemonade from lemons.

The most avid consumers of the Clinton marital analysis are female because of what Hillary means to American women (otherwise, why not a shelf of books about the role of the silent partner in the most disastrous presidency in history?). Hillary is the Boomer Everywoman who came of age in a decade when classified job ads were still segregated by gender, when a leader of the civil rights movement to which she and her ilk were devoted could opine that the appropriate position for women in the movement was 'prone.' The mere fact that she had a law career and made efforts to retain her own name sent a hysterical and very vocal section of America into paroxysms in 1991. Not so long ago.

Smith rehashes the Monica Lewinsky year, and she's got some illuminating interviews with Clinton insiders who feel at last able to talk. There's John Podesta describing Bill angrily telling him that Lewinsky did not perform a sexual act on him and revelations from that keeper of the keys to Bluebeard's Cave, bimbo patroller Betsey Wright, on Bill's therapy, 'addiction' and the no-longer-mystery woman who almost broke up the marriage. The details are riveting as ever. Who can get enough of POTUS sweating on the phone at 2 a.m. with a love-addled 24-year-old woman, placating her with job promises, knowing his world is about to explode as surely as a Sudanese powdered-milk factory?

Meanwhile, what to make of the prospect of Clinton II? Must we watch if an errant husband cuckolds the Leader of the Free World? With the Clintons in office, the Shakespearean tragedy of modern womanhood would play out on the world stage, and humiliation would be experienced en masse. The only possible ray of hope is that the Ole Hound Dog doesn't have it in him anymore.

Sally Bedell Smith is not the first and surely not the last to propose that the Clintons are in bed together (at least sometimes, presumably) 'for love of politics' and nothing more. I suspect there's more to their relationship. But then again, I also think it's not for us to speculate. To do so is second in cruelty to that other favorite sport of American women circa 2007, judging other mothers. Who knows what demons dwell in the sleepless chasm at the edge of screaming Junior's crib that drive professional women to abandon all for the dubious pleasure of pureeing vegetables? Similarly, who are we to assess the path a heartbroken woman finds out of the darkest night of her soul? Judge not, sisters, lest ye ... well, you've heard it before."

Reviewed by Nina Burleigh, who covered the Clintons for Time and whose 'Mirage: Napoleon's Scientists and the Unveiling of Egypt,' will be published next month, Washington Post Book World (Copyright 2006 Washington Post Book World Service/Washington Post Writers Group)
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New York Times bestselling author Bedell Smith strips away the secrecy of the White House to show how the Clinton's political partnership preserved their marriage and paved the way for Hillary's historic run for the presidency. Two 16-page b&w photo inserts.

Sally Bedell Smith is the author of Grace and Power: The Private World of the Kennedy White House, Diana in Search of Herself: Portrait of a Troubled Princess, Reflected Glory: The Life of Pamela Churchill Harriman, and In All His Glory: The Life and Times of William S. Paley and the Birth of Modern Broadcasting. A contributing editor at Vanity Fair since 1996, she previously worked at Time,/i> and The New York Times, where she was a cultural news reporter. She lives in Washington, D.C., with her husband, Stephen. They have three grown children.