IN JANUARY 1993, 10 days after Hillary Rodham Clinton's husband had become president of the United States, the new first lady addressed a meeting of his Cabinet and staff at the presidential retreat, Camp David. "Awed, admired and uncomfortable, " the assembled heads of department listened to her deliver a lecture about "the Journey, the Story, Enemies and Villains" of Bill and Hillary Clinton, as Carl Bernstein writes in his biography about the woman who is herself now a presidential candidate.

Mrs Clinton had an office in the West Wing, the working side of the White House, and a promise from her husband that she would participate in making domestic policy. Less than two years later, she was stunned by her very public failures and by attacks from the press, from the Republican right-wing and even from senior members of the Democratic party.

Worse, she was out of her husband's favour and evicted from his wing of the White House. Like Cherie Blair, Hillary even sought the advice of a new-age "scholar, philosopher and researcher in Human Capacities" named Jean Houston.

According to veteran journalist Bernstein, all of this was Hillary's fault. All of it.

She had immediately alienated the press by restricting reporters' access to the presidential press secretary. She had rejected advice from old-line Washington power brokers and put small-town Clinton friends in key positions in the White House.

Hillary's old friend and law partner, Vincent Foster, shocked by the endemic viciousness of Washington, had committed suicide.

Hillary's stock dealings and real estate deals became matters of public scandal.

Topping it all off, Hillary Clinton's handling of health care reform was so secretive and uncompromising that she destroyed the possibility of meaningful change for the next decade. As Bernstein writes:

"For the first time in American history, a president's wife sent her husband's presidency off the rails.

"Inevitably, when the impeachment ugliness arrived she and their relationship were at its root, the underlying factors, the unstated casus belli, at home and in the Congress. Monica Lewinsky was only the most recent catalyst. The impeachment of the president was a direct reflection of the choices she had made, the compromises she had accepted, however reluctantly, and the enmity engendered by their grand designs, successes, and failures."

This is a stunningly distorted rendering of a presidency that, if memory serves, brought the American people eight years of peace and prosperity that many still remember very fondly. If readers are to believe Bernstein's version of events, we would have to exclude Bill Clinton from the history of his two terms in the White House, exclude his considerable intelligence as a policymaker, his skill as a political charmer, and his resilience as a political prize-fighter. We'd also have to assume that the constant attacks that Bill and Hillary endured were due entirely to their own malfeasance and personality flaws. This is not so . . .

and the author knows it.

Bernstein mentions, in passing, that the staff of special prosecutor Kenneth Starr leaked privileged information on the Clinton administration to Republican Congressman who used it to make war on the Clintons. He also mentions that right-wing activists such as Richard Mellon Scaife spent millions digging up potential dirt on the Clintons.

And again, in passing, he writes that after years of investigation, a special prosecutor, numerous judges and the United States Congress concluded that neither Hillary nor Bill Clinton was guilty of anything . . . other than lying about having had oral sex with a White House intern.

Very curiously, Bernstein also barely mentions the fact that just two newspapers in the United States investigated the "vast right-wing conspiracy" that Hillary Clinton believed was behind the unfounded charges.

Reporters from those newspapers came to agree with her and proved it in print. It simply won't do to dismiss these very substantial facts as if they were mere parenthetical additions to Bernstein's own rendition of "the Journey, the Story, Enemies and Villains".

Even more troubling are Bernstein's sources, all of them people who were deeply involved in Washington in the 1990s. If you know anything at all about politics in America, you'll see that there is a lot of axe-grinding going on here. Many of these "witnesses to history" were sacked, lost their elections, or were treated shabbily by the Clintons.

This is not to say that Hillary wasn't dictatorial, uncompromising and cack-handed at Washington politics. She may well have been all of these things. But this book doesn't prove it.