Top of the Hillary
My favourite story about Hillary Clinton is one recounted by the late Christopher Hitchens. In his 2008 essay ‘The Case Against Hillary Clinton’, the pugnacious polemicist opened his prosecution with a tale of how the former First Lady, and would-be first female President of the US, got her name. According to Hillary, her mother named her after the conqueror of Everest (along with Tenzing Norgay), Edmund Hillary. Wow, what a great story. Except there was one minor detail. Hillary Clinton was born in 1947 some seven years before the other Hillary summited the top of the world. Oops!
This week, the life and times of Hillary Diane Rodham Clinton are chronicled in a four-part series on Sky Documentaries. Hillary (not the man who climbed Everest) promises to spill the beans on the woman who has been blindly venerated or unfairly vilified, depending on which side your bread is buttered. Unfortunately, Mr Hitchens is not among the many contributors, having shuffled off into that great Debating Hall in the Sky in 2011. But the documentary does have interviews with Hill and Bill and their daughter Chelsea as well as some old friends of the family. Hmmm.
TV docs are just the thing right now with Sky Documentaries, a channel devoted exclusively to the genre, opening its doors just last week. There are new shows about Chernobyl, Tiger Woods and Lance Armstrong lining up to give us the definitive version, while the most touted of recent times is The Last Dance, a docu-series about Michael Jordan and the history-making 1990s Chicago Bulls. Compelling entertainment, but the cracks in its truth widen each week, with former Bulls (including Horace Grant and Scottie Pippen) saying Jordan’s account just isn’t so.
But then Michael Jordan has money in The Last Dance with his production company, Jump 23 and is one of the series’ producers. And he had editorial control. In his essay, Hitchens, a long-time critic of Clinton, argued that in her world “something is true if it validates the myth of her striving and her ‘greatness’” and “ceases to be true when it no longer serves that limitless purpose.” It’s a point, however much you agree or disagree, worth considering when watching any TV documentary.
Hillary, which premiered at the Sundance Festival in January, tracks the controversies – Monica Lewinsky, impeachment, Benghazi – but was made with the co-operation of the Clintons who get to tell it their way. Footage of Hillary dissing her rival for the 2016 Democratic nomination, Bernie Sanders, (“Nobody likes him, nobody wants to work with him, he got nothing done”) grabbed the headlines in the US but Hillary is neither myth maker or debunker. Truth might be stranger than fiction, but few TV documentaries give the full picture. Hillary starts on Sky Documentaries on Thursday at 9pm The Last Dance is on Netflix