AMERICAN EVITA Hillary Clinton’s Path to Power Christopher Andersen For my family I don’t quit. I keep going. —Hillary Rodham Clinton PREFACE S he is, quite simply, the most famous, most controversial, most complex, most loved-hated-admired-reviled woman—per- haps person—in America. And, whether she fulfills her life’s ambi- tion or not, she can already lay claim to being the first woman ever considered a serious contender for the presidency. Yet most of what we know about Hillary Rodham Clinton is strictly seen in the context of her marriage to the forty-second President. Indeed, they were the ultimate power couple—he the drawling, fatally charismatic Bubba with Falstaffian appetites, she the brilliant lawyer and consummate political strategist who put her own dreams of high office on hold to focus on capturing the Oval Office for her husband. When it came to her husband’s philander- ing, Hillary had always been willing not just to look the other way, but to go on the offensive—as she did when news of Bill’s affair with Gennifer Flowers threatened to derail Clinton’s 1992 presi- dential campaign. “I’m not,” she famously told CBS’s 60 Minutes at the time, “some Tammy Wynette, standin’ by her man.”