Joyce Milton examines this formidable, fascinating woman, giving probing insight into the First Lady's character, her values and her career. In The First Partner, Milton goes behind the scenes at the Clinton White House and explores the First Lady's involvement in Travelgate, Filegate, the Health Care Task Force fiasco and fund-raising for the 1996 presidential campaign, showing how these controversies grew out of the tensions in her political partnership with Bill Clinton. Milton also describes how Mrs.

Clinton's defensive reactions to her husband's chronic infidelities have often misfired and have sometimes enabled his bad behavior.

Milton also investigates Hillary Rodham's Mid-western childhood and Methodist upbringing, when she developed her strong belief that social and political activism can be an expression of religious faith. This authoritative book follows the future First Lady through her years as a student activist at Wellesley and as a children's rights advocate at Yale Law School, where she met her future husband, Bill Clinton. It takes a close look at Mrs.

Clinton's first Washington experience, as a legal staffer for the House Judiciary Committee during the Watergate investigation; shows how she juggled her positions as an activist, a corporate attorney and the first lady of the state of Arkansas; and probes her handling of the Whitewater investments that eventually led to Independent Counsel Kenneth Starr's investigation of the President.

Milton also examines Mrs. Clinton's attempts to reconcile a host of contradictions - feminist convictions in painful collision with family commitment; philosophical beliefs in conflict with harsh political reality; and the precarious balance of professional ambition, public image and private life.