"entertainment weekly" gave the book a 'd' (poor but not a complete failure) and said, "what could have actually been a rather poignant biography of a fascinating woman is marred by brock's heavy reliance on previously published accounts, his leaden prose, the constant sense that he's proselytizing against bill clinton, and his naïveté about marriages in general and presidential ones in particular." writing for the "new york review of books", garry wills assayed that brock's goal was to establish a premise of a president clinton becoming into a state of being out of control with unrestrained power going into his second term in office.