Diane Blair, who died of cancer in 2000, was an engaging person, a serious and accomplished political scientist at the University of Arkansas in Fayetteville, and a very close friend of Hillary Clinton.

And she kept papers, which her husband, Jim Blair, donated to the UA library in 2005.

Naturally, a right-wing website in Washington dispatched people to Fayetteville to scour the papers. The purpose was to mine for whatever Blair might have placed in those materials on the subject of her good friend who will be our next president unless opposition research like this can derail her.

This won’t.

It turned out that Blair kept a journal and wrote in it with seeming intimacy and candor about what Hillary told her in visits and phone calls through the presidential years of the 1990s.

These Blair papers, as reported by the Washington Free Beacon over the weekend, are more gossipy than genuinely revelatory. They illustrate and amplify a Hillary we already knew-tougher than Bill, hardened toward enemies, disdainful of the press, less angry over her husband’s sexual unfaithfulness than at Republicans for exploiting it, and, like so many public persons, more complex than the often one-dimensional popular persona.

The right-wing website uncovering the documents describes the Hillary in them as “ruthless.” Maybe. They called Bobby Kennedy ruthless, too, and he probably was on his way to the presidency.

Let’s hit the high points of the Blair papers. They are not without spice and particular local flavor.

While hard at work on a proposal for healthcare reform much like the one that is now law, Hillary said at a dinner party in 1993, according to Blair, that a single-payer system of health care made more sense than anything else.

Blair wrote that Hillary was cool to the idea, also in 1993, that her husband would nominate to the U.S. Supreme Court the widely admired and beloved Arkansas judge, Richard Arnold, now deceased. He died in 2004. At one point, Blair wrote, Hillary turned profane in expressing her disdain for Arnold’s advocate and former brother in-law, meaning Walter Hussman, the publisher of this newspaper, which was editorially critical of her husband. But, in the end, Blair writes that Bill Clinton explained to her his entirely separate reasoning for not nominating Arnold but nominating Stephen Breyer instead. It had to do with Arnold’s illness and limited life expectancy.

A president wants to make a long term appointment to the Supreme Court, not one that might not last long beyond his presidency.

If Clinton had nominated Arnold, then George W. Bush would have made a nomination in 2004 for the seat that the liberal Breyer holds now. Among other things, the individual mandate of Obamacare would have been declared unconstitutional, most likely.

Blair wrote that Hillary asserted, in her profane reference to the aforementioned publisher, that this newspaper had destroyed the state of Arkansas through its attacks on her and her husband. She suggested that not seeing his home-state friend nominated to the high court might teach the Arkansas publisher a lesson.

That sentiment pretty much jibes with what I often heard from Clintonites when I attacked Bill and/or Hillary-that I was attacking Arkansas, which, of course, I most certainly was not.

When I attack Arkansas, I do so quite independently of the Clintons.

That Clinton was a chronic dissembler and womanizer is not Arkansas’ fault. That Hillary can be personally unpleasant is not Arkansas’ fault, either. It’s not even suburban Chicago’s fault.

As for Monica Lewinsky, Blair related that Hillary managed at once to blame her husband’s behavior while finding mitigating context for it.

Blair wrote: “It was a lapse, but she says to his credit he tried to break it off, tried to pull away, tried to manage someone who was clearly a ‘narcissistic loony toon,’ but it was beyond control.”

Blair further wrote that Hillary had suggested that Bill dallied with Lewinsky because of the personal toll the deaths of his mother, her father and their friend Vince Foster had taken on him while “the ugly forces started making up hateful things about them, pounding on them.”

Don’t try that rationalization at home.

The everyday husband might not get very far telling his wife that he frolicked with a 20-year-old woman at the office because his mother had died and people had been mean to him.

Bill was simply a sex-starved tomcat. He overheated like a leaky radiator. That’s all. No further psychological analysis is really needed. He’d have lost resistance when Monica flashed that thong even if no one he loved had recently died, and even if Republicans had been perfectly delightful to him.

Blair also wrote that Hillary didn’t think of what Bill and Monica did as sex in the real sense of the word.

Again I would advise the everyday tomcat not to rely on his wife’s drawing such a fine distinction.

For her part, Hillary seemed more wedded to-more in love with-a political life with Bill than a life based on his sexual fidelity. No further psychological analysis is necessary there, either. People have their priorities.

Finally, Blair wrote that Hillary considered members of the press to be possessed of big egos and little brains.

That’s a generalization and stereotype. Of course there is usually specific truth within a generalization and stereotype.

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John Brummett’s column appears regularly in the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette. Email him at [email protected]. Read his blog at brummett.arkansasonline.com, or his @johnbrummett Twitter feed.

Editorial, Pages 15 on 02/13/2014