IN 1959, I WROTE MY AUTOBIOGRAPHY FOR AN assignment in sixth grade. In twenty-nine pages, most half-filled with earnest scrawl, I described my parents, brothers, pets, house, hobbies, school, sports and plans for the future. Forty-two years later, I began writing another memoir, this one about the eight years I spent in the White House living history with Bill Clinton. I quickly realized that I couldn't explain my life as First Lady without going back to the beginning—how I became the woman I was that first day I walked into the White House on January 20, 1993, to take on a new role and experiences that would test and transform me in unexpected ways.
By the time I crossed the threshold of the White House, I had been shaped by my family upbringing, education, religious faith and all that I had learned before—as the daughter of a staunch conservative father and a more liberal mother, a student activist, an advocate for children, a lawyer, Bill's wife and Chelsea's mom.
For each chapter, there were more ideas I wanted to discuss than space allowed; more people to include than could be named; more places visited than could be described. If I mentioned everybody who has impressed, inspired, taught, influenced and helped me along the way, this book would be several volumes long. Although I've had to be selective, I hope that I've conveyed the push and pull of events and relationships that affected me and continue to shape and enrich my world today.
Since leaving the White House I have embarked on a new phase of my life as a U.S. Senator from New York, a humbling and daunting responsibility. A complete account of my move to New York, campaign for the Senate and the honor of working for the people who elected me will have to be told another time, but I hope this memoir illustrates how my success as a candidate for the Senate arose out of my White House experiences.
During my years as First Lady, I became a better student of how government can serve people, how Congress really works, how people perceive politics and policy through the filter of the media and how American values can be translated into economic and social progress. I learned the importance of America's engagement with the rest of the world, and I developed relationships with foreign leaders and an understanding of foreign cultures that come in handy today. I also learned how to keep focused while living in the eye of many storms.
I was raised to love my God and my country, to help others, to protect and defend the democratic ideals that have inspired and guided free people for more than zoo years. These ideals were nurtured in me as far back as I can remember. Back in 1959,1 wanted to become a teacher or a nuclear physicist. Teachers were necessary to "train young citizens" and without them you wouldn't have "much of a country." America needed scientists because the "Russians have about five scientists to our one." Even then, I was fully a product of my country and its times, absorbing my family's lessons and America's needs as I considered my own future. My childhood in the 1950s and the politics of the 1960s awakened my sense of obligation to my country and my commitment to service. College, law school and then marriage took me into the political epicenter of the United States.
A political life, I've often said, is a continuing education in human nature, including one's own. My involvement on the ground floor of two presidential campaigns and my duties as First Lady took me to every state in our union and to seventy-eight nations. In each place, I met someone or saw something that caused me to open my mind and my heart and deepen my understanding of the universal concerns that most of humanity shares.
I always knew that America matters to the rest of the world; my travels taught me how the rest of the world matters to America. Listening to what people in other countries are saying and trying to understand how they perceive their place in the world is essential to a future of peace and security at home and abroad. With this in mind, I have included voices we don't hear often enough—voices of people in every corner of the globe who want the same things we do: freedom from hunger, disease and fear, freedom to have a say in their own destinies, no matter their DNA or station in life. I have devoted considerable space in these pages to my foreign travels because I believe that the people and places are important, and what I learned from them is part of who I am today.
The two Clinton terms covered not only a transforming period in my life but also in America's. My husband assumed the Presidency determined to reverse the nation's economic decline, budget deficits and die growing inequities that undermined opportunities for future generations of Americans.
I supported his agenda and worked hard to translate his vision into actions that improved people's lives, strengthened our sense of community and furthered our democratic values at home and around the world. Throughout Bill's tenure, we encountered political opposition, legal challenges and personal tragedies, and we made our fair share of mistakes. But when he left office in January 2001, America was a stronger, better and more just nation, ready to tackle the challenges of a new century.
Of course, the world we now inhabit is very different from the one described in this book. As I write this in 2003, it seems impossible that my time in the White House ended only two years ago. It feels more like another lifetime because of what happened on September 11, 2001. The lost lives. The human grief. The smoldering crater. The twisted metal. The shattered survivors. The victims' families. The unspeakable tragedy of it all. That September morning changed me and what I had to do as a Senator, a New Yorker and an American. And it changed America in ways we are still discovering. We are all on new ground, and somehow we must make it common ground.
My eight years in the White House tested my faith and political beliefs, my marriage and our nation's Constitution. I became a lightning rod for political and ideological battles waged over America's future and a magnet for feelings, good and bad, about women's choices and roles. This book is the story of how I experienced those eight years as First Lady and as the wife of the President. Some may ask how I could write an accurate account of events, people and places that are so recent and of which I am still a part. I have done my best to convey my observations, thoughts and feelings as I experienced them. This is not meant to be a comprehensive history, but a personal memoir that offers an inside look at an extraordinary time in my life and in the life of America.
I wasn't born a first lady or a senator, I wasn't A. born a Democrat. I wasn't born a lawyer or an advocate for women's rights and human rights. I wasn't born a wife or mother. I was born an American in the middle of the twentieth century, a fortunate time and place. I was free to make choices unavailable to past generations of women in my own country and inconceivable to many women in the world today. I came of age on the crest of tumultuous social change and took part in the political battles fought over the meaning of America and its role in the world.
My mother and my grandmothers could never have lived my life; my father and my grandfathers could never have imagined it. But they bestowed on me the promise of America, which made my life and my choices possible.
My story began in the years following World War II, when men like my father who had served their country returned home to settle down, make a living and raise a family. It was the beginning of the Baby Boom, an optimistic time. The United States had saved the world from fascism, and now our nation was working to unite former adversaries in the aftermath of war, reaching out to allies and to former enemies, securing the peace and helping to rebuild a devastated Europe and Japan.
Although the Cold War was beginning with the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe, my parents and their generation felt secure and hopeful. American supremacy was the result not just of military might, but of our values and of the abundant opportunities available to people like my parents who worked hard and took responsibility. Middle-class America was flush with emerging prosperity and all that comes with ii houses, fine schools, neighborhood parks and safe communities.
Yet our nation also had unfinished business in the post-war era, particularly regarding race. And it was the World War II generation and their children who woke up to the challenges of social injustice and inequality and to the ideal of extending America's promise to all of its citizens.
My parents were typical of a generation who believed in the endless possibilities of America and whose values were rooted in the experience of living through the Great Depression. They believed in hard work, not entitlement; self-reliance not self-indulgence.
That is the world and the family I was born into on October 26, 1947. We were middle-class, Midwestern and very much a product of our place and time. My mother, Dorothy Howell Rodham, was a homemaker whose days revolved around me and my two younger brothers, and my father, Hugh E. Rodham, owned a small business. The challenges of their lives made me appreciate the opportunities of my own life even more.
I'm still amazed at how my mother emerged from her lonely early life as such an affectionate and levelheaded woman. She was born in Chicago in 1919. Her father, Edwin John Howell, Jr., was a Chicago firefighter, and his wife, Delia Murray, was one of nine children from a family of French Canadian, Scottish and Native American ancestry. My maternal grandparents were certainly not ready for parenthood. Delia essentially abandoned my mother when she was only three or four, leaving her alone all day for days on end with meal tickets to use at a restaurant near their five-story walk-up apartment on Chicago's South Side. Edwin paid sporadic attention to her, better at bringing the occasional gift, like a large doll won at a carnival, than at providing any kind of home life. My mother's sister, Isabelle, was born in 1924. The girls were often shuttled from one relative to another and from school to school, never staying anywhere long enough to make friends. In 1927, my mother's young parents finally got a divorce—rare in those days and a terrible shame. Neither was willing to care for their children, so they sent their daughters from Chicago by train to live with their paternal grandparents in Alhambra, a town near the San Gabriel Mountains east of Los Angeles. On the four-day journey, eight-year-old Dorothy was in charge of her three-year-old sister.
My mother stayed in California for ten years, never seeing her mother and rarely seeing her father. Her grandfather, Edwin, Sr., a former British sailor, left the girls to his wife, Emma, a severe woman who wore black Victorian dresses and resented and ignored my mother except when enforcing her rigid house rules. Emma discouraged visitors and rarely allowed my mother to attend parties or other functions. One Halloween, when she caught my mother trick-or-treating with school friends, Emma decided to confine her to her room for an entire year, except for the hours she was in school. She forbade my mother to eat at the kitchen table or linger in the front yard. This cruel punishment went on for months until Emma's sister, Belle Andreson, came for a visit and put a stop to it.
My mother found some relief from the oppressive conditions of Emma's house in the outdoors. She ran through the orange groves that stretched for miles in the San Gabriel Valley, losing herself in the scent of fruit ripening in the sun. At night, she escaped into her books. She was an excellent student whose teachers encouraged her reading and writing.
By the time she turned fourteen, she could no longer bear life in her grandmother's house. She found work as a mother's helper, caring for two young children in return for room, board and three dollars a week. She had little time for the extracurricular athletics and drama that she loved and no money for clothes. She washed the same blouse every day to wear with her only skirt and, in colder weather, her only sweater. But for the first time, she lived in a household where the father and mother gave their children the love, attention and guidance she had never received. My mother often told me that without that sojourn with a strong family, she would not have known how to care for her own home and children.
When she graduated from high school, my mother made plans to go to college in California. But Delia contacted her—for the first time in ten years—and asked her to come live with her in Chicago. Delia had recently remarried and promised my mother that she and her new husband would pay for her education there. When my mother arrived in Chicago, however, she found that Delia wanted her only as a housekeeper and that she would get no financial help for college. Heartsick, she moved into a small apartment and found an office job paying thirteen dollars for a five-and-a-half-day week. Once I asked my mother why she went back to Chicago. "I'd hoped so hard that my mother would love me that I had to take the chance and find out," she told me. "When she didn't, I had nowhere else to go."
My mother's father died in 1947, so I never even met him. But I knew my grandmother, Delia, as a weak and self-indulgent woman wrapped up in television soap operas and disengaged from reality. When I was about ten and Delia was baby-sitting my brothers and me, I was hit in the eye by a chain-link gate while at the school playground. I ran home three blocks, crying and holding my head as blood streamed down my face. When Delia saw me, she fainted. I had to ask our next-door neighbor for help in treating my wound. When Delia revived, she complained that I had scared her and that she could have gotten hurt when she fell over. I had to wait for my mom to return, and she took me to the hospital to get stitches.
On the rare occasions when Delia would let you into her narrow world, she could be enchanting. She loved to sing and play cards. When we visited her in Chicago she often took us to the local Kiddieland or movie theater. She died in 1960, an unhappy woman and a mystery, still. But she did bring my mother to Chicago, and that's where Dorothy met Hugh Rodham.
My father was born in Scranton, Pennsylvania, the middle son of Hugh Rodham, Sr., and Hannah Jones. He got his looks from a line of black-haired Welsh coal miners on his mother's side. Like Hannah, he was hardheaded and often gruff, but when he laughed the sound came from deep inside and seemed to engage every part of his body. I inherited his laugh, the same big rolling guffaw that can turn heads in a restaurant and send cats running from the room.
The Scranton of my father's youth was a rough industrial city of brick factories, textile mills, coal mines, rail yards and wooden duplex houses. The Rodhams and Joneses were hard workers and strict Methodists.
My father's father, Hugh Sr., was the sixth of eleven children. He started work at the Scranton Lace Company when he was still a boy and ended up as supervisor five decades later. He was a gentle, soft-spoken man, quite the opposite of his formidable wife, Hannah Jones Rodham, who insisted on using all three of her names. Hannah collected rent from the houses she owned and ruled her family and anyone else within her reach. My father worshipped her and often told me and my brothers the story of how she had saved his feet.
Around 1920, he and a friend had hitched a ride on the back of a horse-drawn ice wagon. As the horses were struggling up a hill, a motorized truck plowed into the back of the wagon, crushing my dad's legs. He was carried to the nearest hospital, where the doctors deemed his lower legs and feet irreparably damaged and prepared him for surgery to amputate both. When Hannah, who had rushed to the hospital, was told what the doctors intended, she barricaded herself in the operating room with her son, saying no one could touch his legs unless they planned to save them. She demanded that her brother-in-law, Dr. Thomas Rodham, be called in immediately from another hospital where he worked. Dr. Rodham examined my dad and announced that "nobody is going to cut that boy's legs off!" My father had passed out from pain; he awoke to find his mother standing guard, assuring him that his legs were saved and that he'd be whipped hard when he finally got home. That was a family story we heard over and over again, a lesson in confronting authority and never giving up.
Hannah strikes me as a determined woman whose energies and intelligence had little outlet, which led to her meddling in everyone else's business. Her eldest son, my uncle Willard, worked as an engineer for the city of Scranton, but he never left home or married and died shortly after my grandfather in 1965. Her youngest, Russell, was her golden boy. He excelled in academics and athletics, became a doctor, served in the Army, married, had a daughter and came back to Scranton to practice medicine. In early 1948, he fell into a debilitating depression. My grandparents asked my father to come home to help Russell. Shortly after my dad arrived, Russell tried to kill himself. My father found him hanging in the attic and cut him down. He brought Russell back to Chicago to live with us.
I was eight or nine months old when Russell came to stay. He slept on the couch in the living room of our one-bedroom apartment while seeking psychiatric treatment at the Veterans Administration Hospital. He was a handsome man, with fairer hair and complexion than my dad's. One day, when I was about two, I drank from a Coke bottle filled with turpentine left by a workman. Russell immediately induced vomiting and rushed me to the emergency room. He gave up medicine shortly thereafter, and jokingly called me his last patient. He stayed in the Chicago area, where he was a frequent visitor to our home. He died in 1962 in a fire caused by a burning cigarette. I felt so sorry for my father, who had tried for years to keep Russell alive. Modern anti-depressants might have helped him, and I wish they'd been available back then. Dad wanted to tell his father about Russell's death in person, and waited until my grandfather came for a visit. When he finally learned about Russell's death, my grandfather sat at our kitchen table and sobbed. He died brokenhearted three years later.
Despite his financial success later in life, my dad was perceived growing up—by himself and by his parents—as neither as dutiful and reliable as his older brother, Willard, nor as smart and successful as his younger brother, Russell. He was always in trouble for joyriding in a neighbor's brand-new car or roller-skating up the aisle of the Court Street Methodist Church during an evening prayer service. When he graduated from Central High School in 1931, he thought he would go to work in the lace mill beside his father. Instead, his best friend, who had been recruited by Penn State for the football team, told the coach he would not come unless his favorite teammate came too. Dad was a solid athlete, and the coach agreed, so Dad went to State College and played for the Nittany Lions. He also boxed and joined the Delta Up-silon fraternity, where, I'm told, he became an expert at making bathtub gin. He graduated in 1935 and at the height of the Depression returned to Scranton with a degree in physical education.
Without alerting his parents, he hopped a freight train to Chicago to look for work and found a job selling drapery fabrics around the Midwest. When he came back to tell his parents and pack his bags, Hannah was furious and forbade him to go. But my grandfather pointed out that jobs were hard to come by, and the family could use the money for Russell's college and medical education. So my father moved to Chicago. All week, he traveled around the upper Midwest from Des Moines to Duluth, then drove to Scranton most weekends to turn over Ms paycheck to his mother. Though he always suggested that his reasons for leaving Scranton were economic, I believe my rather knew that he had to make a break from Hannah if he was ever to live his own life.
Dorothy Howell was applying for a job as a clerk typist at a textile company when she caught the eye of a traveling salesman, Hugh Rodham. She was attracted to his energy and self-assurance and gruff sense of humor.
After a lengthy courtship, my parents were married in early 1942, shortly after the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor. They moved into a small apartment in the Lincoln Park section of Chicago near Lake Michigan. My dad enlisted in a special Navy program named for the heavyweight boxing champion Gene Tunney and was assigned to the Great Lakes Naval Station, an hour north of Chicago. He became a chief petty officer responsible for training thousands of young sailors before they were shipped out to sea, mostly to the Pacific Theater. He told me how sad he felt when he accompanied his trainees to the West Coast, where they joined their ships, knowing some would not survive. After he died, I received letters from men who had served under him. Often they enclosed a photo of a particular class of sailors, my proud father front and center. My favorite photograph shows him in his uniform smiling broadly, as handsome, to my eyes, as any 1940s movie star.
My father kept close ties with his family in Scranton and drove each of his children from Chicago to Scranton to be christened in the Court Street Methodist Church, where he had worshipped as a child. Grandma Rodham died when I was five and she was going blind when I knew her, but I remember she would try to dress me and braid my hair every morning. I was much closer to my grandfather, who had already retired with a gold watch after fifty years of employment when I was born. He was a kind and proper man, who proudly carried his gold watch on a chain and wore a suit with suspenders every day. When he came to visit us in Illinois, he would take off his suit coat and roll up his shirtsleeves to help my mother around the house.
My father was always strict with his kids, but he was much harder on the boys than on me. Grandpa Rodham often intervened on their behalf, endearing him even more to us. As children, my brothers and I spent a lot of time at his duplex on Diamond Avenue in Scranton, and each summer we spent most of August at the cottage he had built in 1921 about twenty miles northwest of Scranton in the Pocono Mountains overlooking Lake Winola.
The rustic cabin had no heat except for the cast-iron cook stove in the kitchen, and no indoor bath or shower. To stay clean, we swam in the lake or stood below the back porch while someone poured a tub of water onto our heads. The big front porch was our favorite place to play and where our grandfather shared hands of cards with my brothers and me. He taught us pinochle, the greatest card game in the world, in his opinion. He read us stories and told us the legend of the lake, which he claimed was named after an Indian princess, Winola, who drowned herself when her father would not let her marry a handsome warrior from a neighboring tribe.
The cabin is still in our family and so are many of our summer traditions. Bill and I took Chelsea to Lake Winola for the first time when she was not yet two. My brothers spend part of every summer there. Thankfully they have made some improvements. A couple of years ago they even put in a shower.
In the early fifties, few people lived off the two-lane highway that ran in front of the cottage, and there were bears and bobcats in the woods up the mountain behind us. As children we explored the surrounding countryside, hiking and driving the back roads and fishing and boating on the Susquehanna River. My father taught me to shoot a gun behind the cottage, and we practiced aiming at cans or rocks. But the center of our activities was the lake, across the road and down the path past Foster's store. I made summer friends who took me water-skiing or to the movies that were projected onto sheets in an open field on the lake shore. Along the way, I met people I never would have encountered in Park Ridge, such as a family my grandfather called "mountain people," who lived without electricity or a car. A boy from that family, about my age, once showed up at the cottage on horseback to ask me if I wanted to go for a ride.
When I was as young as ten or eleven, I played pinochle with the men—my grandfather, my father, Uncle Willard and assorted others, including such memorable characters as "Old Pete" and Hank, who were notorious sore losers. Pete lived at the end of a dirt road and showed up to play every day, invariably cursing and stomping off if he started losing. Hank came only when my father was there. He would totter up to the front porch with his cane and climb the steep stairs yelling, "Is that black-haired bastard home? I want to play cards." He'd known my dad since he was born and had taught him to fish. He didn't like losing any better than Pete did and occasionally upended the table after a particularly irksome defeat.
After the war, my dad started a small drapery fabric business, Rod-rik Fabrics, in the Merchandise Mart in Chicago's Loop. His first office overlooked the Chicago River, and I can remember going there when I was only three or four. To keep me away from the windows, which he left open for the fresh air, he told me a big bad wolf lived down below and would eat me up if I fell out. Later, he started his own print plant in a building on the North Side. He employed day laborers, as well as enlisting my mother, my brothers and me when we were old enough to help with the printing. We carefully poured the paint onto the edge of the silk screen and pulled the squeegee across to print the pattern on the fabric underneath. Then we lifted up the screen and moved down the table, over and over again, creating beautiful patterns, some of which my father designed. My favorite was "Staircase to the Stars."
In 1950, when I was three years old and my brother Hugh was still an infant, my father had done well enough to move the family to suburban Park Ridge. There were fancier and more fashionable suburbs north of Chicago, along Lake Michigan, but my parents felt comfortable in Park Ridge among all the other veterans who chose it for its excellent public schools, parks, tree-lined streets, wide sidewalks and comfortable family homes. The town was white and middle-class, a place where women stayed home to raise children while men commuted to work in the Loop, eighteen miles away. Many of the fathers took the train, but my dad had to make sales calls on potential customers, so he drove the family car to work every day.
My father paid cash for our two-story brick house on the corner lot of Elm and Wisner Streets. We had two sundecks, a screened-in porch and a fenced-in backyard where the neighborhood kids would come to play or to sneak cherries from our tree. The post-war population explosion was booming, and there were swarms of children everywhere. My mother once counted forty-seven kids living on our square block.
Next door were the four Williams children, and across the street were the six O'Callaghans. Mr. Williams flooded his backyard in the winter to create an ice rink where we skated and played hockey for hours after school and on weekends. Mr. O'Callaghan put up a basketball hoop on his garage that drew kids from all over to play pickup games and the old standbys, HORSE and the shorter version, PIG. The games I most enjoyed were the ones we made up, like the elaborate team contest called "chase and run," a complex form of hide-and-seek, and the near daily softball and kickball marathons played on our corner with sewer covers as bases.
My mother was a classic homemaker. When I think of her in those days, I see a woman in perpetual motion, making the beds, washing the dishes and putting dinner on the table precisely at six o'clock. I came home from Field School for lunch every day—tomato or chicken noodle soup and grilled cheese or peanut butter or bologna sandwiches. While we ate, Mom and I listened to radio programs like Ma Perkins or Favorite Story.
"Tell me a story," it began.
"What kind of story?"
"Any land."
My mother also found lots of what people now call "quality time" for my brothers and me. She didn't learn to drive until the early 1960s, so we walked everywhere. In the winter, she bundled us up on a sled and pulled us to the store. Then we held and balanced the groceries for the trip home. In the middle of hanging the wash on a clothesline in the backyard, she might help me practice my pitching or He down on the grass with me to describe the cloud shapes overhead.
One summer, she helped me create a fantasy world in a large cardboard box. We used mirrors for lakes and twigs for trees, and I made up fairy-tale stories for my dolls to act out. Another summer, she encouraged my younger brother Tony to pursue his dream of digging a hole all the way to China. She started reading to him about China and every day he spent time digging his hole next to our house. Occasionally, he found a chopstick or fortune cookie my mother had hidden there.
My brother Hugh was even more adventurous. As a toddler he pushed open the door to our sundeck and happily tunneled through three feet of snow until my mother rescued him. More than once he and his friends went off to play in the construction sites that had sprung up all around our neighborhood and had to be escorted home by the police. The other boys got in the patrol car, but Hugh insisted on walking home beside it, telling the police and my parents that he was heeding the warning never to get in a stranger's car.
My mother wanted us to learn about the world by reading books. She was more successful with me than with my brothers, who preferred the school of hard knocks. She took me to the library every week, and I loved working my way through the books in the children's section. We got a television set when I was five, but she didn't let us watch it much. We played card games—War, Concentration, Slapjack—and board games like Monopoly and Clue. I am as much of a believer as she is that board games and card playing teach children math skills and strategy. During the school year, I could count on my mother's help with my homework, except for math, which she left to my father. She typed my papers and salvaged my disastrous attempt to make a skirt in my junior high home economics class.
My mother loved her home and her family, but she felt limited by the narrow choices of her life. It is easy to forget now, when women's choices can seem overwhelming, how few there were for my mother's generation. She started taking college courses when we were older. She never graduated, but she amassed mountains of credits in subjects ranging from logic to child development.
My mother was offended by the mistreatment of any human being, especially children. She understood from personal experience that many children—through no fault of their own—were disadvantaged and discriminated against from birth. She hated self-righteousness and pretensions of moral superiority and impressed on my brothers and me that we were no better or worse than anyone else. As a child in California, she had watched the Japanese Americans in her school endure blatant discrimination and daily taunts from the Anglo students. After she returned to Chicago, she often wondered what had happened to one particular boy she liked. The kids called him "Tosh," short for Toshi-hishi. She saw him again when she returned to Alhambra to serve as Grand Marshal at their sixtieth high school reunion. As she had suspected, Tosh and his family had been interned during World War II, and their farm had been taken from them. But she was heartened to learn that, after years of struggling, Tosh had become a successful vegetable farmer himself.
I grew up between the push and tug of my parents' values, and my own political beliefs reflect both. The gender gap started in families like mine. My mother was basically a Democrat, although she kept it quiet in Republican Park Ridge. My dad was a rock-ribbed, up-by-your-bootstraps, conservative Republican and proud of it. He was also tight-fisted with money. He did not believe in credit and he ran his business on a strict pay-as-you-go policy. His ideology was based on self-reliance and personal initiative, but, unlike many people who call themselves conservatives today, he understood the importance of fiscal responsibility and supported taxpayer investments in highways, schools, parks and other important public goods.
My father could not stand personal waste. Like so many who grew up in the Depression, his fear of poverty colored his life. My mother rarely bought new clothes, and she and I negotiated with him for weeks for special purchases, like a new dress for the prom. If one of my brothers or I forgot to screw the cap back on the toothpaste tube, my father threw it out the bathroom window. We would have to go outside, even in the snow, to search for it in the evergreen bushes in front of the house. That was his way of reminding us not to waste anything. To this day, I put uneaten olives back in the jar, wrap up the tiniest pieces of cheese and feel guilty when I throw anything away.
He was a tough taskmaster, but we knew he cared about us. When I worried about being too slow to solve math problems in Miss Metzger's fourth-grade weekly math contests, he woke me up early to drill me on my multiplication tables and teach me long division. In the winter he would turn off the heat at night to save money, then get up before dawn to turn it back on. I often woke up to the sound of my father bellowing his favorite Mitch Miller songs.
My brothers and I were required to do household chores without any expectation of an allowance. "I feed you, don't I?" Dad would say. I got my first summer job when I was thirteen, working for the Park Ridge Park District three mornings a week supervising a small park a few miles from my house. Since my dad left for work early in our only car, I pulled a wagon filled with balls, bats, jump ropes and other supplies back and forth. From that year on, I always had a summer job and often worked during the year.
My dad was highly opinionated, to put it mildly. We all accommodated his pronouncements, mostly about Communists, shady businessmen or crooked politicians, the three lowest forms of life in his eyes. In our family's spirited, sometimes heated, discussions around the kitchen table, usually about politics or sports, I learned that more than one opinion could live under the same roof. By the time I was twelve, I had my own positions on many issues. I also learned that a person was not necessarily bad just because you did not agree with him, and that if you believed in something, you had better be prepared to defend it.
Both my parents conditioned us to be tough in order to survive whatever life might throw at us. They expected us to stand up for ourselves, me as much as my brothers. Shortly after we moved to Park Ridge, my mother noticed that I was reluctant to go outside to play. Sometimes I came in crying, complaining that the girl across the street was always pushing me around. Suzy O'Callaghan had older brothers, and she was used to playing rough. I was only four years old, but my mother was afraid that if I gave in to my fears, it would set a pattern for the rest of my life. One day, I came running into the house. She stopped me.
"Go back out there," she ordered, "and if Suzy hits you, you have my permission to hit her back. You have to stand up for yourself. There's no room in this house for cowards." She later told me she watched from behind the dining room curtain as I squared my shoulders and marched across the street.
I returned a few minutes later, glowing with victory. "I can play with the boys now," I said. "And Suzy will be my friend!"
She was and she still is.
As a Brownie and then a Girl Scout, I participated in Fourth of July parades, food drives, cookie sales and every other activity that would earn a merit badge or adult approval. I began organizing neighborhood kids in games, sporting events and backyard carnivals both for fun and to raise nickels and dimes for charities. There is an old photograph from our local newspaper, the Park Ridge Advocate, that shows me and a bunch of my friends handing over a paper bag of money for the United Way. We raised it from the mock Olympics our neighborhood staged when I was twelve.
Surrounded by a father and brothers who were sports fanatics, I became a serious fan and occasional competitor. I supported our school's teams and went to as many games as possible. I rooted for the Cubs, as did my family and most folks on our side of town. My favorite was Mr. Cub himself, Ernie Banks. In our neighborhood, it was nearly sacrilegious to cheer for the rival White Sox of the American League, so I adopted the Yankees as my AL team, in part because I loved Mickey Mantle. My explanations of Chicago sports rivalries fell on deaf ears during my Senate campaign years later, when skeptical New Yorkers were incredulous that a Chicago native could claim youthful allegiance to a team from the Bronx.
I played in a girls' summer softball league through high school, and the last team I played for was sponsored by a local candy distributor. We wore white knee socks, black shorts and pink shirts in honor of our namesake confection, Good & Plenty. The Park Ridge kids traveled in packs to and from Hinckley Park, swimming in summer in the cold pool waters and skating in winter on the big outdoor rink. We walked or rode our bikes everywhere—sometimes trailing the slow-moving town trucks that sprayed a fog of DDT at dusk in the summer months. Nobody thought about pesticides as toxic then. We just thought it was fun to pedal through the haze, breathing in the sweet and acrid smells of cut grass and hot asphalt as we squeezed a few more minutes of play out of the dwindling light.
We sometimes ice-skated on the Des Plaines River while our fathers warmed themselves over a fire and talked about how the spread of communism was threatening our way of life, and how the Russians had the bomb and, because of Sputnik, we were losing the space race. But the Cold War was an abstraction to me, and my immediate world seemed safe and stable. I didn't know a child whose parents were divorced, and until I went to high school, I didn't know anybody who died of anything except old age. I recognize that this benign cocoon was an illusion, but it is one I would wish for every child.
I grew up in a cautious, conformist era in American history. But in the midst of our Father Knows Best upbringing, I was taught to resist peer pressure. My mother never wanted to hear about what my friends were wearing or what they thought about me or anything else. "You're unique," she would say. "You can think for yourself. I don't care if everybody's doing it. We're not everybody. You're not everybody."
This was fine with me, because I usually felt the same way. Of course, I did make some effort to fit in. I had enough adolescent vanity that I sometimes refused to wear the thick glasses I had needed since I was nine to correct my terrible eyesight. My friend starting in sixth grade, Betsy Johnson, led me around town like a Seeing Eye dog. Sometimes I encountered classmates and failed to acknowledge them—not because I was stuck-up, but because I didn't recognize anyone. I was in my thirties before I learned to wear soft contact lenses strong enough to correct my vision.
Betsy and I were allowed to go to the Pickwick Theater by ourselves on Saturday afternoons. One day, we watched Lover Come Back with Doris Day and Rock Hudson twice. Afterwards, we went to a restaurant for a Coke and fries. We thought we had invented dipping the french fries into ketchup when the waitress at Robin Hood's told us she never saw anybody do that before. I didn't know what a fast-food meal was until my family started going to McDonald's around i960. The first McDonald's opened in the nearby town of Des Plaines in 1955, but my family didn't discover the chain until one opened closer to us in Niles. Even then, we went only for special occasions. I still remember seeing the number of burgers sold change on the Golden Arches sign from thousands to millions.
I loved school, and I was lucky enough to have some great teachers at Eugene Field School, Ralph Waldo Emerson Junior High and Maine Township High Schools East and South. Years later, when I chaired the Arkansas Education Standards Committee, I realized how fortunate I had been to attend fully equipped schools with highly trained teachers and a full range of academic and extracurricular offerings. It's funny what I remember now: Miss Taylor reading to my first-grade class from Winnie-tbe-Pooh every morning. Miss Cappuccio, my second-grade teacher, challenging us to write from one to one thousand, a task that little hands holding fat pencils took forever to finish. The exercise helped teach me what it meant to start and finish a big project. Miss Cappuccio later invited our class to her wedding, where she became Mrs. O'Laughlin. That was such a kind gesture, and for seven-year-old girls, seeing their teacher as a beautiful bride was a highlight of the year.
I was considered a tomboy all through elementary school. My fifth-grade class had the school's most incorrigible boys, and when Mrs. Krause left the room, she would ask me or one of the other girls to "be in charge." As soon as the door closed behind her, the boys would start acting up and causing trouble, mostly because they wanted to aggravate the girls. I got a reputation for being able to stand up to them, which may be why I was elected co-captain of the safety patrol for the next year. This was a big deal in our school. My new status provided me my first lesson hi the strange ways some people respond to electoral politics. One of the girls in my class, Barbara, invited me home for Junch. When we got there, her mother was vacuuming and casually told her daughter and me to go fix ourselves peanut butter sandwiches, which we did. I did not think anything of it until we got ready to go back to school and were saying good-bye to her mother.
She asked her daughter why we were leaving so early, and Barbara told her, "Because Hillary's a patrol captain and has to be there before the other kids."
"Oh, if I'd known that," she said, "I'd have fixed you a nice lunch."
My sixth-grade teacher, Elisabeth King, drilled us in grammar, but she also encouraged us to think and write creatively, and challenged us to try new forms of expression. If we were sluggish in responding to her questions, she said, "You're slower than molasses running uphill in winter." She often paraphrased the verse from Matthew: "Don't put your lamp under a bushel basket, but use it to light up the world." She pushed me, Betsy Johnson, Gayle Elliot, Carol Farley and Joan Throop to write and produce a play about five girls taking an imaginary trip to Europe. It was an assignment from Mrs. King that led me to write my first autobiography. I rediscovered it in a box of old papers after I left the White House, and reading it pulled me back to those tentative years on the brink of adolescence. I was still very much a child at that age, and mostly concerned with family, school and sports. But grade school was ending, and it was time to enter a more complicated world than the one I had known.
What you don't learn from your mother, you learn from the world" is a saying I once heard from the Masai tribe in Kenya- By the fall of i960, my world was expanding and so were my political sensibilities. John F. Kennedy won the presidential election, to my father's consternation. He supported Vice President Richard M. Nixon, and my eighth-grade social studies teacher, Mr. Kenvin, did too. Mr. Kenvin came to school the day after the election and showed us bruises he claimed he had gotten when he tried to question the activities of the Democratic machine's poll watchers at his voting precinct in Chicago on Election Day. Betsy Johnson and I were outraged by his stories, which reinforced my father's belief that Mayor Richard J. Daley's creative vote counting had won the election for President-Elect Kennedy. During our lunch period we went to the pay phone outside the cafeteria and tried calling Mayor Daley's office to complain. We reached a very nice woman who told us she would be sure to pass on the message to the Mayor.
A few days later, Betsy heard about a group of Republicans asking for volunteers to check voter lists against addresses to uncover vote fraud. The ad called for volunteers to gather at a downtown hotel at 9 A.M. on a Saturday morning. Betsy and I decided to participate. We knew our parents would never give us permission, so we didn't ask. We took the bus downtown, walked to the hotel and were directed into a small ballroom. We went up to an information table and told the people we were there to help. The turnout must have been less than expected. We were each handed a stack of voter registration lists and assigned to different teams who, we were told, would drive us to our destinations, drop us off and pick us up a few hours later.
16
Betsy and I separated and went off with total strangers. I ended up with a couple who drove me to the South Side, dropped me off in a poor neighborhood and told me to knock on doors and ask people their names so I could compare them with registration lists to find evidence to overturn the election. Off I went, fearless and stupid. I did find a vacant lot that was listed as the address for about a dozen alleged voters. I woke up a lot of people who stumbled to the door or yelled at me to go away. And I walked into a bar where men were drinking to ask if certain people on my list actually lived there. The men were so shocked to see me they stood silent while I asked my few questions, until the bartender told me I would have to come back later because the owner wasn't there.
When I finished, I stood on the corner waiting to be picked up, happy that I'd ferreted out proof of my father's contention that "Daley stole the election for Kennedy."
Of course, when I returned home and told my father where I had been, he went nuts. It was bad enough to go downtown without an adult, but to go to the South Side alone sent him into a yelling fit. And besides, he said, Kennedy was going to be President whether we liked it or not.
My freshman year at Maine East was a culture shock. The baby boomers pushed enrollment near five thousand white kids from different ethnic and economic groups. I remember walking out of my homeroom the first day of class and hugging the walls to avoid the crush of students, all of whom looked bigger and more mature than me. It didn't help that I had decided the week before to get a more "grown-up" hairdo to begin my high school years. Thus began my lifelong hair struggles.
I wore my long straight hair in a ponytail or held back by a headband, and whenever my mother or I needed a permanent or trim we visited her dear friend Amalia Tbland, who had once been a beautician. Amalia would take care of us in her kitchen while she and my mother talked. But I wanted to show up at high school with a shoulder-length pageboy or flip like those of the older girls I admired, and I begged my mother to take me to a real beauty parlor. A neighbor recommended a man who had his shop in a small windowless room in the back of a nearby grocery store. When I got there, I handed him a photo of what I wanted and waited to be transformed. Wielding scissors, he began to cut, all the time talking to my mother, often turning around to make a point. I watched in horror as he cut a huge hunk of hair out of the right side of my head. I shrieked. When he finally looked at where I was pointing, he said, "Oh, my scissors must have slipped, I'll have to even up the other side." Shocked, I watched the rest of my hair disappear, leaving me—in my eyes, at least—looking like an artichoke. My poor mother tried to reassure me, but I knew better: My life was ruined.
I refused to leave the house for days, until I decided that if I bought a ponytail of fake hair at Ben Franklin's Five and Dime Store, I could pin it to the top of my head, put a ribbon around it and pretend the slipped scissors disaster never happened. So that's what I did, which saved me from feeling self-conscious and embarrassed that first day— until I was walking down the grand central staircase in between classes. Coming up the stairs was Ernest Ricketts, known as "Ricky," who had been my friend since the day we first walked to kindergarten together. He said hello, waited until he passed me, and then, as he had done dozens of times before, reached back to pull my ponytail—but this time it came off in his hand. The reason we are still friends today is that he did not add to my mortification; instead, he handed my "hair" back to me, said he was sorry he scalped me and went on without drawing any more attention to the worst moment—until then, at least—of my life.
It's a cliche now, but my high school in the early 1960s resembled the movie Grease or the television show Happy Days. I became President of the local fan club for Fabian, a teen idol, which consisted of me and two other girls. We watched The Ed Sullivan Show every Sunday night with our families, except the night he showcased the Beatles on February 9, 1964, which had to be a group experience. Paul McCartney was my favorite Beatle, which led to debates about each one's respective merits, especially with Betsy, who always championed George Harrison. I got tickets to the Rolling Stones concert in Chicago's McCormick Place in 1965. "(I Can't Get No) Satisfaction" became a catchall anthem for adolescent angst of all varieties. Years later, when I met icons from my youth, like Paul McCartney, George Harrison and Mick Jagger, I didn't know whether to shake hands or jump up and down squealing.
Despite the developing "youth culture," defined mostly by television and music, there were distinct groups in our school that determined one's social position: athletes and cheerleaders; student council types and brains; greasers and hoods. There were hallways I didn't dare walk down because, I was told, the "shop" guys would confront people. Cafeteria seating was dictated by invisible borders we all recognized. In my junior year, the underlying tensions broke out with fights between groups in the parking lot after school and at football and basketball games.
The administration moved quickly to intervene and established a student group called the Cultural Values Committee consisting of representative students from different groups. The principal, Dr. Clyde Watson, asked me to be on the committee, giving me the chance to meet and talk with kids whom I did not know and previously would have avoided. Our committee came up with specific recommendations to promote tolerance and decrease tension. Several of us were asked to appear on a local television show to discuss what our committee had done. This was both my first appearance on television and my first experience with an organized effort to stress American values of pluralism, mutual respect and understanding. Those values needed tending, even in my suburban Chicago high school. Although the student body was predominantly white and Christian, we still found ways to isolate and de-monize one another. The committee gave me the opportunity to make new and different friends. A few years later, when I was at a dance at a local YMCA and some guys started hassling me, one of the former committee members, a so-called greaser, intervened, telling the others to leave me alone because I was "okay."
All, however, was not okay during my high school years. I was sitting in geometry class on November 22,1963, puzzling over one of Mr. Craddock's problems, when another teacher came to tell us President Kennedy had been shot in Dallas. Mr. Craddock, one of my favorite teachers and our class sponsor, cried, "What? That can't be," and ran out into the hall. When he returned, he confirmed that someone had shot the President and that it was probably some "John Bircher," a reference to a right-wing organization bitterly opposed to President Kennedy. He told us to go to the auditorium to await further information. The halls were silent as thousands of students walked in disbelief and denial to the school auditorium. Finally, our principal came in and said we would be dismissed early.
When I got home, I found my mother in front of the television set watching Walter Cronkite. Cronkite announced that President Kennedy had died at 1 p.m. CST. She confessed that she had voted for Kennedy and felt so sorry for his wife and children. So did 1.1 also felt sorry for our country and I wanted to help in some way, although I had no idea how.
I clearly expected to work for a living, and I did not feel limited in my choices. I was lucky to have parents who never tried to mold me into any category or career. They simply encouraged me to excel and be happy. In fact, I don't remember a friend's parent or a teacher ever telling me or my friends that "girls can't do this" or "girls shouldn't do that." Sometimes, though, the message got through in other ways.
The author Jane O'Reilly, who came of age in the 1950s, wrote a famous essay for Ms. magazine in 1972 recounting the moments in her life when she realized she was being devalued because she was female. She described the instant of revelation as a click!—like the mechanism that triggers a flashbulb. It could be as blatant as the help-wanted ads that, until the mid-sixties, were divided into separate columns for men and women, or as subtle as an impulse to surrender the front section of the newspaper to any man in the vicinity—click!—contenting yourself with the women's pages until he finishes reading the serious news.
There were a few moments when I felt that click! I had always been fascinated by exploration and space travel, maybe in part because my dad was so concerned about America lagging behind Russia. President Kennedy's vow to put men on the moon excited me, and I wrote to NASA to volunteer for astronaut training. I received a letter back informing me that they were not accepting girls in the program. It was the first time I had hit an obstacle I couldn't overcome with hard work and determination, and I was outraged. Of course, my poor eyesight and mediocre physical abilities would have disqualified me anyway, regardless of gender. Still, the blanket rejection hurt and made me more sympathetic later to anyone confronted with discrimination of any land.
In high school, one of my smartest girlfriends dropped out of the accelerated courses because her boyfriend wasn't in them. Another didn't want to have her grades posted because she knew she would get higher marks than the boy she was dating. These girls had picked up the subtle and not-so-subtle cultural signals urging them to conform to sexist stereotypes, to diminish their own accomplishments in order not to outperform the boys around them. I was interested in boys in high school, but I never dated anyone seriously. I simply could not imagine giving up a college education or a career to get married, as some of my girlfriends were planning to do.
I was interested in politics from an early age, and I loved to hone my debating skills with my friends. I would press poor Ricky Ricketts into daily debates about world peace, baseball scores, whatever topic came to mind. I successfully ran for student council and junior class Vice President. I was also an active Young Republican and, later, a Goldwater girl, right down to my cowgirl outfit and straw cowboy hat emblazoned with the slogan "AuH;O."
My ninth-grade history teacher, Paul Carlson, was, and still is, a dedicated educator and a very conservative Republican. Mr. Carlson encouraged me to read Senator Barry Goldwater's recently published book, The Conscience of a Conservative. That inspired me to write my term paper on the American conservative movement, which I dedicated "To my parents, who have always taught me to be an individual." I liked Senator Goldwater because he was a rugged individualist who swam against the political tide. Years later, I admired his outspoken support of individual rights, which he considered consistent with his old-fashioned conservative principles: "Don't raise hell about the gays, the blacks and the Mexicans. Free people have a right to do as they damn please." When Goldwater learned I had supported him in 1964, he sent the White House a case of barbecue fixings and hot sauces and invited me to come see him. I went to his home in Phoenix in 1996 and spent a wonderful hour talking to him and his dynamic wife, Susan.
Mr. Carlson also adored General Douglas MacArthur, so we listened to tapes of his farewell address to Congress over and over again. At the conclusion of one such session, Mr. Carlson passionately exclaimed, "And remember, above all else, 'Better dead than red!' " Ricky Ricketts, sitting in front of me, started laughing, and I caught the contagion. Mr. Carlson sternly asked, "What do you think is so funny?" And Ricky replied, "Gee, Mr. Carlson, I'm only fourteen years old, and I'd rather be alive than anything."
My active involvement in the First United Methodist Church of Park Ridge opened my eyes and heart to the needs of others and helped instill a sense of social responsibility rooted in my faith. My father's parents claimed they became Methodists because their great-grandparents were converted in the small coal-mining villages around Newcastle in the north of England and in South Wales by John Wesley, who founded the Methodist Church in the eighteenth century. Wesley taught that God's love is expressed through good works, which he explained with a simple rule: "Do all the good you can, by all the means you can, in all the ways you can, in all the places you can, at all the times you can, to all the people you can, as long as ever you can." There will always be worthy debates about whose definition of "good" one follows, but as a young girl, I took Wesley's admonition to heart. My father prayed by his bed every night, and prayer became a source of solace and guidance for me even as a child.
I spent a lot of time at our church, where I was confirmed in the sixth grade along with some of my lifelong buddies, like Ricky Ricketts and Sherry Heiden, who attended church with me all the way through high school. My mother taught Sunday school, largely, she says, to keep an eye on my brothers. I attended Bible school, Sunday school, and youth group and was active in service work and in the altar guild, which cleaned and prepared the altar on Saturdays for Sunday's services. My quest to reconcile my father's insistence on self-reliance and my mother's concerns about social justice was helped along by the arrival in 1961 of a Methodist youth minister named Donald Jones.
Rev. Jones was fresh out of Drew University Seminary and four years in the Navy. He was filled with the teachings of Dietrich Bon-hoeffer and Reinhold Niebuhr. Bonhoeffer stressed that the role of a Christian was a moral one of total engagement in the world with the promotion of human development. Niebuhr struck a persuasive balance between a clear-eyed realism about human nature and an unrelenting passion for justice and social reform. Rev. Jones stressed that a Christian life was "faith in action." I had never met anyone like him. Don called his Sunday and Thursday night Methodist Youth Fellowship sessions "the University of Life." He was eager to work with us because he hoped we would become more aware of life outside of Park Ridge. He sure met his goals with me. Because of Don's "University," I first read E. E. Cummings and T. S. Eliot; experienced Picasso's paintings, especially Guernica, and debated the meaning of the "Grand Inquisitor" in Dostoyevsky's Brothers Karamazov. I came home bursting with excitement and shared what I had learned with my mother, who quickly came to find in Don a kindred spirit. But the University of Life was not just about art and literature. We visited black and Hispanic churches in Chicago's inner city for exchanges with their youth groups.
In the discussions we had sitting around church basements, I learned that, despite the obvious differences in our environments, these kids were more like me than I ever could have imagined. They also knew more about what was happening in the civil rights movement in the South. I had only vaguely heard of Rosa Parks and Dr. Martin Luther King, but these discussions sparked my interest.
So, when Don announced one week that he would take us to hear Dr. King speak at Orchestra Hall, I was excited. My parents gave me permission, but some of my friends' parents refused to let them go hear such a "rabble-rouser."
Dr. King's speech was entitled, "Remaining Awake Through a Revolution." Until then, I had been dimly aware of the social revolution occurring in our country, but Dr. King's words illuminated the struggle taking place and challenged our indifference: "We now stand on the border of the Promised Land of integration. The old order is passing away and a new one is coming in. We should all accept this order and learn to live together as brothers in a world society, or we will all perish together."
Though my eyes were opening, I still mostly parroted the conventional wisdom of Park Ridge's and my father's politics. While Don Jones threw me into "liberalizing" experiences, Paul Carlson introduced me to refugees from the Soviet Union who told haunting tales of cruelty under the Communists, which reinforced my already strong anti-Communist views. Don once remarked that he and Mr. Carlson were locked in a battle for my mind and soul. Their conflict was broader than that, however, and came to a head in our church, where Paul was also a member. Paul disagreed with Don's priorities, including the University of Life curriculum, and pushed for Don's removal from the church. After numerous confrontations, Don decided to leave First Methodist after only two years for a teaching position at Drew University, where he recently retired as Professor Emeritus of Social Ethics. We stayed in close touch over the years, and Don and his wife, Karen, were frequent visitors at the White House. He assisted at my brother Tony's wedding in the Rose Garden on May 28,1994.
I now see the conflict between Don Jones and Paul Carlson as an early indication of the cultural, political, and religious fault lines that developed across America in the last forty years. I liked them both personally and did not see their beliefs as diametrically opposed then or now.
At the end of my junior year at Maine East, our class was split in two, and half of us became the first senior class at Maine Township High School South, built to keep up with the baby boomers. I ran for student government President against several boys and lost, which did not surprise me but still hurt, especially because one of my opponents told me I was "really stupid if I thought a girl could be elected President." As soon as the election was over, the winner asked me to head the Organizations Committee, which as far as I could tell was expected to do most of the work. I agreed.
That actually turned out to be fun because, as the first graduating class, we were starting all the high school traditions like homecoming parades and dances, student council elections, pep rallies and proms. We staged a mock presidential debate for the 1964 election. A young government teacher, Jerry Baker, was in charge. He knew I was actively supporting Goldwater. I had even persuaded my dad to drive Betsy and me to hear Goldwater speak when he came on a campaign swing by train through the Chicago suburbs.
One of my friends, Ellen Press, was the only Democrat I knew in my class, and she was a vocal supporter of President Johnson. Mr. Baker, in an act of counterintuitive brilliance—or perversity—assigned me to play President Johnson and Ellen to represent Senator Goldwater. We were both insulted and protested, but Mr. Baker said this would force each of us to learn about issues from the other side. So I immersed myself—for the first time—in President Johnson's Democratic positions on civil rights, health care, poverty and foreign policy. I resented every hour spent in the library reading the Democrats' platform and White House statements. But as I prepared for the debate, I found myself arguing with more than dramatic fervor. Ellen must have had the same experience. By the time we graduated from college, each of us had changed our political affiliations. Mr. Baker later left teaching for Washington, D.C., where he has served for many years as Legislative Counsel for the Air Line Pilots Association, a position that puts to good use his ability to understand both Democratic and Republican perspectives.
Being a high school senior also meant thinking about college. I knew I was going but did not have a clue about where. I went to see our overburdened and unprepared college counselor, who gave me a few brochures about Midwestern colleges but offered neither help nor advice. I got needed guidance from two recent college graduates who were studying for their master's in teaching at Northwestern University and had been assigned to teach government classes at Maine South: Karin Fahlstrom, a graduate of Smith, and Janet Altman, a graduate of Wellesley. I remember Miss Fahlstrom telling our class she wanted us to read a daily newspaper other than Colonel McCormick's Chicago Tribune. When I asked which one, she suggested The New York Times. "But that's a tool of the Eastern Establishment!" I responded. Miss Fahlstrom, clearly surprised, said, "Well, then, read The Washington Post!" Up until then, I had never even seen either of those newspapers and didn't know the Tribune wasn't the gospel.
In mid-October, both Misses Fahlstrom and Altman asked if I knew where I wanted to go to college; I didn't, and they recommended I apply to Smith and Wellesley, two of the Seven Sisters women's colleges. They told me that if I went to a women's college, I could concentrate on my studies during the week and have fan on the weekends. I had not even considered leaving the Midwest for college and had only visited Michigan State because its honors program invited Merit Scholar finalists to its campus. But once the idea was presented, I became interested. They invited me to attend events to meet alumnae and current students. The gathering for Smith was at a beautiful, large home in one of the wealthy suburbs along Lake Michigan, while Wellesley's was in a penthouse apartment on Lake Shore Drive in Chicago. I felt out of place at both. All the girls seemed not only richer but more worldly than I. One girl at the Wellesley event was smoking pastel-colored cigarettes and talking about her summer in Europe. That seemed a long way from Lake Winola and my life.
I told my two teacher mentors that I didn't know about "going East" to school, but they insisted that I talk with my parents about applying. My mother thought I should go wherever I wanted. My father said I was free to do that, but he wouldn't pay if I went west of the Mississippi or to Radcliffe, which he heard was full of beatniks. Smith and Wellesley, which he had never heard of, were acceptable. I never visited either campus, so when I was accepted, I decided on Wellesley based on the photographs of the campus, especially its small Lake Waban, which reminded me of Lake Winola. I have always been grateful to those two teachers.
I didn't know anyone else going to Wellesley. Most of my friends were attending Midwestern colleges to be close to home. My parents drove me to college, and for some reason we got lost in Boston, ending up in Harvard Square, which only confirmed my father's views about beatniks. However, there weren't any in sight at Wellesley, and he seemed reassured. My mother has said that she cried the entire thousand-mile drive back from Massachusetts to Illinois. Now that I have had the experience of leaving my daughter at a distant university, I understand exactly how she felt. But back then, I was only looking ahead to my own future.
CLASS OF '69
IN 1994, FRONTLINE, THE PBS TELEVISION SERIES, Produced a documentary about the Wellesley class of 1969, "Hillary's Class." It was mine, to be sure, but it was much more than that. The producer, Rachel Dretzin, explained why Frontline decided to scrutinize our class twenty-five years after we graduated: "They've made a journey unlike any other generation, through a time of profound change and upheaval for women."
Classmates of mine have said that Wellesley was a girls' school when we started and a women's college when we left. That sentiment probably said as much about us as it did the college.
I arrived at Wellesley carrying my father's political beliefs and my mother's dreams and left with the beginnings of my own. But on that first day, as my parents drove away, I felt lonely, overwhelmed and out of place. I met girls who had gone to private boarding schools, lived abroad, spoke other languages fluently and placed out of freshman courses because of their Advanced Placement test scores. I had been out of the country only once—to see the Canadian side of Niagara Falls. My only exposure to foreign languages was high school Latin.
I didn't hit my stride as a Wellesley student right away. I was enrolled in courses that proved very challenging. My struggles with math and geology convinced me once and for all to give up on any idea of becoming a doctor or a scientist. My French professor gently told me, "Mademoiselle, your talents lie elsewhere." A month after school started I called home collect and told my parents I didn't think I was smart enough to be there. My father told me to come on home and my mother told me she didn't want me to be a quitter. After a shaky start, the doubts faded, and I realized that I really couldn't go home again, so I might as well make a go of it.
One snowy night during my freshman year, Margaret Clapp, then President of the college, arrived unexpectedly at my dorm, Stone-Davis, which perched on the shores above Lake Waban. She came into the dining room and asked for volunteers to help her gently shake the snow off the branches of the surrounding trees so that they wouldn't break under the weight. We walked from tree to tree through knee-high snow under a clear sky filled with stars, led by a strong, intelligent woman alert to the surprises and vulnerabilities of nature. She guided and challenged both her students and her faculty with the same care. I decided that night that I had found the place where I belonged.
Madeleine Albright, who served as Ambassador to the United Nations and Secretary of State in the Clinton Administration, started Wellesley ten years before me. I have talked with her often about the differences between her time and mine. She and her friends in the late fifties were more overtly committed to finding a husband and less buffeted by changes in the outside world. Yet they too benefited from Wellesley's example and its high expectations of what women could accomplish if given the chance. In Madeleine's day and in mine, Wellesley emphasized service. Its Latin motto is Non Ministrari sed Ministrare— "Not to be ministered unto, but to minister"—a phrase in line with my own Methodist upbringing. By the time I arrived, in the midst of an activist student era, many students viewed the motto as a call for women to become more engaged in shaping our lives and influencing the world around us.
What I valued most about Wellesley were the lifelong friends I made and the opportunity that a women's college offered us to stretch our wings and minds in the ongoing journey toward self-definition and identity. We learned from the stories we told one another, sitting around in our dorm rooms or over long lunches in the all-glass dining room. I stayed in the same dorm, Stone-Davis, all four years and ended up living on a corridor with five students who became lifelong friends. Johanna Branson, a tall dancer from Lawrence, Kansas, became an art history major and shared with me her love of paintings and film. Johanna explained on Frontline that from the first day at Wellesley, we were told we were ". . . the cream of the cream. That sounds really bratty and elitist now. But at the time, it was a wonderful thing to hear if you were a girl . . . you didn't have to take second seat to anybody."
Jinnet Fowles, from Connecticut and another art history student, posed hard-to-answer questions about what I thought could really be accomplished through student action. Jan Krigbaum, a free spirit from California, brought unflagging enthusiasm to every venture and helped establish a Latin American student exchange program. Connie Hoenk, a long-haired blonde from South Bend, Indiana, was a practical, down-to-earth girl whose opinions frequently reflected our common Midwestern roots. Suzy Salomon, a smart, hardworking girl from another Chicago suburb who laughed often and easily, was always ready to help anyone.
Two older students, Shelley Parry and Laura Grosch, became mentors. A junior in my dorm when I arrived as a freshman, Shelley had an unusual grace and bearing for a young person. She would look at me calmly with huge, intelligent eyes while I carried on about some real or perceived injustice in the world, and then she would gently probe for the source of my passion or the factual basis for my position. After graduation, she taught school in Ghana and elsewhere in Africa, where she met her Australian husband, and finally settled in Australia. Shelley's roommate was the indomitable Laura Grosch, a young woman of large emotions and artistic talent. When I saw "Fooly Scare," one of Laura's paintings in her dorm room, I liked it so much that I bought it over a course of years of tiny payments. It hangs in our Chappaqua home today. All of these girls matured into women whose friendships have sustained and supported me over the years.
Our all-female college guaranteed a focus on academic achievement and extracurricular leadership we might have missed at a coed college. Women not only ran all the student activities—from student government to newspaper to clubs—but we also felt freer to take risks, make mistakes and even fail in front of one another. It was a given that the president of the class, the editor of the paper and top student in every field would be a woman. And it could be any of us. Unlike some of the smart girls in my high school, who felt pressure to forsake their own ambitions for more traditional lives, my Wellesley classmates wanted to be recognized for their ability, hard work and achievements. This may explain why there is a disproportionate number of women's college graduates in professions in which women tend to be underrepresented.
The absence of male students cleared out a lot of psychic space and created a safe zone for us to eschew appearances—in every sense of the word—Monday through Friday afternoon. We focused on our studies without distraction and didn't have to worry about how we looked when we went to class. But without men on campus, our social lives were channeled into road trips and dating rituals called "mixers." When I arrived in the fall of 1965, the college still assumed the role of surrogate parent to the students. We couldn't have boys in our rooms except from 2 to 5:30 p.m. on Sunday afternoons, when we had to leave the door partly open and follow what we called the "two feet" rule: two (out of four) feet had to be on the floor at all times. We had curfews of 1 a.m. on weekends, and Route 9 from Boston to Wellesley was like a Grand Prix racetrack Friday and Saturday nights as our dates raced madly back to campus so we wouldn't get in trouble. We had reception desks in the entrance halls of each dorm where guests had to check in and be identified through a system of bells and announcements that notified us if the person wanting to see us was male or female. A "visitor" was female, a "caller" male. Notice of an unexpected caller gave you time to either get fixed up or call down to tell the student on duty you weren't available.
My friends and I studied hard and dated boys our own age, mostly from Harvard and other Ivy League schools, whom we met through friends or at mixers. The music was usually so loud at those dances you couldn't understand anything being said unless you stepped outside, which you only did with someone who caught your interest. I danced for hours one night at the Alumni Hall on our campus with a young man whose name I thought was Farce, only to learn later it was Forrest. I had two boyfriends serious enough to meet my parents, which, given my father's attitudes toward anyone I dated, was more like a hazing than a social encounter. Both young men survived, but our relationships didn't.
Given the tenor of the times, we soon chafed at Wellesley's archaic rules and demanded to be treated like adults. We pressured the college administration to remove the in loco parentis regulations, which they finally did when I was college government President. That change coincided with the elimination of a required curriculum that students also deemed oppressive.
Looking back on those years, I have few regrets, but I'm not so sure that eliminating both course requirements and quasi-parental supervision represented unmitigated progress. Two of the courses I got the most out of were required, and I now better appreciate the value of core courses in a range of subjects. Walking into my daughter's coed dorm at Stanford, seeing boys and girls lying and sitting in the hallways, I wondered how anyone nowadays gets any studying done.
By the mid 1960s, the sedate and sheltered Wellesley campus had begun to absorb the shock from events in the outside world. Although I had been elected President of our college's Young Republicans during my freshman year, my doubts about the party and its policies were growing, particularly when it came to civil rights and the Vietnam War. My church had given graduating high school students a subscription to motive magazine, which was published by the Methodist Church. Every month I read articles expressing views that sharply contrasted with my usual sources of information. I also had begun reading The New York Times, much to my father's consternation and Miss Fahlstrom's delight. I read speeches and essays by hawks, doves and every other brand of commentator. My ideas, new and old, were tested daily by political science professors who pushed me to expand my understanding of the world and examine my own preconceptions just when current events provided more than enough material. Before long, I realized that my political beliefs were no longer in sync with the Republican Party. It was time to step down as President of the Young Republicans.
My Vice President and friend, Betsy Griffith, not only became the new President, but stayed in the Republican Party, along with her husband, the political consultant John Deardourff. She fought hard to keep her party from taking a hard right turn and was a staunch supporter of the Equal Rights Amendment. She obtained her Ph.D. in history and wrote a well-received biography of Elizabeth Cady Stan ton before putting her feminism and women's education credentials to work as headmistress of the Madeira School for Girls in northern Virginia. All that, however, was far in the future when I officially left the Wellesley College Young Republicans and submerged myself in learning everything I could about Vietnam.
It's hard to explain to young Americans today, especially with an all-volunteer military, how obsessed many in my generation were with the Vietnam War. Our parents had lived through World War II and had told us stories about America's spirit of sacrifice during that time and the consensus among people after the bombing of Pearl Harbor that America needed to fight. With Vietnam, the country was divided, leaving us confused about our own feelings. My friends and I constantly discussed and debated it. We knew boys in ROTC programs who looked forward to serving when they graduated, as well as boys who intended to resist the draft. We had long conversations about what we would do if we were men, knowing full well we didn't have to face the same choices. It was agonizing for everyone. A friend from Princeton finally dropped out and enlisted in the Navy, because, he told me, he was sick of the controversy and uncertainty.
The debate over Vietnam articulated attitudes not only about the war, but about duty and love of country. Were you honoring your country by fighting a war you considered unjust and contrary to America's self-interest? Were you being unpatriotic if you used the system of deferments or the lottery to avoid fighting? Many students I knew who debated and protested the merits and morality of that war loved America just as much as the brave men and women who served without question or those who served first and raised questions later. For many thoughtful, self-aware young men and women there were no easy answers, and there were different ways to express one's patriotism.
Some contemporary writers and politicians have tried to dismiss the anguish of those years as an embodiment of 1960s self-indulgence. In fact, there are some people who would like to rewrite history to erase the legacy of the war and the social upheaval it spawned. They would have us believe that the debate was frivolous, but that's not how I remember it.
Vietnam mattered, and it changed the country forever. This nation still holds a reservoir of guilt and second-guessing for those who served and those who didn't. Even though as a woman I knew I couldn't be drafted, I spent countless hours wrestling with my own contradictory feelings.
In hindsight, 1968 was a watershed year for the country, and for my own personal and political evolution. National and international events unfolded in quick succession: the Tet Offensive, the withdrawal of Lyndon Johnson from the presidential race, the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr., the assassination of Robert Kennedy and the relentless escalation of the Vietnam War.
By the time I was a college junior, I had gone from being a Gold-water Girl to supporting the anti-war campaign of Eugene McCarthy, a Democratic Senator from Minnesota, who was challenging President Johnson in the presidential primary. Although I admired President Johnson's domestic accomplishments, I thought his dogged support for a war he'd inherited was a tragic mistake. Along with some of my friends, I would drive up from Wellesley to Manchester, New Hampshire, on Friday or Saturday to stuff envelopes and walk precincts. I had the chance to meet Senator McCarthy when he stopped into his headquarters to thank the student volunteers who had rallied around his opposition to the war. He nearly defeated Johnson in the New Hampshire primary, and on March 16, 1968, Senator Robert F. Kennedy of New York entered the race.
Dr. King's assassination on April 4, 1968, near the end of my junior year, filled me with grief and rage. Riots broke out in some cities. The next day I joined in a massive march of protest and mourning at Post Office Square in Boston. I returned to campus wearing a black armband and agonizing about the kind of future America faced.
Before I arrived at Wellesley, the only African Americans I knew were the people my parents employed in my father's business and in our home. I had heard Dr. King speak and participated in exchanges with black and Hispanic teenagers through my church. But I had not had a black friend, neighbor or classmate until I went to college. Karen Williamson, a lively, independent-minded student, became one of my first friends there. One Sunday morning, she and I went off campus to attend church services. Even though I liked Karen and wanted to get to know her better, I was self-conscious about my motives and hyperaware that I was moving away from my past. As I got to know my black classmates better, I learned that they too felt self-conscious. Just as I had come to Wellesley from a predominantly white environment, they had come from predominantly black ones. Janet McDonald, an elegant, self-possessed girl from New Orleans, related a conversation she had with her parents shortly after she arrived. When she told them, "I hate it here, everyone's white," her father agreed to let her leave, but her mother insisted, "You can do it and you are going to stay." This was similar to the conversation I had with my own parents. Our fathers were willing—even anxious—for us to come home; our mothers were telling us to hang in there. And we did.
Karen, Fran Rusan, Alvia Wardlaw and other black students started Ethos, the first African American organization on campus, to serve as a social network for black students at Wellesley and as a lobbying group in dealing with the college administration. After Dr. King's assassination, Ethos urged the college to become more racially sensitive and to recruit more black faculty and students and threatened to call a hunger strike if the college did not meet their demands. This was Wellesley's only overt student protest in the late 1960s. The college addressed it by convening an all-campus meeting in the Houghton Memorial Chapel so Ethos members could explain their concerns. The meeting began to disintegrate into a chaotic shouting match. Kris Olson, who along with Nancy Gist and Susan Graber would go on with me to Yale Law School, worried that the students might shut down the campus and go on strike. I had just been elected college government President, so Kris and the Ethos members asked me to try to make the debate more productive and to translate the legitimate grievances many of us felt toward institutions of authority. To Wellesley's credit, it made an effort to recruit minority faculty and students that began bearing fruit in the 1970s.
Senator Robert F. Kennedy's assassination two months later on June 5, 1968, deepened my despair about events in America. I was already home from college when the news came from Los Angeles. My mother woke me up because "something very terrible has happened again." I stayed on the phone nearly the whole day with my friend Kevin O'Keefe, an Irish-Polish Chicagoan who loves the Kennedys, the Daleys and the thrill of high-stakes politics. We always liked talking about politics, and that day he raged against losing John and Robert Kennedy when our country so badly needed their strong and graceful leadership. We talked a lot then, and in the years since, about whether political action is worth the pain and struggle. Then, as now, we decided that it was, if only, in Kevin's words, to keep "the other guys away from power over us."
I had applied for the Wellesley Internship Program in Washington, D.C., and though dismayed and unnerved by the assassinations, I was still committed to going to Washington. The nine-week summer program placed students in agencies and congressional offices for a firsthand look at "how government works." I was surprised when Professor Alan Schechter, the program's Director and a great political science teacher, as well as my thesis adviser, assigned me to intern at the House Republican Conference. He knew I had come to college as a Republican and was moving away from my father's opinions. He thought this internship would help me continue charting my own course—no matter what I eventually decided. I objected to no avail and ended up reporting for duty to a group headed by then Minority Leader Gerald Ford and including Congressmen Melvin Laird of Wisconsin and Charles Good-ell of New York, who befriended and advised me.
The interns posed for their obligatory photographs with the members of Congress, and years later, when I was First Lady, I told former President Ford I had been one of the thousands of interns whom he'd given an introductory look inside the Capitol. The photo of me with him and the Republican leaders made my father very happy; he had it hanging in his bedroom when he died. I also signed a copy of that photo for President Ford and presented it to him with thanks and apologies for having strayed from the fold.
I think about that first experience in Washington every time I meet with the interns in my Senate office. I particularly remember a session Mel Laird held with a large group of us to discuss the Vietnam War. Although he may have harbored concerns about how the Johnson Administration had financed the war and whether the escalation went beyond the congressional authority granted by the Gulf of Tonkin resolution, he remained publicly supportive as a Congressman. In the meeting with interns, he justified American involvement and advocated vigorously for greater military force. When he stopped for questions, I echoed President Eisenhower's caution about American involvement in land wars in Asia and asked him why he thought this strategy could ever succeed. Although we didn't agree, as our heated exchange demonstrated, I came away with a high regard for him and an appreciation for his willingness to explain and defend his views to young people. He took our concerns seriously and respectfully. Later, he served as President Nixon's Secretary of Defense.
Congressman Charles Goodell, who represented western New York, was later appointed to the Senate by Governor Nelson Rockefeller to replace Robert Kennedy until an election could be held. Goodell was a progressive Republican who was defeated in 1970 in a three-way election by the much more conservative James Buckley. Buckley lost in 1976 to Daniel Patrick Moynihan, my predecessor, who held the seat for twenty-four years. When I ran for that Senate seat in 2000,1 delighted in telling people from Jamestown, Goodell's hometown, that I had once worked for the Congressman. Toward the end of my internship, Goodell asked me and a few other interns to go with him to the Republican Convention in Miami to work on behalf of Governor Rockefeller's last-ditch effort to wrest his party's nomination away from Richard Nixon. I jumped at the chance and headed for Florida.
The Republican Convention was my first inside look at big-time politics, and I found the week unreal and unsettling. The Fontainebleau Hotel on Miami Beach was the first real hotel I had ever stayed in, since my family favored either sleeping in the car on the way to Lake Winola or staying in small roadside motels. Its size, opulence and service were a surprise. It was there that I placed my first-ever room service order. I can still see the giant fresh peach that came wrapped in a napkin on a plate when I asked for peaches with cereal one morning. I had a roll-away bed shoehorned into a room with four other women, but I don't think any of us slept much. We staffed the Rockefeller for President suite, taking phone calls and delivering messages to and from Rockefeller's political emissaries and delegates. Late one night, a Rockefeller campaign staffer asked everybody in the office if we wanted to meet Frank Sinatra and got back the predictably enthusiastic screams of delight at the prospect. I went with the group to a penthouse to shake hands with Sinatra, who courteously feigned interest in meeting us. I took the elevator down with John Wayne, who appeared under the weather and complained all the way down about the lousy food upstairs. Although I enjoyed all my new experiences, from room service to celebrities, I knew Rockefeller would not be nominated. The nomination of Richard Nixon cemented the ascendance of a conservative over a moderate ideology within the Republican Party, a dominance that has only grown more pronounced over the years as the party has continued its move to the right and moderates have dwindled in numbers and influence. I sometimes think that I didn't leave the Republican Party as much as it left me.
I came home to Park Ridge after the Republican Convention with no plans for the remaining weeks of summer except to visit with family and friends and get ready for my senior year. My family was on the annual pilgrimage to Lake Winola so I had the house to myself, which was just as well since I'm sure I would have spent hours arguing with my father over Nixon and the Vietnam War. My dad really liked Nixon and believed he would make an excellent President. About Vietnam, he was ambivalent. His questions about the wisdom of U.S. involvement in the war were usually trumped by his disgust with the long-haired hippies who protested it.
My close friend Betsy Johnson had just returned from a year of study in Franco's Spain. Although much had changed since our high school days—the neat flips and sweater sets we used to wear had been displaced by lanky hair and frayed blue jeans—one constant remained: I could always count on Betsy's friendship and shared interest in politics. Neither of us had planned to go into Chicago while the Democratic Convention was in town. But when massive protests broke out downtown, we knew it was an opportunity to witness history. Betsy called and said, "We've got to see this for ourselves," and I agreed.
Just like the time we had gone downtown to check voting lists in junior high school, we knew there was no way our parents would let us go if they knew what we were planning. My mother was in Pennsylvania, and Betsy's mom, Roslyn, thought of going downtown as a visit to Marshall Field's to shop and Stouffer's for lunch, wearing white gloves and a dress. So Betsy told her mother, "Hillary and 1 are going to the movies."
She picked me up in the family station wagon, and off we went to Grant Park, the epicenter of the demonstrations. It was the last night of the convention, and all hell broke loose in Grant Park. You could smell the tear gas before you saw the lines of police. In the crowd behind us, someone screamed profanities and threw a rock, which just missed us. Betsy and I scrambled to get away as the police charged the crowd with nightsticks.
The first person we ran into was a high school friend whom we hadn't seen in a while. A nursing student, she was volunteering in the first-aid tent, patching up injured protesters. She told us that what she had been seeing and doing had radicalized her, and she seriously thought there might be a revolution.
Betsy and I were shocked by the police brutality we saw in Grant Park, images also captured on national television. As Betsy later told The Washington Post, "We had had a wonderful childhood in Park Ridge, but we obviously hadn't gotten the whole story."
Kevin O'Keefe and I spent hours that summer arguing about the meaning of revolution and whether our country would face one. Despite the events of the last year, we both concluded there would not be one, and, even if there was, we could never participate. I knew that despite my disillusionment with politics, it was the only route in a democracy for peaceful and lasting change. I did not imagine then that I would ever run for office, but I knew I wanted to participate as both a citizen and an activist. In my mind, Dr. King and Mahatma Gandhi had done more to bring about real change through civil disobedience and nonviolence than a million demonstrators throwing rocks ever could.
My senior year at Wellesley would further test and articulate my beliefs. For my thesis I analyzed the work of a Chicago native and community organizer named Saul Alinsky, whom I had met the previous summer. Alinsky was a colorful and controversial figure who managed to offend almost everyone during his long career. His prescription for social change required grassroots organizing that taught people to help themselves by confronting government and corporations to obtain the resources and power to improve their lives. I agreed with some of Alinsky's ideas, particularly the value of empowering people to help themselves. But we had a fundamental disagreement. He believed you could change the system only from the outside. I didn't. Later he offered me the chance to work with him when I graduated from college, and he was disappointed that I decided instead to go to law school. Alinsky said I would be wasting my time, but my decision was an expression of my belief that the system could be changed from within. I took the law school admissions test and applied to several schools.
After I was accepted by Harvard and Yale, I couldn't make up my mind where to go until I was invited to a cocktail party at Harvard Law School. A male law student friend introduced me to a famous Harvard law professor straight out of The Paper Chase, saying, "This is Hillary Rodham. She's trying to decide whether to come here next year or sign up with our closest competitor." The great man gave me a cool, dismissive look and said, "Well, first of all, we don't have any close competitors. Secondly, we don't need any more women at Harvard." I was leaning toward Yale anyway, but this encounter removed any doubts about my choice.
All that remained was graduation from Wellesley, and I thought it would be uneventful, until my classmate and friend Eleanor "Eldie" Acheson decided our class needed its own speaker at graduation. I had met Eldie, the granddaughter of President Truman's Secretary of State, Dean Acheson, in a freshman political science class where we had to describe our political backgrounds. Eldie later told The Boston Globe that she was "shocked to find out that not just Hillary, but other very smart people, were Republican." The discovery "depressed" her, but "it did explain why they won presidential elections from time to time."
Wellesley had never had a student speaker, and President Ruth Adams was opposed to opening that door now. She was uncomfortable with the student milieu of the 1960s. I had weekly meetings with her in my capacity as President of college government, and her usual question to me was a variant of Freud's: "What do you girls want?" To be fair to her, most of us had no idea. We were trapped between an outdated past and an uncharted future. We were often irreverent, cynical and self-righteous in our assessments of adults and authority. So, when Eldie announced to President Adams that she represented a group of students who wanted a student speaker, the initial negative response was expected. Then Eldie upped the pressure by declaring that if the request was denied, she would personally lead an effort to stage a counter commencement. And, she added, she was confident her grandfather would attend. When Eldie reported that both sides were dug in, I went to see President Adams in her little house down on the shore of Lake Waban.
When I asked her, "What is the real objection?" she said, "It's never been done." I said, "Well, we could give it a try." She said, "We don't know whom they are going to ask to speak." I said, "Well, they asked me to speak." She said, "I'll think about it." President Adams finally approved.
My friends' enthusiasm about my speaking worried me because I didn't have a clue about what I could say that could fit our tumultuous four years at Wellesley and be a proper send-off into our unknown futures.
During my junior and senior years, Johanna Branson and I lived in a large suite overlooking Lake Waban, on the third floor of Davis. I spent many hours sitting on my bed looking out the window at the still lake waters, worrying about everything from relationships to faith to antiwar protests. Now, as I thought about all that my friends and I had experienced since our parents dropped off such different girls four years before, I wondered how I could ever do justice to this time we shared. Luckily, my classmates started coming by the suite to leave favorite poems and sayings; wry takes on our shared journey; suggestions for dramatic gestures. Nancy "Anne" Scheibner, a serious religion major, wrote a long poem that captured the Zeitgeist. I spent hours talking to people about what they wanted me to say and hours more making sense of the disparate and conflicting advice I received.
I went out to dinner the night before graduation with a group of friends and their families and ran into Eldie Acheson and her family. When she introduced me to her grandfather, she told Dean Acheson, "This is the girl who's going to speak tomorrow," and he said, "I'm looking forward to hearing what you have to say." I felt nauseated. I still wasn't sure what I was going to say, and I hurried back to my dorm to pull an all-nighter—my last one in college.
My parents were excited about seeing their daughter graduate, but my mother had been experiencing health problems. A doctor had prescribed blood thinners, and he advised her not to travel for a while. So, regrettably, she couldn't come to my graduation, and my father wasn't keen on coming alone.
When I told my parents that I would be speaking, however, he decided he had to be there. And, in typical Hugh Rodham fashion, he flew to Boston late the night before, stayed out by the airport, took the MTA to campus, attended graduation, came to the Wellesley Inn for lunch with some of my friends and their families and then went right back home. All that mattered to me was that he made it to my graduation, which helped diminish the disappointment I felt over my mother's absence. In many ways, this moment was as much hers as mine.
The morning of our graduation, May 31, 1969, was a perfect New England day. We gathered in the Academic Quadrangle for the commencement ceremony on the lawn between the library and the chapel. President Adams asked me what I was going to say, and I told her it was still percolating. She introduced me to Senator Edward Brooke, our official commencement speaker and the Senate's only African American member, for whom I had campaigned in 1966 when I was still a Young Republican. After staying up all night trying to piece a speech together from a communally written text, I was having a particularly bad hair day, made worse by the mortarboard perching on top. The pictures of me that day are truly scary.
Senator Brooke's speech acknowledged that our "country has profound and pressing social problems on its agenda" and that "it needs the best energies of all its citizens, especially its gifted young people to remedy these ills." He also argued against what he called "coercive protest." At the time, the speech sounded like a defense of President Nixon's policies, notable more for what it didn't say than what it did. I listened in vain for an acknowledgment of the legitimate grievances and painful questions so many young Americans had about our country's direction. I waited for some mention of Vietnam or civil rights or of Dr. King or Senator Kennedy, two of our generation's fallen heroes. The Senator seemed out of touch with his audience: four hundred smart, aware, questioning young women. His words were aimed at a different Wellesley, one that predated the upheavals of the 1960s.
I thought how prescient Eldie had been to know that a predictable speech like this one would be such a letdown after the four years we, and America, had experienced. So I took a deep breath and began by defending the "indispensable task of criticizing and constructive protest." Paraphrasing Anne Scheibner's poem, which I quoted at the end, I stated that "the challenge now is to practice politics as the art of making what appears to be impossible, possible."
I spoke about the awareness of the gap between the expectations my class brought to college and the reality we experienced. Most of us had come from sheltered backgrounds, and the personal and public events we encountered caused us to question the authenticity, even the reality, of our pre-college lives. Our four years had been a rite of passage different from the experiences of our parents' generation, which had faced greater external challenges like the Depression and World War II. So we started asking questions, first about Wellesley's policies, then about the meaning of a liberal arts education, then about civil rights, women's roles, Vietnam. I defended protest as "an attempt to forge an identity in this particular age" and as a way of "coming to terms with our human-ness." It was part of the "unique American experience" and "if the experiment in human living doesn't work in this country, in this age, it's not going to work anywhere."
When I had asked the class at our graduation rehearsal what they wanted me to say for them, everyone answered, "Talk about trust, talk about the lack of trust both for us and the way we feel about others. Talk about the trust bust." I acknowledged how hard it was to convey a feeling that permeates a generation.
And, finally, I spoke of the struggle to establish a "mutuality of respect between people." Running throughout my words, however, was an acknowledgment of the fears many of us felt about the future. I referred to a conversation from the previous day with a classmate's mother "who said that she wouldn't want to be me for anything in the world. She wouldn't want to live today and look ahead to what it is she sees because she's afraid." I said, "Fear is always with us, but we just don't have time for it. Not now."
The speech was, as I admitted, an attempt to "come to grasp with some of the inarticulate, maybe even inarticulable things that we're feeling" as we are "exploring a world that none of us understands and attempting to create within that uncertainty." This speech may not have been the most coherent one I have ever delivered, but it struck a chord with my class, which gave me an enthusiastic standing ovation, partly, I believe, because my efforts to make sense of our time and place—played out on a stage in front of two thousand spectators—reflected the countless conversations, questions, doubts and hopes each of us brought to that moment, not just as Wellesley graduates, but also as women and Americans whose lives would exemplify the changes and choices facing our generation at the end of the twentieth century.
Later that afternoon, I took one last swim in Lake Waban. Instead of going to the little beach by the boathouse, I decided to wade in near my dorm, an area officially off-limits to swimming. I stripped down to my bathing suit and left my cut-off jeans and T-shirt in a pile on the shore with my aviatorlike eyeglasses on top. I didn't have a care in the world as I swam out toward the middle, and because of my nearsighted-ness, my surroundings looked like an Impressionist painting. I had loved being at Wellesley and had taken great solace in all seasons from its natural beauty. The swim was a final good-bye. When I got back to shore, I couldn't find my clothes or my glasses.
I finally had to ask a campus security officer if he had seen my belongings. He told me that President Adams had seen me swimming from her house and directed him to confiscate them. Apparently, she was sorry she had ever let me speak. Dripping wet, I followed him, somewhat blindly, to retrieve my possessions.
I had no idea that my speech would generate interest far beyond Wellesley. I had only hoped that my friends thought I had been true to their hopes, and their positive reaction heartened me. When I called home, however, my mother told me that she had been fielding phone calls from reporters and television shows asking me for interviews and appearances. I appeared on Irv Kupcinet's interview show on a local Chicago channel, and Life magazine featured me and a student activist named Ira Magaziner, who addressed his graduating class at Brown University. My mother reported that opinion about my speech seemed to be divided between the overly effusive—"she spoke for a generation"—to the exceedingly negative—"who does she think she is?" The accolades and attacks turned out to be a preview of things to come: I have never been as good as or as bad as my most fervid supporters and opponents claimed.
With a big sigh of relief I took off for a summer of working my way across Alaska, washing dishes in Mt. McKinley National Park (now known as Denali National Park and Preserve) and sliming fish in Valdez in a temporary salmon factory on a pier. My job required me to wear knee-high boots and stand in bloody water while removing guts from the salmon with a spoon. When I didn't slime fast enough, the supervisors yelled at me to speed up. Then I was moved to the assembly packing line, where I helped pack the salmon in boxes for shipping to the large floating processing plant offshore. I noticed that some of the fish looked bad. When I told the manager, he fired me and told me to come back the next afternoon to pick up my last check. When I showed up, the entire operation was gone. During a visit to Alaska when I was First Lady, I joked to an audience that of all the jobs I've had, sliming fish was pretty good preparation for life in Washington.
WHEN I ENTERED YALE LAW SCHOOL IN THE FALL of 1969,1 was one of twenty-seven women out of 2 3 5 students to matriculate. This seems like a paltry number now, but it was a breakthrough at the time and meant that women would no longer be token students at Yale. While women's rights appeared to be gaining some traction as the 1960s skittered to an end, everything else seemed out of kilter and uncertain. Unless you lived through those times, it is hard to imagine how polarized America's political landscape had become.
Professor Charles Reich, who became best known to the general public for his book The Greening of America, was camping out with some students in a shantytown in the middle of the law school's courtyard, to protest the "establishment," which, of course, included Yale Law School. The shantytown lasted a few weeks before being peacefully disassembled. Other protests, however, were not so peaceful. The decade of the 1960s that had begun with so much hope ended in a convulsion of protest and violence. White, middle-class anti-war activists were found plotting to build bombs in their basements. The non-violent, largely black civil rights movement splintered into factions, and new voices emerged among urban blacks belonging to the Black Muslims and Black Panther Party. J. Edgar Hoover's FBI infiltrated dissident groups and, in some cases, broke the law in order to disrupt them. Law enforcement sometimes failed to distinguish between constitutionally protected, legitimate opposition and criminal behavior. As domestic spying and counterintelligence operations expanded under the Nixon Administration, it seemed, at times, that our government was at war with its own people.
Yale Law School historically attracted students interested in public service and our conversations inside and outside the classroom reflected a deep concern about the events enveloping the country. Yale also encouraged its students to get out in the world and apply the theories they learned in the classroom. That world and its realities came crashing down on Yale in April 1970, when eight Black Panthers, including party leader Bobby Seale, were put on trial for murder in New Haven. Thousands of angry protesters, convinced the Panthers had been set up by the FBI and government prosecutors, swarmed into the city. Demonstrations broke out in and around campus. The campus was bracing for a huge May Day rally to support the Panthers when I learned, late on the night of April 27, that the International Law Library, which was in the basement of the law school, was on fire. Horrified, I rushed to join a bucket brigade of faculty, staff and students to put out the fire and to rescue books damaged by flames and water. After the fire was out, the law school's Dean, Louis Pollak, asked everyone to gather in the largest classroom. Dean Pollak, a gentleman scholar with a ready smile and an open door, asked us to organize round-the-clock security patrols for the remainder of the school year.
On April 30, President Nixon announced that he was sending U.S. troops into Cambodia, expanding the Vietnam War. The May Day protests became a larger demonstration, not only to support a fair trial for the Panthers, but also to oppose Nixon's actions in the war. Throughout the era of student protests, Yale's President, Kingman Brewster, and the university chaplain, William Sloane Coffin, had taken a conciliatory approach, which helped Yale avoid the problems occurring elsewhere. Rev. Coffin became a national leader of the anti-war movement through his articulate moral critique of American involvement. President Brewster addressed student concerns and appreciated the anguish felt by many. He had even said he was "skeptical of the ability of black revolutionaries" to achieve a fair trial anywhere in the United States. Faced with the prospect of violent demonstrators, Brewster suspended classes and announced that the dorms would be open to serve meals to anyone who came. His actions and statements inflamed alumni, as well as President Nixon and Vice President Spiro Agnew.
Then, on May 4, National Guard troops opened fire on students protesting at Kent State University in Ohio. Four students were killed. The photograph of a young woman kneeling over the body of a dead student represented all that I and many others feared and hated about what was happening in our country. I remember rushing out the door of the law school in tears and running into Professor Fritz Kessler, a refugee who fled Hitler's Germany. He asked me what the matter was and I told him I couldn't believe what was happening; he chilled me by saying that, for him, it was all too familiar.
True to my upbringing, I advocated engagement, not disruption or "revolution." On May 7,1 kept a previously planned obligation to speak at the convention banquet of the fiftieth anniversary of the League of Women Voters in Washington, D.C., an invitation stemming from my college commencement address. I wore a black armband in memory of the students who had been killed. My emotions, once again, were close to the surface as I argued that the extension of America's Vietnam War into Cambodia was illegal and unconstitutional. I tried to explain the context in which protests occurred and the impact that the Kent State shootings had on Yale law students, who had voted 239-12 to join more than three hundred schools in a national strike to protest "the unconscionable expansion of a war that should never have been waged." I had moderated the mass meeting where the vote took place, and I knew how seriously my fellow students took both the law and their responsibilities as citizens. The law students, who had not previously joined other parts of the university in protest actions, debated the issues in a thoughtful, albeit lawyerly, fashion. They were not the "bums" that Nixon labeled all student protesters.
The keynote speaker at the League convention was Marian Wright Edelman, whose example helped direct me into my lifelong advocacy for children. Marian had graduated from Yale Law School in 1963 and became the first black woman admitted to the bar in Mississippi. She spent the mid-sixties running the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund office in Jackson, traveling throughout the state setting up Head Start programs and risking her neck to advance civil rights in the South. I had first heard about Marian from her husband, Peter Edelman, a Harvard Law School graduate who had clerked on the Supreme Court for Arthur J. Goldberg and had worked for Bobby Kennedy. Peter had accompanied Senator Kennedy to Mississippi in 1967 on a fact-finding trip to expose the extent of poverty and hunger in the Deep South. Marian was one of the Senator's guides for his travels around Mississippi. After that trip, Marian continued working with Peter, and after Senator Kennedy's assassination, they married.
I first met Peter Edelman at a national conference on youth and community development held in October of 1969 at Colorado State University in Fort Collins, Colorado, and sponsored by the League. The League had invited a cross section of activists from around the country to discuss ways in which young people could become more positively involved in government and politics. I was invited to serve on the Steering Committee along with Peter, who was then the Associate Director of the Robert F. Kennedy Memorial; David Mixner, of the Vietnam Moratorium Committee; and Martin Slate, a fellow Yale law student who had been a friend of mine from the days he was at Harvard and I was at Wellesley. One of the issues that united us was our belief that the Constitution should be amended to lower the voting age from twenty-one to eighteen. If young people were old enough to fight, they were entitled to vote. The 26th Amendment finally passed in 1971, but young people between the ages of eighteen and twenty-four did not choose to vote in the numbers many of us then anticipated, and that group today still has the lowest registration and voter turnout of any age group. Their apathy makes it less likely that our national politics will reflect their concerns and safeguard their future.
During a break in the conference, I was sitting on a bench talking with Peter Edelman when our conversation was interrupted by a tall, elegantly dressed man.
"Well, Peter, aren't you going to introduce me to this earnest young lady?" he asked. That was my first encounter with Vernon Jordan, then the Director of the Voter Education Project of the Southern Regional Council in Atlanta and an advocate of the lower voting age. Vernon, a smart and charismatic veteran lawyer of the civil rights movement, became my friend that day, and later, my husband's. He and his accomplished wife, Ann, can always be counted on for good company and wise counsel.
Peter told me about Marian's plans to start an anti-poverty advocacy organization and urged me to meet her as soon as I could. A few months later, Marian spoke at Yale. I introduced myself to her afterwards and asked for a summer job. She told me I could have a job, but she couldn't pay me. That was a problem since I had to earn enough money to supplement the scholarship Wellesley had awarded me for law school and the loans I had taken out. The Law Student Civil Rights Research Council gave me a grant, which I used to support my work during the summer of 1970 at the Washington Research Project Marian had started in Washington, D.C.
Senator Walter "Fritz" Mondale of Minnesota, later Vice President under Jimmy Carter, decided to hold Senate hearings to investigate the living and working conditions of migrant farmworkers. The 1970 hearings coincided with the ten-year anniversary of Edward R. Murrow's famous television documentary Harvest of Shame, which had shocked Americans in i960 with its expose of the deplorable treatment migrants endured. Marian assigned me to do research on the education and health of migrant children. I had some limited experience with migrant children who had attended my elementary school for a few months each year and with others my church had arranged for me to baby-sit when I was about fourteen years old. Every Saturday morning during harvest season, I went with several of my Sunday school friends to the migrant camp, where we took care of the children under ten while their older brothers and sisters worked in the fields with their parents.
I got to know one seven-year-old girl, Maria, who was preparing to receive her First Communion when her family returned to Mexico at the end of the harvest. But she wouldn't be able to mark that passage unless her family saved enough money to buy her a proper white dress. I told my mother about Maria, and she took me to buy a beautiful dress. When we presented it to Maria's mother, she started crying and dropped to her knees to kiss my mother's hands. My embarrassed mother kept saying she knew how important it was for a little girl to feel special on such an occasion. Years later, I realized that my mother must have identified with Maria.
Although these children lived harsh lives, they were bright, hopeful and loved by their parents. The children dropped whatever they were doing to run down the road when their families came home from the fields. Fathers would scoop up excited kids, and mothers would bend over to hug toddlers. It was just like my neighborhood when fathers came home from the city after work.
But as I conducted my research, I learned how often farmworkers and their children were—and still too often are—deprived of basics like decent housing and sanitation. Cesar Chavez started the National Farm Workers Association in 1962, organizing workers in the California fields, but conditions in most of the rest of the country hadn't changed much since i960.
The hearings I attended in July 1970 were part of a series the Senate Committee had been holding to take testimony and evidence from farmworkers, advocates and employers. Witnesses presented evidence that some corporations owned large farms in Florida where migrants were treated as badly as they had been a decade before. Several students I knew from Yale attended on behalf of the corporate clients of the law firms they were working for as summer associates. The students told me they were learning how to rehabilitate a corporate client's tarnished image. I suggested that the best way to do that would be to improve the treatment of their farmworkers.
When I returned to Yale for my second year in the fall of 1970,1 decided to concentrate on how the law affected children. Historically, children's rights and needs were covered in family law and usually defined by whatever their parents decided, with some notable exceptions, like the right of a child to receive necessary medical treatment even over the religious objections of his or her parents. But starting in the 1960s, courts began finding other circumstances in which children had, to a limited extent, rights separate from their parents.
Two of my law school professors, Jay Katz and Joe Goldstein, encouraged my interest in this new area and suggested that I learn more about child development through a course of study at the Yale Child Study Center. They sent me to meet the Center's Director, Dr. Al Sol-nit, and its chief clinician, Dr. Sally Provence. I persuaded them to let me spend a year at the Center attending case discussions and observing clinical sessions. Dr. Solnit and Professor Goldstein asked me to serve as their research assistant for Beyond the Best Interests of the Child, a book they were writing with Anna Freud, Sigmund's daughter. I also began consulting with the medical staff at Yale-New Haven Hospital about the newly acknowledged problem of child abuse and helping to draft the legal procedures for the hospital to use when dealing with suspected child abuse cases.
These activities went hand-in-hand with my assignments at the New Haven Legal Services office. A young legal aid lawyer, Penn Rhodeen, taught me how important it was for children to have their own advocates in situations involving abuse and neglect. Penn asked me to assist him in representing an African American woman in her fifties who had served as a foster mother for a two-year-old mixed-race girl since the child's birth. This woman had already raised her own children and wanted to adopt the little girl. The Connecticut Department of Social Services, however, followed its policy that foster parents were not eligible to adopt and removed the girl from the woman's care and placed her with a more "suitable" family. Penn sued the bureaucracy, arguing that the foster mother was the only mother the little girl had ever known and that removing her would inflict lasting damage. Despite our best efforts, we lost the case, but it spurred me to look for ways that children's developmental needs and rights could be recognized within the legal system. I realized that what I wanted to do with the law was to give voice to children who were not being heard.
My first scholarly article, titled "Children Under the Law," was published in 1974 in the Harvard Educational Review. It explores the difficult decisions the judiciary and society face when children are abused or neglected by their families or when parental decisions have potentially irreparable consequences, such as denying a child medical care or the right to continue school. My views were shaped by what I had observed as a volunteer for Legal Services representing children in foster care and by my experiences at the Child Study Center in Yale-New Haven Hospital; I advised doctors on their rounds as they tried to ascertain whether a child's injuries were the result of abuse and, if so, whether a child should be removed from his or her family and put into the uncertain care of the child welfare system. These were terrible decisions to make. I come from a strong family and believe in a parent's natural presumptive right to raise his or her child as he or she sees fit. But my experiences in Yale-New Haven Hospital were a long way from my sheltered suburban upbringing.
There may have been child abuse and domestic violence in Park Ridge, but I didn't see it. In New Haven, by contrast, I saw children whose parents beat and burned them; who left them alone for days in squalid apartments; who failed and refused to seek necessary medical care. The sad truth, I learned, was that certain parents abdicated their rights as parents, and someone—preferably another family member, but ultimately the state—had to step in to give a child the chance for a permanent and loving home.
I thought often of my own mother's neglect and mistreatment at the hands of her parents and grandparents, and how other caring adults filled the emotional void to help her. My mother tried to repay the favor by taking in girls from a local group home to assist her around our house. She wanted to give them the same chance she had been given to see an intact supportive family in action.
Who would have predicted that during the 1992 presidential campaign, nearly two decades after I wrote the article, conservative Republicans like Marilyn Quayle and Pat Buchanan would twist my words to portray me as "anti-family"? Some commentators actually claimed that I wanted children to be able to sue their parents if they were told to take out the garbage. I couldn't foresee the later misinterpretation of my paper; nor could I have predicted the circumstances that would motivate the Republicans to denounce me. And I certainly didn't know that I was about to meet the person who would cause my life to spin in directions that I could never have imagined.
BILL CLINTON WAS HARD TO MISS IN THE AUTUMN OF 1970. He arrived at Yale Law School looking more like a Viking than a Rhodes Scholar returning from two years at Oxford. He was tall and handsome somewhere beneath that reddish brown beard and curly mane of hair. He also had a vitality that seemed to shoot out of his pores. When I first saw him in the law school's student lounge, he was holding forth before a rapt audience of fellow students. As I walked by, I heard him say: "... and not only that, we grow the biggest watermelons in the world!" I asked a friend, "Who is that?"
"Oh, that's Bill Clinton," he said. "He's from Arkansas, and that's all he ever talks about."
We would run into each other around campus, but we never actually met until one night at the Yale law library the following spring. I was studying in the library, and Bill was standing out in the hall talking to another student, Jeff Gleckel, who was trying to persuade Bill to write for the Yale Law Journal. I noticed that he kept looking over at me. He had been doing a lot of that. So I stood up from the desk, walked over to him and said, "If you're going to keep looking at me, and I'm going to keep looking back, we might as well be introduced. I'm Hillary Rodham." That was it. The way Bill tells the story, he couldn't remember his own name.
We didn't talk to each other again until the last day of classes in the spring of 1971. We happened to walk out of Professor Thomas Emerson's Political and Civil Rights course at the same time. Bill asked me where I was going. I was on the way to the registrar's office to sign up for the next semester's classes. He told me he was heading there too. As we walked, he complimented my long flower-patterned skirt. When I told him that my mother had made it, he asked about my family and where I had grown up. We waited in line until we got to the registrar. She looked up and said, "Bill, what are you doing here? You've already registered." I laughed when he confessed that he just wanted to spend time with me, and we went for a long walk that turned into our first date.
We both had wanted to see a Mark Rothko exhibit at the Yale Art Gallery but, because of a labor dispute, some of the university's buildings, including the museum, were closed. As Bill and I walked by, he decided he could get us in if we offered to pick up the litter that had accumulated in the gallery's courtyard. Watching him talk our way in was the first time I saw his persuasiveness in action. We had the entire museum to ourselves. We wandered through the galleries talking about Rothko and twentieth-century art. I admit to being surprised at his interest in and knowledge of subjects that seemed, at first, unusual for a Viking from Arkansas. We ended up in the museum's courtyard, where I sat in the large lap of Henry Moore's sculpture Draped Seated Woman while we talked until dark. I invited Bill to the party my roommate, Kwan Kwan Tan, and I were throwing in our dorm room that night to celebrate the end of classes. Kwan Kwan, an ethnic Chinese who had come from Burma to Yale to pursue graduate legal studies, was a delightful living companion and a graceful performer of Burmese dance. She and her husband, Bill Wang, another student, remain friends.
Bill came to our party but hardly said a word. Since I didn't know him that well, I thought he must be shy, perhaps not very socially adept or just uncomfortable. I didn't have much hope for us as a couple. Besides, I had a boyfriend at the time, and we had weekend plans out of town. When I came back to Yale late Sunday, Bill called and heard me coughing and hacking from the bad cold I had picked up.
"You sound terrible," he said. About thirty minutes later, he knocked on my door, bearing chicken soup and orange juice. He came in, and he started talking. He could converse about anything—from African politics to country and western music. I asked him why he had been so quiet at my party.
"Because I was interested in learning more about you and your friends," he replied.
I was starting to realize that this young man from Arkansas was much more complex than first impressions might suggest. To this day, he can astonish me with the connections he weaves between ideas and words and how he makes it all sound like music. I still love the way he thinks and the way he looks. One of the first things I noticed about Bill was the shape of his hands. His wrists are narrow and his fingers tapered and deft, like those of a pianist or a surgeon. When we first met as students, I loved watching him turn the pages of a book. Now his hands are showing signs of age after thousands of handshakes and golf swings and miles of signatures. They are, like their owner, weathered but still expressive, attractive and resilient.
Soon after Bill came to my rescue with chicken soup and orange juice, we became inseparable. In between cramming for finals and finishing up my first year of concentration on children, we spent long hours driving around in his 1970 burnt-orange Opel station wagon— truly one of the ugliest cars ever manufactured—or hanging out at the beach house on Long Island Sound near Milford, Connecticut, where he lived with his roommates, Doug Eakeley, Don Pogue and Bill Cole-man. At a party there one night, Bill and I ended up in the kitchen talking about what each of us wanted to do after graduation. I still didn't know where I would live and what I would do because my interests in child advocacy and civil rights didn't dictate a particular path. Bill was absolutely certain: He would go home to Arkansas and run for public office. A lot of my classmates said they intended to pursue public service, but Bill was the only one who you knew for certain would actually doit.
I told Bill about my summer plans to clerk at Treuhaft, Walker and Burnstein, a small law firm in Oakland, California, and he announced that he would like to go to California with me. I was astonished. I knew he had signed on to work in Senator George McGovern's presidential campaign and that the campaign manager, Gary Hart, had asked Bill to organize the South for McGovern. The prospect of driving from one Southern state to another convincing Democrats both to support McGovern and to oppose Nixon's policy in Vietnam excited him. Although Bill had worked in Arkansas on campaigns for Senator J. William Fulbright and others, and in Connecticut for Joe Duffey and Joe Lieberman, he'd never had the chance to be in on the ground floor of a presidential campaign.
I tried to let the news sink in. I was thrilled.
"Why," I asked, "do you want to give up the opportunity to do something you love to follow me to California?"
"For someone I love, that's why," he said.
He had decided, he told me, that we were destined for each other, and he didn't want to let me go just after he'd found me.
Bill and I shared a small apartment near a big park not far from the University of California at Berkeley campus where the Free Speech Movement started in 1964. I spent most of my time working for Mai Burnstein researching, writing legal motions and briefs for a child custody case. Meanwhile, Bill explored Berkeley, Oakland and San Francisco. On weekends, he took me to the places he had scouted, like a restaurant in North Beach or a vintage clothing store on Telegraph Avenue. I tried teaching him tennis, and we both experimented with cooking. I baked him a peach pie, something I associated with Arkansas, although I had yet to visit the state, and together we produced a palatable chicken curry for any and all occasions we hosted. Bill spent most of his time reading and then sharing with me his thoughts about books like To the Finland Station by Edmund Wilson. During our long walks, he often broke into song, frequently crooning one of his Elvis Presley favorites.
People have said that I knew Bill would be President one day and went around telling anyone who would listen. I don't remember thinking that until years later, but I had one strange encounter at a small restaurant in Berkeley. I was supposed to meet Bill, but I was held up at work and arrived late. There was no sign of him, and I asked the waiter if he had seen a man of his description. A customer sitting nearby spoke up, saying, "He was here for a long time reading, and I started talking to him about books. I don't know his name, but he's going to be President someday." "Yeah, right," I said, "but do you know where he went?"
At the end of the summer, we returned to New Haven and rented the ground floor of 21 Edgewood Avenue for seventy-five dollars a month. That bought us a living room with a fireplace, one small bedroom, a third room that served as both study and dining area, a tiny bathroom and a primitive kitchen. The floors were so uneven that plates would slide off the dining table if we didn't keep little wooden blocks under the table legs to level them. The wind howled through cracks in the walls that we stuffed with newspapers. But despite it all, I loved our first house. We shopped for furniture at the Goodwill and Salvation Army stores and were quite proud of our student decor.
Our apartment was a block away from the Elm Street Diner, which we frequented because it was open all night. The local Y down the street had a yoga class that I joined, and Bill agreed to take with me—as long as I didn't tell anybody else. He also came along to the Cathedral of Sweat, Yale's gothic sports center, to run mindlessly around the mezzanine track. Once he started running, he kept going. I didn't.
We ate often at Basel's, a favorite Greek restaurant, and loved going to the movies at the Lincoln, a small theater set back on a residential street. One evening after a blizzard finally stopped, we decided to go to the movies. The roads were not yet cleared, so we walked there and back through the foot-high snowdrifts, feeling very much alive and in love.
We both had to work to pay our way through law school, on top of the student loans we had taken out. But we still found time for politics. Bill decided to open a McGovern for President headquarters in New Haven, using his own money to rent a storefront. Most of the volunteers were Yale students and faculty because the boss of the local Democratic Party, Arthur Barbieri, was not supporting McGovern. Bill arranged for us to meet Mr. Barbieri at an Italian restaurant. At a long lunch, Bill claimed he had eight hundred volunteers ready to hit the streets to out-organize the regular party apparatus. Barbieri eventually decided to endorse McGovern. He invited us to attend the party meeting at a local Italian club, Melebus Club, where he would announce his endorsement.
The next week, we drove to a nondescript building and entered a door leading to a set of stairs that went down to a series of underground rooms. When Barbieri stood up to speak in the big dining room, he commanded the attention of the local county committee members— mostly men—who were there. He started by talking about the war in Vietnam and naming the boys from the New Haven area who were serving in the military and those who had died. Then he said, "This war isn't worth losing one more boy for. That's why we should support George McGovern, who wants to bring our boys home." This was not an immediately popular position, but as the night wore on, he pressed his case until he got a unanimous vote of support. And he delivered on his commitment, first at the state convention and then in the election when New Haven was one of the few places in America that voted for McGovern over Nixon.
After Christmas, Bill drove up from Hot Springs to Park Ridge to spend a few days with my family. Both my parents had met him the previous summer, but I was nervous because my dad was so uninhibited in his criticism of my boyfriends. I wondered what he would say to a Southern Democrat with Elvis sideburns. My mother had told me that in my father's eyes, no man would be good enough for me. She appreciated Bill's good manners and willingness to help with the dishes. But Bill really won her over when he found her reading a philosophy book from one of her college courses and spent the next hour or so discussing it with her. It was slow going at first with my father, but he warmed up over games of cards, and in front of the television watching football bowl games. My brothers basked in Bill's attention. My friends liked him too. After I introduced him to Betsy Johnson, her mother, Roslyn, cornered me on the way out of their house and said, "I don't care what you do, but don't let this one go. He's the only one I've ever seen make you laugh!"
After school ended in the spring of 1972, I returned to Washington to work again for Marian Wright Edelman. Bill took a full-time job with the McGovern campaign.
My primary assignment in the summer of 1972 was to gather information about the Nixon Administration's failure to enforce the legal ban on granting tax-exempt status to the private segregated academies that had sprung up in the South to avoid integrated public schools. The academies claimed they were created simply in response to parents deciding to form private schools; it had nothing to do with court-ordered integration of the public schools. I went to Atlanta to meet with the lawyers and civil rights workers who were compiling evidence that, on the contrary, proved the academies were created solely for the purpose of avoiding the constitutional mandate of the Supreme Court's decisions, starting with Brown v. Board of Education.
As part of my investigation, I drove to Dothan, Alabama, for the purpose of posing as a young mother moving to the area, interested in enrolling my child in the local all-white academy. I stopped first in the "black" section of Dothan to have lunch with our local contacts. Over burgers and sweetened iced tea, they told me that many of the school districts in the area were draining local public schools of books and equipment to send to the so-called academies, which they viewed as the alternatives for white students. At a local private school, I had an appointment to meet an administrator to discuss enrolling my imaginary child. I went through my role-playing, asking questions about the curriculum and makeup of the student body. I was assured that no black students would be enrolled.
While I was challenging discrimination practices, Bill was in Miami working to ensure McGovern's nomination at the Democratic Convention on July 13, 1972. After the convention, Gary Hart asked Bill to go to Texas, along with Taylor Branch, then a young writer, to join a local Houston lawyer, Julius Glickman, in a triumvirate to run the McGov-ern campaign in that state. Bill asked me if I wanted to go, too. I did, but only if I had a specific job. Anne Wexler, a veteran campaigner I knew from Connecticut, then working on behalf of McGovern, offered me a job heading up the voter registration drive in Texas. I jumped at the chance. Although Bill was the only person I knew when I got to Austin, Texas, in August, I quickly made some of the best friends I've ever had.
In 1972, Austin was still a sleepy town compared to Dallas or Houston. It was, to be sure, the state capital and the home of the University of Texas, but it seemed more typical of the past than of the future of Texas. It would have been hard to predict the explosive growth of high-technology companies that transformed the little city in the Texas hill country into a Sunbelt boom town.
The McGovern campaign set up shop in an empty storefront on West Sixth Street. I had a small cubicle that I rarely occupied because I spent most of my time in the field, trying to register the newly enfranchised eighteen- to twenty-one-year-olds and driving around South Texas working to register black and Hispanic voters. Roy Spence, Garry Mauro and Judy Trabulsi, all of whom stayed active in Texas politics and played a part in the 1992 presidential campaign, became the backbone of our young voter outreach efforts. They thought they could register every eighteen-year-old in Texas, which would, in their minds, turn the electoral tide McGovern's way. They also liked to have fun and introduced me to Scholz's Beer Garden, where we would sit outside at the end of eighteen- or twenty-hour days trying to figure out what else we could do in the face of ever-worsening poll numbers.
Hispanics in South Texas were, understandably, wary of a blond girl from Chicago who didn't speak a word of Spanish. I found allies at the universities, among organized labor, and lawyers with the South Texas Rural Legal Aid Association. One of my guides along the border was Franklin Garcia, a battle-hardened union organizer, who took me places I could never have gone alone and vouched for me to Mexican Americans who worried I might be from the immigration service or some other government agency. One night when Bill was in Brownsville meeting with Democratic Party leaders, Franklin and I picked him up and drove over the border to Matamoros, where Franklin promised a meal we'd never forget. We found ourselves in a local dive that had a decent mariachi band and served the best—the only—barbecued cabrito, or goat head, I had ever eaten. Bill fell asleep at the table while I ate as fast as digestion and politeness permitted.
Betsey Wright, who had previously been active in the Texas State Democratic Party and had been working for Common Cause, came over to work in the campaign. Betsey grew up in West Texas and graduated from the university in Austin. A superb political organizer, she had been all over the state, and she didn't disguise what we'd pretty much figured out—that the McGovern campaign was doomed. Even Senator McGovern's stellar war record as an Air Force bomber pilot, later commemorated in Stephen Ambrose's book The Wild Blue, which should have given his anti-war position credibility in Texas, was buried under the incoming attacks from Republicans and missteps by his own campaign. When McGovern picked Sargent Shriver to succeed Senator Thomas Eagleton as his Vice presidential nominee, we hoped both Shriver's work under President Kennedy and his Kennedy family connection through Jack and Bobby Kennedy's sister Eunice might revive interest.
When the period for voter registration ended thirty days before the election, Betsey asked me to help run the campaign in San Antonio for the last month. I stayed with a college friend and dove into the sights, sounds, smells and food of that beautiful city. I ate Mexican food three times a day, usually at Mario's out on the highway or at Mi Tierra downtown.
When you run a presidential campaign in a state or city, you're always trying to persuade national headquarters to send in the candidates or other top-level surrogates. Shirley MacLaine was the best-known supporter we had coaxed to San Antonio until the campaign announced that McGovern would fly in for a rally in front of the Alamo, a symbolic backdrop. For more than a week, all our efforts were focused on turning out as big a crowd as possible. That experience made me realize how important it is for the staff from campaign headquarters to respect the local people. Campaigns send in advance staff to plan the logistics of a candidate's visit. This was my first time to see an advance team in action. I learned that they operated under tremendous stress, wanted all the essentials—phones, copiers, a stage, chairs, sound system—to appear yesterday, and that in a tight or a losing race, somebody has to be responsible for paying the bills. Every time the advance team ordered something, they'd tell me the money to pay for it would be wired down immediately. But the money never appeared. On the night of the big event, McGovern did a great job. We raised just enough money to pay the local vendors, which turned out to be the only successful venture during my month-long sojourn.
My partner in all this was Sara Ehrman, a member of Senator McGovern's legislative staff who had taken a leave to work on the campaign and later moved to Texas to organize field operations. A political veteran with an effervescent wit, Sara was the embodiment of both maternal warmth and bare-knuckled activism. She never minced words or parsed her opinions, no matter her audience. And she had the energy and spunk of a woman half her age—and still does. She had been running the San Antonio campaign when I walked in one October day and told her I was there to help. We sized each other up and decided we would enjoy the ride together, and it was the start of a friendship that endures today.
It was obvious to all of us that Nixon was going to trounce McGovern in the November election. But, as we soon would learn, this didn't deter Nixon and his operatives from illegally using campaign funds (not to mention official government agencies) to spy on the opposition and finance dirty tricks to help ensure a Republican victory. A botched break-in at Democratic Committee offices at the Watergate complex on June 17, 1972, would lead to the downfall of Richard Nixon. It would also figure in my future plans.
Before returning to our classes at Yale, for which we were enrolled but had not yet attended, Bill and I took our first vacation together to Zihuatanejo, Mexico, then a sleepy little charmer of a town on the Pacific Coast. Between swims in the surf, we spent our time rehashing the election and the failings of the McGovern campaign, a critique that continued for months. So much had gone wrong, including the flawed Democratic National Convention. Among other tactical errors, McGovern arrived at the podium for his acceptance speech in the middle of the night, when no one in the country was awake, let alone watching a political convention on television. Looking back on our McGovern experience, Bill and I realized we still had much to learn about the art of political campaigning and the power of television. That 1972 race was our first rite of political passage.
After completing law school in the spring of 1973, Bill took me on my first trip to Europe to revisit his haunts as a Rhodes Scholar. We landed in London, and Bill proved himself to be a great guide. We spent hours touring Westminster Abbey, the Tate Gallery and Parliament. We walked around Stonehenge and marveled at the greener-than-green hills of Wales. We set out to visit as many cathedrals as we could, aided by a book of meticulously charted walking maps covering a square mile of countryside per page. We meandered from Salisbury to Lincoln to Durham to York, pausing to explore the ruins of a monastery laid waste by Cromwell's troops or wandering through the gardens of a great country estate.
Then at twilight in the beautiful Lake District of England, we found ourselves on the shores of Lake Ennerdale, where Bill asked me to marry him.
I was desperately in love with him but utterly confused about my life and future. So I said, "No, not now." What I meant was, "Give me time."
My mother had suffered from her parents' divorce, and her sad and lonely childhood was imprinted on my heart. I knew that when I decided to marry, I wanted it to be for life. Looking back to that time and to the person I was, I realize how scared I was of commitment in general and of Bill's intensity in particular. I thought of him as a force of nature and wondered whether I'd be up to the task of living through his seasons.
Bill Clinton is nothing if not persistent. He sets goals, and I was one of them. He asked me to marry him again, and again, and I always said no. Eventually he said, "Well, I'm not going to ask you to marry me any more, and if you ever decide you want to marry me then you have to tell me." He would wait me out.
SOON AFTER WE RETURNED FROM EUROPE, BILL OF-fered to take me on another journey—this time to the place he called home.
Bill picked me up at the airport in Little Rock on a bright summer morning in late June. He drove me down streets lined with Victorian houses, past the Governor's Mansion and the State Capitol, built to resemble the Capitol building in Washington. We made our way through the Arkansas River Valley with its low-slung magnolia trees, and into the Ouachita Mountains, stopping at overlooks and dropping by country stores so Bill could introduce me to the people and places he loved. As dusk fell, we arrived, at last, in Hot Springs, Arkansas.
When Bill and I first met, he spent hours telling me about Hot Springs, founded around the hot sulfur springs that Indians had bathed in for centuries and that Hernando De Soto had "discovered" in 1541, believing them to be the fountain of youth. The thoroughbred racetrack and illegal gambling had attracted visitors like Babe Ruth, Al Capone and Minnesota Fats. When Bill was growing up, a lot of the restaurants in town had slot machines, and the nightclubs featured the famous entertainers of the 1950s—Peggy Lee, Tony Bennett, Liberace and Patti Page. Attorney General Robert Kennedy shut down the illegal gambling operations, which slowed business for the big hotels, restaurants and bathhouses on Central Avenue. But the city rebounded, as more and more retirees discovered the area's mild weather, its lakes and natural beauty—and the generous spirit of so many people who lived there.
Hot Springs was Virginia Cassidy Blythe Clinton Dwire Kelley's natural element. Bill's mother was born in Bodcaw, Arkansas, and raised in nearby Hope, eighty miles to the southwest. During World War 11 she attended nursing school in Louisiana, and that's where she met her first husband, William Jefferson Blythe. After the war, they moved to Chicago and lived on the North Side, not far from where my parents were living. When Virginia became pregnant with Bill, she went home to Hope to wait for the baby. Her husband was driving down to see her when he had a fatal accident in Missouri in May of 1946. Virginia was a twenty-three-year-old widow when Bill was born on August 19, 1946. She decided to go to New Orleans to train to become a nurse anesthetist because she knew she could make more money that way to support herself and her new son. She left Bill in the care of her mother and father, and when she got her degree, she returned to Hope to practice.
In 1950, she married Roger Clinton, a hard-drinking car dealer, and moved with him to Hot Springs in 1953. Roger's drinking got worse over the years, and he was violent. At the age of fifteen, Bill was finally big enough to make his stepfather stop beating his mother, at least when he was around. He also tried to look out for his little brother, Roger, ten years younger. Virginia was widowed again in 1967 when Roger Clinton died after a long battle with cancer.
We first met in New Haven during a visit she made to see Bill in the spring of 1972. We were each bewildered by the other. Before Virginia arrived, I had trimmed my own hair (badly) to save money. I didn't use makeup and wore jeans and work shirts most of the time. I was no Miss Arkansas and certainly not the kind of girl Virginia expected her son to fall in love with. No matter what else was going on in her life, Virginia got up early, glued on her false eyelashes and put on bright red lipstick, and sashayed out the door. My style baffled her, and she didn't like my strange Yankee ideas either.
I had a much easier time relating to Virginia's third husband, Jeff Dwire, who became a supportive ally. He owned a beauty parlor and treated Virginia like a queen. He was kind to me from the first day we met and encouraging of my continuing efforts to build a relationship with Bill's mother. Jeff told me to give it time, she would come around.
"Oh, don't worry about Virginia," he would tell me. "She just has to get used to the idea. It's hard for two strong women to get along."
Eventually Virginia and I grew to respect each other's differences and developed a deep bond. We figured out that what we shared was more significant than what we didn't: We both loved the same man.
Bill was coming home to Arkansas and taking a teaching job in Fayetteville, at the University of Arkansas School of Law. I was moving to Cambridge, Massachusetts, to work for Marian Wright Edelman at the newly created Children's Defense Fund (CDF). I rented the top floor of an old house, where I lived alone for the first time. I loved the work, which involved a lot of travel and exposure to problems affecting children and teenagers around the country. In South Carolina I helped investigate the conditions under which juveniles were incarcerated in adult jails. Some of the fourteen- and fifteen-year-olds I interviewed were in jail for minor transgressions. Others were already serious offenders. Either way, none of them should have been sharing cells with hard-core adult criminals, who could prey on them or further educate them in criminality. CDF led an effort to separate out juveniles and provide them with more protection and faster adjudication.
In New Bedford, Massachusetts, I went door to door trying to identify the source of a troubling statistic. At CDF, we took census figures of school-age children and compared those numbers to school enrollments. We often found significant discrepancies, and we wanted to determine where these unaccounted-for children were. Knocking on doors was revelatory and heartbreaking. I found children who weren't in school because of physical disabilities like blindness and deafness. I also found school-age siblings at home, baby-sitting their younger brothers and sisters while their parents worked. On the small back porch off her family's home in a neighborhood of Portuguese-American fishermen, I met a girl in a wheelchair, who told me how much she wanted to go to school. She knew she couldn't go because she couldn't walk.
We submitted the results of our survey to Congress. Two years later, at the urging of CDF and other strong advocates, Congress passed the Education for All Handicapped Children Act, mandating that children with physical, emotional and learning disabilities be educated in the public school system.
Despite the satisfaction of my work, I was lonely and missed Bill more than I could stand. I had taken both the Arkansas and Washington, D.C., bar exams during the summer, but my heart was pulling me toward Arkansas. When I learned that I had passed in Arkansas but failed in D.C., I thought that maybe my test scores were telling me something. I spent a lot of my salary on my telephone bills and was so happy when Bill came to see me over Thanksgiving. We spent our time exploring Boston and talking about our future.
Bill told me he enjoyed teaching and loved living in a rented house on the outskirts of Fayetteville, a friendly, slow-paced college town. But the political world called, and he was trying to recruit a candidate to run against Arkansas's only Republican Congressman, John Paul Haramer-schmidt. He hadn't found another Democrat in northwest Arkansas willing to run against the popular four-term incumbent, and I could tell that he had begun to consider entering the race himself. If he decided to do it, I wasn't sure what it would mean for us. We agreed that I would come down to Arkansas after Christmas 1973 so we could try to figure out where we were heading. By the time I arrived for New Year's, Bill had decided to run for Congress. He believed that the Republican Party would be hurt by the Watergate scandal and that even well-entrenched incumbents could be vulnerable. He was excited by the challenge and had started to put together his campaign.
I was aware of the announcement from Washington that John Doar had been selected by the House Judiciary Committee to head up the impeachment inquiry to investigate President Nixon. We had met Doar at Yale, when he served as a "judge" during a mock trial, in the spring of 1973. As Directors of the Barristers Union, Bill and I were responsible for supervising a simulated case for course credit. Doar, recruited as the trial judge, was a Gary Cooper type: a quiet, lanky lawyer from Wisconsin who had worked in the Kennedy Justice Department to help end segregation in the South. He had argued some of the government's most important voting rights cases in federal court, and he had worked on the ground in Mississippi and Alabama during the most violent episodes of the sixties. In Jackson, Mississippi, he had stepped between angry protesters and armed police to prevent a potential massacre. I admired his courage and his relentless, organized application of the law.
One day early in January, while I was having coffee with Bill in his kitchen, the phone rang. It was Doar asking him to join the impeachment staff he was organizing. He told Bill that he had asked Burke Marshall, his old friend and colleague from the Kennedy Justice Department's Civil Rights Division, to recommend a few young lawyers to work on the inquiry. Bill's name was at the top of the list, along with three other Yale classmates: Michael Conway, Rufus Cormier and Hillary Rodham. Bill told Doar he had decided to run for Congress, but he thought the others on the list might be available. Doar said he would call me next. He offered me a staff position, explaining that the job would pay very little, the hours would be long and most of the work would be painstaking and monotonous. It was, as they say, an offer I couldn't refuse. I couldn't imagine a more important mission at this juncture in American history. Bill was excited for me, and we were both relieved to put our personal discussion on hold for a while longer. With Marian's blessing, I packed my bags and moved from Cambridge into a spare room in Sara Ehrman's Washington apartment. I was on my way to one of the most intense and significant experiences of my life.
The forty-four attorneys involved in the impeachment inquiry worked seven days a week, barricaded in the old Congressional Hotel on Capitol Hill across from the House office buildings in southeast Washington. I was twenty-six years old, awed by the company I was keeping and the historic responsibility we had assumed.
Although Doar headed the staff, there were two teams of lawyers: one selected by Doar and appointed by the Democratic Chairman of the committee, Congressman Peter Rodino of New Jersey; the other, appointed by the Republican ranking member, Congressman Edward Hutchinson of Michigan, and selected by Albert Jenner, the legendary litigator from the Chicago-based firm of Jenner & Block. Seasoned lawyers under Doar directed each area of the investigation. One of them was Bernard Nussbaum, an experienced and pugnacious Assistant U.S. Attorney from New York. Another was Joe Woods, a corporate lawyer from California with a dry wit and meticulous standards, who supervised my work on procedural and constitutional issues. Bob Sack, a lawyer with an elegant writing style who frequently leavened our serious moments with puns and asides, was later appointed to the federal bench by Bill. But most of us were young, eager law school graduates who were willing to work twenty-hour days in makeshift offices, reviewing documents, researching and transcribing tapes.
Bill Weld, later the Republican Governor of Massachusetts, worked with me on the constitutional task force. Fred Altschuler, a superb legal draftsman from California, asked me to help him analyze the reporting structure of the White House staff in order to determine what decisions the President likely made. I shared an office with Tom Bell, a lawyer from Doar's family firm in New Richmond, Wisconsin. Tom and I spent late nights together wrestling over fine points of legal interpretation, but we also laughed a lot. He didn't take himself too seriously and wouldn't let me either.
Andrew Johnson was the only previous President to be impeached, and historians generally agreed that the Congress had misused its solemn constitutional responsibility for partisan political purposes. Dagmar Hamilton, a lawyer and professor of government at the University of Texas, researched English impeachment cases; I took on the American cases. Doar was committed to running a process that the public and history would judge as nonpartisan and fair, no matter what the outcome. Joe Woods and I drafted procedural rules to present to the House Judiciary Committee. I accompanied Doar and Woods to a public meeting of the committee and sat with them at the counsel's table while Doar presented the procedures he wanted the members to accept.
There were never leaks from our investigation, so the media were grasping for any nugget of human interest to report. Since women were rare in this environment, their mere presence was considered newsworthy. The only problem I encountered was when a reporter asked me how it felt "being the Jill Wine Volner of the Impeachment inquiry." We had seen the media focus on Jill Wine Volner, the young lawyer who had served in the office of Special Prosecutor Leon Jaworski. Volner conducted the memorable cross-examination of Rose Mary Woods, Nixon's private secretary, about the missing 18/2-minute section of a particularly significant tape. Volner's legal skills and attractiveness were the subject of many stories.
John Doar was allergic to publicity. He enforced a strict policy of total confidentiality, even anonymity. He warned us not to keep diaries, to place sensitive trash in designated bins, never to talk about work outside the building, never to draw attention to ourselves and to avoid social activities of all kinds (as if we had time). He knew that discretion was the only way to achieve a fair and dignified process. When he heard the reporter ask the question comparing me to Volner, I knew I would never be let out in public again.
After working on procedures, I moved on to research the legal grounds for a presidential impeachment and wrote a long memo summarizing my conclusions about what did—and did not—constitute an impeachable offense. Years later, I reread the memo. I still agreed with its assessment of the kinds of "high Crimes and Misdemeanors" the framers of the Constitution intended to be impeachable.
Slowly and surely, Doar's team of lawyers put together evidence that made a compelling case for the impeachment of Richard Nixon. One of the most meticulous, inspirational and demanding lawyers with whom I have ever worked, Doar insisted that no one draw conclusions until all the facts were evaluated. In those days before personal computers, he directed us to use index cards to keep track of the facts, the same method he had applied in the civil rights cases he tried. We typed one fact per card—the date of a memo, the topic of a meeting—and cross-referenced it with other facts. Then we looked for patterns. By the end of the inquiry, we had compiled more than five hundred thousand index cards.
Our work accelerated after we received the subpoenaed tapes from the Watergate Grand Jury. Doar asked some of us to listen to the tapes to further our understanding of them. It was hard work sitting alone in a windowless room trying to make sense of the words and to glean their context and meaning. And then there was what I called the "tape of tapes." Richard Nixon taped himself listening to earlier tapes he had made of himself and discussing what he heard on them with his staff. He justified and rationalized what he had previously said in order to deny or minimize his involvement in ongoing White House efforts to defy the laws and the Constitution. I would hear the President saying things like, "What I meant when I said that was..." or, "Here's what I was really trying to say ..." It was extraordinary to listen to Nixon's rehearsal for his own cover-up.
On July 19, 1974, Doar presented proposed articles of impeachment that specified the charges against the President. The House Judiciary Committee approved three articles of impeachment citing abuse of power, obstruction of justice and contempt of Congress. The charges against President Nixon included paying off witnesses to silence them or influence their testimony, misusing the Internal Revenue Service to obtain the tax records of private citizens, directing the FBI and the Secret Service to spy on Americans and maintaining a secret investigative unit within the Office of the President. The votes were bipartisan, earning the confidence of both the Congress and the American public. Then, on August 5, the White House released transcripts of the June 23, 1972, tape often called the "smoking gun," on which Nixon approved a cover-up of the money used by his reelection committee for illegal purposes.
Nixon resigned the Presidency on August 9, 1974, sparing the nation an agonizing and divisive vote in the House and trial in the Senate. The Nixon impeachment process of 1974 forced a corrupt President from office and was a victory for the Constitution and our system of laws. Even so, some of us on the committee staff came away from the experience sobered by the gravity of the process. The tremendous powers of congressional committees and special prosecutors were only as fair and just and constitutional as the men and women who wielded them.
Suddenly I was out of work. Our close-knit group of lawyers met for one last dinner together before we scattered to the four winds. Everyone talked excitedly about plans for the future. I was undecided, and when Bert Jenner asked me what I wanted to do, I said I wanted to be a trial lawyer, like him. He told me that would be impossible.
"Why?" I asked.
"Because you won't have a wife."
"What on earth does that mean?"
Bert explained that without a wife at home to take care of all my personal needs, I would never be able to manage the demands of everyday life, like making sure I had clean socks for court. I've since wondered whether Jenner was pulling my leg or making a serious point about how tough the law still could be for women. Ultimately it didn't matter; I chose to follow my heart instead of my head. I was moving to Arkansas.
"Are you out of your mind?" said Sara Ehrman when I broke the news. "Why on earth would you throw away your future?"
That spring, I had asked Doar for permission to visit Bill in Fay-etteville. He didn't like the idea but grudgingly gave me a weekend off. While there I went with Bill to a dinner party where I met some of his law school colleagues, including Wylie Davis, then the Dean. As I was leaving, Dean Davis told me to let him know if I ever wanted to teach. Now I decided to take him up on the idea. I called to ask if the offer was still open, and he said it was. I asked him what I'd be teaching, and he said he would tell me when I got there in about ten days to start classes.
My decision to move did not come out of the blue. Bill and I had been pondering our predicament since we started dating. If we were to be together, one of us had to give ground. With the unexpected end of my work in Washington, I had the time and space to give our relationship—and Arkansas—a chance. Despite her misgivings, Sara offered to drive me down. Every few miles, she asked me if I knew what I was doing, and I gave her the same answer every time: "No, but I'm going anyway."
I've sometimes had to listen hard to my own feelings to decide what was right for me, and that can make for some lonely decisions if your friends and family—let alone the public and the press—question your choices and speculate on your motives. I had fallen in love with Bill in law school and wanted to be with him. I knew I was always happier with Bill than without him, and I'd always assumed that I could live a fulfilling life anywhere. If I was going to grow as a person, I knew it was time for me—to paraphrase Eleanor Roosevelt—to do what I was most afraid to do. So I was driving toward a place where I'd never lived and had no friends or family. But my heart told me I was going in the right direction.
On a hot August evening, the day I arrived, I saw Bill give a campaign speech before a good-size crowd in the town square in Benton-ville. I was impressed. Maybe, despite the tough odds, he had a chance. The next day I attended the reception for new law school faculty held by the Washington County Bar Association at the local Holiday Inn. I had been in Arkansas less than forty-eight hours, but I'd been given my assignments. I would be teaching criminal law and trial advocacy and running the legal aid clinic and the prison projects, both of which required that I supervise the students providing legal assistance to the poor and incarcerated. And I'd be doing what I could to help Bill in his campaign.
Bill Bassett, President of the bar association, took me around to meet the local lawyers and judges. He introduced me to Tom Butt, the chancery court judge, saying, "Judge, this is the new lady law professor. She's going to teach criminal law and run the legal aid programs."
"Well," said Judge Butt, peering down at me, "we're glad to have you, but you should know I have no use for legal aid, and I'm a pretty tough S.O.B."
I managed to smile and say, "Well, it's nice meeting you, too, Judge." But I wondered what on earth I had gotten myself into.
Classes started the next morning. I had never taught law school before and was barely older than most of my students, younger than some. The only other woman on the faculty, Elizabeth "Bess" Osenbaugh, became a close friend. We talked about problems in the law and in life, usually over turkey sandwiches on kaiser rolls from Fayetteville's closest thing to a real deli. Though in his seventies, Robert Leflar was still teaching his legendary conflicts of law course in Fayetteville, and an equally renowned course in appellate judging at New York University Law School. He and his wife, Helen, befriended me, and during the first summer I was there, let me stay in their native stone and wood house designed by the prize-winning Arkansas architect Fay Jones. I had good-natured debates with Al Witte, who claimed the title of toughest law professor but was really a softie underneath. I appreciated the kindness of Milt Copeland, with whom I shared an office. And I admired the activism and scholarship of Mort Gitelman, who championed civil rights.
Just as the semester was beginning, Virginia's husband, Jeff Dwire, died suddenly from heart failure. It was devastating for Virginia, who was widowed for the third time, and for Bill's brother, Roger, who was ten years younger and had developed a close relationship with Jeff. Losing Jeff was painful for all of us. Virginia had endured so much over the years. I was amazed at her resilience and saw the same trait in Bill, who had emerged from his difficult childhood without a shred of bitterness. If anything, his experiences have made him more empathetic and optimistic. His energy and disposition drew people to him, and until stories emerged during his presidential campaign very few knew about the painful circumstances he had endured.
Bill returned to the campaign trail after Jeff's funeral, and I explored life in a small college town. After the intensity of New Haven and Washington, the friendliness, slower pace and beauty of Fayetteville were a welcome tonic.
One day when I was standing in line at the A&P, the cashier looked up and asked me, "Are you the new lady law professor?" I said I was, and she told me I was teaching one of her nephews, who had said I was "not bad." Another time I dialed information looking for a student who hadn't shown up for a class conference. When I told the operator the student's name, she said, "He's not home."
"Excuse me?"
"He's gone camping," she informed me. I had never before lived in a place so small, friendly and Southern, and I loved it. I went to Arkansas Razorbacks football games and learned to "call the hogs." When Bill was in town, we spent evenings with friends eating barbecue and weekends playing volleyball at the home of Richard Richards, another of our colleagues on the law school faculty. Or we got together for a round of Charades organized by Bess Osenbaugh.
Carl Whillock, then an administrator at the university, and his delightful wife, Margaret, lived in a big yellow house across the street from the law school. They were the first people to invite me over, and we became fast friends. Margaret had been left by her first husband when her six children were under ten. Conventional wisdom decreed that no man would assume the burden of marriage to a divorcee with six kids, no matter how vivacious and attractive she was. But Carl didn't follow convention, and he signed on for the whole load. I once introduced Margaret to Eppie Lederer, otherwise known as Ann Landers, at the White House. "Honey, your husband deserves sainthood!" Eppie exclaimed after she heard Margaret's story. She was right.
Ann and Morriss Henry also became close friends. Ann, a lawyer, was active in politics and community affairs on her own and on behalf of Morriss, who served in the State Senate. She also had three children and was deeply involved in their schools and sports programs. Ann, who freely expressed her well-informed opinions, was superb company.
Diane Blair became my closest friend. Like me, she was a transplant from Washington, D.C., who had moved to Fayetteville with her first husband. She taught political science at the university and was considered one of the best professors on campus. We played tennis and traded favorite books. She wrote extensively about Arkansas and Southern politics, and her book about the first woman to be elected to the Senate on her own, Hattie Caraway, Democrat from Arkansas, was sparked by her strong convictions about women's rights and roles.
During the national debate about whether or not the country should ratify the Equal Rights Amendment to the Constitution, Diane debated ultraconservative activist Phyllis Schlafly in front of the Arkansas General Assembly. I helped prepare her for the Valentine's Day confrontation in 1975. Diane won the debate hands down, but both of us knew that the combination of religious and political opposition to the ERA in Arkansas wouldn't yield to compelling arguments, logic or evidence.
Diane and I regularly met for lunch in the Student Union. We always chose a table by the big windows that looked out toward the Ozark Hills and share stories and gossip. She and I also spent long hours with Ann at the Henrys' backyard pool. They loved hearing about the cases I handled at the Legal Aid clinic, and I often sought their opinions about some of the attitudes I encountered. One day, the Washington County prosecuting attorney, Mahlon Gibson, called to tell me an indigent prisoner accused of raping a twelve-year-old girl wanted a woman lawyer. Gibson had recommended that the criminal court judge, Maupin Cummings, appoint me. I told Mahlon I really didn't feel comfortable taking on such a client, but Mahlon gently reminded me that I couldn't very well refuse the judge's request. When I visited the alleged rapist in the county jail, I learned that he was an uneducated "chicken catcher." His job was to collect chickens from the large warehouse farms for one of the local processing plants. He denied the charges against him and insisted that the girl, a distant relative, had made up her story. I conducted a thorough investigation.and obtained expert testimony from an eminent scientist from New York, who cast doubt on the evidentiary value of the blood and semen the prosecutor claimed proved the defendant's guilt in the rape. Because of that testimony, I negotiated with the prosecutor for the defendant to plead guilty to sexual abuse. When I appeared with my client before Judge Cummings to present that plea, he asked me to leave the courtroom while he conducted the necessary examination to determine the factual basis for the plea. I said, "Judge, I can't leave. I'm his lawyer."
"Well," said the judge, "I can't talk about these things in front of a lady."
"Judge," I reassured him, "don't think of me as anything but a lawyer."
The judge walked the defendant through his plea and then sentenced him. It was shortly after this experience that Ann Henry and I discussed setting up Arkansas's first rape hot line.
A few months into my new life, I received a call from a female jailer in the Benton County jail, north of Fayetteville. She told me about a woman who had been arrested for disturbing the peace by preaching the gospel on the streets of Bentonville; she was scheduled to appear before a judge who intended to send her down to the state mental hospital because nobody knew what else to do with her. The jailer asked me to come as soon as I could because she didn't think the lady was crazy, just "possessed by the Lord's spirit."
When I got to the courthouse, I met the jailer and the inmate, a gentle-looking soul wearing an ankle-length dress and clutching her well-worn Bible. She explained that Jesus had sent her to preach in Bentonville and that, if released, she would go right back out to continue her mission. When I learned that she was from California, I persuaded the judge to buy her a bus ticket home instead of ordering her to be committed to the state hospital, and I convinced her that California needed her more than Arkansas.
Bill had won the primary for Congress and the Democratic runoff in June, with a little help from my father and my brother Tony, who spent a few weeks in May doing campaign grunt work, putting up posters and answering phones. It still amazes me that my diehard Republican father worked for Bill's election, a testament to how much he had come to love and respect him.
By Labor Day, Bill's campaign was picking up momentum, and the Republicans began a barrage of personal attacks and dirty tricks. It was my first up-close exposure to the efficacy of lies and manipulation in a campaign.
When President Nixon was in Fayetteville for the 1969 Texas vs. Arkansas football game, a young man climbed into a tree to protest the Vietnam War—and Nixon's presence on campus. Five years later, Bill's political opponents claimed that Bill was the guy in the tree. It didn't matter that Bill was studying in Oxford, England, at the time, four thousand miles away. For years after, I ran into people who believed the charge.
One of Bill's mailings to voters was not delivered, and the bales of postcards were later found stashed behind a post office. Other incidents of sabotage were reported, but no foul play could be proved. When election night came that November, Bill lost by 6,000 votes out of over 170,000 cast—52 to 48 percent. Long after midnight, as Bill, Virginia, Roger and I were leaving the little house that had served as Bill's campaign headquarters, the phone rang. I picked it up, sure that it would be some friend or supporter calling to commiserate. Someone shouted into the phone, "I'm so glad that nigger-loving Commie fag Bill Clinton lost," and then hung up. What could inspire such bile? I thought. It was a question I would ask many times in the years ahead.
At the end of the school year I decided to take a long trip back to Chicago and the East Coast to visit friends and people who had offered me jobs. I still wasn't sure what to do with my life. On the way to the airport, Bill and I passed a red brick house near the university with a "For Sale" sign out front. I casually mentioned that it was a sweet-looking little house and never gave it a second thought. After a few weeks of traveling and thinking, I decided I wanted to return to my life in Arkansas and to Bill. When Bill picked me up, he asked, "Do you remember that house you liked? Well, I bought it, so now you'd better marry me because I can't live in it by myself."
Bill proudly drove up the driveway and ushered me inside. The house had a screened-in porch, a living room with a beamed cathedral ceiling, a fireplace, a big bay window, a good-sized bedroom and bathroom and a kitchen that needed a lot of work. Bill had already bought an old wrought-iron bed at a local antiques store and had been to Wal-Mart for sheets and towels.
This time I said "yes."
We were married in the living room on October 11, 1975, by the Reverend Vic Nixon. Vic, a local Methodist minister, and his wife, Freddie, had worked on Bill's campaign. There for the ceremony were my parents and brothers; Virginia and Roger; Johanna Branson; Betsy Johnson Ebeling, now married to our high school classmate Tom; F. H. Martin, who had served as treasurer of Bill's 1974 campaign, and his wife, Myrna; Marie Clinton, Bill's cousin; Dick Atkinson, a friend from Yale Law School, who had joined us on the law school faculty; Bess Os-enbaugh and Patty Howe, a close friend who had grown up with Bill in Hot Springs. I wore a lace-and-muslin Victorian dress I had found shopping with my mother the night before. I walked into the room on my father's arm, and the minister said, "Who will give away this woman?" We all looked at my father expectantly. But he didn't let go. Finally Rev. Nixon said, "You can step back now, Mr. Rodham."
After the ceremony, Ann and Morriss Henry hosted a reception in their big backyard, where a few hundred friends gathered to celebrate with us.
After all that has happened since, I'm often asked why Bill and I have stayed together. It's not a question I welcome, but given the public nature of our lives, it's one I know will be asked again and again. What can I say to explain a love that has persisted for decades and has grown through our shared experiences of parenting a daughter, burying our parents and tending our extended families, a lifetime's worth of friends, a common faith and an abiding commitment to our country? All I know is that no one understands me better and no one can make me laugh the way Bill does. Even after all these years, he is still the most interesting, energizing and fully alive person I have ever met. Bill Clinton and I started a conversation in the spring of 1971, and more than thirty years later we're still talking.
BILL CLINTON'S FIRST ELECTION VICTORY AS ATTORNEY General of Arkansas in 1976 was anticlimactic. He had won the primary in May and had no Republican opponent. The big show that year was the presidential contest between Jimmy Carter and Gerald Ford.
Bill and I had met Carter the year before when he gave a speech at the University of Arkansas. He had sent two of his top lieutenants, Jody Powell and Frank Moore, to Fayetteville to help in Bill's 1974 campaign, a sure sign he was surveying the political landscape with an eye toward a national run.
Carter introduced himself to me by saying, "Hi, I'm Jimmy Carter and I'm going to be President." That caught my attention, so I watched and listened closely. He understood the mood of the country and bet that post-Watergate politics would create an opening for a newcomer from outside Washington who could appeal to Southern voters. Carter correctly concluded he had as good a chance as any, and as his introduction implied, he certainly had the confidence necessary to undertake the ego-mangling of a presidential campaign.
He also guessed that President Ford's pardon of Richard Nixon would be a good issue for the Democrats. Although I believed Ford's pardon was the right decision for the country, I agreed with Carter's analysis that it would remind voters that Gerald Ford had been Richard Nixon's choice to succeed the disgraced Spiro Agnew as Vice President.
At the end of our meeting, Carter asked me if I had any advice for him.
"Well, Governor," I said, "I wouldn't go around telling people you're going to be President. That could be a little off-putting to some."
"But," he replied with that trademark smile, "I am going to be."
With Bill's election assured, we both felt free to get involved in Carter's campaign when he became the Democratic nominee. We went to the July convention in New York City to talk to his staff about working for him in the election. Then we left for a glorious two-week vacation in Europe that included a pilgrimage to the Basque town of Guernica. I had wanted to visit the site that inspired Picasso's masterpiece since Don Jones showed my Methodist youth group a reproduction of the painting. Twentieth-century warfare started in Guernica in 1937 when Francisco Franco, Spain's fascist dictator, called in the Luftwaffe, Hitler's air force, to annihilate the town. Picasso captured the horror and panic of the massacre in a painting that became an anti-war emblem. When Bill and I walked Guernica's streets and drank coffee in the central plaza in 1976, the rebuilt town looked like any other mountain village. But the painting had branded Franco's crime into my memory.
Upon our return to Fayetteville, Carter's staff asked Bill to head the campaign in Arkansas and me to be the field coordinator in Indiana. Indiana was a heavily Republican state, but Carter thought his Southern roots and farming background might appeal even to Republican voters. I thought it was a long shot, but I was game to try. My job was to set up a campaign in every county, which meant finding local people to work under the direction of regional coordinators, mostly brought in from around the country. The Indianapolis campaign office was in a building that had housed an appliance store and a bail-bonding firm. We were right across the street from the city jail, and the neon sign flashing "Bail Bondsman" still hung above the Carter-Mondale posters in the front windows.
I learned a lot in Indiana. One night I had dinner with a group of older men who were in charge of the Democratic Party's get-out-the-vote efforts for Election Day. I was the only woman at the table. They wouldn't give me any specifics, and I kept pressing for details about how many phone calls, cars and door hangers they planned to put out on Election Day. All of a sudden, one of the men reached across the table and grabbed me by my turtleneck. "Just shut up, will you. We said we'd do it, we will, and we don't have to tell you how!" I was scared. I knew he had been drinking, and I also knew that all eyes were on me. My heart was beating fast as I looked him in the eye, removed his hands from my neck and said, "First, don't ever touch me again. Second, if you were as fast with the answers to my questions as you are with your hands, I'd have the information I need to do my job. Then I could leave you alone—which is what I'm going to do now." My knees were shaking, but I got up and walked out.
Even though Carter did not carry Indiana, I was thrilled that he won the national election, and I looked forward to the new administration. But Bill and I had more immediate concerns. We had to move to Little Rock, which meant leaving the house we had been married in. We bought a 980-square-foot house on a quaint street in the Hillcrest section not far from the Capitol. Fayetteville was too far to commute, so I couldn't continue teaching at the university, which saddened me because I enjoyed my colleagues and students. I had to decide what to do next, and I didn't think it was a good idea to work for any state-funded institution or in any other public job such as prosecutor, defender or legal aid lawyer where my work might overlap or conflict with that of the Attorney General. I began to seriously consider joining a private firm, a career choice I had resisted before. Representing private clients, I thought, would be an important experience and would help us financially since Bill's salary as Attorney General would be $26,500.
The Rose Law Firm was the most venerable firm in Arkansas and reputed to be the oldest firm west of the Mississippi River. I had gotten to know one of the partners, Vince Foster, while I was running the legal aid clinic at the law school. When I tried to send law students into Judge Butt's court to represent indigent clients, the judge required the students to qualify their clients under a nineteenth-century statute that permitted free legal assistance only when a person's assets were worth no more than ten dollars and the clothes on his or her back. It was an impossible standard to meet for anyone who owned an old clunker car or a television or anything else worth more than ten dollars. I wanted to change the law, and I needed the help of the Arkansas Bar Association to do it. I also wanted the bar to provide financial assistance to the legal aid clinic at the law school to help pay for a full-time administrator and legal secretary since it provided real-world experience to future lawyers. Vince was the head of the bar committee that oversaw legal aid, so I went to visit him. He enlisted several other leading lawyers to help me, including Henry Woods, the state's premier trial lawyer, and William R. Wilson, Jr., a self-proclaimed mule-skinner's assistant—a "swamper"—who was also one of the best lawyers around. Judge Butt and I appeared before the state bar's executive committee and presented our opposing arguments. The committee voted to support the clinic and endorsed repealing the statute, thanks to the support Vince recruited.
After the 1976 election, Vince and another Rose Firm partner, Herbert C. Rule III, came to see me with a job offer. In keeping with the firm's steadfast efforts to follow proper procedures, Herb, an erudite Yale College alum, had already obtained an opinion from the American Bar Association that approved the employment by a law firm of a lawyer married to a state's Attorney General and set forth the steps to be taken to avoid conflicts of interest.
Not all the Rose Firm lawyers were as enthusiastic as Vince and Herb about having a woman join them. There had never been a woman associate, although the firm had hired a female law clerk in the 1940s, Elsijane Roy, who stayed only a few years before leaving to become the permanent clerk for a federal judge. Later appointed to succeed that judge by President Carter, she became the first woman appointed to the federal bench in Arkansas. Two of the senior partners, William Nash and J. Gaston Williamson, were Rhodes Scholars, and Gaston had served on the committee that had selected Bill for his Rhodes Scholarship. Herb and Vince took me around to meet them and the other lawyers, fifteen in all. When the partners voted to hire me, Vince and Herb gave me a copy of Hard Times by Charles Dickens. But who could have known what an appropriate gift that would be?
I joined the litigation section, headed by Phil Carroll, a thoroughly decent man, former prisoner of war in Germany and first-class lawyer who became President of the Arkansas Bar Association. The two lawyers with whom I worked most were Vince and Webster Hubbell.
Vince was one of the best lawyers I've ever known and one of the best friends I've ever had. If you remember Gregory Peck's performance as Atticus Finch in To Kill a Mockingbird, you can picture Vince. He actually looked the part, and his manner was similar: steady, courtly, sharp but understated, the sort of person you would want around in times of trouble.
Vince and I had adjacent offices at the firm, and we shared a secretary. He was born and raised in Hope, Arkansas. The backyard of his boyhood home bordered the backyard of Bill's grandparents, with whom Bill lived until he was four. Bill and Vince played together as little boys, although they lost touch when Bill moved to Hot Springs in 1953. When Bill ran for Attorney General, Vince became a strong supporter.
Webb Hubbell was a big, burly, likeable man, a former University of Arkansas football star and an avid golfer, which endeared him to Bill from the outset. He was also a great raconteur in a state where storytelling is a way of life. Webb had a wealth of experience in all sorts of fields; he would eventually become Mayor of Little Rock, and he served for a time as Chief Justice of the Arkansas Supreme Court. He was great fun to work with and a loyal, supportive friend.
Hubbell looked like a good oF boy, but he was a creative litigator, and I loved to listen to him talk about arcane Arkansas law. His memory was phenomenal. He also had a tricky back that would sometimes go out on him. Once Webb and I stayed at the office all night working on a brief that was due the next day. Webb lay on the floor on his hurting back spouting citations of cases back to the nineteenth century; my job was to run around the law library hunting them down.
In the first jury trial I handled on my own, I defended a canning company against a plaintiff who found the rear end of a rat in the can of pork and beans he opened for dinner one night. He didn't actually eat it but claimed that the mere sight was so disgusting that he couldn't stop spitting, which in turn interfered with his ability to kiss his fiancee. He sat through the trial spitting into a handkerchief and looking miserable. There was no doubt that something had gone wrong in the processing plant, but the company refused to pay the plaintiff since it argued that he hadn't really been damaged; and besides, the rodent parts which had been sterilized might be considered edible in certain parts of the world. Although I was nervous in front of the jury, I warmed to the task of convincing them that my client was in the right and was relieved when they awarded the plaintiff only nominal damages. For years after, Bill used to kid me about the "rat's ass" case and mimic the plaintiff's claim he could no longer kiss his fiancee because he was so busy spitting.
I also continued my work in child advocacy through my law practice. Beryl Anthony, an attorney in El Dorado, asked me to help him represent a couple who wanted to adopt the foster child who had lived with them for two and a half years. The Arkansas Department of Human Services refused, citing a policy against permitting foster parents to adopt. I'd encountered the same policy in Connecticut when I was working as a law student at legal services. Beryl, married to Vince's older sister, Sheila, had heard from Vmce about my interest in such issues. I jumped at the chance to work on the case. Our clients, a local stockbroker and his wife, had the means to fund an effective challenge to the policy. The Arkansas Department of Human Services had its own lawyers, so I didn't have to worry about going up against the Attorney General.
Beryl and I presented expert testimony about the stages of a child's development and the degree to which a child's emotional well-being depends on the presence of a consistent caregiver in early life. We persuaded the judge that the contract the foster parents had signed— agreeing not to adopt—should not be enforceable if its terms were contrary to the child's best interests. We won the case but our victory didn't change the state's formal policy about foster children's placement because the state didn't appeal the decision. Thankfully our victory did serve as a precedent that the state eventually adopted. Beryl was elected to Congress in 1978, where he served for fourteen years, and Sheila Foster Anthony became a lawyer herself.
My experience on this case and others convinced me that Arkansas needed a statewide organization devoted to advocating for children's rights and interests. I was not alone in thinking that. Dr. Bettye Cald-well, an internationally recognized professor of child development at the University of Arkansas at Little Rock, knew of my work and asked me to form one with her and other Arkansans concerned about the status of children in the state. We founded the Arkansas Advocates for Children and Families, which spearheaded reforms in the child welfare system and continues to advocate for children today.
While I was working on lawsuits at Rose and taking on child advocacy cases pro bono, I was also learning about the expectations and unspoken mores of life in the South. Wives of elected officials were constantly scrutinized. In 1974 Barbara Pryor, wife of the Governor-elect, David Pryor, had drawn withering criticism for her newly permed short hairdo. I liked Barbara and thought the public attention to her hair was ridiculous. (Little did I know.) I assumed that as a busy mother of three sons she was looking for an easy style. In a show of solidarity, I decided to subject my stubbornly straight hair to a tight permanent that would, I thought, replicate Barbara's. I had to have the permanent applied twice in order to get the desired effect. When I showed up with my frizzed hair, Bill just shook his head, wondering why I had cut off and "messed up" my long hair.
One of the reasons Vince and Webb became such good friends is that they accepted me for who I was, often poking fun at my intensity or explaining patiently why some idea of mine would never fly. We made it a habit to escape from the office for regular lunches, often going to an Italian restaurant called the Villa. It was a checkered-cloth-and-candle-in-the-Chianti-bottle sort of place near the university, where we could avoid the usual business crowds. It was fun to exchange war stories about our battles in the Arkansas court system or just to talk about our families. Of course, this too raised some eyebrows. In Little Rock at that time, women did not usually have meals with men who were not their husbands.
While being a politician's wife as well as a trial lawyer occasionally got people talking when I stepped out in public, I was not usually recognized. Once another attorney and I chartered a small plane to fly to Harrison, Arkansas, for a court appearance, only to land at the airstrip and find there were no taxis. I walked over to a group of men standing around the hangar. "Is anybody driving into Harrison?" I asked. "We need to go to the courthouse."
Without turning around, one man offered, "I am. I'll take you."
The man drove an old junker stuffed with tools, so we all crammed into the front seat and headed for Harrison. We barreled along with the radio blaring until the news came on and the announcer said, "Today, Attorney General Bill Clinton said that he would be investigating Judge So-and-so for misbehavior on the bench . . ." All of a sudden our driver shouted, "Bill Clinton! You know that son of a bitch Bill Clinton?"
I braced myself and said, "Yeah, I do know him. In fact, I'm married to him."
That got the man's attention, and he turned to look at me for the first time. "You're married to Bill Clinton? Well, he's my favorite son of a bitch, and I'm his pilot!"
This was when I noticed that our Samaritan had a black disk over one eye. He was called One-Eyed Jay, and sure enough, had been flying Bill in little airplanes all over. Now I just hoped old One-Eyed Jay's driving was as good as his flying, and I was grateful when he delivered us to the courthouse safe and sound, if a bit rumpled.
The years 1978 through 1980 were among the most difficult, exhilarating, glorious and heartbreaking in my life. After so many years of talking about the ways Bill could improve conditions in Arkansas, he finally had a chance to act when he was elected Governor in 1978. Bill started his two-year term with the energy of a racehorse exploding from the gate. He had made dozens of campaign promises, and he started fulfilling them in his first days in office. Before long he had delivered a thick, detailed budget book to every legislator and presented sweeping initiatives to create a new economic development department, reform rural health care, overhaul the state's inadequate education system and fix the state highways. Since new revenue would be needed to support these measures, particularly road improvement, taxes had to be raised. Bill and his advisers thought the people would accept an increase in car tag fees for the promise of better highways. But that proved to be woefully wrong.
In 1979 I was made a partner at the Rose Law Firm, and I devoted as much energy as possible to my job. Often I hosted social events at the Governor's Mansion or presided over meetings of the Rural Health Advisory Committee, which Bill had asked me to chair as part of his effort to improve access to quality health care in rural Arkansas. I continued my involvement with Marian Wright Edelman and the Children's Defense Fund and commuted to Washington, D.C., every few months to chair board meetings. And based on my experience and my work on his campaign, President Carter had appointed me to the board of the Legal Services Corporation, a position for which I had to be confirmed by the U.S. Senate. The Corporation was the nonprofit federal program created by Congress and President Nixon that funded legal assistance for the poor. I served with Mickey Kantor, a former legal services lawyer who had represented migrant workers in Florida. He later became a successful lawyer in Los Angeles and served as Chairman of Bill's 1992 presidential campaign.
As if that weren't enough, Bill and I were also trying to have a baby. We both love children, and anyone with kids knows there is never a "convenient" time to start a family. Bill's first term as Governor seemed as inconvenient a time as any. We weren't having any luck until we decided to take a vacation in Bermuda, proving once again the importance of regular time off.
I persuaded Bill to attend Lamaze classes with me, a new enough phenomenon that it prompted many people to wonder why their Governor was planning to deliver our baby. When I was about seven months' pregnant, I was in court, trying a lawsuit with Gaston Williamson and chatting with the judge when I mentioned that Bill and I were attending "birthing" classes every Saturday morning.
"What?" the judge exploded. "I've always supported your husband, but I don't believe a husband has any business being there when the baby is born!" And he wasn't kidding.
Around this same time, in January 1980, the Arkansas Children's Hospital was planning to build a big expansion and needed a good bond rating. Dr. Betty Lowe, the hospital's Medical Director and later Chelsea's pediatrician, asked if I would go with a group of trustees and doctors to help make the case before the rating agencies in New York City. I had gotten so big that I made some people nervous, but I went, and for years Betty told people that the rating agencies agreed with their plans as a way of getting a very pregnant Governor's wife out of their offices before she delivered.
As my March due date drew near, my doctor said I couldn't travel, which meant that I missed the annual White House dinner for the Governors. Bill got back to Little Rock on Wednesday, February 27, in time for my water to break. That threw him and the state troopers into a panic. Bill ran around with the Lamaze list of what to take to the hospital. It recommended bringing a small plastic bag filled with ice, to suck on during labor. As I hobbled to the car, I saw a state trooper loading a thirty-nine-gallon black garbage bag filled with ice into the trunk.
After we arrived at the hospital, it became clear that I would have to have a cesarean, not something we had anticipated. Bill requested that the hospital permit him to accompany me into the operating room, which was unprecedented. He told the administrators that he had gone with his mother to see operations and knew he'd be fine. That he was the Governor certainly helped convince Baptist Hospital to let him in. Soon thereafter the policy was changed to permit fathers in the delivery room during cesarean operations.
Our daughter's birth was the most miraculous and awe-inspiring event in my life. Chelsea Victoria Clinton arrived three weeks early on February 27, 1980, at 11:24 P.M to the great joy of Bill and our families. While I was recovering, Bill took Chelsea in his arms for father-daughter "bonding" laps around the hospital. He would sing to her, rock her, show her off and generally suggest that he had invented fatherhood.
Chelsea has heard us tell stories about her childhood many times: She knows she was named after Judy Collins's version of Joni Mitchell's song "Chelsea Morning," which her father and I heard as we strolled around Chelsea in London, during the wonderful vacation we took over Christmas in 1978. Bill said, "If we ever have a daughter, we should name her Chelsea." And he started singing along.
Chelsea knows how mystified I was by her arrival and how inconsolable she could be when she cried, no matter how much I rocked her. She knows the words I said to her in my effort to calm us both: "Chelsea, this is new for both of us. I've never been a mother before, and you've never been a baby. We're just going to have to help each other do the best we can."
Early on the morning after Chelsea's birth, my law partner Joe Giroir called and asked me if I wanted a ride to work. He was kidding of course, but up until then, I had not succeeded in persuading my partners to formally adopt a parental leave plan. In fact, as I grew bigger and bigger, they just averted their eyes and talked about anything else besides my plans for when the baby came. Once Chelsea arrived, however, they told me to take whatever time I needed.
I was able to take four months off from full-time work to stay home with our new daughter, though with less income. As a partner, I continued to receive a base salary, but my income depended on the fees I generated, which naturally decreased during the time I wasn't working. I never forgot how much more fortunate I was than many women to be given this time with my child. Bill and I both recognized the need for parental leave, preferably paid. We emerged from our experience committed to ensuring that all parents have the option to stay home with their newborn children and to have reliable child care when they return to work. That's why I was so thrilled when the first bill he signed as President was the Family and Medical Leave Act.
We were living in the Governor's Mansion, which had a built-in support system to help with Chelsea. Eliza Ashley, the invaluable cook who had worked in the mansion for decades, loved having a child in the house. Carolyn Huber, whom we had coaxed away from the Rose Law Firm to manage the mansion during Bill's first term, was like a member of the family. Chelsea came to think of her as a surrogate aunt, and her help was priceless. But I never took any of our blessings for granted. As soon as Bill and I decided to start a family, I had begun to plan for a more stable financial future.
Money means almost nothing to Bill Clinton. He is not opposed to making money or owning property; it has simply never been a priority. He's happy when he has enough to buy books, watch movies, go out to dinner and travel. Which is just as well, because as Governor of Arkansas he never made more than $35,000 a year, before taxes. That was a good income in Arkansas, and we lived in the Governor's Mansion and had an official expense account that covered meals, which made it a better one. But I worried that because politics is an inherently unstable profession, we needed to build up a nest egg.
I'm sure I inherited my concerns from my notoriously frugal father, who made smart investments, put his kids through college and retired comfortably. My dad taught me how to follow the stock market when I was still in grade school and frequently reminded me that "money doesn't grow on trees." Only through hard work, savings and prudent investing could you become financially independent. Still, I had never given much thought to savings or investments until I realized that if our growing family were going to have any financial cushion, it would be mostly my responsibility. I started looking for opportunities I could afford. My friend Diane Blair was married to someone who knew the intricacies of the commodities market, and he was willing to share his expertise.
With his gravelly drawl, large frame and silver hair, Jim Blair was an imposing figure and an exceptional lawyer whose clients included the poultry giant Tyson Foods. Jim also held strong political opinions. He championed civil rights, opposed the Vietnam War and supported Senators Fulbright and McGovern against the political tides. He was blessed with a great personal warmth and a mischievous sense of humor. When he married Diane, he found a soul mate, as did she. Bill performed their wedding ceremony in 1979, and I served as their "best person."
The commodities markets were booming in the late 1970s, and Jim had developed a system of trading that was making him a fortune. By 1978, he was doing so well that he encouraged his family and best friends to jump into the market. I was willing to risk $1,000 and let Jim guide my trades through the colorfully named broker Robert "Red" Bone. Red was a former poker player, which made perfect sense, given his calling.
The commodities market is nothing like the stock exchange—in fact, it has more in common with Las Vegas than Wall Street. What investors buy and sell are promises (known as "futures") to purchase or sell certain goods—wheat, coffee, cattle—at a fixed price. If the price is higher when those commodities are brought to market, the investor makes money. Sometimes it's a great deal of money, because each dollar invested can control many times its value in futures. Price fluctuations of a few cents are amplified by huge volumes. On the other hand, if the market in hogbellies or corn is glutted, then the price drops and the investor loses big.
I did my best to educate myself about cattle futures and margin calls to make it less frightening. I won and lost money over the months and followed the markets closely. For a while I opened a smaller, broker-controlled account with another investment firm in Little Rock. But soon after I got pregnant with Chelsea in 1979,1 lost my nerve for gambling. The gains I had made suddenly seemed like real money we could use for our child's higher education. I walked away from the table $100,000 ahead. Jim Blair and his compatriots stayed in the market longer and lost a good deal of the money they had made.
The large return on my investment was examined ad infinitum after Bill became President, although it never became the focus of a serious investigation. The conclusion was that, like many investors at the time, I'd been fortunate. Bill and I weren't so lucky with another investment we made during the same period. Not only did we lose money on a piece of property called Whitewater Estates, the investment would spawn an investigation fifteen years later that endured throughout Bill's Presidency.
It all started one day in the spring of 1978 when a businessman and longtime politico named Jim McDougal approached us with a sure-thing deal: Bill and I entered a partnership with Jim and his young wife, Susan, to buy two-hundred-thirty undeveloped acres on the south bank of the White River in North Arkansas. The plan was to subdivide the site for vacation homes, then sell the lots at a profit. The price was $202,611.20.
Bill had met McDougal in 1968 when Jim was working on Senator J. William Fulbright's reelection campaign and Bill was a twenty-one-year-old summer volunteer. Jim McDougal was a character: charming, witty and eccentric as the day is long. With his white suits and baby blue Bentley, McDougal looked as if he'd just stepped out of a Tennessee Williams play. Despite his colorful habits, he had a solid reputation. He seemed to do business with everybody in the state, including the impeccable Bill Fulbright, for whom he helped make a lot of money in real estate. His credentials were reassuring to both of us. Bill had also made a small real estate investment with McDougal the year before that had turned a reasonable profit, so when Jim suggested Whitewater, it seemed like a good idea.
The North Arkansas Ozarks were booming with second homes for people flocking down south from Chicago and Detroit. The attraction was obvious: forested land with low property taxes in gently rolling countryside bordered by mountains and laced with lakes and rivers that offered some of the best fishing and rafting in the country. If all had gone according to plan, we would have turned over the investment after a few years and that would have been the end of it. We took out bank loans to buy the property, eventually transferring ownership to the Whitewater Development Company, Inc., a separate entity in which we and the McDougals had equal shares. Bill and I considered ourselves passive investors; Jim and Susan managed the project, which was expected to finance itself once the lots started to sell. But by the time the development was surveyed and lots were ready for sale, interest rates had gone through the roof, climbing close to 20 percent by the end of the decade. People could no longer afford to finance second homes. Rather than take a huge loss, we held on to Whitewater, making some improvements and building a model home while hoping for an economic turnaround. From time to time, over the next several years, Jim asked us to write checks to help make interest payments or other contributions, and we never questioned his judgment. We didn't realize that Jim McDougal's behavior was turning the corner from "eccentric" to "mentally unstable" and that he was becoming involved in a raft of dubious business schemes. It would be years before we learned anything about his double life.
Nineteen eighty was a big year for us. We were new parents, and Bill was running for reelection. His opponent in the primary election was a seventy-eight-year-old retired turkey farmer, Monroe Schwarz-lose, who spoke for a lot of rural Democrats when he criticized the increase in the cost of car tags and capitalized on the impression of some that Bill was "out of touch" with Arkansas. Schwarzlose ended up getting one-third of the vote. It didn't help that Jimmy Carter's Presidency was beset by problems. The economy was slowly sinking as interest rates continued to climb. The administration was sidetracked by a series of international crises, culminating in the taking of American hostages in Iran. Some of those troubles spilled over into Arkansas in the spring and summer of 1980, when hundreds of detained Cuban refugees—mostly inmates from prisons and mental hospitals whom Castro released to the United States in the infamous Mariel boat lift-sent to a "resettlement camp" at Fort Chaffee, Arkansas. In late May, the refugees rioted and hundreds broke out of the fort, heading toward the nearby community of Fort Smith. County deputies and local citizens loaded their shotguns and waited for the expected onslaught. The situation was made worse because the Army, under a doctrine known as posse comitatus, had no police authority off the base and were not even empowered to forcefully keep the detainees—who were not technically prisoners—on the grounds. Bill sent state troopers and National Guardsmen to round up the Cubans and control the situation. Then he flew up to oversee the operation.
Bill's actions saved lives and prevented widespread violence. When Bill went back a few days later to follow up, I joined him. There were still signs on gas stations: "All out of ammo, come back tomorrow," and in front of homes: "We shoot to kill." I also attended some tense meetings Bill held with James "Bulldog" Drummond, the frustrated general in command of Fort Chaffee, and representatives from the White House. Bill wanted federal assistance to contain the detainees, but General Drummond said his hands were tied because of orders from above. The White House message seemed to be: "Don't complain, just handle the mess we gave you." Bill had done just that, but there was a big political price to pay for supporting his President.
After the June riots, President Carter had promised Bill that no more Cubans would be sent to Arkansas. In August, the White House broke that promise, closing sites in Wisconsin and Pennsylvania and sending more refugees to Fort Chaffee. That reversal further undermined support for Bill Clinton and Jimmy Carter in Arkansas.
Southerners have an expression to describe something or someone whose luck turns all bad. By now it was clear that Jimmy Carter's Presidency was snakebit. It was harder to admit that Bill Clinton's Governorship was suffering the same fate.
Bill's Republican opponent, Frank White, began running negative ads. Against footage of dark-skinned Cuban rioters, a voice-over announced that "Bill Clinton cares more about Jimmy Carter than he does about Arkansas." I initially dismissed the ads, thinking that everyone in Arkansas knew what a good job Bill had done containing the violence. Then I started fielding questions at school assemblies and civic clubs: "Why did the Governor let the Cubans riot?" "Why didn't the Governor care about us more than about President Carter?" Ads like this one, which demonstrated the power of a negative message, became all too common in 1980, largely because of a strategy employed by the National Conservative Political Action Committee (NCPAC), formed by the Republicans to design and run negative ads all over the country. By October, I thought the polls showing Bill ahead were wrong and that Bill might actually lose. Bill had used a young, abrasive New York pollster, Dick Morris, for his successful 1978 race, but no one on his staff or in his office could stand working with Morris, so they persuaded Bill to use a different team in 1980. I called Morris to ask what he thought was happening. He told me Bill was in real trouble and probably would lose unless he made some kind of dramatic gesture, like repealing the car tag tax or repudiating Carter. I couldn't persuade anyone else to ignore the polls that showed Bill winning. Bill himself was uncertain. He didn't want to break publicly with the President or call a special session to repeal the car tag hike. So he just upped his campaigning and kept on explaining himself to voters.
Right before the election, we had a disturbing conversation with an officer in the National Guard who had been in charge of some of the troops called up to quell riots at the base. He told Bill that his elderly aunt had informed him that she intended to vote for Frank White because Bill had let the Cubans riot. When this officer explained to his aunt that he had been there and knew for a fact that Governor Clinton had stopped the rioting, his aunt said that wasn't true because she had seen what happened on television. The ads trumped not just the news, but personal witness. That 1980 campaign, where truth was turned on its head, convinced me of the piercing power of negative ads to convert voters through distortion.
Exit polls showed Bill winning by a wide margin, but he lost, 52 to 48 percent. He was devastated. The big hotel room his campaign had rented was filled with shocked friends and supporters. He decided he would wait until the next day to make any public comments and asked me to go and thank everyone for their help and invite them to come over to the Governor's Mansion the following morning. The gathering on the back lawn was like a wake. Bill had now lost two elections—one for Congress, one as an incumbent Governor—and many wondered whether this defeat would break him.
Before the week was out we found an old home to buy in the Hill-crest section of Little Rock, near where we had lived before. On two lots, it had a converted attic that we used for Chelsea's nursery. Bill and I are partial to older homes and traditional furniture, so we haunted thrift stores and antique shops. When Virginia visited, she asked us why we liked old things. As she explained, "I've spent my whole life trying to get away from old homes and furniture." When she figured out our taste, though, she cheerfully sent over a Victorian "courting couch" she had in her garage.
Chelsea was the only bright spot in the painful months following the election. She was the first grandchild in our families, so Bill's mother was more than happy to do a lot of baby-sitting, as were my parents when they came to visit. It was in our new house that Chelsea celebrated her first birthday, learned to walk and talk and taught her father a lesson in the perils of multitasking. One day Bill was holding her while watching a basketball game on television, talking on the phone and doing a crossword puzzle. When she couldn't get his attention, she bit him on the nose!
Bill took a job at Wright, Lindsey and Jennings, a Little Rock law firm. One of his new colleagues, Bruce Lindsey, became one of Bill's closest confidants. But before Frank White had moved into the mansion, Bill was unofficially campaigning to get his job back.
The pressures on me to conform had increased dramatically when Bill was elected Governor in 1978.1 could get away with being considered a little unconventional as the wife of the Attorney General, but as First Lady of Arkansas, I was thrown into an unblinking spotlight. And for the first time, I came to realize how my personal choices could impact my husband's political future.
My parents raised me to focus on the inner qualities of people, not the way they dressed or the titles they held. That sometimes made it hard for me to understand the importance of certain conventions to others. I learned the hard way that some voters in Arkansas were seriously offended by the fact that I kept my maiden name.
Because I knew I had my own professional interests and did not want to create any confusion or conflict of interest with my husband's public career, it made perfect sense to me to continue using my own name. Bill didn't mind, but our mothers did. Virginia cried when Bill told her, and my mother addressed her letters to "Mr. and Mrs. Bill Clinton." Brides who kept their maiden names were becoming more common in some places in the mid-1970s, but they were still rare in most of the country. And that included Arkansas. It was a personal decision, a small (I thought) gesture to acknowledge that while I was committed to our union, I was still me. I was also being practical. By the time we married, I was teaching, trying cases, publishing and speaking as Hillary Rodham. I kept my name after Bill was elected to state office partly because I thought it would help avoid the appearance of conflict of interest. And there's one case I think I would have lost had I taken Bill's name.
I was helping Phil Carroll defend a company that sold and shipped creosote-treated logs by railroad. As a shipment was unloaded at its destination, the logs came loose from their supports on one of the flatbed cars and injured some employees of the company that had purchased the logs. The ensuing lawsuit was tried before a judge who had been accused of misconduct on the bench, mostly due to his excessive acquaintance with alcohol. Under Arkansas law, judicial investigations were conducted by the Attorney General, namely my husband. The judge, who knew me only as "Ms. Rodham," paid close attention to me, often making comments like, "How pretty you look today," or, "Come up here so I can get a good look at you."
At the end of the plaintiff's case, Phil moved for a directed verdict in favor of our client, since there was no evidence connecting our client to the alleged negligence that had caused the accident. The judge agreed and granted the motion. Phil and I packed up and went back to Little Rock. A few days later, an attorney for one of the other defendants called to tell me what had happened while the jury was out. The judge had started ranting to the lawyers about Bill Clinton's investigation and how mistreated he felt. Finally, one of them interrupted him and asked, "Judge, you know that lady lawyer, Hillary Rodham, who was here with Phil Carroll? That's Bill Clinton's wife."
"Well, goddammit, if I'd known that," the judge exclaimed, "they'd never have gotten that directed verdict!"
The winter after Bill's defeat, a few of our friends and supporters came to talk to me about using "Clinton" as my last name. Ann Henry told me some people were upset when they received invitations to events at the Governor's Mansion from "Governor Bill Clinton and Hillary Rodham." Chelsea's birth announcement, also featuring our two names, was apparently a hot subject of conversation around the state. People in Arkansas reacted to me much as my mother-in-law had when she first met me: I was an oddity because of my dress, my Northern ways and the use of my maiden name.
Jim Blair joked about staging an elaborate scenario on the steps of the Capitol. Bill would put his foot on my throat, yank me by my hair and say something like, "Woman, you're going to take my last name and that's that!" Flags would wave, hymns would be sung and the name would change.
Vernon Jordan came to town to give a speech and asked me if I would make him breakfast, including grits, at our house the next morning. In our little kitchen, perched on a too small chair, he ate my instant grits and urged me to do the right thing: start using Bill's last name. The only person who didn't ask me or even talk to me about my name was my husband. He said my name was my business, and he didn't think his political future depended on it one way or another.
I decided it was more important for Bill to be Governor again than for me to keep my maiden name. So when Bill announced his run for another term on Chelsea's second birthday, I began calling myself Hillary Rodham Clinton.
The 1982 campaign was a family endeavor. We loaded Chelsea, diaper bag and all, into a big car driven by a true friend, Jimmy Red Jones, and we drove around the state. We started in the South, where spring had snuck in under the pine trees, and ended in Fayetteville in a snowstorm. I've always liked campaigning and traveling through Arkansas, stopping at country stores, sale barns and barbecue joints. It's a continuing education in human nature, including your own. I had been surprised when I had gone door-to-door for Bill in his 1978 campaign and encountered women who told me their husbands did the voting for them or met African Americans who thought there was still a poll tax to be paid.
In 1982, with Chelsea on my hip or holding my hand, I walked up and down streets meeting voters. I remember meeting some young mothers in the small town of Bald Knob. When I said I bet they were having a good time talking to their babies, one of them asked, "Why would I talk to her? She can't talk back." I knew from my Yale Child Study days—and from my mother—how important it was to talk and read to babies to build their vocabularies. Yet when I tried to explain this, the women were polite but dubious.
After Bill's election in 1982, a humbler, more seasoned Governor returned to the State House, though no less determined to get as much done as possible in two years. And there was so much to be done. Arkansas was a poor state, last or close to last by many measures, from percentage of college graduates to per capita personal income. I hadhelped Bill tackle health care reform in his first term, successfully setting up a network of health clinics, recruiting more doctors, nurses and midwives into rural areas—over the opposition of the state's medical society. When Governor White tried to make good on his 1980 campaign promise to dismantle the network, people flooded into the Capitol to protest, and White had to retreat. Bill and I agreed that Arkansas would never prosper without an overhaul of its education system. Bill announced that he was forming an Education Standards Committee to recommend sweeping educational reforms, and he wanted me to be its Chair.
I had chaired the Rural Health Committee, and Bill asked me to tackle education because he wanted to send a signal about how serious he was. Nobody, including me, thought it was a good idea. But Bill wouldn't take no for an answer. "Look on the bright side," he said. "If you're successful, our friends will complain that you could have done even more. And our enemies will complain that you did too much. If you accomplish nothing, our friends will say, 'She should never have tried this.' And our enemies will say, 'See, she couldn't get anything done!' " Bill was convinced he was right to appoint me, and eventually I relented.
Again, this was a politically risky move. Improving the schools would require an increase in taxes—never a popular idea. The fifteen-member committee also recommended that students be subjected to standardized tests, including one before they could graduate from eighth grade. But the cornerstone of the proposed reform plan was mandatory teacher testing. Though this enraged the teachers union, civil rights groups and others who were vital to the Democratic Party in Arkansas, we felt there was no way around the issue. How could we expect children to perform at national levels when their teachers sometimes fell short? The debate was so bitter that one school librarian said I was "lower than a snake's belly." I tried to remember that I was being called names not because of who I was but what I represented.
Getting the legislature to approve and fund the reform package turned into a knock-down-drag-out fight among interest groups. Teachers worried about their jobs. Legislators representing rural areas fretted that the plan would consolidate their small school districts. In the midst of this contention, I stepped before a joint session of the Arkansas legislature's House and Senate to plead our case for improving all schools, big and small. For whatever reason—probably a combination of skill and lots of practice—public speaking has always been one of my strong suits. I laughed when Representative Lloyd George, a legislator from rural Yell County, later announced to the assembly: "Well, fellas, it looks like we might have elected the wrong Clinton!" It was another example of a phenomenon I call "the talking dog syndrome." Some people are still amazed that any woman (this includes Governors' wives, corporate CEOs, sports stars and rock singers) can hold her own under pressure and be articulate and knowledgeable. The dog can talk! In fact, it's often an advantage if people you hope to persuade underestimate you at first. I would have been willing to bark my whole speech in order to guarantee education reform!
We won some votes and lost some, and we had to fight the teachers union in court. But by the end of Bill's term in office, Arkansas had a plan in place to raise school standards, tens of thousands of children had a better chance to realize their learning potentials and teachers got a desperately needed raise in pay. I was particularly pleased when Terrel Bell, President Reagan's Secretary of Education, praised the Arkansas reform plan, commenting that Bill had been "a prime leader in education."
The public success of education reform legislation was followed by a devastating personal challenge. In July 1984, I received a call in the middle of the week from Betsey Wright, who had become Bill's Chief of Staff in 1983 after his reelection. She told me Bill was on his way to see me. I had just finished lunch with some friends, so I excused myself and stood outside the restaurant until Bill pulled up. We sat in the car while he told me that the head of the state police had just informed him that his brother, Roger, was under police surveillance. The police had videotaped him selling drugs to an informer. The state police director then told Bill they could arrest Roger right then or continue to run up the charges and increase the pressure on him to identify his supplier, the real target. Roger was selling, he said, to finance a serious cocaine habit. The director then asked Bill what he wanted him to do. Bill replied there was no choice. The operation against Roger had to run its course. As a big brother, however, it was excruciatingly painful to know that, at best, his brother would be going to jail and, at worst, he might kill himself with drug abuse.
Bill and I berated ourselves for not seeing signs of Roger's abuse and taking some kind of action to help him. We worried that this news, and Bill's knowledge beforehand, would deeply hurt his mother. Finally, the wait was over. Roger was arrested and charged with possessing and selling cocaine. Bill explained to both Roger and Virginia that he had learned about the investigation but felt duty-bound not to tell his mother or warn his brother. Virginia was shocked by the accusations and the realization that Bill and I had known that Roger was headed for prison. Although I understood their pain and anger, I believed Bill had taken the only course open to him by keeping the information from his family. Roger agreed to counseling before he left to serve his prison sentence. In the course of those sessions, Roger admitted how much he hated his father, and Virginia and Bill learned for the first time how profoundly Roger had been affected by his father's alcoholism and violence. Bill realized that living with alcoholism and the denial and secrecy that it spawned had also created consequences and problems for him that would take years to sort out. This was one of many family crises we would face. Even strong marriages can be strained when trouble comes. In the years ahead we would have rough patches, but we were determined to get through them.
Starting in 1987, more than a few Democratic Party leaders were urging Bill to consider a run for the Presidency in 1988 when Ronald Reagan's second term would end. Both Bill and I hoped Senator Dale Bumpers would decide to run, and we thought he would. He had been a first-rate Governor and Senator and could have been a formidable national candidate. In late March, though, he decided not to run. The interest in Bill increased, and he asked me what I thought. I did not think he should run and told him so. It looked as if Vice President Bush would be nominated as the successor to President Reagan, running for Reagan's surrogate third term. I thought that Bush would be hard to beat. But there were other reasons, too. Bill had been elected in 1986 to a fourth term as Governor and the first four-year term since Reconstruction. He had not yet served as Chairman of the Democratic Leadership Council and had just begun his chairmanship of the National Governors Association. He was only forty years old. His mother was dealing with problems in her nursing practice, and his brother was readjusting to life after prison. If that weren't enough, my father had just suffered a stroke and my parents were moving to Little Rock so that Bill and I could help them out. I thought it was the wrong time in our lives and told him I just was not convinced.
One day he thought he would run, the next day, he was ready to say he would not. Finally, I persuaded him to set a date by which he would make a decision. Anyone who knows Bill understands he has to have a deadline or he will continue to explore every possible pro and con. He picked July 14 and reserved a room in a hotel to make his announcement—whatever it might be. A number of his friends from around the country came down to be with him the day before. Some were pushing him to run; others thought it was premature and he should wait. Bill analyzed every point anyone raised. I thought it was significant that he was still debating less than twenty-four hours before he had to comment publicly. That meant to me that he was leaning against running but not quite ready to slam the door.
Much has been written about the reasons for his decision not to run, but it finally came down to one word: Chelsea. Carl Wagner, a longtime Democratic activist and father of an only daughter, told Bill he would effectively be turning his daughter into an orphan. Mickey Kantor delivered the same message while he and Bill sat on the back porch of the Governor's Mansion. Chelsea came out and asked Bill about our upcoming vacation plans. When Bill said he might not have one if he ran for President, Chelsea looked at him and said, "Then Mom and I will go without you." That sealed the decision for Bill.
Chelsea was beginning to understand what it meant to have a father in the public eye. When she was little and Bill was Governor, she had no idea what he did. Once when she was about four and someone asked her, she replied, "My daddy talks on the telephone, drinks coffee and makes 'peeches."
The 1986 Governor's campaign was the first one she had been old enough to follow. She could read and watch the news and be exposed to some of the mean-spiritedness that politics seems to generate. One of Bill's opponents was Orval Faubus, the infamous former Governor who defied court orders to integrate Little Rock's Central High School in 1957. President Eisenhower sent troops to enforce the law. Because of my concerns about what Faubus and his supporters would say and do, Bill and I tried to prepare Chelsea for what she might hear about her father or, for that matter, about her mother. We sat around our dinner table in the Governor's Mansion role-playing with her, pretending we were in debates where one of us acted like a political opponent who criticized Bill for not being a good Governor. Chelsea's eyes grew big at the idea that anyone would say such bad things about her daddy.
I loved Chelsea's growing assertiveness, though it wasn't always convenient. Around Christmas, 1988, I went duck hunting with Dr. Frank Kumpuris, a distinguished surgeon and good friend of mine, who invited me to join him, his two doctor sons, Drew and Dean, and a few other buddies at their hunting cabin. I hadn't shot much since my days at Lake Winola with my dad, but I thought it would be fun. That's how I found myself standing hip deep in freezing water, waiting for dawn in eastern Arkansas. When the sun rose, the ducks flew overhead and I made a lucky shot, hitting a banded duck. When I got home, Chelsea was waiting for me, outraged to wake up and learn that I had left home before dawn to go "kill some poor little duck's mommy or daddy." My efforts at explaining were futile. She didn't speak to me for a whole day.
Although Bill decided not to run in 1988, the nominee, Governor Michael Dukakis of Massachusetts, asked him to give the nominating speech at the Democratic Convention in Atlanta. It turned into a fiasco. Dukakis and his staff had reviewed and approved every word of Bill's text ahead of time, but the speech was longer than the delegates or the television networks expected. Some delegates on the floor began yelling at Bill to finish. This was a humiliating introduction to the nation, and many observers assumed Bill's political future was over. Eight days later, though, he was on Johnny Carson's Tonight Show, making fun of himself and playing his saxophone. Yet another comeback.
After Bill was reelected Governor in 1990, Democrats across the country approached him once again about running for President. That encouragement reflected the assessment that George H. W Bush was out of touch with most Americans. Although Bush's popularity remained astronomical in the aftermath of the Gulf War, I thought his performance on domestic issues—particularly the economy—made him vulnerable. I had realized how unfamiliar President Bush was with many of the problems facing America when I spoke with him at an Education Summit he had convened of all the Governors in Char-lottesville, Virginia, in September 1989. As the wife of the Democratic co-chair of the Summit for the National Governors Association, I was seated next to President Bush at a grand dinner held at Monticello. We enjoyed a cordial relationship and had been around each other many times at the White House or the annual Governors meetings. We talked about the American health care system. I said we had the best system in the world if you wanted a heart transplant but not if you wanted a baby to survive his or her first birthday. Our rate of infant mortality at that time placed us behind eighteen other industrialized nations, including Japan, Canada and France. President Bush was incredulous and said, "You can't be right about that."
I told him, "I'll get you the statistics to prove it."
He replied, "I'll get my own."
The next day, during a meeting with the Governors, he slipped Bill a note: "Tell Hillary she was right."
This time I believed Bill should carefully consider whether to run. In June of 1991, he attended the annual Bilderberg Conference in Europe, which brought together leaders from all over the world. After listening to Bush Administration officials defend their policies, he called to tell me how frustrated he was with their prescriptions for economic growth and nearly everything else. "This is crazy," he said. "We're not doing anything to get the country ready for the future." I could tell as much from the tone of his voice as his words that he was seriously thinking through the arguments he would make if he decided to run. He had enhanced his national standing through his work in the National Governors Association, and his record in Arkansas on education, welfare reform and economic development was considered a success. When we attended the annual Governors Conference in Seattle in August, I was not surprised that a number of his Democratic colleagues told him they would support him if he was serious about running.
After the conference, Bill, Chelsea and I took a short vacation to Victoria and Vancouver, Canada, to talk over what he should do. Chelsea, now eleven, was significantly more mature than she had been four years earlier and ready to offer her opinions. She and I agreed: Bill could be a good President. Luckily, the primary campaign would be shorter and more focused than usual because Senator Tom Harkin of Iowa was running, which meant Bill could bypass the Iowa caucus and go straight to New Hampshire. He already had spent time there setting up a DLC chapter, and he thought he could compete against Senator Paul Tsongas of Massachusetts for the "new Democrat" vote. As Bill discussed the pros and cons with us, he assured Chelsea that his schedule would include all of her important dates, like the annual Arkansas Ballet performace of The Nutcracker, and that we would still go to Renaissance Weekend over New Year's like we always did. I could not have predicted all that would happen, but I believed Bill was prepared on the substance of what needed to be done for the country and how to run a winning political campaign. We figured: What did we have to lose? Even if Bill's run failed, he would have the satisfaction of knowing he had tried, not just to win, but to make a difference for America. That seemed to be a risk worth taking.
I GOT A HINT OF WHAT IT TOOK TO SURVIVE A PRESI-dential campaign in September 1991, when I bumped into Hal Bruno in a hallway of the Biltmore Hotel in Los Angeles. Bruno, a veteran television producer and a casual acquaintance, was in town to check out potential presidential candidates during the fall meeting of the Democratic National Committee.
He asked me how it was going.
I must have looked bewildered. "I don't know. This is all new to me. Do you have any suggestions?"
"Just this," he said. "Be very careful who you trust. This is different from anything you have been through before. Other than that, try to enjoy the experience!"
It was sage advice, though it would be impossible to run an undertaking as complex and pressured as a presidential campaign without trusting an awful lot of people. We started with the array of friends and campaign professionals we knew we could rely on.
As soon as he decided in September to enter the race, Bill contacted a skeletal crew of advisers to help him launch his candidacy. Craig Smith, a longtime aide, left the Governor's payroll to work on operations until a full-fledged campaign could be assembled, and he then became its Director of State Operations. On October 2, 1991, many of Bill's advisers were in Little Rock to help him shape his announcement speech scheduled for the following day. The scene of creative chaos in the mansion that night would be typical of the entire campaign. Stan Greenberg, the pollster, and Frank Greer, the media adviser, along with Al From, the President of the Democratic Leadership Council (DLC), and Bruce Reed, the DLC's Policy Director, huddled around Bill all day and into the night, trying to get him to finish his crucial speech. Bill made phone calls, read through his previous speeches and dove into trays of food laid out on the table. Chelsea, eleven years old and a budding ballerina, jeted between rooms and pirouetted around her father and our guests until her bedtime. At four in the morning, the speech was done.
At noon the next day, in front of the Old State House in Little Rock, a reenergized Bill Clinton stood with Chelsea and me before a bank of microphones and TV cameras and declared his intention to run for President. His speech laid out his emerging critique of the Bush Administration. "Middle-class people are spending more time on the job, less time with their children and bringing home less money to pay more for health care and housing and education. The poverty rates are up, the streets are meaner and ever more children are growing up in broken families. Our country is headed in the wrong direction, fast. It's falling behind, it's losing its way, and all we've gotten out of Washington is status quo paralysis, neglect and selfishness . . . not leadership and vision."
The campaign he wanted to run would be "about ideas, not slogans" and would offer "leadership that will restore the American dream, fight for the forgotten middle class, provide more opportunity, demand more responsibility from each of us and create a stronger community in this great country of ours." Behind his rhetoric were the specific plans that Bill would present during the course of the primary campaign to persuade Democratic voters that he had the best chance to defeat President Bush.
The mainstream media didn't give Bill much hope of making it through the primaries, let alone being elected President. He was initially dismissed as an obscure if colorful outsider, handsome and articulate but, at age forty-six, too young and inexperienced for the job. As his message of change caught on with potential voters, the press—and President Bush's backers—started to take a closer look at Bill Clinton. And at me.
If the first forty-four years of my life were an education, the thirteen-month presidential campaign was a revelation. Despite all the good advice we had received and all the time Bill and I had spent in the political arena, we were unprepared for the hardball politics and relentless scrutiny that comes with a run for the Presidency. Bill had to make the case nationwide for his political beliefs, and we had to endure exhaustive inspection of every aspect of our lives. We had to get acquainted with a national press corps that knew little about us and even less about where we came from. And we had to manage our own emotions in the glare of the public spotlight, through the course of an increasingly mean-spirited and personal campaign.
I relied on my friends and staff to help us through the rough patches. Bill put together a terrific team, including James Carville and Paul Begala, who had masterminded Harris Wofford's election to the Senate from Pennsylvania in 1991. James, a Louisiana Cajun and ex-Marine, bonded with Bill immediately; they both relished their Southern roots, adored their mamas and understood that presidential politics was a contact sport. Paul, a talented Texan who occasionally had to serve as a translator for Carville's rapid-fire patois, embodied a passion for populism and commitment to civility, no easy feat. David Wil-helm, who became campaign manager, was from Chicago and intuitively understood how to win the contest for delegates on the ground, person by person. Another Chicagoan, Rahm Emanuel, had sharp political skills and a genius for fund-raising, and became the finance manager. George Stephanopoulos, a Rhodes Scholar and aide to Congressman Richard Gephardt, figured out how to respond instantly and effectively to the political attacks and to seize the offensive with the press. Bruce Reed, also a Rhodes Scholar, who came to the campaign from the Democratic Leadership Council, had a gift for expressing complex policy ideas in simple and compelling language and was instrumental in articulating Bill's campaign message. The DLC and its founder Al From were essential to the development of Bill's policies and message in the campaign.
Bill and I also relied on a dedicated team from Arkansas including Rodney Slater, Carol Willis, Diane Blair, Ann Henry, Maurice Smith, Patty Howe Criner, Carl and Margaret Whillock, Betsey Wright, Sheila Bronfman, Mack and Donna McLarty and so many others who put their lives on hold to elect the first President from Arkansas.
I had begun to assemble my own staff as soon as Bill announced his candidacy. This was a departure from protocol, in which the candidate's staff controls his wife's schedule and message. I was different—something that would become increasingly apparent in the months ahead.
The first person I called for help was Maggie Williams, then in a Ph.D. program at the University of Pennsylvania. Maggie and I had worked together at the Children's Defense Fund during the 1980s. I admired her skills as a leader and communicator and thought she would be able to handle with aplomb whatever happened. Although she couldn't come on full-time until late 1992, she offered advice and support throughout the campaign.
Three young women who started working for me in the campaign became invaluable and stayed with me through the eight White House years. Patti Solis, a politically active daughter of Mexican immigrants, had grown up in Chicago and worked for Mayor Richard M. Daley. She had never done scheduling in a presidential campaign, and I had never had anyone tell me what I had to do and where and when to do it, but Patti turned out to be a natural as my scheduler, juggling the challenges of politics, people and preparation with intelligence, decisiveness and laughter. She ran my life hour by hour for nine years, becoming a close friend and valued adviser on whom I still rely today.
Capricia Penavic Marshall, a dynamic young lawyer from Cleveland, was also the daughter of immigrants—her mother from Mexico and her father a Croatian refugee from Tito's Yugoslavia. When she saw Bill on television giving a speech in 1991, she decided she wanted to be involved in his campaign and worked for months rounding up convention delegates in Ohio. Finally she was hired onto my staff to do advance work, primarily a young person's game and a premier educational experience in politics and in life. Capricia took to advance like a pro, and despite an unfortunate first trip where she was waiting for me at the wrong airport in Shreveport, we hit it off. Her good-humored grace under pressure served her—and me—well when she became the White House social secretary in Bill's second term.
Kelly Craighead, a beautiful former competitive diver from California, was already an experienced events planner when she became my trip director, which meant she oversaw my life on the road. Everywhere I went over the next eight years—around the block or around the world—Kelly was by my side. Her slogan, "Fail to plan, plan to fail," became one of our campaign mantras. No one worked harder or longer hours to iron out every last detail of any trip I took. Hers was a demanding and exhausting job, requiring the combined talents of a general and a diplomat. She also had a lot of insight, dedication and spunk. Knowing that she was looking out for me gave me comfort and confidence on even the hardest days throughout the White House years.
In addition to all the young people who signed on to help, Brooke Shearer volunteered to travel with me. Brooke, her husband, Strobe Talbott, and her entire family had been friends of Bill's since he and Strobe were Rhodes Scholars together. As soon as Bill and I became a couple, they became friends of mine. And their sons became close to Chelsea. Brooke, who had lived in Washington and worked in journalism, brought a wealth of experience about the national media and a wry take on the absurdities of campaigns.
I learned quickly that, in a race for the Presidency, nothing is off-limits. Innocent comments or jests erupt into controversies within seconds of being reported on the news wires. Rumors become the story du jour. And while our past experiences may have seemed like ancient history to us, every detail of our lives was being sifted and combed as if we were some sort of archaeological dig. I had seen this before in other people's campaigns: Senator Ed Muskie defending his wife in 1972 and Senator Bob Kerrey telling a risque joke in 1992 without realizing that a boom microphone was nearby. But until you are the focus of the klieg lights, you simply cannot imagine their heat.
One evening, when Bill and I were stumping in New Hampshire, he introduced me to a crowd of supporters. Recounting my two decades of work on children's issues, he joked that we had a new campaign slogan: "Buy one, get one free." He said it as a way of explaining that I would be an active partner in his administration and would continue to champion the causes I had worked on in the past. It was a good line, and my campaign staff adopted it. Widely reported in the press, it then took on a life of its own, disseminated everywhere as evidence of my alleged secret aspirations to become "co-President" with my husband.
I hadn't had enough exposure to the national press corps to fully appreciate the extent to which the news media was a conduit for everything that happened on a campaign. Information, policy positions and quotes were filtered through a journalistic lens before they reached the public. A candidate can't get his or her ideas across without media coverage, and a journalist can't report effectively without access to the candidate. Thus, candidates and reporters are at once adversarial and mutually dependent. It's a tricky, delicate and important relationship, and I didn't fully understand it.
The "buy one, get one free" comment was a reminder to Bill and me that our remarks might be taken out of context because news reporters didn't have time or space to provide the text of an entire conversation. Simplicity and brevity were essential to reporters. So were snappy lines and catchphrases. One of the masters of political innuendo weighed in early.
Former President Nixon's political instincts remained finely tuned, and he commented on our campaign in an interview during a visit to Washington in early February. "If the wife comes through as being too strong and too intelligent," he remarked, "it makes the husband look like a wimp." He then went on to note that voters tended to agree with Cardinal de Richelieu's assessment: "Intellect in a woman is unbecoming."
"This man never does anything without a purpose," I remember thinking when I saw Nixon's comment reported in The New York Times. My service on the 1974 impeachment staff aside, I suspected that Nixon understood better than many the threat Bill posed to the Republican hold on the Presidency. He probably believed that denigrating Bill because he put up with an outspoken wife, and vilifying me as "unbecoming," might scare voters anxious for a change but uncertain about us.
By then Bill's entire life was under a media microscope. He already had been asked more questions about personal matters than any presidential candidate in American history. While the mainstream press still avoided printing unsubstantiated rumors, the supermarket tabloids were offering cash for shocking stories from Arkansas. Eventually one of these fishing expeditions hooked a whale of a tale.
I was in Atlanta campaigning on January 23 when Bill called to warn me about an upcoming tabloid story in which a woman named Gennifer Flowers claimed she had a twelve-year affair with him. He told me it wasn't true.
The campaign staff went into a tailspin over the story, and I knew that some of them thought the race was over. I asked David Wilhelm to set up a conference call for me to talk to everyone. I said that all of us were in this campaign because we believed Bill could make a difference for our country and that it was up to the voters to decide whether or not we'd be successful.
"So," I ended, "let's get back to work."
Like a rampant virus, the Flowers story hopped between species of media, from the Star, a supermarket tabloid, to Nightline, a respected network news show. Despite our efforts to keep going, the wall-to-wall press coverage made it impossible for the campaign to focus attention on substantive issues. And the New Hampshire primary was just weeks away. Something had to be done. Our friend Harry Thomason, along with Mickey Kantor, James Carville, Paul Begala and George Stephanopoulos, consulted with Bill and me about what we could do. They recommended that we appear on the Sunday night television show 60 Minutes right after the Super Bowl, when we would be seen by the largest possible audience. I took a lot of convincing that such exposure was worth the risks, loss of privacy and potential impact on our families, especially on Chelsea. Finally, I was persuaded that if we didn't deal with the situation publicly, Bill's campaign would be over before a single vote was cast.
The 60 Minutes interview took place on January 26 in a suite at a Boston hotel starting at 11 a.m. The room had been transformed into a set, with banks of temporary lights on poles surrounding the couch where Bill and I were sitting. Partway through the interview, a heavy pole loaded with lights fell toward me. Bill saw it falling and pulled me out of the way just as the tower crashed where I'd been sitting. I was shaken up, and Bill held me tight, whispering over and over, "I've got you. Don't worry. You're okay. I love you."
The interviewer, Steve Kroft, started with a series of questions about our relationship and the state of our marriage. He asked whether Bill had committed adultery and whether we had been separated or had contemplated divorce. We declined to answer such personal questions about our private lives. But Bill acknowledged that he had caused pain in our marriage and said he would leave it to voters to decide whether that disqualified him from the Presidency.
Kroft: I think most Americans would agree that it's very admirable that you have stayed together, that you 've worked your problems out, that you seem to have reached some sort of an understanding and an arrangement.
An arrangement? An understanding? Kroft may have been trying to pay us a compliment, but his categorization of our marriage was so off target that Bill was incredulous. So was I.
Bill Clinton: Wait a minute. You're looking at two people who love each other. This is not an arrangement or an understanding. This is a marriage. That's a very different thing.
I wish I had let him have the last word, but now it was my turn to add my two cents, and I did.
Hillary Clinton: You know, I'm not sitting here, some little woman standing by my man like Tammy Wynette. I'm sitting here because I love him and I respect him and I honor what he's been through and what we 've been through together. And you know, if that's not enough for people, then heck, don't vote for him.
Although the interview lasted fifty-six minutes, CBS broadcast about ten minutes, leaving out much of what was important—at least as far as I was concerned. We hadn't known how drastically they would cut our words. Still, I was relieved that it was over. Bill and I felt good about how we had responded and so did everyone with us. Apparently, most Americans agreed with our basic point: that the election was about them, not our marriage. Twenty-three days later, Bill became known as the "Comeback Kid" for his strong second-place finish in the New Hampshire primary.
I didn't fare as well. The fallout from my reference to Tammy Wynette was instant—as it deserved to be—and brutal. Of course, I meant to refer to Tammy Wynette's famous song, "Stand by Your Man," not to her as a person. But I wasn't careful in my choice of words, and my comment unleashed a torrent of angry reactions. I regretted the way I had come across, and I apologized to Tammy personally and later publicly in another television interview. But the damage was done. And more was on the way.
In early March, with the Democratic primary season in high gear, former California Governor and Democratic presidential candidate Jerry Brown went on the offensive against Bill, focusing on my law practice and on the Rose Law Firm, where I had been a partner since 1979. After Bill became Governor again in 1983,1 asked my law partners to calculate my share of profits, without including fees earned by other lawyers for work done for the state or any state agency. The Rose Firm had provided these services to the Arkansas State government for decades. There was no conflict of interest, but I wanted to avoid every appearance of one. The firm agreed to wall me off from the work and any fees derived from it. When Frank White tried to make this an issue in the 1986 Arkansas gubernatorial campaign, he was embarrassed when the facts established that other Arkansas law firms had received significantly more business from the state while Bill was Governor.
Spoon-fed false information by Bill's political adversaries in the state, Jerry Brown recycled the charges for the debate in Chicago two days before the March 17 primaries in Illinois and Michigan. Brown accused Bill of steering state business to the Rose Firm to increase my income. It was a spurious and opportunistic charge that had no basis in fact. And it's what led to the infamous "cookies and tea" incident.
Bill and I were at the Busy Bee Coffee Shop in Chicago, trailed by a gaggle of cameras and microphones. With the Illinois primary looming, reporters were throwing questions at Bill about Brown's charges. Then a reporter asked me what I thought of Brown's accusations against us. My answer was long and rambling:
"I thought, number one, [the remark] was pathetic and desperate, and also thought it was interesting because this is the sort of thing that happens to ... women who have their own careers and their own lives. And I think it's a shame, but I guess it's something that we're going to have to live with. Those of us who have tried and have a career—tried to have an independent life and to make a difference—and certainly like myself who has children . . . you know I've done the best I can to lead my life, but I suppose it'll be subject to attack. But it's not true and I don't [know] what else to say except it's sad to me."
Then came the reporter's follow-up—about whether I could have avoided an appearance of conflict of interest when my husband was Governor.
"I wish that were true," I replied. "You know, I suppose I could have stayed home and baked cookies and had teas, but what I decided to do was fulfill my profession, which I entered before my husband was in public life. And I've worked very, very hard to be as careful as possible, and that's all I can tell you."
It wasn't my most eloquent moment. I could have said, "Look, short of abandoning my law firm partnership and staying home, there was nothing more I could have done to avoid the appearance of a conflict of interest." Besides, I've done quite a lot of cookie-baking in my day, and tea-pouring, too!
My aides, aware that the press had picked up on the "cookies and tea" comment, suggested that I talk to reporters a second time to explain in greater detail—and more articulately—what I meant. On the spot, I had an impromptu mini-press conference. But it had little effect. Thirteen minutes after I answered the question, a story ran on the AP wire. CNN quickly aired one, too, and followed with an afternoon segment that made little reference to the initial question—about conflicts of interest and the Rose Law Firm—but reduced everything I said to, "I could have stayed home and baked cookies and had teas." The theme for most news organizations that day was that I had made a serious political error.
I had made an awkward attempt to explain my situation and to suggest that many women who juggle careers and lives are penalized for the choices they make. It turned into a story about my alleged callousness toward stay-at-home mothers. Some reporters merged "tea and cookies" and "standing by my man like Tammy Wynette" into one quote, as if I had uttered both phrases in the same breath—not fifty-one days apart. The controversy was a boon to GOP strategists. Republican Party leaders labeled me a "radical feminist," a "militant feminist lawyer" and even "the ideological leader of a Clinton-Clinton Administration that would push a radical-feminist agenda."
I got hundreds of letters about "cookies and tea." Supporters offered their encouragement and praised me for defending a broad array of choices for women. Critics were venomous. One letter referred to me as the Antichrist, and another said I was an insult to American motherhood. I often worried about how much attention Chelsea paid and how much sank in. She wasn't six anymore.
Some of the attacks, whether demonizing me as a woman, mother and wife or distorting my words and positions on issues, were politically motivated and designed to rein me in. Others may have reflected the extent to which our society was still adjusting to the changing roles of women. I adopted my own mantra: Take criticism seriously, but not personally. If there is truth or merit in the criticism, try to learn from it. Otherwise, let it roll right off you. Easier said than done.
While Bill talked about social change, I embodied it. I had my own opinions, interests and profession. For better or worse, I was outspoken. I represented a fundamental change in the way women functioned in our society. And if my husband won, I would be filling a position in which the duties were not spelled out, but the performance was judged by everybody. I soon realized how many people had a fixed notion of the proper role of a President's wife. I was called a "Rorschach test" for the American public, and it was an apt way of conveying the varied and extreme reactions that I provoked.
Neither the fawning admiration nor the virulent rage seemed close to the truth. I was being labeled and categorized because of my positions and mistakes, and also because I had been turned into a symbol for women of my generation. That's why everything I said or did—and even what I wore—became a hot button for debate.
Hair and fashion were my first clues. For most of my life I had paid little attention to my clothes. I liked headbands. They were easy, and I couldn't imagine that they suggested anything good, bad or indifferent about me to the American public. But during the campaign, some of my friends began a mission to spruce up my appearance. They brought me racks of clothes to try on, and they told me the headband had to go.
What they understood, and I didn't, was that a First Lady's appearance matters. I was no longer representing only myself. I was asking the American people to let me represent them in a role that has conveyed everything from glamour to motherly comfort.
My good friend Linda Bloodworth-Thomason suggested that a friend of hers in Los Angeles, the hairstylist Christophe Schatteman, cut my hair. She was convinced it would improve my appearance. I thought the whole notion was a stretch. But soon I was like a kid in a candy store, trying out every style I could. Long hair, short hair, bangs, flips, braids and buns. This was a new universe and it turned out to be fun. But my eclectic experimentation spawned stories about how I could never stick with any hairstyle and what that revealed about my psyche.
Early in the campaign I also got a glimpse of the difficulties of serving in what is, by definition, a derivative position. I was Bill's principal surrogate on the campaign trail. I wanted to support his campaign and to advance his ideas, but as we had already learned from Bill's "buy one, get one free" remark, I had to be careful where I stepped. I had taken leave from my law firm and resigned from all of the charitable and corporate boards on which I served. That meant leaving the board of Wal-Mart, on which I had sat for six years at the invitation of Sam Walton, who taught me a great deal about corporate integrity and success. While on the board, I chaired a committee that looked into ways that Wal-Mart could become more environmentally sensitive in its practices, and I worked to promote a "Buy America" program that helped put people to work and saved jobs around the country. Resigning from the Wal-Mart board and others like the Children's Defense Fund left me feeling vulnerable and unsettled. I had worked full-time during my marriage to Bill and valued the independence and identity that work provided. Now I was solely "the wife of," an odd experience for me.
My new status hit home over something mundane: I had ordered new stationery to answer all the campaign mail I was receiving. I had chosen cream paper with my name, Hillary Rodham Clinton, printed neatly across the top in navy blue. When I opened the box I saw that the order had been changed so that the name on it was Hillary Clinton. Evidently someone on Bill's staff decided that it was more politically expedient to drop "Rodham," as if it were no longer part of my identity. I returned the stationery and ordered another batch.
After Bill won the California, Ohio and New Jersey primaries on June 2, his nomination was assured, but his election was not. After all the negative publicity in the campaign, he was running third in the polls behind Ross Perot and President Bush. He decided to reintroduce himself to America and began appearing on popular television shows. Thanks to a suggestion from Mandy Grunwald, a consultant who had joined the campaign, he played the saxophone on The Arsenio Hall Show. His staff also persuaded me to give more interviews and to agree to a People magazine story, complete with a cover photo that included Chelsea. I was not enthusiastic but finally was persuaded by the argument that most Americans didn't even know we had a child. On the one hand, I was pleased that we had sheltered Chelsea from the media and protected her during the brutal primary season. On the other hand, I believed that being a mother was the most important job I had ever had. If people didn't know that, they certainly couldn't understand us. The article was fine, but it prompted me to restate my position that Chelsea deserved her privacy, which, I believe, is essential for any child to develop and explore her own choices in life. So Bill and I established guidelines: When Chelsea was with us as part of our family—attending an event with Bill or me—the press would naturally cover her. But I would not agree to more articles or interviews that included her. This was one of the best decisions Bill and I made, and we stuck with it through the next eight years. I'm also grateful that, with few exceptions, the press respected her privacy and her right to be left alone. As long as Chelsea did not seek out their attention or do something that was of public interest, she would be off-limits.
In July 1992, the Democratic Party held its convention in New York City to formally nominate Bill and his running mate, Senator Al Gore from Tennessee. New York was a great choice. Although we had nothing to do with its selection as the host city, New York was one of Bill's and my favorite cities in the world, and we were delighted that it would be the place where Bill was nominated for President. Bill had chosen Al after an exhaustive process led by Warren Christopher, a former Deputy Secretary of State and distinguished lawyer from California. I had met Al and his wife, Tipper, at political events during the 1980s, but neither Bill nor I knew them well. Some political observers were surprised that Bill would select a running mate who seemed so like him. Southerners from neighboring states, they were close in age, of the same religion and considered to be serious students of public policy. But Bill respected Al's record of public service and believed he would add strengths to Bill's own background.
Many people have told me that the picture of Al, Tipper, their children, Bill, Chelsea and me—all standing on the porch of the Governor's Mansion on the day Bill publicly announced his selection—perfectly captured the energy of the campaign and its potential for change. I think what I felt that day reflected the emotions of many Americans. It was a new generation's turn to lead, and people conveyed an optimism about the prospects for a new direction for our country. On the final night of the convention we were giddy and elated as we all hugged and danced on the stage.
The next morning, July 17, we started on our magical bus tours or, as I called them, "Bill, Al, Hillary and Tipper's Excellent Adventures."
The bus trips were the joint brainchild of David Wilhelm, the campaign manager, and Susan Thomases, whom Bill and I had known for more than twenty years. She was a warmhearted friend and a hard-driving lawyer, and she understood that good campaign scheduling had to tell a story about a candidate, had to illustrate his concerns and plans so that voters understood what made him tick and what positions he'd champion. Susan moved with her husband and son to Little Rock to supervise campaign scheduling for the general election. She and David wanted to build on the convention's excitement and drama and thought that a bus trip through battleground states would visually convey the partnership and generational change Bill and Al represented, as well as their message: "Putting People First."
Traveling on the buses gave us all a chance to get to know one another better. Bill, Al, Tipper and I spent hours talking, eating, waving out the window and stopping the bus convoy to conduct impromptu rallies. Loose and relaxed, Al was quick with one-liners and deadpan comments. He quickly learned that a small crowd up ahead on the side of the road, no matter where we were or what time it was, would tempt Bill to yell, "Stop the bus." Al would peer out the window ahead, see one lone soul waving or watching, and shout out, "I feel a sojourn coming on." When we were met by hundreds of patient supporters as we pulled into Erie, Pennsylvania, at 2 a.m., Al delivered a rousing version of his standard appeal stump speech: "What's up—health care costs and interest rates—should be down, and what's down—employment and hope—should be up. We have to change direction." Then he announced to the three of us—who were barely keeping our eyes open— "I think there are two people drinking coffee in the all-night diner around the corner. Let's go see them." Even Bill passed on that offer.
Tipper and I talked for hours about our experiences as political spouses, our children and what we hoped Bill and AJ could do to help solve the country's problems. Tipper had become controversial when she spoke out against violent and pornographic music lyrics in 1985.1 admired her willingness to take a stand and empathized with the criticism she had encountered. I also admired the work she had done on behalf of the homeless and mentally ill. An accomplished photographer, she helped chronicle the campaign with her ever-present camera.
One evening in the rural Ohio River Valley, we stopped at the farm of Gene Branstool for a barbecue and a meeting with local farmers. As we were getting ready to leave, Branstool said some folks had gathered at a crossroads a few miles away and we should stop. It was a lovely summer night, and people were sitting on their tractors waving flags while children stood at the edge of fields holding signs and welcoming us. My favorite said, "Give us eight minutes and we'll give you eight years!" In the waning light, we were astonished to see thousands of people filling the large field.
From Vandalia, Illinois to St. Louis, Missouri to Corsicana, Texas to Valdosta, Georgia, we were met by similarly huge crowds radiating a joyous intensity that I have never seen anywhere else in politics.
Back in Little Rock, the vast third floor of the old Arkansas Gazette Building served as Clinton campaign headquarters. James Carville insisted that people from each part of the campaign—including press, political and research—work together in the same large space. It was a brilliant and effective way to diminish the hierarchy and encourage the free flow of information and ideas. Every day at 7 a.m. and 7 p.m., Carville and Stephanopoulos held meetings in what was dubbed the "war room" to assess the news of the day and formulate a response to news stories and attacks from the Bush campaign. The idea was that no attack on Bill would go unanswered. The physical setup of the war room allowed Carville, Stephanopoulos and the "rapid response" team to react immediately to correct distortions put out by the opposition and to work aggressively to get out our message throughout the day.
One night Patti Solis's phone rang in the back of the headquarters in Little Rock. Another campaign aide, Steve Rabinowitz, rushed to pick up the receiver and, for no particular reason, blurted out: "Hillary-land!" He was embarrassed to hear my voice on the line, but I thought he had come up with a great nickname. Patti loved it, too, and tacked a sign on the wall behind her desk that said "Hillaryland." The name stuck.
Over time, my confidence that Bill would win the election grew. Americans wanted new leadership. Twelve years of Republicans in the White House had quadrupled the national debt, produced large and growing budget deficits and led to a stagnant economy in which too many people couldn't find or keep a decent job, or afford health care insurance for themselves and their children. President Bush had vetoed the Family and Medical Leave Act twice and had backed off women's rights. Though a supporter of family planning when he was Ambassador to the United Nations and as a Texas Congressman, Bush became an anti-choice Vice President and President. With rates of crime, unemployment, welfare dependency and homelessness climbing, the Bush Administration seemed increasingly out of touch.
To Bill and me, no issue was more distressing than the health care crisis in America. Everywhere we went, we heard story after story about the inequities of the health care system. Growing numbers of citizens were being deprived of necessary health care because they were uninsured and didn't have the means to pay their own medical bills.
In New Hampshire, Bill and I met Ronnie and Rhonda Machos, whose son, Ronnie Jr., had been born with a serious heart condition. When Ronnie lost his job and his health insurance, he faced crushing medical bills to provide the care his son needed. The Gores told us about the Philpott family from Georgia, whose seven-year-old son, Brett, had shared a hospital room with young Albert Gore after his devastating car accident. Al and Tipper spoke often about the tremendous financial burden the Philpott family had faced because of Brett's illness.
As moving as each story was, we knew that for every tragic case we heard about or witnessed, thousands more went untold.
I don't think Bill expected that health care reform would become a cornerstone of his campaign. After all, James Carville's famous war room slogan was "It's the economy, stupid." But the more Bill studied the problem, the clearer it became that reforming health care insurance and reining in skyrocketing costs were integral to fixing the economy, as well as taking care of people's urgent medical needs. "Don't forget about health care," Bill told his staff over and over again. They began to collect data, including a study by Ira Magaziner, the mover and shaker I had first heard of in 1969 when we were featured in Life magazine after delivering our college commencement speeches. Bill had met Ira the same year, when Ira arrived at Oxford University as a Rhodes Scholar. Bill, Ira and a growing team of expert advisers began developing ideas about how to tackle health care after the election. Bill previewed those plans in a campaign book entitled Putting People First and in a speech he delivered in September setting forth his goals to address the health care crisis. The reforms he outlined included controlling spiral-ing health care costs, reducing paperwork and insurance industry red tape, making prescription drugs more affordable and, most important, guaranteeing that all Americans had health insurance. We knew that trying to fix the health care system would be a huge political challenge. But we believed that if voters chose Bill Clinton on November 3, it meant that change was what they wanted.
BILL AND I SPENT THE LAST TWENTY-FOUR HOURS of the 1992 campaign crisscrossing the country, making final stops in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania; Cleveland, Ohio; Detroit, Michigan; St. Louis, Missouri; Paducah, Kentucky; McAllen and Ft. Worth, Texas; and Albuquerque, New Mexico. We saw the sun rise in Denver, Colorado, and landed back in Little Rock, where Chelsea met us at the airport at around 10:30 a.m. After a quick stop to change clothes, the three of us went to our polling site, where I proudly cast my vote for Bill to be my President. We spent the day at the Governor's Mansion with family and friends, making calls to supporters around the country. At 10:47 p-M-> the television networks declared that Bill had won.
Though I had expected a victory, I was overwhelmed. After President Bush called Bill to concede, Bill and I went into our bedroom, closed the door and prayed together for God's help as he took on this awesome honor and responsibility. Then we gathered everyone up for the drive to the Old State House, where the campaign had begun thirteen months before. We joined the Gores in front of a huge crowd of ecstatic Arkansans and ardent supporters from every corner of America.
Within hours, the kitchen table in the Governor's Mansion became the nerve center of the Clinton transition. In the next few weeks, potential cabinet nominees came in and out, phones rang around the clock, piles of food were consumed. Bill asked Warren Christopher to head his transition and to work with Mickey Kan tor and Vernon Jordan to vet candidates for major positions. They first concentrated on the economic team, because that was Bill's highest priority. Senator Lloyd Bentsen of Texas agreed to become Secretary of the Treasury; Robert Rubin, the co-Chairman of the investment bank Goldman Sachs, accepted Bill's offer to become the first head of a soon-to-be-created National Economic Council; Laura D'Andrea Tyson, a professor of economics at the University of California at Berkeley, became Chair of the Council of Economic Advisers; Gene Sperling, a former aide to Governor Mario Cuomo of New York, became Rubin's deputy and later succeeded him; and Congressman Leon Panetta, the Democratic Chairman of the House of Representatives Budget Committee, became the Director of the Office of Management and Budget. They worked with Bill to forge the economic policy that put our nation on the path to fiscal responsibility in government and unprecedented growth in the private sector.
We were also facing the more mundane challenges of any family changing jobs and residences. In the midst of forming a new Administration, we had to pack up the Governor's Mansion, the only home Chelsea remembered. And since we didn't own a house of our own, everything would come with us to the White House. Friends pitched in to organize and sort, piling boxes in every room. Loretta Avent, a friend from Arizona who had joined me on the campaign after the convention, took charge of the thousands of gifts that arrived from all over the world, filling a huge section of the large basement. Periodically, Loretta would shriek up the stairs: "Wait till you see what just came." And I'd go down to find her clutching a portrait of Bill made out of seashells and mounted on a red velvet background or a collection of stuffed dogs dressed in baby clothes sent to our now famous black-and-white cat, Socks.
We had to find a new school in Washington for Chelsea, who was almost a teenager and not happy with the prospect of dismantling her life. Bill and I wondered how we could give her a normal childhood in the White House, where her new reality would include twenty-four-hour Secret Service protection. We had already decided to bring Socks to Washington, although we had been warned that he could no longer roam free, collecting dead birds and mice as trophies. Because the White House fence was wide enough for him to slip through into traffic, we reluctantly decided he would have to be on a leash whenever he was outside.
I had taken a leave of absence to campaign, but now I resigned my law practice and started putting together a staff for the office of First Lady, while helping Bill in any way I could. We were both grappling with what my role should be. I would have a "position" but not a real "job." How could I use this platform to help my husband and serve my country without losing my own voice?
There is no training manual for First Ladies. You get the job because the man you married becomes President. Each of my predecessors brought to the White House her own attitudes and expectations, likes and dislikes, dreams and doubts. Each carved out a role that reflected her own interests and style and that balanced the needs of her husband, family and country. So would I. Like all First Ladies before me, I had to decide what I wanted to do with the opportunities and responsibilities I had inherited.
Over the years, the role of First Lady has been perceived as largely symbolic. She is expected to represent an ideal—and largely mythical— concept of American womanhood. Many former First Ladies were highly accomplished, but true stories of what they had done in their lives were overlooked, forgotten or suppressed. By the time I was preparing to take on the role, history was finally catching up to reality. In March 1992, the Smithsonian's National Museum of American History revised its popular First Ladies Exhibit to acknowledge the varied political roles and public images of these women. In addition to gowns and china, the museum displayed the camouflage jacket Barbara Bush wore when she visited the troops of Desert Storm with her husband and featured a quote from Martha Washington: "I am more like a state prisoner than anything else." The exhibit's chief curator, Edith Mayo, and the Smithsonian were criticized for rewriting history and demeaning the "family values" of the First Ladies.
As I studied the marriages of previous Presidents, I recognized that Bill and I were not the first couple who relied on each other as partners in life and politics. Because of research done by the Smithsonian and historians such as Carl Sferrazza Anthony and David McCullough, we now know about the political advice Abigail Adams provided her husband, which earned her the derogatory nickname "Mrs. President"; the behind-the-scenes role Helen Taft played in pushing Theodore Roosevelt to choose her husband as his successor; the "unofficial Presidency" run by Edith Wilson after her husband's stroke; the political firestorms ignited by Eleanor Roosevelt; and the painstaking review by Bess of Harry Truman's speeches and letters.
Like those of many previous White House inhabitants, the relationship that Bill Clinton and I had built was rooted in love and respect, shared aspirations and accomplishments, victories and defeats. That wasn't about to change with an election. After seventeen years of marriage, we were each other's biggest cheerleaders, toughest critics and best friends.
Yet it wasn't clear to either of us how this partnership would fit into the new Clinton Administration. Bill couldn't appoint me to an official position, even if he had wanted to. Anti-nepotism laws had been on the books since President John F. Kennedy appointed his brother Bobby to be Attorney General. But there were no laws to prevent me from continuing my role as Bill Clinton's unpaid adviser and, in some cases, representative. We had worked together for so long, and Bill knew he could trust me. We always understood that I would contribute to my husband's administration. But we didn't know precisely what my role would be until late in the transition, when Bill asked me to oversee his health care initiative.
He was in the process of centralizing economic policy in the White House and wanted a similar structure for health care. With so many government agencies claiming a stake in reform, he worried that turf wars could stifle creativity and new approaches. Bill decided that Ira Magaziner should coordinate the process inside the White House to develop the legislation, and he wanted me to head up the initiative to make it law. Bill intended to announce our appointments right after the inauguration. Because of our experience in Arkansas, where Bill had appointed me to lead committees on rural health care and public education, neither of us spent much time worrying about reactions my involvement might provoke. When it came to political spouses, we certainly didn't expect the nation's capital to be more conservative than Arkansas.
We were running late when we left Little Rock on the evening of January 16, 1993. Thousands of our friends and supporters jammed into a huge hangar at Little Rock Airport for an emotional farewell ceremony. I was excited about what lay ahead of us, but my enthusiasm was tinged with melancholy. Bill was on the verge of tears as he recited the lyrics of a song to the crowd of well-wishers, "Arkansas runs deep in me, and it always will." What seemed like a thousand hugs and waves later, we boarded our chartered plane. Once we were airborne, the lights of Little Rock disappeared beneath the clouds, and there was nothing to do but look ahead.
We flew to Charlottesville, Virginia, to continue the journey to Washington by bus, following the 121-mile route Thomas Jefferson had taken to his inauguration in 1801. I thought it was an appropriate way to initiate the Presidency of William Jefferson Clinton.
The next morning, we met up with Al and Tipper and toured Mon-ticello, the great house Jefferson designed. Then we boarded another bus together, just as we had during the campaign, and headed north to Washington. Route 29 was lined with thousands of people cheering us on, waving flags, holding balloons and banners. Some held homemade signs to encourage us, congratulate us or chastise us: "Bubbas for Bill." "We are counting on you." "Keep your promises—AIDS won't wait." "You're socialists, stupid." My favorite was a plain, hand-lettered sign with two words: "Grace, Compassion."
The sky was still clear, but the temperature was dropping as we pulled into Washington, D.C. By some act of providence, the punctuality-impaired President-elect was running on time, and we arrived at the Lincoln Memorial five minutes early for the first official event—a concert on the steps in front of an enormous crowd that stretched down the Mall. Harry Thomason, Rahm Emanuel and Mel French, another friend from Arkansas, were the impresarios of the inaugural festivities. Harry and Rahm were so relieved to see us that they hugged each other.
I had never sat in an enclosure of bulletproof glass—a strange sensation and somewhat alienating. I was grateful, though, for the little heaters by our feet because the temperature had dropped precipitously. Pop diva Diana Ross sang a spectacular rendition of "God Bless America." Bob Dylan played to the packed Mall, just as he had on that August day in 1963 when Martin Luther King, Jr., delivered his "I Have a Dream" speech from the same steps. I felt extremely fortunate to have seen Reverend King speak when I was a teenager in Chicago, and now here I was listening to my husband honor the man who helped this nation overcome its painful history:
"Let us build an American home for the twenty-first century, where everyone has a place at the table and not a single child is left behind," Bill said. "In this world and the world of tomorrow, we must go forward together or not at all."
The sun was setting when Bill, Chelsea and I led thousands of swaying, singing celebrants in a march across Memorial Bridge.
We stopped on the other side of the Potomac River to ring a replica of the Liberty Bell, touching off a celebration in which thousands of "Bells of Hope" were rung simultaneously across the country and even aboard the space shuttle Endeavor as it circled the planet. We lingered a while as fireworks lit up the night sky over the capital. Then it was off to another event, and still another. By then all the celebrations were blending together in a kaleidoscope of faces and stages and voices.
During inaugural week, our families and personal staff stayed with us in Blair House, the traditional guest residence for visiting heads of state and Presidents-elect. Blair House and its professional staff run by Benedicte Valentiner, known to all as Mrs. V., and her deputy, Randy Baumgardner, made us feel welcome in the quietly elegant mansion that became an oasis during a hectic week. Blair House is famous for being able to accommodate any special need. Our crew was tame compared to certain visiting heads of state who demanded that their guards be nude to ensure they carried no weapons, or imported their own cooks to prepare everything from goat to snake.
Bill gave a lot of speeches that week, but he still hadn't finished writing the biggest one of his life: the inaugural address. Bill is a wonderful writer and gifted speechmaker who makes it look easy, but his constant revisions and last-minute changes are nerve-racking. He's never met a sentence he couldn't fool with. I was used to his constant tinkering, but even I could feel my anxiety rise as the day grew nearer. Bill worked on the draft whenever there was a moment between events.
My husband likes to pull everybody around him into his creative tumult. David Kusnet, his main speechwriter; Bruce Reed, his Deputy Domestic Policy Adviser; George Stephanopoulos, his Communications Director; Al Gore and I all put our two cents in. Bill also called in two longtime friends: Tommy Caplan, a marvelous wordsmith and novelist who had been one of his roommates at Georgetown University, and the Pulitzer Prize-winning author Taylor Branch, who had worked with us in Texas for the McGovern campaign. In the midst of the process, Bill received a letter from Father Tim Healy, the former President of Georgetown and head of the New York Public Library. He and Bill shared a Georgetown connection, and Father Healy had been writing the letter to Bill when he died suddenly of a heart attack as he returned home from a trip. The letter was found in Father Healy's typewriter and sent on to Bill, who found in this posthumous message a wonderful phrase. Father had written that Bill's election would "force the spring" and lead to a flowering of new ideas, hope and energy that would reinvigorate the country. I loved his words and his apt metaphor for Bill's ambitions for his Presidency.
It was fascinating to watch my husband that week as he literally became President before my eyes. Throughout the inaugural festivities, Bill received security briefings to prepare him for the historic responsibilities he was about to assume. With remarkable agility, he was already shifting his attention from a major speech to news of U.S. planes that were bombing Iraq in response to Saddam Hussein's contempt for U.N. demands to briefings about the worsening conflict in Bosnia.
He was still writing his speech the day before inauguration. To give him time to work, I agreed to fill in for him at his afternoon events, although I had to keep my own schedule, too. That afternoon I also squeezed in an appearance at events sponsored by my alma maters, Wellesley College and Yale Law School. On the way back from the Mayflower Hotel, my car got stuck in a gridlock of inaugural crowds and out-of-state vehicles on Pennsylvania Avenue, within sight of Blair House. I was so late and frustrated that I jumped out and took off running through the traffic. Capricia Marshall, who was watching from a window in Blair House, still laughs when she describes the sight of me darting between cars, wearing heels and a snug gray flannel dress, with my alarmed Secret Service detail scrambling behind.
Bill finally finished writing and rehearsing the big speech an hour or two before dawn on the morning of his inauguration.
We slept very briefly and then started our extraordinary day with an emotional interfaith service at the Metropolitan A.M.E. Church. Then we went to the White House, where the Bushes greeted us at the North Portico with their spaniels, Millie and Ranger, darting around their legs. They were very welcoming and put us at ease. Although the campaign had been bruising for both our families, Barbara Bush had been gracious to me when we had met in the past and had given me a walking tour of the family quarters of the White House after the election. George Bush had always been friendly when we had seen him at the annual National Governors Association conferences, and I had sat next to him at NGA dinners at the White House and at the Education Summit in Charlottesville atMonticello in 1989. When the summer Governors Conference was held in Maine in 1983, the Bushes opened their property at Kennebunkport for a big clambake. Chelsea, only three at the time, came along, and when she had to go to the bathroom, then Vice President Bush took her by the hand and showed her the way.
The Gores joined us at the White House, along with Alma and Ron Brown, who was Chairman of the DNC and soon to be sworn in as Commerce Secretary, and Linda and Harry Thomason, who had co-chaired the inauguration.
President and Airs. Bush guided our party to the Blue Room, where we had coffee and made small talk for twenty minutes or so until it was time to leave for the Capitol. Bill rode in the presidential limousine with George Bush, while Barbara Bush and I followed in another car. The crowds lining Pennsylvania Avenue cheered and waved as we passed. I admired Mrs. Bush's elan as we prepared to watch one President, her husband, make way for another.
At the Capitol we stood on the West Front with its breathtaking view down the Mall to the Washington Monument and the Lincoln Memorial. The huge crowd spilled out beyond the Monument.
Following custom, the United States Marine Band struck up "Hail to the Chief one final time for George Bush just before noon, and again to the new President a few minutes later. I had always been stirred by those chords, and now I felt moved beyond words to hear them play for my husband. Chelsea and I reverently held the Bible as Bill took the oath of office. Then he gathered Chelsea and me in his arms and, kissing each of us, whispered, "I love you both so much."
Bill's speech stressed the themes of sacrifice and service for America and called for the changes he had featured in his campaign. "There is nothing wrong with America that cannot be cured by what is right with America," he said, calling Americans to "a season of service" on behalf of those in need at home and those around the world whom we must help to build democracy and freedom.
After the swearing-in ceremony, while some of our new staffers hurried to the White House to start unpacking and organizing our things, Bill and I lunched in the Capitol with members of Congress. Just as the mantle of power passes from one President to the next at noon on Inauguration Day, so does possession of the White House. The belongings of a new President and his family cannot be moved into the White House until after he is sworn in. At 12:01 p.m., George and Barbara Bush's moving vans pulled away from the delivery entrance as ours came in. Our luggage, furniture and hundreds of boxes were unloaded in a mad dash in the few hours between the ceremony at the Capitol and the end of the inaugural parade. Aides scrambled to locate what we would need immediately and stuffed the rest of our possessions into closets and spare rooms to deal with later.
White House security procedures require that essential employees be cleared with the uniformed Secret Service guards, a process known by its acronym, WAVES, which stands for "Workers and Visitors Entry System." A list of prescreened guests or staff is then WAVE-d into the White House. Unfortunately, my personal assistant, Capricia Marshall, hadn't quite mastered the system. She thought being "waved in" involved a welcoming hand gesture. Capricia, who would not let my inaugural gown out of her sight that day, carried it from Blair House, waving at guards as she went from gate to gate trying to find someone to WAVE her in. It's a testament to her persuasiveness—and her eventual inclusion in the WAVES system—that my violet blue lace-covered ball gown made it past White House security on Inauguration Day.
After lunch, Bill, Chelsea and I drove from the Capitol down the parade route to the Treasury Building; there, with the Secret Service's reluctant blessing, we got out and walked along Pennsylvania Avenue to the reviewing stand in front of the White House, where I sat down in front of a space heater to watch the parade. Because Democrats hadn't had a winner in sixteen years, everyone wanted to participate. We couldn't say no and didn't want to. There were six marching bands from Arkansas alone, in a parade that lasted three hours.
We first walked into the White House as its new residents in the early evening after the last float passed by. I remember looking around in wonder at this house I had visited as a guest. Now it would be my home. It was during my walk up the path toward the White House and up the stairs of the North Portico and into the Grand Foyer that the reality hit me: I was actually the First Lady, married to the President of the United States. It was the first of many times I would be reminded of the history I was now joining.
Members of the permanent White House staff, numbering about one hundred, were waiting to greet us in the Grand Foyer. These are the men and women who run the house and tend to the special needs of its residents. The White House has its own engineers, carpenters, plumbers, gardeners, florists, curators, cooks, butlers and housekeepers who continue from one administration to the next. The entire operation is overseen by the "ushers," a quaint term from the nineteenth century still used to describe the administrative staff. In 2000,1 published my third book, An Invitation to the White House, which was both a tribute to the permanent White House staff and a behind-the-scenes look at the extraordinary job they do every day.
We were escorted upstairs to the private residence on the second floor, which looked barren as our belongings had not been unpacked. But we had no time to worry about any of that. We had to get ready to go out.
One of the most convenient features of the residence is the beauty salon, put in by Pat Nixon on the second floor. Chelsea, her friends, my mother, my mother-in-law and my sister-in-law, Maria, crowded in and jockeyed to be transformed, like Cinderellas, for the balls.
Bill wanted to attend each of the eleven inaugural balls that evening, and not just for the customary five-minute drop-by and wave. We were going to celebrate. Chelsea and four of her girlfriends from Arkansas accompanied us to several events, including the MTV Ball, before returning to the White House for a sleepover. The Arkansas Ball, held in the Washington Convention Center, was the biggest and most fun for us because that's where our families and twelve thousand of our friends and supporters had gathered. Ben E. King handed Bill a saxophone, and the crowd erupted in cheers and Razorback hog calls of "Soooooo-ey!"
No one had more fun than Bill's mother, Virginia. She was the belle of at least three balls. She probably already knew half the revelers, and she was quickly meeting the rest. She also made a special friend that night: Barbra Streisand. She and Barbra struck up a friendship at the Arkansas Ball that continued with weekly phone calls for the next year.
Bill and I carried on at the balls, and by the end of the evening, we had danced to so many renditions of "Don't Stop Thinking About Tomorrow," the unofficial campaign theme song, that I had to kick off my shoes to give my feet a rest. Neither of us wanted the night to end, but I finally coaxed Bill out of the Midwestern Ball at the Sheraton Hotel when the musicians started packing away their instruments. We headed back to the White House well after two in the morning.
When we stepped out of the elevator into the second floor residence, we looked at each other in disbelief: this was now our home. Too tired to explore these grand new surroundings, we crashed into bed.
We had been asleep for only a few hours when we heard a brisk knock on the bedroom door.
Tap, tap, tap.
"Whuh?"
TAP, TAP, TAP.
Bill bolted up in bed, and I groped for my glasses in the dark, thinking there must be some sort of emergency on our very first morning.
Suddenly the door swung open and a man in a tuxedo stepped into the bedroom carrying a silver breakfast tray. This is how the Bushes began their day, with a bedroom breakfast at 5:30 a.m., and it's what the butlers were accustomed to. But the first words this poor man heard from the forty-second President of the United States were, "Hey! What are you doing here?"
You never saw anyone back out of a room so quickly.
Bill and I just laughed and settled back under the covers to try to steal another hour of sleep. It struck me that both the White House and we, its new occupants, were in for some major adjustments, publicly and privately.
The Clinton Presidency represented generational and political change that would affect every institution in Washington. For twenty of the previous twenty-four years, the White House had been a Republican domain. Its occupants had been members of our parents' generation. The Reagans often ate dinner in front of the television on TV trays and the Bushes reportedly awoke at dawn to walk the dogs, and then read newspapers and watch the morning news shows on the five television sets in their bedroom. After twelve years, the dedicated permanent staff was used to a predictable routine and regular hours. Children hadn't lived there full-time since Jimmy Carter left office in 1981. I suspected that our family's casual lifestyle and round-the-clock work habits were bound to be as unfamiliar to the staff as the formality of the White House was to us.
Bill's campaign had emphasized Putting People First, so on our first full day in the White House we wanted to make good on that promise by inviting thousands of people for an open house, many selected by lottery. They all held tickets and many had lined up in the dark before sunrise to meet us and the Gores. But we hadn't anticipated how long it would take to greet everyone and hadn't scheduled enough time. The lines stretched across the grounds from the East Gate to the South Portico, and I felt terrible when I realized many of the people waiting outside in the cold wouldn't make it inside to the Diplomatic Reception Room before we had to leave. The four of us went outside to tell the hardy souls remaining how sorry we were that we could not stay to greet them, but that they were still welcome to visit their house.
After our other obligations ended late that afternoon, Bill and I were finally free to change into casual clothes and have a look around our new home. We wanted to share these first days and nights in the White House with our closest friends and family. There were two guest rooms on the second floor, referred to as the Queen's Room and the Lincoln Bedroom, and seven other guest rooms on the third floor. In addition to Chelsea and her friends from Little Rock, our parents, Hugh and Dorothy Rodham and Virginia and Dick Kelley, and our brothers, Hugh Rodham (and his wife, Maria), Tony Rodham and Roger Clinton, were staying with us. And we had also invited four of our best friends, Diane and Jim Blair and Harry and Linda Thomason, to spend the night.
Harry and Linda produced and wrote several television shows, including the hugely successful Designing Women and Evening Shade, but their hearts never left the Ozarks. Harry had grown up in Hampton, Arkansas, and started out as a high school football coach in Little Rock. Linda came from a family of lawyers and activists in Poplar Bluff, Missouri, just across the Arkansas State line. The only other famous person born in that patch of Missouri, Linda told us with a laugh, was Rush Limbaugh, the right-wing radio host who was one of George Bush's biggest cheerleaders. Linda's and Rush's families knew each other and had a long-standing, amiable rivalry.
After a whirlwind week of inaugural festivities, it felt good to relax with people we had known for years and trusted completely. At the end of the evening, we decided to raid the small family kitchen off the West Sitting Hall. Harry and Bill checked the cabinets while Linda and I opened the refrigerator. It was empty except for one item: a half-full bottle of vodka. We used the contents to toast the new President, the country and our future.
Our parents had already gone to bed, and Chelsea and her guests were finally quiet. The night before, the girls had come back early from the inaugural balls and had a great time going on a scavenger hunt staged for them by the curators and ushers. I thought it would be a good way for her to have fun and get familiar with her new environment. The curators came up with all sorts of historical clues, such as find "the painting with the yellow bird" {Still Life with Fruit, Goblet and Canary by Severin Roesen, in the Red Room) and find "the room where it is sometimes said a ghost has been seen." (The Lincoln Bedroom, where guests have reported cold breezes and spectral figures.)
I don't believe in ghosts, but we did sometimes feel that the White House was haunted by more temporal entities. Spirits of administrations past were everywhere. Sometimes they even left notes. Harry and Linda were given the Lincoln Bedroom that night. When they climbed into the long rosewood bed, they found a folded piece of paper under a pillow.
Dear Linda, I was here first, and I'll be back," the note said. It was signed "Rush Limbaugh."
THE WHITE HOUSE IS THE PRESIDENT'S OFFICEAND home, and it is also a national museum. Its organizational culture, I quickly learned, is like a military unit. For years things had been done a certain way, often by staff who had worked there for decades, perfecting the way the house was run and preserved. The head gardener, Irv Williams, started under President Truman. The permanent staff knew that they provided the continuity from one First Family to the next. In many ways they were the keepers of the institutional Presidency from one administration to the next. We were merely temporary residents. When the senior President Bush came to unveil his official portrait during Bill's first term, he saw George Washington Hannie, Jr., a butler who had worked at the House for more than twenty-five years. "George, you're still here?"
The veteran butler replied: "Yes, sir. Presidents come and go. But George is always here."
Like many venerable institutions, change came slowly to the White House. The phone system was a throwback to another era. To dial out from the residence, we had to pick up the receiver and wait for a White House operator to dial for us. Eventually I got used to it and came to appreciate the kind and patient operators who worked at the switchboard. When the entire phone system was eventually upgraded with newer technology, I continued to place calls through them.
I knew I would never get used to the Secret Service agent posted outside our bedroom door. This was standard operating procedure for past Presidents, and the Secret Service was adamant, at first, about keeping it that way.
"What if the President has a heart attack in the middle of the night?" one agent asked me when I suggested that he station himself downstairs instead of with us on the second floor.
"He's forty-six years old and in great health," I said. "He's not going to have a heart attack!"
The Secret Service adapted to our needs, and we to theirs. After all, they were the experts when it came to our safety. We just had to find a way to let them do their job and let us be ourselves. For twelve years, they had been used to a predictable routine where spontaneity was the exception, not the rule. Our campaign, with its breakneck pace, frequent stops and rope lines, made our agents scramble. I had many long conversations with the agents assigned to protect us. One of my lead agents, Don Flynn, said: "Now I get it. It's like if one of us was President. We like to go places and do things and stay up late too." That one comment helped set the tone of cooperation and flexibility that came to characterize our relationships with the agents sworn to protect us. Bill, Chelsea and I have nothing but praise for their courage, integrity and professionalism, and we feel lucky to remain friends with many agents who protected us.
Maggie Williams had agreed to help me at the end of the 1992 presidential campaign, but only if I understood that she would return to Philadelphia after the election to finish her Ph.D. at Penn. With the election over, I realized I needed her more than ever. I begged, pleaded, implored and hounded her to stay on through the transition, then to join the administration as my Chief of Staff.
Our first job was to recruit other staffers, pick office space and learn the intricacies of the traditional First Lady duties. Since the Truman Administration, First Ladies and their staffs had operated entirely out of the East Wing, which houses two floors of office space, a large reception room for visitors, the White House movie theater and a long glass colonnade that runs along the edge of the East Garden that Lady Bird Johnson dedicated to Jackie Kennedy. Over the years, as First Ladies expanded their duties, their staffs grew bigger and more specialized. Jackie Kennedy was the first to have her own press secretary. Lady Bird Johnson organized her staff structure to reflect that of the West Wing. Rosalynn Carter's staff director operated as a chief of staff and attended daily meetings with the President's staff. Nancy Reagan increased the size and prominence of her staff within the White House.
The West Wing is where the Oval Office is located, along with the Roosevelt Room, the Cabinet Room, the Situation Room (where top-secret meetings are held and communications are sent and received), the White House Mess (where meals are served) and offices housing the President's senior staff. The rest of the White House staff work across a driveway in the Old Executive Office Building, or OEOB. No First Lady or her staff had ever had offices in the West Wing or the OEOB (which has since been renamed the Eisenhower Executive Office Building).
Although the visitors office, personal correspondence and the social secretary would remain headquartered in the East Wing, some of my staff would be part of the West Wing team. I thought they should be integrated physically as well. Maggie made her case to Bill's transition staff for the space we wanted in the West Wing, and the Office of the First Lady moved into a suite of rooms at the end of a long corridor on the first floor of the OEOB. I was assigned an office on the second floor of the West Wing just down the hall from the domestic policy staff. This was another unprecedented event in White House history and quickly became fodder for late night comedians and political pundits. One cartoon depicted the White House with an Oval Office rising from the roof of the second floor.
Maggie assumed the title of Assistant to the President—her predecessors had been Deputy Assistants to the President—and each morning she attended the 7:30 a.m. senior staff meeting with the President's top advisers. I also had a domestic policy staffer assigned to my office full-time, as well as a presidential speechwriter designated to work on my speeches, especially those relating to health care reform. My staff of twenty included a Deputy Chief of Staff, press secretary, scheduler, travel director and compiler of my daily briefing book. Two of the original staff are still with me today: Pam Cicetti, an experienced executive assistant who became my all-purpose person, and Alice Pushkar, Director of the First Lady's Correspondence, who assumed one of the most daunting of all jobs with poise and imagination.
These physical and staff changes were important if I was going to be involved in working on Bill's agenda, particularly as it related to issues affecting women, children and families. The people I hired were committed to the issues and to the idea that government could—and should—be a partner in creating opportunities for people who were willing to work hard and take responsibility. Most of them came out of the public sector or from organizations committed to improving economic, political and social conditions for the underrepresented and the underprivileged.
Before long, my staff was recognized within the administration and by the press as active and influential, due in large part to the leadership of Maggie and Melanne Verveer, my Deputy Chief of Staff. Melanne and her husband, Phil, had been friends of Bill's since their days at Georgetown University, and she was a longtime Democratic activist and experienced Washington hand. A true policy wonk who loves the complexities and nuances of issues, Melanne had worked for years on Capitol Hill and in the advocacy world. I used to joke that there wasn't a single person in Washington she didn't know. Not only was Melanne a legend in the nation's capital; so was her Rolodex. At last count, it contained six thousand names. There is no way to catalog the many projects that Melanne masterminded, first as Deputy and then, in the second term, as my Chief of Staff. She also became a key player on the President's team, advocating for policies affecting women, human rights, legal services and the arts.
Soon my staff became known around the White House as "Hillary-land." We were fully immersed in the daily operations of the West Wing, but we were also our own little subculture within the White House. My staff prided themselves on discretion, loyalty and camaraderie, and we had our own special ethos. While the West Wing had a tendency to leak, Hillaryland never did. While the President's senior advisers jockeyed for big offices with proximity to the Oval Office, my senior staff happily shared offices with their young assistants. We had toys and crayons for children in our main conference room and every child who ever visited knew exactly where we stashed the cookies. One Christmas, Melanne ordered lapel buttons that read, in very small letters, hillaryland, and she and I began handing out honorary memberships, usually to long-suffering spouses and children of my overworked staffers. Membership entitled them to visit anytime—and to come to all of our parties.
The West Wing operation was up and running, but my East Wing duties were still giving me the jitters. Just ten days after the inauguration, Bill and I would be hosting our first big event, the National Governors Association annual dinner. Bill had been Chairman of the NGA, and many of those attending were colleagues and friends we had known for years. We wanted the dinner to come off well, and I was eager to dispel the notion, percolating in the news media, that I had little interest in the customary functions of the First Lady's office, which included overseeing White House social events. I had enjoyed those responsibilities, carried out on a far less grand scale, as First Lady of Arkansas and looked forward to them now. But my staff and I needed guidance. I had been to White House dinners since 1977, when President and Mrs. Carter invited then Arkansas Attorney General Bill Clinton and his spouse to a dinner honoring Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau of Canada and his wife, Margaret. We had been back every year Bill was Governor for the very dinner I was now charged with planning. Attending the event as guests was a far cry from hosting it ourselves.
I had the help of our new social secretary, Ann Stock, an energetic woman of impeccable taste and style who had worked in the Carter White House and then as a top executive at Bloomingdale's. Ann and I tried different combinations of linens and place settings before settling on the gold-and-red-rimmed china acquired by Mrs. Reagan. We worked on the seating arrangements, eager to ensure that our guests would be comfortable with their tablemates. We knew almost everyone and decided to mix them up on the basis of interests and personalities. I consulted with the White House florist, Nancy Clarke, as she arranged the tulips I had selected for each table. From that day on, Nancy's cheerful stamina never ceased to amaze me.
Every hour of life in the White House brought some new and unanticipated hurdle. Yet there were few people I could talk to who genuinely understood my experience. My close friends were supportive and always available for conversations by phone, but none of them had lived in the White House. Fortunately, though, someone I knew had, and she understood what I was going through. She became a valued source of wisdom, advice and support.
On January 26, a bitterly cold morning just a few days after the inauguration, I flew to New York City on the regular shuttle. It was my only flight on a commercial airline during my eight years at the White House. Because of the security required and the inconvenience to other passengers, I agreed with the Secret Service to forgo that link to my previous life. Officially, I was going to New York to receive the Lewis Hine Award for my work on children's issues and to visit PS. 115, a local public school, to promote voluntary tutoring. But I was also making a private stop to have lunch with Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis at her beautiful apartment on Fifth Avenue.
I had met Jackie a few times before and had visited her once during the 1992 campaign. She had been an early supporter of Bill's, contributing financially and attending the convention. She was a transcendent public figure, someone I had admired and respected for as long as I could remember. Not only had Jackie Kennedy been a superb First Lady, bringing style, grace and intelligence to the White House, she also had done an extraordinary job raising her children. Months before, I had asked her advice about bringing up children in the public eye, and on this visit I hoped to hear more from her about how she dealt with the established culture at the White House. It had been thirty years since she lived there, but I sensed that not much had changed.
The Secret Service dropped me off at her apartment shortly before noon, and Jackie greeted me at the elevator door on the fifteenth floor. She was impeccably dressed, wearing silk pants in one of her signature colors—a combination of beige and gray—and a matching blouse with subtle peach stripes. At sixty-three, she remained as beautiful and dignified as she was when she first entered the national consciousness as the glamorous thirty-one-year-old wife of the second-youngest President in American history.
After President Kennedy's death in 1963, she had receded from public view for many years, married Greek shipping tycoon Aristotle Onassis and later launched a successful career as a literary editor for one of the finest publishing houses in New York City. The first thing I noticed about her apartment was that it was overflowing with books. They were stacked everywhere—on and under tables, beside couches and chairs. Books were piled so high in her study that she could rest her plate on them if she was eating at her desk. She is the only person I've met who literally decorated her apartment with books—and pulled it off. I've tried to duplicate the effect I saw in Jackie's apartment and her Martha's Vineyard home with all the books Bill and I own. Predictably, ours never look quite as elegant.
We sat at a table in the corner of her living room overlooking Central Park and the Metropolitan Museum of Art and continued the conversation we had begun at our lunch the summer before. Jackie gave me invaluable advice about how to deal with my loss of privacy, and she told me what she had done to protect her children, Caroline and John. Providing Chelsea with a normal life would be one of the biggest challenges Bill and I faced, she told me. We had to allow Chelsea to grow up and even make mistakes, while shielding her from the constant scrutiny she would endure as the daughter of a President. Her own children, she said, had been lucky to have so many cousins, natural playmates and friends, many of them with fathers in the public eye, too. She felt it would be much harder for an only child.
"You've got to protect Chelsea at all costs," Jackie said. "Surround her with friends and family, but don't spoil her. Don't let her think she's someone special or entitled. Keep the press away from her if you can, and don't let anyone use her."
Already, Bill and I had taken a measure of the public's interest in Chelsea and the national fascination with a child growing up in the White House. Our decision about where to send Chelsea to school had inspired passionate debate inside and outside the Beltway, largely because of its symbolic significance. I understood the disappointment felt by advocates of public education when we chose Sidwell Friends, a private Quaker school, particularly after Chelsea had attended public schools in Arkansas. But the decision for Bill and me rested on one fact: Private schools were private property, hence off-limits to the news media. Public schools were not. The last thing we wanted was television cameras and news reporters following our daughter throughout the school day, as they had when President Carter's daughter, Amy, attended public school.
So far, our instincts and Jackie's prescriptions had served Chelsea well. She was adjusting to her new school as comfortably as could be expected, although she missed her friends from Arkansas. She was settling into her two rooms on the second floor. They had been Caroline's and John's and then Lynda and Luci Johnson's, so Jackie knew exactly where they were. One was now Chelsea's bedroom with twin beds so she could have sleepovers, and the other was a den where she could do homework, watch television, listen to music and entertain friends.
I told Jackie how grateful I was that she had created a dining room upstairs and that we were converting the butler's pantry into a small kitchen where we could eat our family meals in a more relaxed and informal atmosphere. One night, I sparked a culinary crisis. Chelsea was not feeling well, and I wanted to make her soft scrambled eggs and applesauce, the comfort foods I had always provided in our pre-White House years. I looked in the small kitchen for utensils and then called downstairs and asked the chef if he could provide me with what I needed. He and the kitchen staff were completely undone at the thought of a First Lady wielding a frying pan with no supervision! They even called my staff to ask if I was cooking myself because I was unhappy with their food. This incident reminded me of Eleanor Roosevelt's similar experiences of adjusting to living in the White House. "Unconsciously, I did many things that shocked the ushers," she wrote in her autobiography. "My first act was to insist on running the elevator myself without waiting for one of the doormen to run it for me. That just wasn't done by the President's wife."
Jackie and I also discussed the Secret Service and the unusual security challenges that the children of Presidents presented. She confirmed my instincts that even though security was necessary, it was important to stress to Chelsea, as she had to her own children, that she owed respect to the agents sworn to protect her. I had seen children of Governors boss around and even defy the middle-aged state troopers assigned to guard them. Jackie told me about the time an older kid had taken John's bicycle and he had asked his security detail to get it back for him. When Jackie found out, she told John he would have to stand up for himself. The successive teams of agents assigned to protect Chelsea understood that, as much as possible, she needed to live the life of a normal teenage girl.
The Service uses code names for its protectees, and each member of a family has a name beginning with the same letter. Bill became "Eagle," I was "Evergreen" and Chelsea, appropriately, was called "Energy." The code names sound whimsical, but they mask a harsh reality: Ongoing threats require the vigilance and intrusiveness of protective security.
Jackie spoke frankly about the peculiar and dangerous attractions evoked by charismatic politicians. She cautioned me that Bill, like President Kennedy, had a personal magnetism that inspired strong feelings in people. She never came out and said it, but she meant that he might also be a target. "He has to be very careful," she told me. "Very careful."
I was still having a hard time understanding how we could salvage any semblance of normality in our lives if we had to keep looking over our shoulders everywhere we went. Jackie knew that, unlike previous presidential couples, we didn't have our own house or vacation getaway to escape to. She urged me to use Camp David and to stay with friends who had homes in secluded places where we could avoid the curiosity seekers and paparazzi.
Not all our conversation was so serious. We gossiped about mutual friends and even fashion. Jackie was one of the twentieth century's iconic trendsetters. My friends and some in the press had kibbitzed about my clothes, my hair and my makeup since the day Bill announced he would run. When I asked her if I should just turn myself over to a team of famous consultants as some in the media had recommended, she looked horrified. "You have to be you," she said. "You'll end up wearing someone else's idea of who you are and how you should look. Concentrate instead on what's important to you." Her words were a relief. With Jackie's tacit permission, I determined to continue having fun while not taking any of it too seriously.
After lingering for two hours, it was finally time for me to leave. Jackie urged me to call or be in touch if I ever had questions or needed to chat. Until her untimely death from cancer sixteen months later, she remained a source of inspiration and advice for me.
I was reassured after my visit with Jackie, but the respite didn't last long. I had agreed to grant my first newspaper interview as First Lady to Marian Burros of The New York Times, who typically covered the first big black-tie dinner of each new administration. Her stories usually focused on the choice of food, flowers and entertainment for the evening. I thought the interview offered me a chance to share my ideas about how I intended to make the White House a showcase for American food and culture.
Burros and I met in the Red Room, one of three sitting rooms on the State Floor of the Executive Mansion. We sat on a nineteenth-century American Empire sofa next to the fireplace. Gilbert Stuart's famous 1804 portrait of Dolley Madison, President Madison's wife and one of my feisty predecessors, hung on one wall. As Burros and I talked, I occasionally caught a glimpse of Dolley out of the corner of my eye. She was an extraordinary woman, well ahead of her time, famous for her sociability, trendsetting personal style (she favored turbans), political skills and great courage. During the War of 1812, as invading British troops advanced on Washington, she spent the day preparing what would be her last White House dinner party for President Madison and his military advisers, who were expected to return from the front. Although she finally realized that she had to evacuate, she refused to leave until the British were practically at the door. She fled with the clothes on her back, important state documents and a few treasured items from the Mansion. Her last act was to request that the full-length portrait of George Washington by Gilbert Stuart be cut out from its frame, rolled up and removed to a safe house. Shortly after her escape, Admiral Cockburn and his men sacked the White House, ate the meal she had prepared and burned the Mansion.
I wanted my first White House dinner party to be memorable, but not that memorable.
I told Burros that I wanted to put our personal stamp on the White House, as previous First Couples had done. I began by introducing American cuisine to the menu. Ever since the Kennedy Administration, the White House kitchen had been ruled by the French. I understood why Jackie had wanted to improve much about the White House, from decor to cuisine, but that was then. In the three decades since she had occupied the White House, American chefs had revolutionized cooking, starting with the incomparable duo Julia Child and Alice Waters. Child had written Bill and me at the end of 1992, urging us to showcase American culinary arts, and Waters wrote to encourage us to appoint an American chef. I agreed with them. The White House, after all, was one of our nation's most visible symbols of American culture. I hired Walter Scheib, an experienced chef who specialized in American cuisine featuring lighter, fresher ingredients and introduced more food and wine supplied by American purveyors.
The dinner turned out to be a grand success, with the few flaws visible hopefully only to us. The mostly American-grown feast included smoked marinated shrimp, roast tenderloin of beef, baby vegetables in a zucchini basket and Yukon Gold potatoes with Vidalia onions. We ate goat cheese from Massachusetts and drank American wines. Our guests seemed genuinely pleased, particularly with the after-dinner Broadway-style revue put together at the last minute by our Tony Award-winning friend James Naughton and featuring Lauren Bacall and Carol Channing. I heaved a big sigh of relief.
The Burros story ran on the front page of The New York Times on February 2, and it broke some minor news. I announced that we were banning smoking in the Executive Mansion as well as the East and West Wings, that broccoli would return to the White House kitchen (having been exiled by the Bushes) and that we hoped to make the White House more accessible to the public. Accompanying the text was a photo of me wearing a bare-shoulder, black Donna Karan evening dress.
To me, the story and the photo seemed harmless enough, but they inspired a lot of commentary. The White House press corps was not happy that I had granted an exclusive interview to a reporter whose beat was not White House politics. In their view, my choice signaled my determination to avoid challenging questions about my role in the policy arena. Some critics suggested that the story was contrived to "soften" my image and portray me as a traditional woman in a traditional role. Some of my most ardent defenders also took exception to the interview and the picture because neither reflected their conception of me as First Lady. If I was serious about substantive policy issues, they reasoned, why was I talking to a reporter about food and entertainment? Conversely, if I was really worrying about floral centerpieces and the color of table linens, how could I be substantive enough to head a major policy effort? What kind of message was I sending, anyway?
It seemed that people could perceive me only as one thing or the other—either a hardworking professional woman or a conscientious and caring hostess. I was beginning to catch on to what Kathleen Hall Jamieson, a distinguished professor of communications and Dean of the Annenberg School of Communications at the University of Pennsylvania, would later term "the double bind." Gender stereotypes, says Jamieson, trap women by categorizing them in ways that don't reflect the true complexities of their lives. It was becoming clear to me that people who wanted me to fit into a certain box, traditionalist or feminist, would never be entirely satisfied with me as me—which is to say, with my many different, and sometimes paradoxical, roles.
My friends lived the same way. On any given day, Diane Blair might be teaching a political science class hours before preparing dinner for a huge crowd at the Blairs' lakefront home. Melanne Verveer might be running a White House meeting one minute and talking on the phone with her granddaughter the next. Lissa Muscatine, a Rhodes Scholar from Harvard who gave birth to three children while working for me at the White House, might be on an airplane revising speeches or changing diapers at home. So who was the "real" woman? In fact, most of us took on all those roles and more every day of our lives.
I know how hard it is to integrate the many disparate demands, choices and activities women pursue and face every day. Most of us live with nagging voices questioning the choices we make and with loads of guilt, whatever our choice. In my own life I have been a wife, mother, daughter, sister, in-law, student, lawyer, children's rights activist, law professor, Methodist, political adviser, citizen and so much else. Now I was a symbol—and that was a new experience.
Bill and I had worried about the problems we would face when we moved into the White House, but I never expected that the way I defined my role as First Lady would generate so much controversy and confusion. In my own mind, I was traditional in some ways and not in others. I cared about the food I served our guests, and I also wanted to improve the delivery of health care for all Americans. To me, there was nothing incongruous about my interests and activities.
I was navigating uncharted terrain—and through my own inexperience, I contributed to some of the conflicting perceptions about me. It took me awhile to figure out that what might not be important to me might seem very important to many men and women across America. We were living in an era in which some people still felt deep ambivalence about women in positions of public leadership and power. In this era of changing gender roles, I was America's Exhibit A.
The scrutiny was overwhelming. Ever since I had become a Secret Service protectee at the Democratic Convention in New York in July 1992,1 had been trying to adjust to my loss of anonymity. Occasionally, I snuck out of the White House wearing sweats, sunglasses and a baseball cap. I loved walking through the Mall, looking at the monuments, or riding my bike along the C&O Canal in Georgetown. I bargained the Secret Service down to only one agent, dressed in casual clothes, walking or biking behind me. I soon learned, though, that they had one of those big black fully loaded vans trailing somewhere nearby just in case. If I moved fast, even people who thought they recognized me weren't sure. One morning, a touring family asked me to take their picture as theyposedinfrontofthe Washington Monument. I quickly agreed, and as they stood together smiling, I snapped a photo. As I was leaving, I heard one of the children saying, "Mom, that lady looks familiar." I was out of earshot before I heard whether they guessed who their photographer was.
These moments of quiet anonymity were fleeting, and so was time with close friends. Several from Arkansas had come to work in Bill's administration, but ironically, they were among the people I missed the most those early weeks. We simply hadn't had time to see them.
In early February, Bill and I invited Vince Foster, now Deputy White House Counsel; Bruce Lindsey, also in the Counsel's office and still one of Bill's closest advisers and traveling companions; and Webb Hubbell, Associate Attorney General, to a small, informal dinner in the second-floor dining room of the residence to celebrate our friend Mary Steenburgen's fortieth birthday. Mary, a fellow Arkansan, had done well in Hollywood, winning an Academy Award for acting, but she had never lost touch with her roots. She, Bruce, Vince and Webb were among our closest friends, and I remember that meal as one of the last carefree times we had together. For a few hours, we screened out the worries of the day and talked about adjusting to Washington and timeless issues—kids, schools, movies, politics. I can still close my eyes and see Vince at that table, looking tired but happy, leaning back and listening with a smile on his face. At that moment, it was impossible to guess the strain he was under as a newcomer to Washington's political world.
ON JANUARY 25, BILL INVITED ME AND TWO GUESTS to lunch in the President's small study near the Oval Office: Carol Rasco, the newly named White House domestic policy adviser who had served in Bill's administration in Arkansas, and our old friend Ira Maga-ziner, a successful business consultant who had produced a groundbreaking study on health care costs.
Tall, angular and intense, Ira was prone to worry in the best of times, and on this day he seemed particularly anxious. In a few hours, Bill planned to unveil a health care task force and announce that it would produce reform legislation during his first one hundred days in office. Few on the White House staff knew that Bill had asked me to chair the task force or that Ira would manage the day-to-day operations as a senior adviser to the President for policy and planning. Ira had learned about his new job only ten days before the inauguration.
Bill wanted to approach health care reform from a new angle, and Ira, with his brilliant and creative mind, had a knack for coming up with inventive ways of looking at issues. He also had private sector experience as the owner of a consulting business in Rhode Island that advised multinational companies on how to become more productive and profitable.
After the Navy stewards brought us our food from the White House Mess, Ira delivered troubling news: Some Capitol Hill veterans were warning him that our timetable for delivering a health care reform bill in one hundred days was unrealistic. We had been encouraged by the electoral success of Harris Wofford, the new Democratic Senator from Pennsylvania who had campaigned on a health care platform and often told crowds: "If criminals have the right to a lawyer, working Americans have the right to a doctor." But Ira was getting a different message.
"They think we're gonna get killed," said Ira, who hadn't touched his sandwich. "We'll need at least four to five years to put together a package that will pass Congress."
"That's what some of my friends are saying too," I said. I had cared about this issue for a long time, well before Bill and I got into politics, and I believed that access to quality affordable health care was a right American citizens should be guaranteed. I knew that Ira felt the same way. That might explain why I didn't run screaming from the room when Bill first broached the idea of my leading the task force and working with Ira on this signature initiative of his Administration. On this day, it was Bill's boundless optimism and his determination that kept me in my chair.
"I'm hearing the same thing," Bill said. "But we have to try. We just have to make it work."
There were compelling reasons to push ahead. By the time Bill became President, thirty-seven million Americans, most of them working people and their children, were uninsured. They weren't getting access to care until they were in a medical crisis. Even for common medical concerns they wound up in an emergency room, where care was most expensive, or they went broke trying to pay for medical emergencies on their own. In the early 1990s, one hundred thousand Americans were losing coverage each month, and two million were without coverage temporarily as they changed jobs. Small businesses were unable to offer coverage for their employees because of the exploding cost of health care premiums. And the quality of medical care was suffering, too: In an effort to control costs, insurance companies often denied or delayed treatment prescribed by doctors in deference to their corporate bottom lines.
Rising health care costs were sapping the nation's economy, undermining American competitiveness, eroding workers' wages, increasing personal bankruptcies and inflating the national budget deficit. As a nation, we were spending more on health care—14 percent of our GDP—than any other industrialized country. In 1992, as much as $45 billion in health care costs was spent on administrative costs, rather than going to doctors, nurses, hospitals, nursing homes or other health care providers for direct care.
This terrible cycle of escalating costs and declining coverage was largely the result of a growing number of uninsured Americans. Patients without insurance seldom could afford to pay for their medical expenses out-of-pocket, so their costs were absorbed by the doctors and hospitals that treated them. Doctors and hospitals, in turn, raised their rates to cover the expense of caring for patients who weren't covered or couldn't pay, which is why $2 aspirin tablets and $2,400 crutches sometimes appear on hospital bills. Insurers, confronted with having to cover higher doctor and hospital rates, began trimming coverage and raising the price of premiums, deductibles and co-payments for people with insurance. As the price of premiums went up, fewer employers were willing or able to provide coverage for their workers, so more people lost their insurance. And the vicious cycle continued.
Solving these problems was critical to the well-being of tens of millions of Americans and to our nation as a whole. But even so, we knew it was going to be an uphill battle. For most of the twentieth century, Presidents had tried to reform our nation's health care system, with mixed success. President Theodore Roosevelt and other Progressive leaders were among the first to propose universal health care coverage nearly a century ago. In 1935, President Franklin D. Roosevelt envisioned a national health insurance system as a complement to Social Security, the cornerstone of his New Deal. The idea went nowhere, owing in large measure to opposition from the American Medical Association, the lobbying group representing the nation's doctors, who feared governmental control over their practices.
President Truman took up the cause of universal health care coverage as part of his Fair Deal and included it in his campaign platform in the 1948 election. He, too, was thwarted by well-financed and well-organized opposition from the AMA, the U.S. Chamber of Commerce and others who opposed national health insurance on ideological grounds, suggesting it was linked to socialism and communism. Opponents also believed then, as now, that the existing system worked well enough as is, despite the paradox that the United States spends more on health care than any other nation yet doesn't provide health insurance for everyone. After failing to overcome the opposition, Truman proposed the more modest—and practical—idea of providing health insurance for Social Security recipients.
During the 1940s and 1950s, labor unions bargained for health care benefits in the contracts they negotiated for workers. Other employers began offering these benefits to nonunion employees. This led to an extensive employer-based health care system in which insurance coverage increasingly was linked to one's employment.
In 1965, President Johnson's Great Society initiative led to the creation of Medicaid and Medicare, which provide federally funded health insurance for two underserved groups—the poor and the elderly. The programs serve seventy-six million individuals today. Johnson's effort, made possible by his landslide victory in 1964 and a huge Democratic majority in Congress, still represents the biggest health care success of the twentieth century and the realization of President Truman's goal.
Funded by payroll contributions from workers, Medicare removed the worry for people over sixty-five by making them eligible for physician and hospital services. Although Medicare doesn't cover prescription drugs—and should—it remains a popular and crucial service for older Americans, and its administrative costs are far lower than those of private health insurance companies providing coverage. Medicaid, the program that pays for care for the poorest Americans and those with disabilities, is funded jointly by the states and the federal government and is administered by the states according to federal rules. More politically vulnerable than Medicare because the poor are less politically powerful than the elderly, it has been a godsend for many Americans, especially children and pregnant women.
President Nixon recognized the draining effects of health care costs on the economy and proposed a system of universal health care based on what's known as an "employer mandate": all employers would be required to pay for limited benefits for their employees. Although as many as twenty different health care proposals were introduced in Congress during the Nixon Administration, no proposal for universal coverage got a majority vote from a congressional committee until nearly twenty years later, in 1994.
Presidents Ford and Carter—Republican and Democrat—also pursued reform in the 1970s, but they ran into the same political obstacles that had blocked change for most of the twentieth century. Over several decades, the health insurance industry had grown increasingly powerful. Many insurance companies opposed universal coverage because they feared it could restrict the amount they could charge and limit their ability to turn down high-risk patients. Some thought that universal coverage might sound the death knell for private insurance.
The historical odds were against Bill because attitudes about health care reform were diverse, even among Democrats. As one expert put it, opinions are "theologically held"—thus impervious to reason, evidence or argument. But Bill felt he had to show the public and the Congress that he had the political will to move forward and make good on his campaign promise to take immediate action on health care. Reform was not only good public policy that would help millions of Americans, it also was inextricably tied to reducing the deficit.
I shared Bill's profound concerns about the economy and the fiscal irresponsibility of the prior twelve years, under the Reagan and Bush Administrations. Recent deficit projections by the Bush Administration camouflaged the real deficit by underestimating the effects of a stagnant economy, the impact of health care costs and federal spending on the savings and loan bailout. These costs had helped swell the projected deficit to $387 billion over four years—considerably higher than the estimate the departing Bush White House had released. But beyond budgetary concerns, I believed health care reform could relieve the anguish of working people throughout our wealthy country. As the wife of a Governor and now a President, I didn't have to worry about my family's access to health care. And I didn't think anyone else should have to, either.
My experiences serving on the board of Arkansas Children's Hospital and chairing a state task force on rural health care introduced me to problems embedded in our health care system, including the tricky politics of reform and the financial quandaries faced by families who were too "rich" to qualify for Medicaid but too "poor" to pay for their own care. Traveling around Arkansas in the 1980s, and then around the United States during the presidential campaign, I met Americans who reinforced my belief that we had to fix what was wrong with the system. Bill's commitment to reform represented our greatest hope of guaranteeing millions of hardworking men and women the health care they deserved.
Bill, Ira, Carol and I walked out of the Oval Office, past the bust of Abraham Lincoln by Augustus Saint-Gaudens and across the narrow hall to the Roosevelt Room, where a crowd of cabinet secretaries, senior White House staff and journalists was waiting for what the official schedule listed as a "task force meeting."
Stepping into the Roosevelt Room is stepping back into American history. You are surrounded by banners from every U.S. military campaign and flags from each division of the U.S. Armed Forces, portraits of Theodore and Franklin Roosevelt and the Nobel Peace Prize medal that Theodore Roosevelt won in 1906 for mediating a settlement of the Russo-Japanese War. During our time in the White House, I added a small bronze bust of Eleanor Roosevelt so that her contributions as a "Roosevelt" would also be acknowledged in the room named for her uncle and husband.
In this historic room, Bill declared that his administration would present a health care reform plan to Congress within one hundred days—a plan that "would take strong action to control health care costs in America and to begin to provide for the health care needs of all Americans."
Then he announced that I would chair a newly formed President's Task Force on National Health Care Reform, which would include the Secretaries of Health and Human Services, Treasury, Defense, Commerce and Labor, as well as the Directors of Veterans Affairs and of the Office of Management and Budget and senior White House staff. Bill explained that I would work with Ira, the cabinet and others to build on what he had sketched out in the campaign and in his inaugural address. "We're going to have to make some tough choices in order to control health care costs. . . and to provide health care for all," he said. "I am grateful that Hillary has agreed to chair the task force, and not only because it means she'll be sharing some of the heat I expect to generate."
Heat came from all directions. The announcement was a surprise inside the White House and federal agencies. A few on Bill's staff had assumed I would be named domestic policy adviser (which Bill and I had never discussed). Others thought I would work on education or children's health, largely because of my past experiences on these issues. Maybe we should have told more staff members, but sensitive internal information was already flowing out of the White House, and Bill wanted to break the story himself and answer the first questions raised.
Many White House aides thought it was a great idea. Several of Bill's key lieutenants heartily endorsed the idea, including Robert Rubin, Chairman of the National Economic Council and later Secretary of the Treasury. One of my favorite people in the administration, Bob is fabulously smart and successful, yet thoroughly self-effacing. He later joked about his extraordinary political acumen: He didn't think my appointment would generate such intense political fallout. I was surprised by the reaction, too.
Some of our friends gave us lighthearted warnings about what lay ahead. "What did you do to make your husband so mad at you?" Mario Cuomo, then Governor of New York, asked me during a White House visit.
"What do you mean?"
"Well," Mario replied, "he'd have to be awfully upset about something to put you in charge of such a thankless task."
I heard the warnings, but I didn't fully realize the magnitude of what we were undertaking. My work in Arkansas running the rural health care task force and the Arkansas Education Standards Committee didn't rival the scale of health care reform. But both efforts were considered successful and made me excited and hopeful as I took on this new challenge. The biggest problem seemed to be the deadline that Bill announced. He had won the election in a three-way race with less than a majority of the popular vote—43 percent—and he couldn't afford to lose whatever political momentum he had at the beginning of the new administration. James Carville, our friend, adviser and one of the most brilliant tactical minds in American politics, had given Bill this warning: "The more time we allow for the defenders of the status quo to organize, the more they will be able to marshal opposition to your plan, and the better their chances of killing it."
Democrats in Congress were also urging us to move quickly. A few days after Bill's announcement, House Majority Leader Dick Gephardt asked to meet with me. He was known on Capitol Hill for his Midwestern roots and sensibilities, as well as his command of budget issues. His compassion for people in need reflected his upbringing, and his commitment to health care reform was heightened by his son's bout with cancer years earlier. Through position and experience, Gephardt would be a leading voice in any health care deliberations in the House. On February 3, Gephardt and his top health care aide came to my West Wing office to discuss strategy. For the next hour, we listened as Gephardt outlined his concerns about health care reform. It was an intense meeting.
One of Gephardt's chief worries was that we would be unable to unify Democrats, who were seldom united under the best of circumstances. Health care reform widened existing divisions. I thought of the old Will Rogers joke:
"Are you a member of any organized political party?"
"No, I'm a Democrat."
I knew of the potential divisiveness but hoped that a Democratic Congress would rally around a Democratic President to show what the party could accomplish for America.
Democratic members had already begun to outline their own models for reform in order to influence the President's plans. Some proposed a "single payer" approach, modeled on the European and Canadian health care systems, which would replace the current employer-based system. The federal government, through tax payments, would become the sole financier—or single payer—of most medical care. A few favored a gradual expansion of Medicare that would eventually cover all uninsured Americans, starting first with those aged fifty-five to sixty-five.
Bill and other Democrats rejected the single-payer and Medicare models, preferring a quasi-private system called "managed competition" that relied on private market forces to drive down costs through competition. The government would have a smaller role, including setting standards for benefit packages and helping to organize purchasing cooperatives. The cooperatives were groups of individuals and businesses forged for the purpose of purchasing insurance. Together, they could bargain with insurance companies for better benefits and prices and use their leverage to assure high-quality care. The best model was the Federal Employees Health Benefit Plan, which covered nine million federal employees and offered an array of insurance options to its members. Prices and quality were monitored by the plan's administrators.
Under managed competition, hospitals and doctors would no longer bear the expense of treating patients who weren't covered because everyone would be insured through Medicare, Medicaid, the veterans and military health care plans or one of the purchasing groups.
Perhaps most important, the system would allow patients to choose their own doctors, a non-negotiable item in Bill's view.
Given the multitude of approaches to health care reform, feelings in Congress ran deep, Gephardt told us. Just a week earlier, he had held a health care meeting in his House office in which two members of Congress disagreed so violently that they nearly came to blows. Gephardt was emphatic that our best hope for passage was to attach health care reform to a budget bill known as the Budget Reconciliation Act, which Congress usually voted on in late spring. "Reconciliation" combines a variety of congressional budget and tax decisions into one bill that can be approved or disapproved by a simple majority vote in the Senate without the threat of a filibuster, a delaying tactic often used to kill controversial legislation, which requires sixty votes to break. Many budget items, particularly those relating to tax policy, are so complicated that debate can endlessly tie up proceedings in the full House and Senate. Reconciliation is a procedural tool designed to move controversial tax and spending bills through Congress. Gephardt was suggesting that it be used in an unprecedented way: to legislate a major transformation in American social policy.
Gephardt was sure that Republicans in the Senate would filibuster any health care package we put forward. He also knew that the Senate Democrats would have trouble mustering sixty votes to stop it, given that Democrats held only a fifty-six to forty-four advantage. Gephardt's strategy, therefore, was to circumvent a filibuster by putting health care reform into the budget reconciliation package. A simple majority would be required to pass the bill, and Vice President Gore could cast the tie-breaking fifty-first vote, if needed.
Ira and I knew that Bill's economic team inside the White House would likely reject a budget reconciliation strategy that included health care because it could complicate the administration's efforts on the deficit reduction and economic plan. We broke up our meeting, and I took Gephardt straight to the Oval Office to make his case directly to Bill. Bill was convinced by Gephardt's argument and asked Ira and me to explore the idea with the Senate leadership.
Armed with Gephardt's suggestions and Bill's encouragement, Ira and I trooped up to Capitol Hill the following day to meet with Majority Leader George Mitchell in his office in the Capitol. This was the first of hundreds of visits I made to members of Congress over the course of health care reform. Mitchell's soft-spoken demeanor belied his tough-minded leadership of the Senate Democrats. I respected his opinion, and he agreed with Gephardt. Health care would be impossible to pass unless it was part of reconciliation. Mitchell was also nervous about the Senate Finance Committee, which would otherwise have jurisdiction over many aspects of health care legislation. He was particularly worried that committee Chairman Daniel Patrick Moynihan of New York, a veteran Democrat and a skeptic about health care reform, would react badly to the plan. Moynihan was an intellectual giant and an academic by training—he had taught sociology at Harvard before running for the Senate—as well as an expert on poverty and family issues. He had wanted the President and Congress to take up welfare reform first. He wasn't happy when Bill announced his one-hundred-day target for health care legislation—and he let everyone know it.
At first I found his position frustrating, but I began to understand. Bill and I shared Senator Moynihan's commitment to welfare reform, but Bill and his economic team believed that the government would never get control of the federal budget deficit unless health care costs went down. They had concluded that health care reform was essential to his economic policy and that welfare could wait. Senator Moynihan anticipated how hard it would be to get health care through his committee. He knew he was going to be responsible for shepherding Bill's economic stimulus package through the Finance Committee and onto the Senate floor. That in itself would require extraordinary political skill and leverage. Some Republicans were already publicizing plans to vote against it, no matter what it contained. And some Democrats might need convincing, particularly if the package involved a tax increase.
We left Mitchell's office with a clearer sense of what needed to be done, particularly on reconciliation. Now we had to convince the economic team—notably Leon Panetta, Director of the Office of Management and Budget—that including health care reform in reconciliation would serve the overall economic strategy the President was pursuing, not divert attention from the deficit reduction plan. Bill only had so much political capital to work with, and he had to use it to get the deficit down, one of his central campaign promises. The thinking in some quarters of the West Wing was that Bill's focus on health care would divert Americans from his economic message and muddy the political waters.
We also had to convince Senator Robert C. Byrd of West Virginia that health care reform belonged in reconciliation. The Democratic Chairman of the Senate Appropriations Committee, Byrd had served in the Senate by then for thirty-four years. Stately and silver-haired, he was the unofficial historian of the Senate and a parliamentary genius, famous for standing in the well of the chamber and dazzling his colleagues with quotations from the classics. He was also a stickler for procedural rules and decorum and had invented a procedural hurdle called the "Byrd rule" to ensure that items placed in the Budget Reconciliation Act were germane to budget and tax law. Democracy was undermined, in his view, if reconciliation was cluttered with bills that had little to do with passing the nation's budget. Health care, arguably, was a budget bill, as it affected spending, taxes and entitlement programs. But if Senator Byrd thought differently, we would need a waiver of his rule to allow the measure into reconciliation.
Slowly, I was learning what a steep mountain we were climbing. In the absence of an overwhelming crisis like a depression, passing either the economic or the health care plan was going to be difficult; passing both seemed almost insurmountable. Health care reform might be essential to our long-term economic growth, but I didn't know how much change the body politic could digest at one time.
Our goals were simple enough: We wanted a plan that dealt with all aspects of the health care system rather than one that tinkered on the margins. We wanted a process that considered a variety of ideas and allowed for healthy discussion and debate. And we wanted to adhere to congressional wishes as much as we could.
Almost immediately, we hit turbulence.
Bill had assigned Ira the task of setting up the process for health care reform, which turned out to be an unfair burden for someone who was not a Washington insider. In addition to the President's Task Force, which consisted of me, the cabinet secretaries and other White House officials, Ira organized a giant working group of experts divided into teams that would consider every aspect of health care. This group, comprising as many as six hundred people from different government agencies, Congress and health care groups, and including physicians, nurses, hospital administrators, economists and others, met regularly with Ira to debate and review specific parts of the plan in detail. The group was so large that some members concluded they were not at the center of the action where the real work was getting done. Some got frustrated and stopped coming to meetings. Others became narrowly interested in their own piece of the agenda, rather than invested in the outcome of the overall plan. In short, the attempt to include as many people and viewpoints as possible—a good idea in principle—ended up weakening rather than strengthening our position.
On February 24, we were dealt a blow that none of us anticipated. Three groups affiliated with the health care industry sued the task force over its composition, claiming that because I was not technically a government employee (First Ladies derive no salary), I was not legally allowed to chair or even attend closed task force meetings. These groups had seized on an obscure federal law designed to prevent private interests from surreptitiously influencing government decision making and usurping the public's right to know. There was certainly nothing secret about hundreds of people participating in this process, but the press, which was not invited to meetings, jumped on the issue. If I was allowed in the meetings, the lawsuit claimed, government sunshine laws required that the closed meetings be opened to outsiders, including the press. It was a deft political move, designed to disrupt our work on health care and to foster an impression with the public and the news media that we were conducting "secret" meetings.
Soon thereafter, we got more bad news, this time from Senator Byrd. Every Democratic emissary we could think of, including the President, had asked him to allow health care reform into reconciliation. But on March 11, in a phone call with the President, the Senator said he objected on procedural grounds and that the "Byrd rule" would not be waived. The Senate was permitted to debate reconciliation bills for only twenty hours, which he viewed as insufficient time on a health care reform package of such magnitude. It was just too complicated an issue for reconciliation, he told Bill. In retrospect and based on my service in the Senate, I agree with his assessment. At the time, it was a political setback that forced us to refocus our strategy and figure out how to get health care reform through the normal legislative process. Hastily, we held meetings with members of the House and Senate to nail down elements of the plan we would deliver to Congress. We didn't see that Byrd's opinion on reconciliation was a giant red flag. We were trying to move too quickly on a bill that would fundamentally alter American social and economic policy for years to come. And we were already losing the race.
In this climate, and with Bill weathering controversies over gays in the military and his nominations for Attorney General, we savored any successes that came our way. In the middle of March, the House passed Bill's economic stimulus package, and my staff and I decided to have our own small celebration. On March 19, about twenty of us gathered for lunch in the White House Mess. The room, with its oak-paneled walls, Navy memorabilia and leather-cushioned chairs, was a perfect setting for private conversation and as much laughter as we could muster. The gathering offered me a rare opportunity to let my hair down with trusted aides and speak my mind about whatever topic was under discussion. From the moment I set foot in the room, I could feel my mood lighten and my mind relax for the first time in days.
Lunch arrived and we began sharing stories of our first few weeks in the White House. Then I saw Carolyn Huber enter the room. One of my longtime assistants from Arkansas who had come with us to Washington, Carolyn walked over to my chair and bent down to whisper in my ear. "Your father has had a stroke," she said. "He's in the hospital."
I LEFT THE WHITE HOUSE MESS AND WENT UP-stairs to call Drew Kumpuris, my father's doctor in Little Rock. He confirmed that my father had suffered a massive stroke and been taken by ambulance to St. Vincent's Hospital, where he lay unconscious in the intensive care unit. "You've got to come right now," Drew said. I rushed to tell Bill and pack some clothes. Within hours, Chelsea, my brother Tony and I were on a plane to Arkansas for a long, sad trip home.
I can't remember landing in Little Rock that night or driving to the hospital. My mother met me outside the intensive care unit, looking drawn and worried but thankful to see us.
Dr. Kumpuris explained that my dad had slipped into a deep, irreversible coma. We could visit him, but it was doubtful he would know we were there. At first I was concerned about taking Chelsea to see her grandfather, but she insisted and I relented because I knew how close she felt to him. When we went in, I was relieved that he looked almost peaceful. Since it would have been useless for the doctors to operate on his injured brain, he was not hooked up to the tentacles of tubes, drains and monitors he had needed after his heart bypass operation a decade earlier. Although a mechanical respirator was breathing for him, there were only a few unobtrusive drips and monitors at his bedside. Chelsea and I held his hands. I smoothed his hair and spoke to him, still clinging to a small hope that he might open his eyes again or squeeze my hand.
Chelsea sat by his side and talked to him for hours. His condition didn't seem to upset her. I was amazed at how calmly she dealt with the situation.
Hugh arrived later that night from Miami and joined us in Dad's room. Hugh started telling family stories and singing songs, especially the ones that used to get such a rise out of my father. One of his frequent tirades concerned my brothers' taste—or lack thereof—in television shows. He particularly despised the theme song to The Flintstones. So Hugh and Tony stood on either side of his bed and sang that inane song, hoping to provoke some sort of reaction—"Shut that noise up!"—as it had when we were kids. If he heard us that night, he never showed it. But I want to believe that somehow he knew we were there for him just as he had been for us when we were kids.
Mostly we took turns sitting next to Dad's bed, watching the mysterious green blips on the monitors rise and fall, succumbing to the hypnotic whir and click of the respirator. The center of my turbulent universe of obligations and meetings contracted to that small hospital room in Little Rock until it became a world unto itself, removed from all concerns except the things that matter most.
Bill arrived Sunday, March 21.1 was so happy to see him and could feel myself relax for the first time in two days as he took charge of talking to the doctors, helping me think about the decision we would soon have to make about my father's medical options.
Carolyn Huber and Lisa Caputo had come from Washington with me and Chelsea. Carolyn was especially close to my parents. I had met her when I joined the Rose Law Firm, where she had worked for years as an office administrator. She had managed the Arkansas Governor's Mansion during Bill's first term, and we had asked her to come with us to the White House to handle personal correspondence.
Lisa Caputo had been my press secretary since the convention. She and my father hit it off the first time they met when they found out they were both from the Scranton-Wilkes-Barre area of Pennsylvania. "Hillary, you did real good," my dad told me. "You hired someone from God's country!"
Harry Thomason flew in from the West Coast, and he also made travel arrangements for Virginia and Dick Kelley, who had been out of town and who arrived at the hospital Sunday night. Bill and I thought they had been in Las Vegas, their favorite destination. But Harry pulled Bill and me aside to deliver more tragic news. He told us, as gently as he could, that Virginia and Dick had not been in Nevada for a vacation. They had been in Denver, where Virginia was exploring experimental treatments for the cancer that had returned and spread after her mastectomy two years before. She did not want us to know how sick she was, and Harry said she would deny it if we confronted her. Harry had tracked them down, and he felt it was something we needed to know. Bill and I thanked him for his good sense and his good heart and rejoined Virginia and Dick, who were talking to my mother and brothers. We decided to respect Virginia's wishes for now; it was best to deal with one family crisis at a time.
The day after he arrived, Bill had to fly back to Washington. Luckily, Chelsea didn't have to miss school because it was spring break. She stayed with me in Little Rock, and I was profoundly grateful to have her calm and loving companionship. As the hours dragged into days, Dad's condition remained critical. Friends and family members began showing up from all over to lend their emotional support. To pass the time, we played word games or cards. Tony taught me how to play Tetris on his little handheld computer, and I sat for hours, mindlessly fitting together the geometric pieces as they floated down the screen.
I simply couldn't focus on my duties as First Lady. I cleared my schedule, and I asked Lisa Caputo to explain to Ira Magaziner and everyone else that they should go ahead without me. Tipper graciously stepped in on several occasions to attend previously scheduled forums on health care, and Al spoke in my place to leaders of the American Medical Association in Washington and presided over the first public meeting of the Task Force on National Health Care Reform. I just couldn't leave my parents. Normally I am able to handle a great many things at once, but I couldn't pretend that this was a normal time. I knew that our family would soon face the decision to remove my dad from life support.
Perhaps to divert my feelings, in the long hours I spent in the hospital, I talked with doctors, nurses, pharmacists, hospital administrators and family members of other patients about the present health care system. One of the doctors told me how frustrating it was for him to write prescriptions for some of his Medicare patients, knowing that they could not afford to fill them. Other patients paid for their drugs but took smaller doses than prescribed, to make them last longer. Often, these patients ended up right back in the hospital. The health care policy problems we were tackling in Washington were now a part of my daily reality. These personal encounters reinforced my sense of both the difficulty of the assignment Bill had given me and the importance of improving our system.
Bill returned to Little Rock on Sunday, March 28, and we gathered our immediate family together and met with the doctors, who spelled out our options: Hugh Rodham was essentially brain-dead, kept alive by machines. None of us could imagine that the fiercely independent man we had known would want us to keep his body going under such circumstances. I remembered how angry and depressed he had been after his quadruple bypass surgery in 1983. He had enjoyed good health for most of his life and valued his self-reliance. He told me then that he would rather die than be sick and helpless. This was so much worse, although at least he seemed to be unaware of his condition. Each member of the family agreed that we should remove him from the respirator that night after our final good-byes and let God take him home. Dr. Kumpuris told us he would probably die within twenty-four hours.
However, the soul of the former Nittany Lions football player and boxer wasn't quite ready to leave. After the life support was removed, Dad began to breathe on his own, and his heart kept on beating. Bill stayed with us until Tuesday, when he had to resume his schedule. Chelsea and I decided to stay until the end.
While I had canceled every public appearance, including the chance to throw out the first pitch for the Cubs' opening game at Wrigley Field in Chicago, there was one engagement I could not seem to break. Liz Carpenter had been Lady Bird Johnson's press secretary, and now, among her many activities, she hosted a lecture series at the University of Texas in Austin. Many months earlier, I had accepted her invitation to speak on April 6. With my father hovering between life and death, I called her to cancel or reschedule. Liz is a spunky, outgoing woman, and in her inimitable manner, she wouldn't take no for an answer. It would be only a few hours of my time, she told me, and it would take my mind off my father's condition. She even had Lady Bird call to persuade me to come. Liz knew how much I admired Lady Bird Johnson, a gracious woman and one of our most effective and influential First Ladies. Finally it seemed easier to agree to make the speech than to keep saying no.
On Sunday, April 4, my father was still hanging on to life. He had survived a week without artificial support or food. The hospital had to move him out of intensive care to make room for another patient. He was now in a regular hospital room, lying on the bed, looking as if he had just fallen asleep and would soon wake up. He looked rested and younger than his eighty-two years. The hospital administration had told my mother and me that they would soon require that a feeding tube be surgically inserted so he could be moved to a nursing home. Both of us were praying that we could avoid that nightmare. I thought of how a feeding tube would horrify my father while—even worse in his value system—his life savings would be siphoned off for nursing care. But if his vegetative state persisted, there was no alternative.
Chelsea needed to get back to school, and we returned to the White House late on April 4. Two days later, I flew to Austin. Since I hadn't planned on making that speech, I had to write one, and when I climbed aboard the plane I didn't have a clue about what I would say.
I believe that when our hearts are raw with grief, we are more vulnerable to hurt, but also more open to new perceptions. I don't know how much I was changed by my father's imminent death, but many of the issues that I had been thrashing around for years came flooding into my mind. The speech I sketched out in longhand was not seamless, or even particularly articulate, but it was an unfiltered reflection of what I was thinking at the time.
Years before, I had begun carrying around a small book that I stuffed with notations, inspirational quotes, sayings and favorite Scripture. On the plane to Austin, I leafed through it and stopped at a magazine clipping of an article written by Lee Atwater before he died of brain cancer at age forty. Atwater was a political wunderkind on the campaigns of Presidents Reagan and George H. W. Bush and a principal architect of the Republican ascendancy in the 1980s. He was a political street fighter and famous for his ruthless tactics. Winning, Atwater proclaimed, was all that mattered—until he got sick. Shortly before he died, he wrote about a "spiritual vacuum at the heart of American society." His message had moved me when I first read it, and it seemed even more important now, so I decided to quote him in my address before the fourteen thousand people gathered for the Liz Carpenter lecture.
"Long before I was struck with cancer, I felt something stirring in American society," Atwater wrote. "It was a sense among the people of the country—Republicans and Democrats alike—that something was missing from their lives—something crucial. ... I wasn't exactly sure what 'it' was. My illness helped me to see that what was missing in society is what was missing in me: a little heart, a lot of brotherhood.
"The 8o's were about acquiring—acquiring wealth, power, prestige. I know. I acquired more wealth, power and prestige than most. But you can acquire all you want and still feel empty. What power wouldn't I trade for a little more time with my family? What price wouldn't I pay for an evening with friends? It took a deadly illness to put me eye to eye with that truth, but it is a truth that the country, caught up in its ruthless ambitions and moral decay, can learn on my dime. . . ."
I drew on different sources to put together a statement about the need to "remold society by redefining what it means to be a human being in the twentieth century, moving into a new millennium. . . .
"We need a new politics of meaning. We need a new ethos of individual responsibility and caring. We need a new definition of civil society which answers the unanswerable questions posed by both the market forces and the governmental ones, as to how we can have a society that fills us up again and make us feel that we are part of something bigger than ourselves."
I suggested a response to Lee Atwater's poignant question: "Who will lead us out of this 'spiritual vacuum?'" The answer, I said, is: "All of us."
When I finished the speech, I hugged Liz Carpenter, Governor Ann Richards and Lady Bird Johnson. Then I headed to the airport to return to the White House, check on my daughter and see my husband before leaving again to help my mother face the reality of moving my dad into a nursing home.
It was a relief to have given the speech, and I thought that would be the end of it. But within weeks, my words were derided in a New York Times Magazine cover story facetiously titled "Saint Hillary." The article dismissed my discussion of spirituality as "easy, moralistic preaching" couched in the "gauzy and gushy wrappings of New Age jargon." I was grateful when many people called to thank me for raising questions about meaning in our lives and in society.
The day after my speech in Austin, my father died.
I couldn't help but think how my relationship with my father had evolved over time. I adored him when I was a little girl. I would eagerly watch for him from a window and run down the street to meet him on his way home after work. With his encouragement and coaching, I played baseball, football and basketball. I tried to bring home good grades to win his approval. But as I grew older, my relationship with him inevitably changed, both because of my experiences growing up, which occurred in such a different time and place from his, and because he changed. He gradually lost the energy that got him outside throwing football pass patterns to me and Hugh as we ran around the elm trees in front of our house. Just as those magnificent elms succumbed to disease and had to be cut down in neighborhoods like ours throughout the country, his energy and spirit seemed to wane over time.
More and more, his immediate world seemed to shrink as he lost his father and both brothers in a few short years in the mid-sixties. Then he decided in the early seventies that he had made and saved enough money, so he quit working and dismantled his small company. During my high school and college years, our relationship increasingly was defined either by silence, as I searched for something to say to him, or by arguments, which I often provoked, because I knew he would always engage with me over politics and culture—Vietnam, hippies, bra-burning feminists, Nixon. I also understood that even when he erupted at me, he admired my independence and accomplishments and loved me with all his heart.
I recently reread letters he wrote me when I was at Wellesley and Yale, usually in response to a despondent collect call home in which I expressed doubts about my abilities or confusion about where my life was heading. I doubt anyone meeting my father or being on the receiving end of his caustic criticism would ever have imagined the tender love and advice he offered to buck me up, straighten me out and keep me going.
I also respected my father's willingness to change his views, although he would rarely admit he had. He started out in life inheriting every prejudice imaginable in his working-class, Protestant family— against Democrats, Catholics, Jews and blacks—and anyone else considered outside the tribe. When I got exasperated by these attitudes during our summer visits to Lake Winola, I would announce to all the Rodhams that I intended to grow up and marry a Catholic Democrat— a fate they considered the worst I could meet. Over time, my father softened and changed, largely because of personal experiences with all kinds of people. He owned a building in downtown Chicago with a black man whom he came to respect and admire, causing him to change his views on race. When I grew up and fell in love with a Southern Baptist Democrat, my father was bewildered, but he rallied and became one of Bill's strongest supporters.
When my parents moved to Little Rock in 1987, they bought a condo next door to the one owned by Larry Curbo, a nurse, and Dr. Dillard Denson, a neurologist. They were among my mother's closest friends and began checking in on my parents, visiting with my dad, talking about the stock market or politics and helping out my mother around the house. When Bill and I came to visit, the military and Secret Service used their house as the command center. One night my parents were watching a television show that featured gay characters. When my father expressed his disapproval of homosexuals, my mother said, "What about Dillard and Larry?"
"What do you mean?" he asked.
So my mother explained to my father that his dear friends and neighbors were a gay couple in a long-lasting committed relationship. One of my father's last stereotypes fell. Larry and Dillard visited my father in the hospital as he lay in a coma. One night Larry relieved my mother for a few hours so she could go home and get some rest. And it was Larry who held my father's hand and said good-bye as he died. Perhaps fittingly, my father spent his last days at St. Vincent's, a wonderful Catholic hospital, a sign that another of his prejudices had disappeared.
Early the next morning, Bill, Chelsea and I, joined by an intimate group of family and friends, flew back to Little Rock for a memorial service at the First United Methodist Church. With us were my brother Tony, his future wife, Nicole Boxer, my dear friend Diane Blair, who had been staying with us, Bruce Lindsey, Vince Foster and Webb Hubbell. I was touched that Al and Tipper flew down with Mack McLarty, one of Bill's best friends from growing up and now White House Chief of Staff, along with Mack's wife, Donna. The church on that Good Friday was filled for "A Service of Death and Resurrection" led by the church's senior minister, the Rev. Ed Matthews, and the minister who had married Bill and me, the Rev. Vic Nixon. After the service, our family, joined by Dillard and Larry, Carolyn and Dr. John Holden, one of my brothers' best friends from Park Ridge, took my father home to Scranton. In character, my father had chosen and paid for his gravesite years before.
We had a second funeral service at the Court Street Methodist Church, down the street from the house where my dad had grown up. Bill delivered a loving eulogy that conveyed Hugh Rodham's brusque-ness and devotion:
"In 1974 when I made my first political race, I ran in a congressional district where there were a lot of Republicans from the Middle West. And my future father-in-law came down in a Cadillac with an Illinois license plate; never told a living soul I was in love with his daughter, just went up to people and said, 'I know that you're a Republican and so am 1.1 think Democrats are just one step short of communism, but this kid's all right.' "
We laid him to rest in the Washburn Street Cemetery. It was a cold, rain-drenched April day, and my thoughts were as gloomy as the leaden sky. I stood listening to the Military Honor Guard's bugler playing taps. After the burial, we went with some of my father's old friends to a local restaurant, where we reminisced.
We were supposed to be celebrating my father's life, but I was overwhelmed with sadness for what he would now be missing. I thought about how much he enjoyed seeing his son-in-law serve as President and how much he wanted to watch Chelsea grow up. When Bill was preparing his eulogy on the plane from Little Rock, we were all telling stories. Chelsea reminded us that her PopPop had always said that when she graduated from college, he would rent a big limousine and pick her up wearing a white suit. He had many dreams that wouldn't be realized. But I was thankful for the life, opportunities and dreams he passed along to me.
BILL, CHELSEA AND I WANTED TO SPEND EASTER AT Camp David, and we invited our immediate family and the friends who had come to Scranton. We all needed time to unwind after the funeral and the long weeks of worry, and Camp David was the only haven where we would have the peace and privacy we craved. Jackie Kennedy Onassis had encouraged me to shelter my intimate family life in this protected retreat, surrounded by a forest preserve in Maryland's Catoctin Mountains. Her simple, pragmatic advice, as always, had proved invaluable. I was also pleased that my father had visited the retreat after the inauguration. We could remember his presence in its rustic cabins and his delight in seeing the place that President Eisenhower had renamed for his grandson, David. Now we were with my father's grandchild, Chelsea, to mourn his passing.
That Easter weekend was cold and rainy, and it fit my mood perfectly. I went for a long walk in the drizzle with my mother, and I asked her if she wanted to live with us in the White House. In her characteristically independent manner, she said that she would stay awhile, but that she wanted to go home to attend to all the issues accompanying my father's death. She thanked me for inviting Dillard Denson and Larry Curbo to Camp David. She knew they would continue to be valuable friends as she faced her life alone.
We attended Easter service in the recently built Evergreen Chapel, an A-frame of wood and stained glass that fits beautifully into its wooded setting. I sat in my pew and thought of how my father used to embarrass my brothers and me with his loud, off-key hymn singing. I share his tone deafness, but that morning I sang out, hoping the discordant notes might reach the heavens.
Physically and emotionally drained, I probably should have taken more time to rest and to let myself grieve. But I couldn't ignore the call back to work. Ira had been sending me SOS signals, warning that the health care initiative was being sidelined by budgetary battles. And there was Chelsea, who needed to return to school and to her life. After sharing Easter dinner together with our guests, Bill, Chelsea and I returned to Washington.
The moment I walked into our bedroom on Sunday evening, I sensed something was wrong. I began to unpack our suitcases and realized that a few pieces of furniture were out of place. Items on our bedside tables had been moved around, and there was a gash in the wooden television cabinet that stood between the large windows on the South Wall. I went back into the West Sitting Hall and family den and noticed that other furniture was not where it had been. I called Gary Walters, the chief usher, and asked him what had happened while we were gone. He told me that a security team had searched all of our possessions to check for bugging devices and other breaches of security. He had forgotten to tell me about it, he said.
Nobody on my staff or on the President's staff had been informed about the operation. Helen Dickey, a friend from Little Rock who was staying up on the third floor, heard noises Saturday night and went downstairs to see what was happening. She was confronted by armed men dressed in black, who ordered her out of the area.
I suddenly remembered the Rush Limbaugh note placed in the Lincoln bed for Harry and Linda. I wondered, too, about the source of some bizarre stories that had appeared in the press, one citing an anonymous Secret Service employee who claimed that I had thrown a lamp at my husband. Under other circumstances, it would have been laughable that a major periodical chose to run such a ridiculous story based on nothing more than malicious rumor.
As with many of the good and bad things that have been said about me over the years, reports about my "legendary temper" are exaggerated. But in this case, I admit that I was ready to explode. I called Mack McLarty, Bill's Chief of Staff, and David Watkins, the White House Director of Management and Administration, to let them know exactly what I had discovered and what I thought about it. I wanted to make sure this sort of thing never happened again without our knowledge.
Mack and David let me vent for a while. After looking into it, they reported that arrangements for the search had been made through the usher's office. Mack issued orders that it was not to happen again unless he was informed, and the President approved.
I was grieving my father's death, and I was undone by the invasion of privacy. Yes, we were living in a house that belongs to our nation. But there's an understanding that the individuals who occupy it are allowed some rooms of their own. Ours had been violated, and it made me feel that there was no place where my family and I could go to work through our sadness alone and in peace.
I didn't get much sleep that night, and it was a particularly short one. Starting at about 5 a.m., parents and children were lining up outside the gates for the annual Easter Egg Roll that takes place on the South Lawn Easter Monday. When I looked out the window at around 8 a.m., I saw thousands of children gathered, spoons in hand, waiting to push brightly colored Easter eggs across the grass. They were thrilled to be there, and there was no way I would let my personal concerns ruin their day. So I got dressed and stepped out into the sun. At first I was going through the motions. Then the children's excitement and laughter, rippling across the wide green lawn, touched my heart and lifted my spirits.
The last few months had been a difficult beginning to a pitiless season in Washington. Looking back, I realize that what sustained me most through this time was what sustained me throughout our White House tenure: my family, friends and faith. My religious faith has always been a crucial part of my life. Until he had his fatal stroke, my father knelt by his bed to say his prayers every night. And I shared his belief in the power and importance of prayer. I've often told audiences that if I hadn't believed in prayer before 1992, life in the White House would have persuaded me.
Before my father's stroke, I received an invitation from my good friend Linda Lader, who, with her husband, Phil, launched the Renaissance Weekends Bill, Chelsea and I had attended since 1983 over New Years'. These gatherings were always stimulating and led to many important friendships in our lives.
Linda invited Tipper and me to a luncheon sponsored by a women's prayer group that included Democrats and Republicans, among them Susan Baker, the wife of the first President Bush's Secretary of State, James Baker; Joanne Kemp, the wife of former Republican Congressman (and future Vice Presidential candidate) Jack Kemp; and Grace Nelson, married to my now Senate colleague Bill Nelson, Democrat from Florida. Holly Leachman was the spiritual spark plug who kept it all going for me and became a dear friend. Throughout my time at the White House, Holly faxed me a daily Scripture reading or faith message and came often to visit just to cheer me up or pray with me.
The lunch on February 24, 1993, was held at the Cedars, an estate on the Potomac that serves as headquarters for the National Prayer Breakfast and the prayer groups it has spawned around the world. Doug Coe, the longtime National Prayer Breakfast organizer, is a unique presence in Washington: a genuinely loving spiritual mentor and guide to anyone, regardless of party or faith, who wants to deepen his or her relationship with God and offer the gift of service to others in need. Doug became a source of strength and friendship, and he, too, often sent me notes of support. All of these relationships began at that extraordinary lunch.
Each of my "prayer partners" told me she would pray for me weekly. In addition, they presented me with a handmade book filled with messages, quotes and Scripture that they hoped would sustain me during my time in Washington. Of all the thousands of gifts I received in my eight years in the White House, few were more welcome and needed than these twelve intangible gifts of discernment, peace, compassion, faith, fellowship, vision, forgiveness, grace, wisdom, love, joy and courage. Over the coming months and years, these women faithfully prayed for and with me. I appreciated their concern and their willingness to ignore Washington's political divide to reach out to someone in need of support. I often pulled out their little book. Susan Baker visited and wrote me, offering encouragement and empathy about events ranging from the loss of my father to the political storms surrounding Bill's Presidency.
As the administration neared its one-hundred-day mark at the end of April, it was obvious that we would not meet our self-imposed deadline for a health care package, and it wasn't because I had spent two weeks in Little Rock. Information about every proposal under consideration to pay for universal health care coverage ended up in the press, agitating members of Congress about strategies before any decisions had been made. We were already on the defensive before we had a plan. I was surprised how readily people leaked information to journalists. Some believed they were influencing events; others seemed to crave the feeling of self-importance, even if they were only quoted as anonymous sources.
The nation was still reeling from the ghastly outcome of the standoff in Waco, Texas, when the Branch Davidians shot and killed four Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms agents and wounded twenty others as they tried to serve warrants. In the confrontation that followed on April 19, members of the group set the compound on fire, and at least eighty Branch Davidians were killed, including children. It was a devastating loss of life, and though an independent investigation concluded that the Branch David-ian leadership was responsible for the fires and gunshots that resulted in so many deaths, it could do nothing to mitigate the regret we all felt over the violence and death caused by a perversion of religion.
In the former Yugoslavia, Bosnian Serbs were besieging the Muslim town of Srebrenica in a frenzy of "ethnic cleansing." Another example of the misuse of religious differences for purposes of political power. The news media were sending back horrific pictures of civilian massacres and emaciated prisoners, reminiscent of the Nazi atrocities in Europe. The situation became more agonizing as the death toll mounted, and I was disgusted by the failure of the United Nations to intervene or even to protect the Muslim population.
In the shadow of these events, Bill and I hosted twelve Presidents and Prime Ministers at the White House who had come to Washington for the dedication of the Holocaust Museum on April 22. Some of the visiting leaders were pressuring the United States to get more involved in the U.N. effort to stop the slaughter in Bosnia. The most eloquent messenger of this viewpoint was Elie Wiesel, who delivered an impassioned speech about Bosnia at the museum dedication. Wiesel, a Nazi death camp survivor and winner of the Nobel Peace Prize, turned to Bill and said: "Mr. President... I have been in the former Yugoslavia. ... I cannot sleep since what I have seen. As a Jew I am saying that. We must do something to stop the bloodshed in that country." I had read Night, Wiesel's chilling account of his experiences in Auschwitz and Buchenwald, the death camps in Poland and Germany. I admired his writing and dedication to human rights, and since that day, he and his wife, Marion, have been friends.
Sitting in the gray drizzle, I agreed with Elie's words, because I was convinced that the only way to stop the genocide in Bosnia was through selective air strikes against Serbian targets. I knew that Bill was frustrated by Europe's failure to act after it had insisted that Bosnia was in its own backyard and was its own problem to solve. Bill met with his advisers to consider American involvement in the peacekeeping effort and other options to end the conflict. The situation became more agonizing as the death toll mounted.
We were adjusting to the roller-coaster ride of good and bad news at home and around the world. On the Hill, Republicans had mounted a filibuster in the Senate and defeated the President's economic stimulus package after the House had passed it. With so much going on, some of the administration's best moments were eclipsed. To commemorate Earth Day, April 22, Bill pledged to sign an important international biodiversity treaty that President Bush had rejected. The following week, he announced a national service program, Ameri-Corps, that would revive the idealism of the Peace Corps and VISTA and direct the energy of young volunteers to tackle the needs of our own country.
Whatever our public demands, Bill and I tried never to lose sight of our obligations as Chelsea's parents. We went to every school event and stayed up with her while she finished her homework. Bill could still help with her eighth-grade algebra, and if he was traveling out of town, she would fax him her problems and-then they would talk over solutions. We also continued to insist on her privacy, to the dismay of some in the media and on Bill's staff. The White House Press Office had convinced Bill to let NBC follow him around to film A Day in the Life of the President, which would air in early May. I agreed to participate but said Chelsea was off-limits. Bill's staff tried to persuade me that it would be good for our image to be seen with Chelsea at breakfast or talking over homework. When that didn't work, the show's producer tried to persuade me. Finally, anchorman Tom Brokaw called. To Tom's credit, when I said, "Absolutely not," he told me he respected my decision.
We were also in the middle of making the private quarters a real home. This meant painting and wallpapering and installing bookshelves wherever we could. In the midst of the dust, paint and other chemicals used in redecorating, Chelsea developed a frightening respiratory reaction shortly after Easter, and I was more eager than ever to be near her all the time. We tried to keep her condition private, and few people knew how worried I was.
Chelsea recovered as we got the allergies under control. To cheer us both up, I took her to New York to see the American Ballet Theatre perform Sleeping Beauty. That was when my hair got me into more trouble. Susan Thomases told me I just had to try this wonderful stylist Frederic Fekkai. I was game and asked if he could stop by our room at the Waldorf-Astoria hotel before we went out that night. I liked him right away, so I agreed to try something new, a "carefree" cut similar to broadcast journalist Diane Sawyer's. It certainly was shorter, and a dramatic change. International headlines ensued.
Lisa Caputo, my press secretary, learned about the haircut in a late night phone call from Capricia Marshall, who was with me in New York.
"Don't be mad at me," said Capricia. "She cut her hair off."
"What!"
"Susan just brought this guy into her hotel room, and when she came out, her hair was gone."
"Oh, my God."
The problem for Lisa was not a momentary public relations gaffe— she was used to handling hair stories—but a more complicated media concern. Since my staff once thought that there would be a health care package to present by May, I had agreed to let Katie Couric and her Today show crew trail me around the White House in advance of a major sit-down interview. NBC had spent hours taping me the prior week as a First Lady with a shoulder-length flip. The First Lady about to be interviewed live by Katie Couric had a new look. And there was no way to reshoot the earlier footage so I would look the same throughout the program.
Katie never blinked when she arrived at the White House and found me in my new 'do. Nor did she complain that my pink suit did not exactly complement her salmon-colored outfit. I had always liked watching her on TV, and I was happy to find that she was as down-to-earth in real life as she seemed on the screen—and a good sport too.
I was still learning the ropes and still discovering what it meant to be America's First Lady. The difference between being a Governor's wife and a President's is immeasurable. Suddenly the people around you spend a lot of time anticipating what will make you happy. Sometimes those people don't know you well or misread you. Everything you say is amplified. And you have to be very careful what you wish for, or you'll get it by the caseload.
I was taking one of my first solo trips as First Lady when a young aide asked me, "What would you like to drink in your suite?"
"You know, I really feel like a Diet Dr Pepper," I said.
For years afterward, every time I opened a fridge in a hotel suite, it was loaded with Diet Dr Pepper. People would come up to me with frosty glasses of it. I felt like the sorcerer's apprentice, the Mickey Mouse character in the classic animated film Fantasia: I couldn't turn off the Dr Pepper machine.
This is a benign story, but the implications were sobering. I had to recognize how many people wanted to do whatever they could to please me and how seriously they might misinterpret what I wanted. I simply could not say, "Well, look into it," when presented with a problem. Maybe I should have figured that out earlier. But I didn't, until I was stuck with the consequences of an offhand comment I made after hearing about concerns of financial mismanagement and waste in the White House Travel Office. I said to Chief of Staff Mack McLarty that if there were such problems, I hoped he would "look into it."
"Travelgate," as it came to be known in the media, was perhaps worthy of a two- or three-week life span; instead, in a partisan political climate, it became the first manifestation of an obsession for investigation that persisted into the next millennium.
Before we moved into the White House, neither Bill nor I nor our immediate staff had known that there was a White House Travel Office. The travel office charters planes, books hotel rooms, orders meals and generally takes care of the press when they travel with the President. The costs are billed to the news organizations. Although we didn't know much about what the office did, we certainly didn't want to ignore or appear to condone allegations of misuse of funds anywhere in the White House. An audit by KPMG Peat Marwick had discovered that the Director of the Travel Office kept an off-book ledger, that a minimum of $18,000 of checks had not been properly accounted for and that the office's records were in "shambles." Based on these findings, Mack and the White House Counsel's Office decided to fire the travel office staff and reorganize the department.
These actions, which seemed like no-brainers to the decision makers involved, ignited a firestorm. When Dee Dee Myers, the President's press secretary—and the first woman to hold that position—announced the dismissals in her morning briefing on May 19, 1993, we were surprised by the reaction in the press room. The administration was trying to look out for the media's financial interests, as well as the country's, while some members of the press were focused on the fact that their friends in the travel office, who serve at the pleasure of the President, had been fired. The Administration was charged with amateurism and cronyism due to the fact that a White House employee, who was one of Bill's distant relatives and had experience making travel arrangements, was temporarily put in charge of the revamped travel office. Bill Kennedy, my former law partner who also worked in the counsel's office, had called on the FBI to investigate the case, further inflaming some of the press. I have the highest regard for Bill Kennedy's honesty and legal skills. Like most of us, however, he was a newcomer to Washington and its ways. He didn't know that his direct contact with the FBI, asking them to investigate the alleged misuse of funds, would be considered a serious breach of Washington protocol.
After an internal review, released in full to the media, Mack McLarty publicly reprimanded four Administration officials, including Watkins and Kennedy, for their poor judgment in the way they handled the matter. But at least seven separate investigations—including those conducted by the White House, the General Accounting Office, the FBI and Kenneth Starr's Office of the Independent Counsel—failed to turn up any illegality, wrongdoing or conflicts of interest by anyone in the Administration and confirmed that the initial concerns about the travel office were justified. The Independent Counsel, for example, concluded that the decision to fire the Travel Office political employees was lawful and that there was evidence of financial mismanagement and irregularities. The Justice Department found enough evidence to indict and try the former head of the travel office for embezzlement. According to press reports, he offered to plead guilty to a criminal charge and to serve a brief prison sentence, but the prosecutor insisted on going to trial on a felony charge. After several famous journalists testified as character witnesses at his trial, he was ultimately acquitted.
Despite the unanimous conclusion that there was no illegality in the White House's handling of the affair, it was a disastrously inauspicious first date with the White House press. I'm not sure I've ever learned so much so fast about the consequences of saying or doing anything before knowing exactly what's going on. And for a long time after, I would wake up in the middle of the night worrying that the actions and reactions concerning the travel office helped drive Vince Foster to take his own life. Vince Foster was stung by the travel office affair. A meticulous, decent and honorable man, he felt that he had let down the President, Bill Kennedy, Mack McLarty and me by failing to understand and contain the drama. Apparently the final blow came in a series of spiteful editorials published in The Wall Street Journal, which attacked the integrity and competence of all the Arkansas lawyers in the Clinton Administration. On June 17, 1993, an editorial titled "Who Is Vince Foster?" proclaimed that the most "disturbing" thing about the Administration was "its carelessness about following the law." For the next month, the Journal continued its editorial campaign to paint the Clinton White House and my colleagues from the Rose Firm as some sort of corrupt cabal.
Bill and I may have been inexperienced in our White House roles, but we were seasoned enough in the rough world of politics. We knew we had to isolate the attacks and focus on the reality of our lives. Vince Foster had no such defenses. He was new to this culture, and he took the criticism to heart. Although we will never know what went through his mind in those last weeks of his life, I believe that as he absorbed each accusation, he was driven deeper into pain and distress. I will go to my own grave wishing I had spent more time with him and had somehow seen the signs of his despair. But he was a very private person, and nobody—not his wife, Lisa, or his closest colleagues, or his sister Sheila, with whom he had always been close—had any idea of the depth of his depression.
The last time I remember speaking to Vince was in mid-June, on the Saturday night before Father's Day. Bill was out of town giving a commencement address, so I made plans to go out to dinner with Webb Hubbell; his wife, Suzy; the Fosters and a few other couples from Arkansas. We arranged to meet between seven and eight o'clock at the Hubbells' house.
Just as I was getting ready to leave the White House, Lisa Caputo called to tell me that the lead story in the "Style" section of the next day's Washington Post would be about Bill's birth father, William Blythe. The story would reveal that he had been married at least twice before he met Bill's mother—something nobody in the family had known— and it would name a man who claimed to be Bill's half-brother. Happy Father's Day.
Bill's press office asked me to call and tell him about the article so that he wouldn't get blindsided by reporters' questions about his father. Then Bill and I had to find Virginia, who also had no idea about her husband's past. I was particularly worried because her cancer was getting worse and she didn't need any more stress.
When I called Webb's house to cancel my dinner plans, Vince picked up the phone. I told him why I couldn't make it that night.
"I've got to find Bill, and then we have to find his mother," I said. "He has to be the one to tell her that this story is coming out."
"Oh, I'm so sorry," Vince said.
"So am I. You know, I'm just so sick of this."
That's the last time I remember talking to Vince.
For the rest of the month and into July, Vince was busy with Bernie Nussbaum, the White House counsel, in vetting candidates to replace both retiring Justice Byron "Whizzer" White on the Supreme Court and William Sessions, who had been asked to step down as head of the FBI. I was still working to keep health care reform on the congressional agenda. And I was preoccupied with preparing for my first trip out of the country as First Lady. Bill was set to attend the G-7 summit, an annual meeting of the seven leading industrial countries, in Tokyo in early July, and I was going with him.
I was looking forward to visiting Japan again. I had been there during Bill's governorship, and I remember standing outside the gates and gazing at the beautiful Imperial Palace grounds. This time we would attend a formal dinner on the inside, hosted by the Emperor and Empress. Gentle, artistic and intelligent, this engaging couple embody the grace of their nation's art as well as the serenity of the peaceful gardens I finally visited while at the Palace. During this trip I also met with a group of prominent Japanese women—the first of dozens of such meetings that I held around the world—to learn about the issues women were facing everywhere.
I was especially pleased that my mother could come with us on the trip. I thought she could use a radical change of scenery to help her deal with my father's death. She had a great time with us in Japan and Korea, and then she and I met Chelsea in Hawaii where I attended a meeting about Hawaii's statewide health care system. On July 20, Chelsea and I flew to Arkansas to drop off my mother and to visit some friends. That night, sometime between eight and nine o'clock, Mack McLarty called me at my mother's house and told me he had terrible news: Vince Foster was dead; it looked like a suicide.
I was so staggered that I still can't sort out the sequence of events that night. I remember crying and questioning Mack. I just couldn't believe it. Was he sure there wasn't a mistake? Mack gave me some sketchy details about the body discovered in a park, the handgun at the scene, a gunshot wound in the head. He wanted my advice about when to tell the President. At that moment Bill was appearing on CNN's Larry King Live from the White House and had just agreed to go into an extra half hour. Mack asked me if I thought Bill should finish the show. I thought Mack should cut the interview short so he could tell Bill as soon as possible. I couldn't bear the idea of Bill being told on live TV about the tragic death of one of his closest friends.
As soon as Mack got off the line, I told my mother and Chelsea. Then I started dialing everyone I could think of who knew Vince, hoping someone could shed light on how and why this could have happened.
I craved information like oxygen. I was frantic because I felt so far away, and I couldn't figure out what was going on. As soon as Bill finished the show, I called him. He sounded shell-shocked and kept saying, "How could this have happened?" and "I should have stopped it somehow." Immediately after I talked to Bill, he went to the town house Vmce and Lisa had rented in Georgetown. In one of our numerous calls, he told me how Webb was a pillar of strength and efficiency, taking charge of the funeral that would be held in Little Rock, making the travel arrangements, doing everything that needed to be done for the family. I'll always be grateful to Webb for that, and when I spoke to him, I offered to help in any way I could. I also talked with Lisa and with Vince's sister Sheila. None of us could believe what we were being told. We were all still clinging to an irrational hope that this awful nightmare stemmed from a misunderstanding, a case of mistaken identity.
I called Maggie Williams, who was devoted to Vince and saw him daily. All she could do was sob, so both of us tried to talk through our tears. I called Susan Thomases, who had known Vmce since the 1980s. I called Tipper Gore and asked her if she thought we should bring in counselors to educate the staff about depression. Tipper was both comforting and informative, explaining that many suicides come as a surprise because we don't know how to read the warning signs.
I stayed up all night crying and talking to friends. I wondered ceaselessly whether this tragedy could have been prevented if I or anyone had noticed something amiss in Vince's behavior. When The Wall Street Journal editorial page had started pillorying him, I told him to ignore the stories—advice that was easy for me to give but, it seems, impossible for Vmce to take. He told mutual friends that he and his friends and clients had always read the Journalin Arkansas and he couldn't imagine facing those people after they saw the stories about him.
Vmce's funeral service was held in Little Rock's St. Andrew's Cathedral. Vince wasn't Catholic, but Lisa and the children were, and holding it there meant a great deal to them. Bill spoke eloquently of the special man whom he had known all his life, and he ended by quoting a Leon Russell song, "I love you in a place that has no space or time. / I love you for my life. / You are a friend of mine."
After the service, we drove in a long, mournful caravan to Hope, where Vince was born and raised. It was a blazing summer day, and heat rose in waves over the dusty fields. Vince was buried just outside of town. By then I was beyond words. Numb. All I could feel was a vague notion that Vince was finally safe now, back home where he belonged.
The days that followed seemed to pass in slow motion as we tried to resume a normal routine. But all of us who were close to Vmce were still obsessed with the question Why? Maggie was especially heartbroken. Bernie Nussbaum was beside himself that he had been with Vmce the morning of his death and never had a clue. It had been the best week for the counsel's office since the inauguration. Ruth Bader Ginsburg was on her way to a seat on the Supreme Court, and just that morning the President had named Judge Louis Freeh as the new FBI Director. Bernie thought Vince seemed relaxed, even lighthearted.
As I learned more about clinical depression, however, I began to understand that Vmce may have appeared happy because the idea of dying gave him a sense of peace. As always, Vince had a plan. His father's Colt revolver was already in his car. It is hard to imagine the sort of pain that would make death seem like a welcome relief, but Vince was feeling it. We found out later that he had reached out for psychiatric help a few days before his suicide, but it was too late to save him. He drove out to a secluded park along the Potomac, put the gun's barrel in his mouth and pulled the trigger.
Two days after Vince's death, Bernie Nussbaum went to Vince's office and, with representatives from the Justice Department and the FBI, reviewed every document there for anything that might shed light on his suicide.
Bernie had already conducted a cursory search for a suicide note on the night of Vince's death but had found nothing. According to volumes of subsequent testimony, in the course of this first search, Bernie discovered that Vince had stored in his office some personal files containing work he had done for Bill and me when he was our attorney in Little Rock, including files that had to do with the land deal called Whitewater. Bernie gave these files to Maggie Williams, who delivered them to the residence, and, soon after, they were transferred to the office of Bob Barnett, our private attorney in Washington. Since Vmce's office was never a crime scene, these actions were understandable, legal and justifiable. But they would soon spawn a cottage industry of conspiracy theorists and investigators trying to prove that Vince was murdered to cover up what he "knew about Whitewater."
Those rumors should have ended with the official report ruling his death a suicide and with the sheet of notepaper Bernie found torn into twenty-seven pieces at the bottom of Vmce's briefcase. It was not so much a suicide note as a cry from the heart, an accounting of the things that were tearing at his soul.
"I was not meant for the job in the spotlight of public life in Washington. Here ruining people is considered sport," he wrote.
"... The public will never believe the innocence of the Clintons and their loyal staff. ..."
"The WSJ [Wall Street Journal] editors lie without consequence."
Those words left me grief-stricken. Vince Foster was a good man who wanted to make a contribution to his country. He could have continued to practice law in Little Rock, to serve someday as President of the Arkansas Bar Association and to never hear a bad word breathed about him. Instead, he came to Washington to work for his friend from Hope. His short time in public service destroyed his self-image and, in his mind, irreparably stained his reputation. Shortly after his death, a columnist for Time magazine summed up the sad transformation of his life in Vmce's own words: "Before we came here," he had said, "we thought of ourselves as good people." He was speaking not just for himself, but for all of us who had made the journey from Arkansas.
The six months since the exuberance of Inauguration Day had been brutal. My father and close friend dead; Vmce's wife, children, family and friends devastated; my mother-in-law dying; the faltering missteps of a new Administration being literally turned into federal cases. I didn't know where to turn, so I did what I often do when faced with adversity: I threw myself into a schedule so hectic that there was no time for brooding. I can see now that I was on automatic pilot, pushing myself to attend health care meetings on the Hill and deliver speeches, often on the verge ot weeping. It 1 met someone who reminded me ot my father, or I ran across a nasty comment about Vince, I would feel the tears well up in my eyes. I'm sure that I sometimes appeared brittle, sad and even angry—because I was. I knew that I had to carry on and bear the pain I felt in private. This was one of the times when I kept going on sheer willpower.
The great budget battle finally ended in August, with the passage of Bill's economic plan. Before the vote, I had spoken with wavering Democrats who worried not only about the tough budget vote, but also about how they would explain equally difficult votes that might follow on health care, guns and trade. One Republican Congresswoman called me to explain that she agreed with the President's goal to tame the deficit but had been ordered by her leadership to vote no regardless of her convictions. In the end, not a single Republican voted for the balanced budget package. It squeaked through the House by one vote, and Vice President Gore in his official role as President of the Senate had to vote to break a 50-50 tie. Several courageous Democrats, exemplified by Representative Marjorie Margolis Mezvinsky, who did what they believed to be in America's long-term interests, lost in the next election.
The plan wasn't everything the Administration had wanted, but it signaled the return of fiscal responsibility for the government and the beginning of an economic turnaround for the country, unprecedented in American history. The plan slashed the deficit in half; extended the life of the Medicare Trust Fund; expanded a tax cut called the Earned Income Tax Credit, which benefited fifteen million lower-income working Americans; reformed the student loan program, saving taxpayers billions of dollars; and created empowerment zones and enterprise communities that provided tax incentives for investing in distressed communities. To pay for these reforms, the plan raised taxes on gasoline and on the highest-income Americans, who in return got lower interest rates and a soaring stock market as the economy boomed. Bill signed the legislation on August 10, 1993.
By the middle of August, we were so wrapped up in work that Bill and I both nearly had to be bound, gagged and tossed onto the plane for our vacation on Martha's Vineyard. It turned out to be a wonderful and healing time for me.
It was Ann and Vernon Jordan who persuaded us to come to the Vineyard, where they had been vacationing for years. They found us the perfect spot, a small, secluded house that belonged to Robert McNamara, the Secretary of Defense under Kennedy and Johnson. The two-bedroom Cape Cod cottage sat on the edge of Oyster Pond, one of the large saltwater ponds off the southern coast of the island. I slept and swam and felt the months of tension beginning to melt away.
The Jordans' party to celebrate Bill's forty-seventh birthday on August 19 was filled with old friends and new people who made me laugh and relax. It was one of the best times I'd had since the inauguration. Jackie Kennedy Onassis was there with her longtime companion, Maurice Templesman. The always gracious Katharine Graham, publisher of The Washington Post, came, as did Bill and Rose Styron, who became trusted friends.
Styron, a wry, deeply intelligent Southerner with a wonderful weathered face and piercing eyes, had recently published Darkness Visible: A Memoir of Madness, recounting his struggles with clinical depression. I talked to him about Vince at dinner, and we continued the conversation the next day during a long walk on one of the Vineyard's beautiful beaches. He described the overwhelming sense of loss and desperation that can grip a person until the desire for release from the daily pain and disorientation makes death seem a preferable, even rational, choice.
I also spent time with Jackie. Her house, surrounded by several hundred of the most beautiful acres on Martha's Vineyard, had books and flowers everywhere and windows looking out over the gentle dunes leading to the ocean in the distance. The house had the same unpretentious elegance that characterized everything Jackie did.
I loved seeing her and Maurice together. Charming, smart and well read, he radiated love, respect and concern for her, as well as delight in her company. They made each other laugh, one of my criteria for any relationship.
Jackie and Maurice invited us to go sailing on Maurice's yacht with Caroline Kennedy Schlossberg and her husband, Ed Schlossberg, Ted and Vicky Kennedy and Ann and Vernon Jordan. Caroline is one of the few people in the world who can understand Chelsea's unique experiences, and from that visit onward, she became a perceptive friend and role model for my daughter. Ted Kennedy, Caroline's uncle and the paterfamilias of the Kennedy clan, is one of the most effective Senators who has ever served our country and is also an expert sailor. He kept up a running commentary about pirates and naval battles, while his intelligent, effervescent wife, Vicky, provided additional color.
We motored out of Menemsha Harbor on a glorious, sunny day and anchored next to a small island to go swimming before lunch. I went below to put on my bathing suit, and by the time I came back up on deck, Jackie, Ted and Bill were already in the water. Caroline and Chelsea had climbed up to a platform about forty feet above the water. As I looked up, they jumped together and landed in the ocean with a splash.
They came up laughing and swam back to the boat for another jump.
Chelsea said, "Come on, Mom, try it!"
Of course, Ted and Bill started yelling, "Yeah, give it a try—give it a try!" For reasons that escape me to this day, I said okay. I am not all that athletic anymore, but the next thing I knew I was following Caroline and Chelsea up a narrow little ladder to get to the top. By now I was thinking, "How did I get myself into this?" As soon as Caroline and Chelsea reached the platform—boom! Off they went again. Now perched up there alone, looking down at the tiny figures below me treading water, I listened to their shouts, "Come on, come on! Jump!"
Then I heard Jackie's voice rising above the rest: "Don't do it, Hillary! Don't let them talk you into it. Don't do it!"
I thought to myself, "Now there is the voice of reason and experience." I'm sure that there were countless times when Jackie said, "No, I just won't do that." She knew exactly what was going through my mind, and she came to my rescue.
"You know, you're right!" I shouted back.
Slowly I climbed down with as much dignity as I could summon. Then I got into the water and went for a swim with my friend Jackie.
WHEN WE RETURNED TO WASHINGTON A WEEK BE-fore Labor Day with an important budget victory under the Administration's belt, it was time for the White House to focus full-time on the health care initiative. Or so I hoped. Bill's one-hundred-day target had long since passed, the task force had disbanded at the end of May, and health care had been relegated to the sidelines for months so that the President and his economic and legislative teams could focus on the deficit reduction package. During the summer I had phoned members of Congress, working hard to help Bill pass his economic program, the key to everything he hoped to achieve for the country.
But even with the crucial budget victory behind us, health care still had to compete with other legislative priorities. Since the beginning of the Administration, Treasury Secretary Lloyd Bentsen had warned about the timetable for health care, skeptical that it could be passed in less than two years. By late August, Bentsen, Secretary of State Warren Christopher and economic adviser Bob Rubin were adamant about postponing health care reform and moving forward with the North American Free Trade Agreement, known as NAFTA. They believed that free trade was also critical to the nation's economic recovery and NAFTA warranted immediate action. Creating a free trade zone in North America—the largest free trade zone in the world—would expand U.S. exports, create jobs and ensure that our economy was reaping the benefits, not the burdens, of globalization. Although unpopular with labor unions, expanding trade opportunities was an important administration goal. The question was whether the White House could focus its energies on two legislative campaigns at once. I argued that we could and that postponing health care would further weaken its chances. But it was Bill's decision, and because NAF1A faced a legislative deadline, he concluded that it had to be addressed first.
He was also particularly committed to strengthening relations with our closest neighbor to the south. Not only was Mexico the ancestral home of millions of Mexican-Americans, it was undergoing profound political and economic changes that had the potential to ripple across Latin America. Bill wanted to support President Ernesto Zedillo, an economist by training, who was transforming the national government from a one-party political system to a multiparty democracy that would tackle long-time problems of poverty and corruption as well as cross-border concerns like immigration, drugs and trade.
Once again, health care would have to wait. Nonetheless, Ira and I and a cadre of health care staffers continued to lay the groundwork for a bill that would deliver quality, affordable health care to all Americans. Bill's dramatic legislative victories over the summer made us optimistic about our chances. We kept reminding ourselves that reform was not just about complex public policies, but about people's lives, and in my quest for solutions, many of those lives touched my own.
While Bill and his advisers were hammering out a policy to jump-start the economy, I had been traveling around the country listening to Americans talk about the hardships of coping with the rising medical costs, inequitable treatment and bureaucratic quagmires they encountered every day. From Louisiana to Montana, and from Florida to Vermont, my travels reinforced my belief that the existing health system could be more efficient and less costly while ensuring that every American who needed medical attention received it.
I spoke to people who temporarily lost their coverage because they switched jobs—which was happening to an average of two million workers each month. I met men and women who discovered they couldn't get insurance if they had "a preexisting condition" like cancer or diabetes that was already diagnosed and part of their medical history. Some elderly Americans living on fixed incomes told me they were forced to choose between paying the rent or buying prescription drugs. My father's hospitalization taught me that even with the best care and support, losing someone you love is indescribably painful. I couldn't bear thinking how much harder it would be if the loss were avoidable.
I also met Americans who made my heart soar with hope. One day when I went to speak to health care reformers on Capitol Hill, I noticed a little boy in the front row sitting in a wheelchair. He had the most beautiful smile on his sweet face, and I couldn't keep my eyes off him. Just before I spoke, I went over to him. When I bent down to say hello, he threw his arms around my neck. I picked him up and discovered that he wore a full body brace that must have weighed forty pounds. I addressed the audience holding him in my arms. That was my introduction to Ryan Moore, a seven-year-old from South Sioux City, Nebraska, who had been born with a rare form of dwarfism. His family constantly battled with their insurance company to pay for the multiple surgeries and treatments he needed. Ryan's condition stunted his body's growth, but it didn't interfere with his positive attitude. He so endeared himself to me and my staff that Melanne hung a giant photo of him on the wall in the Hillaryland offices. Stories like Ryan's kept our eyes on the prize throughout our struggle to bring health care coverage to all Americans, and his courage and hope continue to inspire me today. Ryan is now in high school and dreams of becoming a sportscaster.
By early September, Bill was also focused on preparations for the upcoming visit of Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin and Palestinian leader Yasir Arafat and the signing of a new Middle East peace accord. The historic meeting that took place on the White House South Lawn on September 13, 1993, was the result of months of negotiations in Oslo, Norway, and the agreement was known as the Oslo Accords. It was important to establish our government's support for the agreement because the United States is the only country that could push both sides to actually implement the agreement's terms and be trusted by Israel to protect its security. The people of the Middle East and the world would also see Prime Minister Rabin and Chairman Arafat personally commit to what their representatives had negotiated.
I had first met Yitzhak and Leah Rabin earlier that spring when they paid a courtesy call at the White House. The Prime Minister, a man of medium height, did nothing to demand attention, but his quiet dignity and intensity drew me—and so many others—to him. He created an aura of strength; this was a man who made me feel safe. Leah, a striking, dark-haired woman with piercing blue eyes, exuded energy and intelligence. She was also well read, observant and knowledgeable about the arts. Now, on this second visit with me at the White House, she noticed where I had rehung some paintings from the White House art collection. Leah was outspoken, sharing her opinions about personalities and events with blunt remarks that quickly endeared her to me. Both Rabins were realistic about the challenges that lay ahead for Israel. They believed they had no choice but to try to achieve a secure future for their nation through negotiations with their sworn enemies. Their attitude called to mind the old saying "Hope for the best, plan for the worst." That was also Bill's and my assessment.
On that auspicious day, Bill persuaded Yitzhak to shake hands with Arafat as a tangible sign of their commitment to the peace plan. Rabin agreed, as long as there would be no kissing, a common Arab custom. Before the ceremony, Bill and Yitzhak engaged in a hilarious rehearsal of the handshake, with Bill pretending to be Arafat as they practiced a complicated maneuver that would prevent the Palestinian leader from drawing too close.
The handshake and the agreement, which seemed to offer such hope, were seen by some Israelis and Arabs as a rebuke to their political interests and religious beliefs, which later led to violence and Rabin's tragic assassination. But on that perfect afternoon—under bright warm sunlight that seemed to bestow God's blessing—I hoped only for the best and determined to help in any way I could to support Israel's courageous decision to take this risk for a lasting and secure peace.
Even as he worked on these varied and pressing issues, Bill scheduled a televised prime-time address to Congress on September 22 to outline the health care plan. Following that, I was slated to testify before the five congressional committees that would consider health care legislation, which we hoped would be introduced in early October.
It was an ambitious September schedule, and we couldn't afford more roadblocks. Although the bill itself was not finished, Bill, Ira and I wanted to acquaint Democratic members with it before Bill's big speech so that they would understand the reasoning behind our decisions. But the raw numbers in the bill needed to be calculated and confirmed by budget experts, and that took several weeks longer than anticipated. Instead of circulating an unfinished document, we set up a "reading room" where Democratic staffers could look at the proposal with the understanding that the figures were likely to change. The content of the document was leaked to news organizations, and the ensuing stories left many in Congress thinking that this draft was the final bill. Already wary of health care reform, Senator Moynihan decried the whole enterprise, saying it was based on "fantasy" numbers.
Proponents and opponents of reform had begun organizing their own campaigns to influence the outcome. Groups representing consumers, families, workers, the elderly, children's hospitals and pediatricians were, for the most part, lining up in favor of reform. But business groups, particularly small business, pharmaceuticals and the insurance giants had long viewed reform as a threat. Doctors, too, objected to specific elements of the plan.
It didn't take long to see how well organized and well financed the opposition was. In early September, the Health Insurance Association of America, a powerful interest group representing the nation's insurance companies, launched television advertisements designed to discredit reform. The ads featured a couple at a kitchen table, reviewing their medical bills, worrying aloud that the government was going to force them to sign up for a new health care plan they didn't want. "Things are changing and not all for the better. The government may force us to pick from a few health care plans designed by government bureaucrats," the announcer intoned. It was false and misleading advertising, but it was a clever scare tactic that had the desired effect.
On September 20, two days before Bill was to unveil his health care plan to Congress and the nation, he asked me to look at the speech draft he had just received from the speechwriting team. Over the years, Bill and I have always relied on each other as sounding boards. We also recruit each other as editors whenever we are working on a big speech or any important writing. It was a Sunday afternoon, and I settled into an oversize chair in one of my favorite rooms on the top floor of the White House—the Solarium—where we often retreated to relax, play cards, watch television and feel like a regular family. Quickly thumbing through the pages of the speech, I could see that it wasn't ready—and Bill was supposed to deliver it in just over forty-eight hours. Panic set in. I picked up the phone and asked the White House operator to call Maggie. Always calm in a storm, she glanced at the speech and quickly called a meeting of top health care advisers and speechwriters for that evening. Over bowls of nachos and guacamole, Bill and I and about a dozen staffers sat in the Solarium and tossed around themes for the speech. I suggested that health care reform was part of the American journey, an apt metaphor because in Bill's view, this was our generation's chance to answer a call on behalf of future generations. We settled on the journey theme, and with a combined sense of urgency and relief, we handed a rough draft back to the speechwriters. With constant editing and rewriting from Bill, they wrestled the text into shape for Tuesday night's appearance.
Presidents deliver special addresses to Congress from a podium in the ornate chamber of the House or Representatives, it s a ntuai-evening. As the President enters the hall, the sergeant-at-arms announces in a somber tone: "The President of the United States." The audience rises, and the President greets members of both parties who, by tradition, sit on opposite sides of the aisle. He then climbs to the lectern and faces the audience. The Vice President and the Speaker of the House sit directly behind him.
The First Lady, along with White House guests and other dignitaries, sits in a special area of the balcony, and it was a favorite Washington parlor game to guess who would be seated with her. On my right that evening was one of the nation's leading pediatricians and one of my favorite people, Dr. T. Berry Brazelton, with whom I had worked on behalf of children's issues for about ten years. More surprising was the guest on my left, Dr. C. Everett Koop. Dr. Koop, a pediatric surgeon by training, had been President Reagan's Surgeon General, in charge of overseeing the nation's Public Health Service. Bearded and bespectacled, he was a Republican and an adamant foe of abortion who had endured a vitriolic confirmation battle. Bill and I had come to admire Dr. Koop for the courageous stands he took as Surgeon General, warning Americans about the dangers of tobacco use and the spread of AIDS and crusading for immunizations, condom use, environmental health and better nutrition. Having witnessed the failings of the system as both a clinician and a policy maker, Koop had become a vocal advocate for health care reform and was an invaluable adviser and ally.
After motioning the audience to sit down, Bill began the speech. To his immense credit, not even I realized that something was wrong. We learned later that an aide had placed the wrong speech in the TelePrompTer—the economic address Bill had given months before. Bill is legendary for extemporizing and ad-libbing, but this speech was too long and too important to do entirely off-the-cuff. For a nerve-racking seven minutes, as his staffers rushed to correct the mistake, he delivered his remarks from memory.
It was a great speech, with just the right mix of passion, wisdom and substance. I was so proud of him that night. It was a courageous path for a new President. Franklin D. Roosevelt had boldly found a way to give older Americans economic security through the Social Security program; Bill wanted, through health care reform, to vastly improve the quality of life for tens of millions of Americans. He held up a red, white and blue "health security card" that he hoped would be issued to every American, vowing to deliver a plan that would guarantee every citizen health insurance coverage and access to affordable, quality medical care.
"Tonight we come together to write a new chapter in the American story," Bill told the nation. "... At long last, after decades of false starts, we must make this our most urgent priority: giving every American health security, health care that can never be taken away, health care that is always there."
When he finished the fifty-two-minute speech, the audience gave him a standing ovation. Although a few Republican lawmakers immediately took issue with some details of the plan, many in both parties said they admired Bill's willingness to tackle an issue that had vexed so many of his predecessors. As one journalist put it, the reform effort was like "scaling the Mount Everest of social policy." We had started the trek. I felt excited yet apprehensive, well aware that a rousing speech was one thing while designing and passing legislation was another. But I was grateful for Bill's commitment and eloquence, and I believed we would reach a compromise because our nation's long-term economic and social well-being depended on it.
After the speech we loaded up the motorcade and headed back to the White House. We had planned a post-speech party on the State Floor, but we decided to go first to the Old Executive Office Building, where the health care staff worked in crowded, makeshift cubicles in room 160. Bill and I thanked them for spending days and nights working for reform. I stood on a chair and declared to laughter and applause that with the impending birth of the health care bill, the room would now be renamed "the Delivery Room."
We had every reason to be optimistic about the reform plan as reviews of Bill's speech and the outlines of the plan were generally positive. The public overwhelmingly supported action on health care reform. News reports praised the plan and our efforts at reaching bipartisan consensus with headlines that read, health care reform;
WHAT WENT RIGHT?
Although the bill wouldn't be "delivered" for another month, I was eager to proceed with my testimony before the committees reviewing reform. Six days after Bill's speech, on September 28, I had my opportunity. My appearance before the House Ways and Means Committee marked the first time a First Lady was the lead witness on a major administration legislative initiative. Other First Ladies had also testified before Congress, including Eleanor Roosevelt and Rosalynn Carter, who appeared before a Senate subcommittee in 1979 to argue for increased funding of programs that aid mental health patients and support treatment facilities.
The hearing room was packed when I arrived, and I was unusually nervous. Every seat was taken, and there wasn't an inch of empty space left along the side and back walls. Several dozen photographers were sitting or lying on the floor in front of the witness table, clicking furiously as I took my seat. All of the networks had sent camera crews to record the event.
I had worked hard preparing my testimony. In one of our prep sessions, Mandy Grunwald, the savvy media consultant who had worked with James Carville on our 1992 campaign and continued working for the Democratic National Committee, asked me what I really wanted to convey.
I knew I couldn't afford to make any factual mistakes, but I also didn't want the human stories of anxiety and suffering to get lost in the arcana of public policy. I wanted my words to convey the real-life dimension of the health care problem. I decided to start with the personal: why I cared so deeply about improving health care. At 10 a.m., Chairman Dan Rostenkowski, that gruff and gritty old-school pol from Chicago, gaveled the House Ways and Means Committee to order and introduced me.
"During the past months, as I have worked to educate myself about the problems facing our nation and facing American citizens about health care, I have learned a great deal," I said. "The official reason I am here today is because I have had that responsibility. But more importantly for me, I'm here as a mother, a wife, a daughter, a sister, a woman. I'm here as an American citizen concerned about the health of her family and the health of her nation."
For the next two hours I answered questions from committee members. Later that day I testified before the House Energy and Commerce Committee, chaired by one of the longest-serving House members and a longtime champion of health care reform, Democratic Congressman John Dingell of Michigan. Over the next two days, I appeared before one other House committee and two Senate committees. The experience was fascinating, challenging and exhausting. I was happy to have had the chance to speak publicly about our plan and pleased that the reviews were generally positive. Members of Congress applauded the testimony and, according to news reports, were impressed that I knew the intricacies of the health care system. This gave me hope. Maybe my testimony had helped people understand why reform was so vital to American citizens and their families, as well as to the nation's economy. I was also just plain relieved that I had gotten it behind me and hadn't embarrassed myself or my husband, who was on the line for choosing me to represent him on such a big undertaking.
While many members genuinely appreciated the finer points of the health care debate, I realized that some of the laudatory responses to my testimony were just the latest example of "the talking dog syndrome," which I had learned about as First Lady of Arkansas. There's a similar thought attributed to Dr. Samuel Johnson by Boswell: "Sir, a woman preaching is like a dog's walking on its hind legs. It is not done well; but you are surprised to find it done at all."
Much of the praise centered on the fact that I hadn't used notes or consulted my aides and that I generally knew my stuff. In short, even many complimentary committee members who appreciated my appearing were not necessarily sold on the substance of the plan.
I also learned that my popularity beyond the Beltway, my positive reception on the Hill and the apparent willingness of Congress to consider health care reform set off alarms among Republicans. If Bill Clinton passed a bill that provided every American with health insurance, he would be a shoo-in for a second term as President. That was an outcome Republican Party planners were determined to prevent. Our own political experts sensed a scorched-earth strategy emerging on the Right. Steve Ricchetti, the chief White House liaison with the Senate, was concerned. "They are going to come after you," he told me one afternoon in my office. "You're too strong in this process. They have to take a pound of flesh out of you, one way or another."
I assured Steve that I had taken heat before, and at least I'd be taking it now for something I believed in.
After my testimony, it was time for what the White House called the health care "roll-out"—a series of speeches and events in which the President generates attention and support for the policy. Bill was scheduled to do the roll-out for much of the first half of October, starting with a trip to California on October 3, where he would hold town meetings to discuss reform and win as many converts as possible. But any presidential agenda is subject to outside events. Bill was en route to California on October 3 when his aides received an urgent call from the White House Situation Room. Two Black Hawk helicopters had been shot down in Somalia. Details were vague, but it was clear that American soldiers had been killed and that there might be ongoing violence. Troops had originally been sent to the famine-ravaged country by President Bush on a humanitarian aid mission, but it had evolved into a more aggressive peacekeeping effort.
Every President must quickly adopt a strategy when troubling events unfold: He can stop everything else and focus very publicly on the crisis or handle the situation while trying to stick to his official schedule. Bill remained in California but stayed in constant touch with his national security team. Then the news got worse: The body of an American serviceman had been dragged through the streets of Mogadishu, an appalling act of barbarity orchestrated by the Somali warlord General Mohamed Aideed.
Bill was given terrible news about Russia, too. There had been an attempted military coup against President Boris Yeltsin. On October 5, in Culver City, California, Bill cut short a town hall meeting about health care and returned to Washington. Over the next few weeks, Bill, the news media and the nation were consumed by Somalia and the unrest in Russia, and health care reform took a backseat.
We had originally envisioned presenting Congress with an outline of principles that would shape the health care reform legislation. But we subsequently learned that Congressman Dan Rostenkowski expected us to produce a detailed bill, complete with legislative language. Giving Congress a comprehensive bill at the outset turned out to be a tremendous challenge and a tactical mistake for us. We thought it would be 250 pages at most, but as drafting continued, it became clear that the bill needed to be much longer, in part because the plan was complex and in part because we acquiesced to some specific requests from interested groups. The American Academy of Pediatrics, for example, insisted that the bill guarantee nine childhood vaccinations in the benefits package as well as six well-child visits. These demands may have been legitimate, but this level of detail should have been negotiated after the bill was introduced, not in the drafting process. The Health Security Act delivered by the White House to Congress on October 27 was 1,342 pages long. A few weeks later, on the last day of the congressional session and with little fanfare, Senate Majority Leader George Mitchell introduced the measure. Though many other bills dealing with complex issues like energy or the budget have more than one thousand pages, opponents used the length of our bill against us. We were proposing to streamline and simplify a major social policy, but it looked like we couldn't streamline and simplify our own bill. It was a smart tactic, and it effectively obscured the fact that our health care legislation would have eliminated thousands of pages of health-related legislation and regulations already on the books.
With so much happening, I could have easily forgotten my own birthday on October 26. But my staff never missed an occasion for a party. The Hillaryland gang invited over a hundred of my family members and friends to come from around the country for a surprise forty-sixth birthday party at the White House. I knew something was up when I returned to the residence in the evening from meetings with Senator Moynihan and Senator Barbara Mikulski of Maryland, a Capitol Hill veteran known as the "dean" of the women Senators.
All the lights inside the residence were off. A power blackout, I was told. That was my first clue; the power never goes off in the White House. I was ushered upstairs and told to put on a black wig and hoop-skirt—the Colonial look, to be sure, and an attempt to replicate the fashions worn by Dolley Madison. Then I was led down to the State Floor, where I was greeted by a dozen staffers in blond wigs representing "a dozen different Hillarys"—headband Hillary, cookie-baking Hillary, health care Hillary. Bill was disguised as President James Madison (with white wig and tights). I loved him for it, but I was glad we were living in the late twentieth century. He looks better in a suit.
ON HALLOWEEN 1993, I PICKED UP A COPY OF THE Sunday Washington Post and learned that our old, money-losing real estate venture in Arkansas had come back to haunt us. According to unnamed "government sources," the Resolution Trust Corporation (RTC), a federal agency examining failed savings and loans, had recommended the criminal investigation of Madison Guaranty Savings and Loan, owned by Jim McDougal. McDougal and his wife, Susan, had been our partners in the Whitewater Development Company, Inc., a completely separate entity created to hold land purchased four years before McDougal bought Madison Guaranty. Because of our past connection with McDougal, however, we were wrongly implicated in his subsequent misadventures. During the 1992 presidential race, allegations surfaced in the press—and were quickly dismissed—that McDougal had received special favors from the state when Bill was Governor because of his business relationship with us. The story faded when Bill and I proved that we had lost money on the Whitewater investment and that, while he was Governor, the Arkansas Securities Department had actually urged the federal regulators to remove McDougal and shut down Madison Guaranty.
Now The Washington Post was reporting that RTC investigators were looking into allegations that McDougal had used his S&L to funnel money illegally to political campaigns in Arkansas, including Bill's gubernatorial reelection campaign in 1986. I was confident nothing would come of it. Bill and I never deposited money in Madison Guaranty or borrowed from it. As to the campaign contributions, Bill had supported the law in Arkansas imposing a strict limit of $1,500 per contribution per election. McDougal had already been indicted, tried and acquitted by the federal government on charges arising from his operation of Madison Guaranty before Bill ran for President.
Bill and I failed to recognize the political significance of Whitewater's sudden reappearance, which may have contributed to some public relations mistakes in how we handled the growing controversy. But I could never have predicted how far our adversaries would take it.
The name Whitewater came to represent a limitless investigation of our lives that cost the taxpayers over $70 million for the Independent Counsel investigation alone and never turned up any wrongdoing on our part. Bill and I voluntarily cooperated with investigators. Every time they leaked or leveled a new charge, we bent over backwards to make sure we hadn't missed or overlooked anything substantive. But as one allegation followed another, we realized we were chasing ghosts in a house of mirrors: we would run in one direction only to have the apparition pop up behind us. Whitewater never seemed real because it wasn't.
The purpose of the investigations was to discredit the President and the Administration and slow down its momentum. It didn't matter what the investigations were about; it only mattered that there were investigations. It didn't matter that we had done nothing wrong; it only mattered that the public was given the impression that we had. It didn't matter that the investigations cost taxpayers tens of millions of dollars; it only mattered that our lives and the work of the President were disrupted over and over again. Whitewater signaled a new tactic in political warfare: investigation as a weapon for political destruction. "Whitewater" became a convenient catchall for any and all attacks that our political adversaries could design. Whitewater was a political war from the start, and it raged throughout Bill Clinton's Presidency.
At the time, however, Whitewater seemed to me like a new twist on an old story with a familiar cast of characters—more of a nuisance than a threat.
However, in light of the Post's Halloween article and a similar New York Times piece that soon followed, we thought we should take the precaution of hiring a private attorney. Our personal lawyer, Bob Barnett, recused himself from Whitewater because his wife, Rita Braver, was a CBS correspondent assigned to cover the White House. Bob is a longtime Democrat, and the favorite debating partner of Democratic presidential and vice presidential nominees. In mock debates staged to prepare candidates for the rhetorical styles and political arguments of their opponents, he plays the perfect Republican foil—taking the part of Vice President and then President George Bush against Congress-woman Geraldine Ferraro in 1984, Governor Michael Dukakis in 1988 and Governor Bill Clinton in 1992; playing former Secretary of Defense Dick Cheney against Senator Joe Lieberman in the 2000 vice presidential debate; and even performing as Congressman Rick Lazio in preparation for my own debate during the 2000 Senate race. Bob became my counsel and adviser in 1992, and I could not have asked for a better friend in the years that followed.
Bob recommended David Kendall, his colleague at Williams and Connolly, to represent us in the Whitewater matter. We had known David for years. Although he was a few years older than Bill and me, we had overlapped at Yale Law School. Like Bill, David was a Rhodes Scholar. As a fellow Midwesterner—David was born and raised in rural Indiana on a farm—he and I had a natural rapport. Soon he became an anchor in our lives.
David was perfect for the job. He had clerked on the Supreme Court for Justice Byron White and had experience in corporate law and in cases involving the media. He had represented clients in several S&L investigations in the 1980s, so he was familiar with S&L issues. At the same time, he had an unwavering social conscience. On his office wall hangs a copy of his arrest record in Mississippi, where he had been jailed briefly as a civil rights activist during the voting rights drive in Freedom Summer in 1964. In one of his first jobs as an attorney, he defended death penalty cases for the NAACP Legal Defense Fund.
Like all really good lawyers, David has the talent to transform seemingly random and disconnected facts into a persuasive narrative. But reconstructing the story of Whitewater would test his skills. First, David took over the files from Vince Foster's office, which had been turned over to Bob Barnett after Vmce's death. Then he tracked down other documents from Washington to Flippin, Arkansas, near the Whitewater property.
David met with us in the White House every week or so for the next three months. As I listened with fascination, he filled us in on what he had learned while piecing together gaps in the Whitewater record and tracing Jim McDougal's increasingly bizarre investments. Trying to re-create McDougal's paper trail, he said, was like shoveling smoke.
Neither Bill nor I had ever visited the Whitewater property; we had only seen photographs. David decided that he needed to see the place "in three dimensions and in real time" in order to understand the case. He flew to southern Missouri (which was closer to the property than Little Rock) and rented a car. Hours after losing his way down back roads, he finally followed a rough track bulldozed through the woods that ended up at the benighted Whitewater development. There were "For Sale" signs here and there, but nobody home. Had he returned a few months later, after the media swarmed in looking to photograph and interview anyone connected to Whitewater, David would have seen a large sign posted on one of the few occupied dwellings on the site: "Go Home, Idiots."
Eventually David traced the current ownership of certain Whitewater lots to a local Flippin realtor named Chris Wade. We had not known that back in May 1985, McDougal had sold the company's remaining twenty-four lots to Wade. Despite the fact that we were still partners then, McDougal had not informed us, asked us to sign off on the deal or offered to split the $3 5,000 proceeds. We were also unaware that McDougal acquired in this transaction a small used Piper Semi-nole plane that became his "corporate aircraft."
By the mid-1980s McDougal presided over a small corporate empire, at least on paper. In 1982, he had bought a small thrift called Madison Guaranty and quickly opened the cash spigot. McDougal aspired to be a populist banker, and he had grandiose ideas. From what David Kendall could deduce, many of McDougal's deals were questionable. In David's understated terminology, McDougal made "overly optimistic investments." Unfortunately, when he couldn't cover the payments, McDougal shifted money around, borrowing from Peter to pay Paul. Unbeknownst to us, once he even used the Whitewater Development Company to buy property near a trailer park south of Little Rock that he confidently named Castle Grande Estates. His web of business partners and failed schemes would take years to untangle.
Madison Guaranty started out like thousands of other S&Ls that made small home mortgage loans. Then, in 1982, the Reagan Administration deregulated the savings and loan industry. Suddenly owners like McDougal could make large, reckless loans outside of their traditional businesses, and they eventually drove the whole industry, including Madison Guaranty, into serious financial trouble. One of the ways S&L executives and their lawyers attempted to salvage their failing businesses was by raising capital through preferred stock offerings, which they were permitted to do under federal law, if they had state regulatory approval.
In 1985, Rick Massey, a young lawyer at the Rose Law Firm, along with a friend of his who worked for McDougal, proposed just such a remedy for Madison Guaranty. Because McDougal had been negligent in paying a previous bill from Rose for legal services, the firm insisted that he pay a $ 2,000 monthly retainer before Massey undertook the work. My partners asked me to request the retainer from McDougal and to become the "billing partner" for Massey because, as a junior associate, he couldn't bill a client himself. After I arranged the retainer, my own involvement in the account was minimal. The stock offering was never approved by Arkansas regulators, and the federal S&L regulators took over Madison Guaranty, removed McDougal as president and initiated an examination of the S&L's transactions because of allegations thatMcDou-gal had engaged in a pattern of self-dealing.
The federal investigation and the criminal prosecution it later spawned against McDougal consumed him for years. In 1986 he approached us and asked if we would sign over our 50 percent share in the Whitewater Development Company. I thought it was a great idea. We had made our investment eight years earlier, and it had only cost us money. But before we signed over our stock, I asked McDougal to take our names off the mortgage, and in return for obtaining 100 percent of the remaining equity of the company, assume the remaining debt and release us from any remaining and future liabilities. When he balked at that, alarms started going off in my head. For the first time since we became partners in 1978, I demanded to see the books. I've been asked why I had never done that before and how I could have been so ignorant of McDougal's actions. I've asked myself that too. I just thought we had made a bad investment and had to pay the price for buying real estate for second homes just as interest rates skyrocketed. We were stuck with a loser and had to wait for the market to turn around or until we could sell it. I had no reason to question McDougal, whose investment track record had been impressive in the 1970s and who, I figured, couldn't be expected to make a silk purse out of every sow's ear. I kept paying whatever McDougal said we owed and tended to the more imminent demands in my life, including having a baby, participating in my husband's elections every two years and trying to practice law. Once my accountant analyzed the Whitewater documents I had rounded up with Susan McDougal's help over many months, I realized that the records were in disarray and that Whitewater was a fiasco. I decided that Bill and I had to get everything in order, then extract ourselves from McDougal's mess. Given McDougal's problems, that took years.
First, I wanted to take care of any conceivable obligation the corporation had to the IRS, to the Arkansas Department of Revenue and for local property taxes. Whitewater had never made money, but it was still obligated to submit corporate tax returns, which, I learned in 1989, McDougal had not done in recent years. He had failed to pay property taxes, despite assurances to us to the contrary. To file tax returns now, I needed the signature of an officer of the Whitewater Development Company, Inc., and only the McDougals held titles. I tried for a year to get power of attorney from McDougal so I could file the returns, pay the taxes and sell the property to cover the debt.
Meanwhile, McDougal's life was falling apart. His wife, Susan, had left him in 1985 and later moved to California. The following year he suffered a debilitating stroke, which heightened the manic depression he'd apparently been fighting for some time. I was not eager to contact McDougal, so in 1990 I called Susan in California, explained what I wanted to do, and asked her if she, as corporate secretary, would sign. She agreed, and I overnighted her the forms, which she signed and returned to me. When McDougal found out, he screamed at Susan over the phone and called my office to threaten me. I had turned him into an enemy.
McDougal grew even more embittered after he was indicted and tried for eight federal felony counts for conspiracy, fraud, false statements and fiscal misdealing. He checked himself into a psychiatric hospital before his trial in 1990. He also asked Bill to be a character witness for him, but I talked Bill out of doing it. Bill is always willing to give anyone, especially old friends, the benefit of the doubt, but I just didn't feel he could vouch for McDougal. Both of us realized we had no idea who he really was or what he'd been up to all these years. After the jury acquitted him, McDougal threatened me again, this time implying that he would pay me back for filing the Whitewater tax returns.
And so he did, with considerable help from Bill's political adversaries. Sheffield Nelson, a self-made former CEO of the Arkansas Louisiana Gas Company (Arkla) had switched to the Republican Party to run against Bill for Governor in 1990. Used to getting what he wanted, Nelson became deeply vengeful and antagonistic over his defeat. As soon as Bill announced his run for the Presidency in 1991, Nelson let the Bush White House know he would be willing to offer whatever help he could to defeat Bill. To that end, he persuaded McDougal to voice any complaints he could about Bill and me, no matter how outlandish.
The result was the first "Whitewater" story, an article that appeared on the front page of the Sunday New York Times in March 1992, in the middle of the Democratic primaries.
Jim McDougal was quoted throughout the piece, liberally planting false information about our partnership. The writer made much of our "complicated relationship" with McDougal and erroneously implied that he had made us money in the Whitewater deal and received favors in return. While the article's headline trumpeted that "Clintons Joined S&L Operator in Ozark Real Estate Venture," we had made our investment with the McDougals four years before Jim bought the S&L. The Clinton campaign immediately hired Jim Lyons, a respected corporate attorney from Denver, who, in turn, retained a firm of forensic accountants to assemble and explain the records of the Whitewater investment.
The Lyons report, which cost $25,000 and took a mere three weeks to complete, proved that Bill and I were equally liable with the McDougals for the original loan that we took out to purchase the Whitewater land and that we had lost tens of thousands of dollars on the investment—the final figure was more than $46,000. Ten years and tens of millions of dollars later, the independent counsel's final Whitewater report released in 2002 supported Lyons's findings, as did a separate investigation commissioned by the Resolution Trust Corporation. After the campaign released the Lyons report in March 1992, the press dropped the story. Some Republicans and their allies did not give up so easily. In August 1992, a low-level RTC investigator, L. Jean Lewis, filed a criminal referral concerning Madison that attempted to implicate Bill and me. Chuck Banks, the Republican U.S. Attorney in Little Rock who had been nominated by President Bush to be a federal judge, came under pressure from the Bush Justice Department to take action on this referral and issue grand jury subpoenas that would inevitably become public and signify that we were somehow involved in a criminal investigation. Banks refused, expressing surprise that the RTC had not sent him this information three years earlier when he had been investigating Jim McDougal. Banks said that this referral gave him no basis to suspect us of criminal conduct or to investigate us, and that he was afraid any last-minute investigative activity by him would leak and prejudice the presidential election. Somewhat surprisingly, the final Whitewater report actually documents the involvement of the Bush Administration in trying to create an "October Surprise" just weeks before the election. Not only was Attorney General William Barr involved, but White House Counsel C. Boyden Gray tried to find out about a potential criminal referral from the RTC involving us. When the rumblings of Whitewater resurfaced in the fall of 1993, none of us in the White House could have imagined the array of forces about to converge in what would become—for our adversaries—a perfect political storm.
In mid-November, while David Kendall was immersed in his fact-finding mission, The Washington Post submitted a long list of questions about Whitewater and McDougal to the White House. For the next several weeks, an internal debate simmered within the administration about how to handle media requests. Should we answer questions? Show them documents? And if so, which ones? Our political advisers, including George Stephanopoulos and Maggie Williams, favored dumping the documents on the media. So did David Gergen, who had served in the Nixon, Ford and Reagan White Houses and had joined Bill's staff. Gergen contended that the press wouldn't rest until they got information, but once they did, they would move on to something else. There was nothing to hide, so why not? The story would mushroom for a while and then die.
But David Kendall, Bernie Nussbaum and Bruce Lindsey, all lawyers, argued that releasing documents to the press was a "slippery slope." Since the record was still partial and might never be complete, we didn't know the answers to lots of questions about McDougal and his business dealings. The press would not be satisfied, always thinking we were holding something back when we didn't have anything left to tell them. As a lawyer, I tended to agree with this view. Bill didn't pay much attention to the issue, since he knew he hadn't done anything as Governor to favor McDougal, and besides, we had lost money. Consumed with the demands of the Presidency, he told me to decide with David how to handle our response.
Because of our experience with the Nixon impeachment in 1974, Bernie and I believed that we should cooperate fully with the government investigation so that no one could fairly claim that we were stonewalling or claiming executive privilege. So I instructed David to advise the government investigators that we would voluntarily provide them with all documents and cooperate with a grand jury investigation. I did not believe—wrongly, it turned out—that the media would continue to blast us because we hadn't turned over the same documents to them, so long as we had provided them to the Department of Justice.
Even before the Justice Department issued a subpoena, we agreed through David to cooperate fully and without delay, offering to produce all the documents we could find relating to Whitewater and waiving all privileges with respect to the documents we were producing—including any work Vmce Foster had done for us as our personal lawyer.
Still confident that this nonscandal would blow over as it had during the campaign, we headed off to Camp David for Thanksgiving. This was a bittersweet time for us. My father would not be at the table vying with Hugh and Tony for one of the drumsticks or asking for more cranberries and watermelon pickle, two of his favorites from childhood. And we knew that Virginia's health was failing. This might be our last Thanksgiving with her, and we were determined to give her a good time, taking care of her without fussing over her, which was just not her style. Virginia required a blood transfusion every few days, so we arranged for her to be transfused at Camp David, which is fully equipped to. provide medical care for the President, his family and guests and the sailors and Marines stationed there.
Virginia's husband, Dick, who had served in the Navy in the Pacific Theater during World War II, loved coming to Camp David. He spent a lot of time visiting with the young off-duty Marines, relaxing in the small restaurant and bar in Hickory Lodge on the base. Virginia liked to sit with him, nursing a drink, listening to a twenty-year-old corporal tell her about his family and the girl he planned to marry. In my mind's eye, I can see Virginia wearing red boots, white pants and sweater and a red leather jacket, kidding and laughing with Dick and the young men. Anyone who ever had the pleasure of spending time with Virginia knew her to be an American original—bighearted, good-humored, fun loving and totally without prejudice or pretense.
In early November, the press reported that her cancer had returned, but most people didn't know how serious her condition was, given her positive attitude and how good she continued to look. The makeup and false eyelashes went on no matter how she felt. Christophe Schatteman, our hairstylist friend from Los Angeles, had flown to Arkansas to fix up Virginia's post-chemo wigs to look exactly like her hair, an act of kindness that speaks volumes about him.
My brother Tony had recently become engaged to Nicole Boxer, the daughter of Senator Barbara Boxer of California and her husband, Stewart. We were planning a spring wedding for Tony and Nicole at the White House, so I invited Nicole, her parents and her brother, Doug, to join us for Thanksgiving dinner at Camp David.
Camp David was a perennial work-in-progress as each new President and First Lady added their personal touches to the compound. It had been built by the CCC and WPA as a work camp during the Depression in the 1930s. President Franklin Roosevelt first decided to use it for a presidential retreat, naming it "Shangri-la" and upgrading its facilities. By the time we arrived, it was both a military installation and a retreat. There were ten rustic lodges for guests, all named for trees. The largest guest lodge, Aspen, reserved for the President, sits atop a hill that slopes down to the putting green installed by President Eisenhower and the pool added by President Nixon. The living room windows overlook the forest preserve that surrounds the camp. The perimeter's security fences, cameras and Marine patrols are out of sight, allowing one to forget that this peaceful setting is a military base, made even more secure because of the special protections afforded the President.
The center of Camp activity is the largest lodge, Laurel, where we gathered to watch football, play games, sit in front of the two-story brick fireplace and eat our meals together. After spending time there, I thought that the central room in Laurel could be more functional and take better advantage of the view. There were few windows on the long back wall facing the woods, and a large pillar blocked the flow of traffic through the room. I worked with the Navy and my friend Kaki Hock-ersmith, an interior decorator from Arkansas, to develop plans for a renovation that got rid of the pillar and added windows to bring in more light, opening the room to the changing seasons outside.
The Navy cooks and stewards prepared and served the classic Thanksgiving dinner both sides of our family expected. Melding the traditions of my family and Bill's meant we had both bread and corn-bread stuffing, pumpkin and mincemeat pies. The buffet tables were groaning under the weight of all the food while everyone observed one tradition that transcends all regions: overindulging.
Over the weekend, two old friends, Strobe Talbott, then serving as Ambassador-at-Large to the New Independent States of the former Soviet Union, later to become Deputy Secretary of State, and Brooke Shearer, Director of the White House Fellows Program and my campaign companion, came to visit with their sons. We didn't talk much about Whitewater, which we saw as a momentary blip on the radar screen. Instead, we discussed the events of the past year. We were more hopeful than ever about the future of the country. We had been through a personally difficult year, but in terms of Bill's agenda, it had been productive. To use a horse-racing metaphor Virginia would have enjoyed: We might have been slow out of the gate, but we were gaining speed. The country was showing signs of economic recovery and increasing consumer confidence. The unemployment rate was down to 6.4 percent, the lowest since early 1991. New home purchases were up, while interest rates and inflation were dropping. In addition to the economic plan, which was essential to the unprecedented expansion, Bill had signed into law the National Service Act, creating AmeriCorps; the Family and Medical Leave Act, which President Bush had vetoed twice; the motor voter legislation, making it easier for working people to register to vote when they went into their local motor vehicle offices; direct student financial aid, cutting the cost of going to college; and one of Strobe's priorities, economic aid for Russia, which was intended to shore up that fledgling democracy.
We came back from the holidays a few pounds heavier but refreshed. I was particularly pleased that Bill signed the Brady bill on November 30, 1993. Like the Family and Medical Leave Act, this bill had been opposed by President Bush. Long overdue, it was commonsense legislation to require a five-day waiting period to check the background of any purchaser of a handgun. The bill wouldn't have been possible without the tireless efforts of James and Sarah Brady. Jim, a former White House press secretary, had suffered brain damage when he was shot in the head in 1981 by a deranged man attempting to assassinate President Ronald Reagan. He and his indomitable wife, Sarah, had dedicated their lives to keeping guns out of the hands of criminals and the mentally ill. Their perseverance resulted in the immensely moving scene in the East Room when Bill, flanked by the Bradys, signed into law the most important gun control bill in twenty-five years. In the years since, no lawful gun owner has lost his guns, but six hundred thousand fugitives, stalkers and felons have been stopped from buying them.
NAFTA was ratified on December 8, 1993, which meant the administration could finally turn its full attention to supporting health care reform. To keep up the momentum, Dr. Koop and I hit the road again. On December 2, we addressed eight hundred doctors and health care professionals attending the Tri State Rural Health Care Forum in Hanover, New Hampshire.
Dr. Koop had become an increasingly enthusiastic advocate of our health care plan. When he spoke, it was like listening to an Old Testament prophet. He could deliver the hard truth and get away with it. He could say, "We have too many specialists in medicine and not enough generalists," and an audience filled with specialists would nod in agreement.
The New Hampshire forum was televised, so it was a particularly important event for our advocacy and a great opportunity to explain the virtues of the Clinton plan. I became engrossed in the discussion. At some point, I looked toward the audience and saw my aide-de-camp Kelly Craighead crawling down the center aisle of the auditorium. She was gesturing frantically, slapping the top of her head and pointing at me. I kept on talking and listening, unable to figure out what she was doing.
It was another hair crisis. Capricia Marshall, who was in Washington watching her television, noticed that a stray piece of hair was sticking straight up from the center of my head. She suspected that the audience would be staring at my hair instead of listening to what I was saying, so she got Kelly on her cell phone: "Get her hair down!"
"I can't, she's sitting in front of hundreds of people."
"I don't care, send her a signal!"
When Kelly told me the story after the event, we all laughed. Just shy of a year into my new life, I was finally catching on to the significance of the insignificant. From then on we worked out a system of hand gestures, like those of a coach and a pitcher, so that I would know when to smooth my hair down or wipe the lipstick off my teeth.
Back in Washington, the White House Christmas season rituals were in full swing. I could now appreciate the surreal planning I had been urged to begin on a warm day back in May, when Gary Walters, the chief usher, said to me, "You know, Mrs. Clinton, it's getting late to start preparing for Christmas." He told me I had to settle on a design for the White House Christmas card, pick a theme for the decorations and plan the parties we would hold in December. I love Christmas, but Thanksgiving had always been a fine time to start thinking about it, so this represented a big change in my planning style. I dutifully adjusted and soon began sorting through pictures of snowdrifts on the White House lawn as the scent of magnolias wafted through the windows.
All those months of preparation paid off. I decided to make American crafts my theme and invited artisans from around the country to send in handmade ornaments, which we hung on the more than twenty trees placed throughout the residence. We hosted, on average, one reception or party every day for three solid weeks. I liked planning menus and activities and overseeing the dozens of volunteers who flock to the White House to help hang ornaments. One sad result of the attacks of September 11, 2001, is that the White House is no longer as open as it was during our time there. That first Christmas season, some 150,000 visitors came through the public rooms to view the decorations and sample a cookie or two. Because we wanted to include people of all faiths in the holiday season, we lit the menorah I had commissioned for the White House that December to celebrate Chanukah. Three years later, we held the first Eid al-Fitr event in the White House to honor the end of Ramadan, the Muslim month of fasting.
Christmas is always a big event in the Clinton family. Bill and Chelsea are enthusiastic shoppers, gift wrappers and tree decorators. I love watching them trim our tree together, pausing to reminisce about the origin of each ornament. This year was no different, although it took a while to find the family Christmas decorations. Many of our possessions remained in unlabeled boxes stuffed in rooms on the third floor of the White House or in the presidential warehouse in Maryland. Finally, though, our treasured Christmas stockings hung from the mantel of the fireplace in the Yellow Oval Room, in a house that was starting to feel like home.
This would be the last Christmas for Virginia, who was getting weaker and now required regular transfusions. The indomitable Mrs. Kelley was determined to live every last moment of her life to the hilt, and Bill and I wanted her to spend as much time as possible with us, so we convinced her to stay for a week. She agreed but insisted that she couldn't remain through New Year's because she and Dick were going to Barbra Streisand's concert in Las Vegas. Virginia had formed a deep friendship with Barbra, who had invited them to be her guests at her long-awaited return to the concert stage. I think Virginia willed herself to live long enough to make the trip, because there was nothing she enjoyed more than a swing through the casinos and a chance to see Barbra Streisand perform.
The media fixation with Whitewater continued throughout the holiday season as The New York Times, The Washington Post and Newsweek competed for scoops. Republicans in the House and Senate—particularly Bob Dole—called for an "independent review" of Whitewater. Editorial writers hectored Attorney General Janet Reno to appoint a special counsel. The Independent Counsel Act, which had been voted into law after the Watergate scandal, had recently expired, and investigations now had to be authorized by the Attorney General. The pressure was mounting every day, though there were no facts that came close to meeting the only criterion for appointing a special counsel: credible evidence of wrongdoing.
Vince Foster was being hounded beyond the grave. A week before Christmas, the press reported that some of his files, including Whitewater documents, had been "spirited" out of his office by Bernie Nuss-baum. The Justice Department was well aware, of course, that the personal files had been retrieved from his office in the presence of lawyers from the Justice Department and FBI agents, handed over to our lawyers and were being turned over to the Justice Department for examination. But the leak of this "news" tossed fuel on a smoldering fire.
Then we were confronted with an outrageous partisan attack. On Saturday, December 18,1 was hosting a holiday reception when David Kendall reached me by telephone.
"Hillary," he said, "I've got to tell you about something very, very ugly. ...»'
I sat down and listened as David summarized a long, detailed article that would appear in the American Spectator, a right-wing monthly that regularly attacked the administration. The article, written by David Brock, was filled with the most vile stories I had ever heard, worse than the salacious garbage in supermarket tabloids. Brock's main sources were four Arkansas troopers from Bill's former bodyguard detail. They claimed—among other things—that they had procured women for Bill when he was Governor. Years later, Brock would recant, writing a stunning confession of his political motives and directives at the time.
"Look, it's just a lot of sleaze, but it's going to be out there," said David. "You've got to be prepared."
My first thoughts were for Chelsea and for my mother and Virginia, who had already been through too much.
"What can we do about it?" I asked David. "Is there anything anyone can do?"
His advice was to stay calm and say nothing. Comments from us would only help publicize the article. The troopers were doing a reasonable job of discrediting themselves, shamelessly boasting that they expected to cash in on their stories. Two of the four agreed to be identified, and they were shopping around for a book deal. Even more telling, they were being represented by Cliff Jackson, another of Bill's most vehement political enemies in Arkansas. Most of Brock's tales were too vague to be checked on, but certain specifics were easily refuted. The article claimed, for example, that I had ordered the gate logs to the Governor's Mansion destroyed to cover up Bill's supposed liaisons; the mansion, however, never kept such logs. Unfortunately, the fact that Brock's sources were state troopers who had worked for Bill gave their stories a veneer of credibility.
I don't think the full effect of the article hit me until the next evening, at a Christmas party for our friends and family at the White House. Lisa Caputo told me that two of the troopers were touting their stories on CNN that night and that the Los Angeles Times was about to publish its own version of the troopers' allegations. It was too much. I wondered if what Bill was trying to do for the country was worth the pain and humiliation our families and friends were about to suffer. I must have looked as devastated as I felt, because Bob Barnett came over to ask if he could help. I told him we had to decide how to respond by the next day. I suggested we go upstairs with Bill for a few minutes to talk it over. Bill paced in the center hall. Bob knelt in front of me as I sank into a small chair against the wall. With his oversize glasses and mild features, Bob looks like everybody's favorite uncle. Now he was talking in a soothing voice, clearly trying to see whether after all that had happened this year, we had the strength for yet another struggle.
I looked at him and said, "I am just so tired of all of this."
He shook his head. "The President was elected, and you've got to stay with this for the country, for your family. However bad this seems, you've got to stick it out," he said. He wasn't telling me anything I didn't know, and it wasn't the first time I had been advised that my actions and words could either strengthen or undermine Bill's Presidency. I wanted to say, "Bill's been elected, not me!" Intellectually, I understood Bob was right and that I would have to summon whatever energy I had left. I was willing to try. But I just felt so tired. And at the moment, very much alone.
I realized that attacks on our reputations could jeopardize the work Bill was doing to set the country on a different track. Ever since the campaign, I had seen how ferociously the Republicans wanted to hold on to the White House. Bill's political adversaries understood how high the stakes were, which made me want to fight back. I went back downstairs to rejoin the party.
I had scheduled several media interviews that I couldn't cancel. On December 21, I met for a year-end wrap-up with Helen Thomas, the dean of the White House press corps and a legendary journalist, and other wire service reporters. Naturally, they asked me about the Spectator article, and I decided to give them an answer. I didn't believe it was a coincidence that these attacks should surface just when Bill's standing in the polls was at the highest level since his inauguration, and I told them so. I also believed the stories were planted for partisan political and ideological reasons.
"I think my husband has proven that he's a man who really cares about this country deeply and respects the Presidency. . . . And when it's all said and done, that's how most fair-minded Americans will judge my husband. And all the rest of this stuff will end up in the garbage can where it deserves to be."
It was not exactly the calm, quiet response David had recommended.
Although the initial damage had been done, the media finally started examining the troopers' motives. It turned out that two were angry because they felt that Bill had been ungrateful to them. They had also been subjects of an investigation into an alleged insurance fraud scheme involving a state vehicle in which they were riding, which had been wrecked in 1990. Another trooper who reportedly claimed that Bill had offered him a federal job for his silence later signed an affidavit swearing it never happened. But nearly a decade would pass before we learned the full, chilling story behind what became known as "Trooper-gate."
David Brock, the author of the Spectator article, was seized by an attack of conscience in 1998 and publicly apologized to Bill and me for the lies he had spread about us. He was so consumed with building his right-wing credentials that he allowed himself to be used politically even when he had doubts about his sources. His memoir, Blinded by the Right, published in 2002, chronicles his years as a self-described "right-wing hit man." He claims he was not only on the Spectator's legitimate payroll, but was receiving money under the table to dig up and publish whatever dirt anyone would say about us. Among his secret patrons was the Chicago financier Peter Smith, a key supporter of Newt Gingrich. Smith paid Brock to travel to Arkansas to interview the troopers, an arrangement facilitated by Cliff Jackson. According to Brock, the success of the trooper article inspired Richard Mellon Scaife, an ultracon-servative billionaire from Pittsburgh, to fund similar stories through a clandestine enterprise called "the Arkansas Project." Through an educational foundation, Scaife also pumped hundreds of thousands of dollars into the Spectator to support its anti-Clinton vendetta.
The plot described by Brock and others is convoluted and the cast of characters preposterous. But it is important for Americans to know what was taking place behind the scenes to understand fully the meaning of Troopergate, the tabloid scandals that preceded it and those that would follow. This was all-out political war.
"[I]n pursuit of my budding career as a right-wing muckraker," writes Brock, "I let myself get mixed up in a bizarre and at times ludicrous attempt by well-financed right-wing operatives to tar Clinton with sleazy personal allegations. Operating in conjunction with, but outside of, official GOP or movement organizations and well below the radar of the American public and the press corps as the election campaign unfolded, the effort went far beyond the opposition research typically conducted by political campaigns—not only in its secretiveness and its single-mindedness, but also in its lack of fidelity to any standard of proof, principle or propriety. These activities . . . were a very early hint of how far the political right would go in the coming decade to try to destroy the Clintons."
Along with other members of Scaife's secret Arkansas Project, Brock took on the task of planting and nourishing seeds of doubt about Bill Clinton's character and his fitness to govern. According to Brock's memoir, the "country was being conditioned to see an invention made up entirely by the Republican right.. . . from virtually the first moment that they stepped out of Arkansas and onto the national stage, the country never again saw the Clintons."
One frosty morning between Christmas and New Year's, Maggie Williams and 1 were having coffee in our favorite spot in the residence: the West Sitting Hall in front of a large fan-shaped window. We were talking and leafing through the newspapers. Most front pages were wall-to-wall Whitewater.
"Hey, look at this!" said Maggie as she handed me a copy of USA Today. "It says you and the President are the most admired people in the world." I didn't know whether to laugh or cry. All I could do was hope that the American people would maintain their reserves of fairness and goodwill, as I struggled to maintain my own.
THE SOUND OF A TELEPHONE RINGING IN THE MID-dle of the night is one of the most jarring in the world. When our bedroom phone rang long after midnight on January 6, 1994, it was Dick Kelley calling to tell Bill that his mother had just died in her sleep at her home in Hot Springs.
We were up for the rest of the night, making and taking phone calls. Bill spoke twice with his brother, Roger. We reached out to one of our closest friends, Patty Howe Criner, who had grown up with Bill, and we asked her to work with Dick on the funeral arrangements. Al Gore called at about three in the morning. I woke Chelsea and brought her into our bedroom so Bill and I could tell her. She had been very close to her grandmother, whom she called Ginger. Now, she had lost two of her grandparents in less than a year.
Before dawn, the White House Press Office put out the news of Virginia's death, and when we turned on the television set in our bedroom, we saw the first news item flash on the screen: "The President's mother died early this morning after a long battle with cancer." It made her death seem terribly final. We almost never watched the morning news, but the background noise was a relief from our own thoughts. Then Bob Dole and Newt Gingrich appeared on the Today show for a previously scheduled appearance. They began talking about Whitewater: "It to me cries out for the appointment of a regulatory, independent counsel," Dole said. I looked over at Bill's face. He was utterly stricken. Bill was raised by his mother to believe that you don't hit peo-ple when they're down, that you treat even your adversaries in life or Politics with decency. A few years later, someone told Bob Dole how much his words had hurt Bill that day, and to his credit, he wrote Bill a letter of apology.
Bill asked the Vice President to deliver a speech scheduled for Milwaukee that afternoon so he could go to Arkansas right away. I stayed behind to contact family and friends and help with their travel arrangements. Chelsea and I flew to Hot Springs the next day and went straight to Virginia's and Dick's lakeside home, where we found friends and family members squeezed into the modest rooms. Barbra Streisand had flown in from California, and her presence added a touch of excitement and glamour that Virginia would have loved. We stood around drinking coffee and eating the mountains of food that show up after any death in Arkansas. We swapped stories about Virginia's amazing life and her appropriately titled autobiography that was moving toward publication, Leading with My Heart. She would never see it published, but what a remarkable and honest story it tells. I am convinced that if she had lived to promote it, not only would it have been a best-seller, but it might have helped some people understand Bill a little better. Hours later the house was still as packed as a church on Easter Sunday, but without Virginia's presence, it felt as though the whole choir were missing.
There wasn't a church in Hot Springs big enough to accommodate a lifetime's worth of Virginia's friends. The memorial service would have to be held at the Convention Center in downtown Hot Springs. Bill told me, "If the weather were better, we could have used Oaklawn racetrack. Mother would have loved that!" I smiled at the thought of the track filled with thousands of racing fans cheering one of their own.
As the funeral procession drove through Hot Springs the next morning, the roads were lined with people who silently paid their respects. The service celebrated Virginia's life with stories and hymns, but nothing could capture the essence of this unique woman who had shared her love of life with anyone who crossed her path.
After the service, we drove to the cemetery in Hope where Virginia would be laid to rest with her parents and first husband, Bill Blythe. Virginia had come home to Hope.
Air Force One picked us up at the airport in Hope for the sad flight back to Washington. The plane was filled with family and friends who tried to lift Bill's spirits. But even on the day he buried his mother, Bill couldn't escape being hounded about Whitewater.
White House staff members and lawyers huddled with the President. Everyone was concerned that the drumbeat for appointing a special prosecutor was drowning out Bill's message, but nobody could predict whether asking for a special prosecutor would quiet the drums. By the time we had landed at Andrews Air Force Base and helicoptered to the White House, Bill was obviously tired of the debate. He had to go back to Andrews to fly to Europe that night for long-scheduled meetings in Brussels and Prague about the expansion of NATO, followed by a state visit to Russia to address President Boris Yeltsin's concern about NATO's plans to move eastward. Before Bill left, he made it clear to me that he wanted the Whitewater issue resolved one way or another, and soon.
I had planned to join Bill in Moscow for the state visit on January 13. At Virginia's funeral, we decided that I should bring Chelsea because we didn't want to leave her in the White House at such a sad time. I knew a decision about the special prosecutor had to be made before we left. That Sunday, a number of leading Democrats appeared on the political talk shows to voice their support for a special prosecutor. None of them could explain exactly why this step was appropriate or necessary. They seemed to be caught up in the moment and wary of pressure from the press. The momentum kept building, and my own determination was wearing down.
My gut instinct, as a lawyer and a veteran of the Watergate impeachment inquiry staff, was to cooperate fully with any legitimate criminal inquiry but to resist giving someone free rein to probe indiscriminately and indefinitely. A "special" investigation should be triggered only by credible evidence of wrongdoing, and there was no such evidence. Without credible evidence, a call for a special prosecutor would set a terrible precedent: From then on, every unsubstantiated charge against a President concerning events during any period of his life could require a special prosecutor.
The President's political advisers predicted that a special prosecutor would eventually be forced on us and argued that it was better to appoint one and get it over with. George Stephanopoulos researched previous independent counsels and cited the case of President Carter and his brother, Billy, who were investigated for a disputed loan to a peanut warehouse in the mid-1970s. The special prosecutor requested by Carter completed his investigation in seven months and exonerated the Carters. That was encouraging. By contrast, the investigation into what was known as "the Iran-Contra affair," begun in the Reagan-Bush Administration, had continued on for seven years. In that case, though, there was illegal activity by White House and other governmental personnel in the conduct of our nation's foreign policy. Several Administration officials were indicted, including Defense Secretary Caspar Weinberger and Lt. Col. Oliver North, who worked on the National Security Council.
Only David Kendall, Bernie Nussbaum and David Gergen agreed with me that we should resist a special prosecutor. Gergen considered a special prosecutor a "dangerous proposition." Bill's staff trooped in to lobby me, one after another, each delivering the same familiar message: I would destroy my husband's Presidency if I didn't support their strategy. Whitewater had to be pushed off the front pages so we could get on with the business of the administration, including health care reform.
I believed that we needed to distinguish between holding our ground when we were in the right and giving in to political expediency and pressure from the press. "Requesting a special prosecutor is wrong," I said. But I couldn't change their minds.
On January 3, Harold Ickes, an old friend and adviser from the 1992 campaign, had joined the administration as Deputy Chief of Staff. Bill had asked Harold, a sandy-haired, hyperkinetic lawyer, to coordinate the upcoming health care campaign. Within days he was diverted to organize a "Whitewater Response Team" composed of several senior advisers and members of the communications staff and counsel's office. Harold was the best advocate to have in your corner during a fight. Like Kendall, he was a veteran of the civil rights movement in the South—in fact, Harold had been so badly beaten while organizing black voters in the Mississippi Delta that he had lost a kidney. Although he had spent most of his early life avoiding his legacy—at one point he worked breaking horses on a cattle ranch—he was the son of Harold Ickes, Sr., one of the most significant players in Franklin D. Roosevelt's cabinet. Politics pumped through Harold's veins, and the White House seemed to be his natural habitat.
Harold did his best to keep the Whitewater debate under control, but the turmoil continued in the West Wing. Each news story brought us closer to a fateful decision. The day after I returned to the White House from Hot Springs, Harold told me that he had reluctantly concluded we should request a special prosecutor.
On Tuesday evening, January n, I arranged a conference call with Bill in Prague. David Kendall and I met in the Oval Office with a handful of Bill's top aides for a final debate on the issue. The scene reminded me of a cartoon I had seen: A man stood in front of two doors, obviously trying to decide which one to enter. A sign above the first door said, "Damned if you do." The other said, "Damned if you don't."
It was the middle of the night in Europe. Bill was worn out and exasperated after days of hearing nothing but Whitewater questions from the media. He was also heartbroken about losing his mother, the one steady presence throughout his life and his chief cheerleader, offering unconditional love and support. I felt sorry for him and wished that he didn't have to deal with such a crucial decision under these circumstances. He was terribly hoarse, and we had to lean in close to the black, batwing-shaped conference phone to hear his voice.
"I don't know how much longer I can take this," he said, frustrated that the press didn't want to talk about the historic expansion of NATO that would soon open the door to the former Warsaw Pact nations. "All they want to know is why we're ducking an independent investigation."
George Stephanopoulos opened, calmly making the political arguments for the appointment of a special prosecutor. He said that a special prosecutor would get the media off Bill's back, that it was inevitable and that any further delay would kill our legislative agenda.
Then Bernie Nussbaum made a forceful last-ditch plea for his position. Like me, Bernie knew that the prosecutors would be under enormous pressure to come up with indictments to justify their efforts. As Bernie kept stressing, we were already turning over documents to the Justice Department, and, because there was no credible evidence of wrongdoing, a special prosecutor could not, under the law, be ordered. We could only request one, which seemed truly absurd. A political circus would be welcome compared to a potentially endless legal process.
After several heated rounds back and forth, Bill, exhausted, had heard enough. I wrapped up the meeting, asking only David Kendall to remain for a few more words with the President.
The room was quiet for a moment, and then Bill spoke.
"Look, I think we've just got to do it," he said. "We've got nothing to hide, and if this keeps up, it's going to drown out our agenda."
It was time to fold my cards. "I know that we've got to move past this," I said. "But it's up to you."
David Kendall strongly agreed with Bernie. They were both experienced criminal lawyers who understood that the innocent could be persecuted. But they were outnumbered by the political advisers who just wanted the press to change the subject. David left the room, and I picked up the phone to talk to Bill alone.
"Why don't you sleep on the decision," I said. "If you're still willing to do it, we'll send a request to the Attorney General in the morning."
"No," he said, "let's get this over with." Though he feared, as much as I did, that we were underestimating the consequences of this decision, he told me to go ahead with the request. I felt terrible. He had been pushed into a decision that he didn't feel comfortable about. But given the pressures confronting us, we didn't know what else to do.
I walked into Bernie Nussbaum's office to deliver the bad news in person and hugged my old friend. Though it was late, Bernie began to compose a letter to Janet Reno, relaying the President's formal request that the Attorney General appoint a special prosecutor to conduct an independent investigation of Whitewater.
We will never know if Congress would eventually have forced an independent counsel on us. And we will never know whether releasing an inevitably incomplete set of personal documents to The Washington Post would have averted a special prosecutor. With the wisdom of hindsight, I wish I had fought harder and not let myself be persuaded to take the path of least resistance. Bernie and David were right. We were being swept up in what legal analyst Jeffrey Toobin later described as the politicization of the criminal justice system and the criminalization of the political system. What had been promoted as a quick fix to our political problems sapped the administration's energy for the next seven years, unfairly invaded the lives of innocent people and diverted America's attention from the challenges we faced at home and abroad.
It was Bill's innate optimism and resilience that kept him going, inspired me and made it possible to implement most of his agenda for America by the end of his two terms. All that, however, was in the future as Chelsea and I boarded the plane to join Bill in Russia.
The descent into Moscow was turbulent, and I felt queasy when I walked off the plane. Chelsea got into a car with Capricia Marshall and I got into the official limousine with Alice Stover Pickering, wife of our Ambassador to Russia, Thomas Pickering. Both had been in numerous Foreign Service postings around the world. Tom Pickering later served with distinction as Undersecretary of State for Political Affairs under Madeleine Albright. While driving into town for my meeting with Naina Yeltsin, I felt sick to my stomach. The speeding motorcade, preceded and followed by Russian police cars, could not stop. The backseat of the limousine was totally clean, without a cup, towel or napkin in sight. I bent my head over and threw up on the floor. Alice Pickering appeared totally unfazed and—to diminish my embarrassment—continued pointing out the sights. She never said a word to anyone, which I deeply appreciated. By the time we arrived at Spaso House, the Ambassador's official residence, I was feeling a little better. After a quick shower, a change of clothes and a crucial encounter with a toothbrush, I was ready to start my schedule.
I was looking forward to seeing Mrs. Yeltsin, whom I had enjoyed meeting in Tokyo the previous summer. Naina had worked as a civil engineer in Yekaterinburg, where her husband had been the regional Communist Party head. She had a hearty sense of humor, and we laughed our way through a day of public appearances and private meals with local dignitaries.
This first visit to Russia was intended to strengthen relations between Bill and President Yeltsin so that they could constructively address issues such as the dismantling of the former Soviet Union's nuclear arsenal and the expansion eastward of NATO. While our husbands held their summit talks, Naina and I visited a hospital, newly painted in honor of our visit, to discuss the health care systems in our countries. Russia's was deteriorating in the absence of the government support it had once received. The doctors we met were curious about our health care reform plan. They acknowledged the high quality of American medicine yet criticized our failure to guarantee health care to everyone. They shared our goal of universal coverage but were facing difficulties in achieving it.
I finally caught up with Bill that evening. The Yeltsins hosted a state dinner that began with a receiving line in the newly refurbished St. Vladimir Hall and continued with dinner in the Hall of Facets, a many-mirrored room and one of the most beautiful I've seen anywhere in the world. I sat next to President Yeltsin, with whom I'd never had an extended visit, and he kept up a running commentary about the food and wine, informing me in all seriousness that red wine protected Russian sailors on nuclear-powered submarines from the ill effects of strontium 90.1 always did like red wine.
Chelsea joined us after dinner for the entertainment in St. George's Hall, and then Boris and Naina took us on an extensive tour of the private quarters in the Kremlin, where we spent the night. We enjoyed the Yeltsins immensely, and I hoped we would see more of them.
The next morning, as our long motorcade left the Kremlin, Chelsea and Capricia were somehow left behind, standing on the steps with Chelsea's lone Secret Service agent and one of Bill's valets. They realized what was happening as they watched the last car pull out and two men roll up the red carpet. The agent and Capricia spotted a beat-up white van and raced over to it, determined to commandeer it. The driver, who was delivering sheets, spoke English. Once he understood their story, he loaded the four of them into the back of his van for a mad dash through the barricades to the airport. They made it, only to be refused entrance. The Russian security recognized Chelsea, but they couldn't figure out why she was not with us inside. While they were trying to sort out the confusion, Chelsea and her party picked up their bags and ran toward the terminal. I didn't discover that Chelsea was missing until we were ready to board the plane, and they came panting into the terminal. It seems funny now, but at the time I was beside myself worrying. I resolved not to let Chelsea or Capricia out of my sight for the rest of the trip.
Our next stop, Minsk, Belarus, was hands down one of the most depressed-looking places I've visited, its architecture evoking Soviet-style bleakness and the lingering aura of authoritarian communism; the weather, rainy and gray. Despite Belarusian efforts to build an independent and democratic country, they faced high odds against success. The intellectuals and academics I met who found themselves trying to run the government after the collapse of the Soviet Union seemed no match for the leftover Communists. Our itinerary was filled with reminders of the disasters of the Belarusian past. At Kuropaty Memorial, we laid flowers in memory of the almost three hundred thousand people who had been murdered by the Stalinist secret police. My visit to a hospital treating children who suffered from Chernobyl-related cancers painfully drove home the Soviet Union's cover-up of the accident at the nuclear plant and the potential dangers of nuclear power, including the proliferation of nuclear weapons. The one bright spot was a magnificent performance of the ballet adaptation oiCarmina Burana in the State Academic Great Opera and Ballet Theatre. Chelsea and I sat on the edge of our seats in sheer delight. The years since our visit have not been kind to Belarus, which is governed again by an authoritarian regime of former Soviet Communists who have cracked down on press freedom and human rights.
On January 20, 1994, the administration's one-year anniversary, Janet Reno announced the appointment of Robert Fiske as special prosecutor. A Republican, Fiske was highly regarded as a thorough and fair-minded lawyer with prosecutorial experience. President Ford had appointed him U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of New York, and he had stayed on through the Carter Administration. He now worked for a Wall Street law firm. Fiske promised a quick and impartial investigation, and he took a leave of absence from his law firm so he could devote all of his time and energies to finishing the investigation. If he had been left to do his job, my concerns, and those of Bernie, David and Bill, would have proved unfounded.
A few days later, the President delivered the State of the Union Address. The speech was forceful and hopeful. Over an objection by David Gergen, Bill added a few theatrics to his remarks on health care: He held up a pen over the podium, promising to veto any health care bill that didn't include universal coverage. Gergen, a veteran of the Nixon, Ford and Reagan Administrations, worried that the gesture was too confrontational. I sided with the speechwriters and political advisers who thought it would be an effective visual signal that Bill would stand strong for his beliefs. Gergen's concerns turned out to have merit as we struggled for any ground on which to compromise.
After weeks of tension, I jumped at the chance to lead the American delegation to Lillehammer, Norway, for the 1994 Winter Olympics. Bill asked me to go, and I decided to take Chelsea. Despite the mishap at the end, she had enjoyed our visit to Russia, and I was happy to see her relax and smile more. Since moving to Washington, she had suffered so many losses: two grandparents; a school friend from Little Rock who died in a jet ski accident and Vince Foster, whose wife, Lisa, had taught her to swim in the Fosters' backyard pool and whose children were her friends. Moving to Washington and being part of the First Family had not been any easier for her than for the rest of us.
A charming village, Lillehammer provided a picture-perfect Olympics venue. Our traveling entourage was assigned rooms in a small hotel outside of town with its own ski run. For the opening ceremonies, where we were supposed to represent our nation, Chelsea and I looked like we were from the North Pole so layered were we in warm ski clothes. In comparison, the European delegation, mostly royals like Princess Anne from England, walked about in elegant cashmere coats, bareheaded. We also saw hardy Norwegians camping in the snowy woods so they could claim good observation points along the trails for the cross-country events. A highlight of the trip was my meeting with Gro Brundtland, a medical doctor, who was then Prime Minister of Norway.
Prime Minister Brundtland invited me to breakfast at the Maihau-gen Folk Museum, in a rustic lodge with a big roaring fireplace. The first thing she said to me as we sat down to eat was, "I've read the health care plan, and I have several questions."
From that moment, she was a friend for life. I was so happy to find somebody who had read the plan, let alone wanted to talk about it. Of course, it helped that she was a physician, but I was impressed and delighted. Over a feast of fish, bread, cheese and strong coffee, we compared the relative merits of the European health care models and then delved into other related topics. Brundtland later left Norwegian politics to head the World Health Organization, where she championed initiatives I supported on tuberculosis, HIV/AIDS and anti-smoking.
This was my first official overseas trip without the President. I enjoyed representing him and my country, and took advantage of a relaxed schedule. I did a little skiing, cheered our athletes like downhill and slalom medalist Tommy Moe and stood in the snow, watching very fit people rocket past me in a blur. I also had a chance to talk to Chelsea away from the fray. She is bright and inquisitive, and I knew she was following the Whitewater saga in the news. I could tell she was torn between wanting to ask me about it and wanting to let me forget it. I was torn between wanting to share with her my frustrations about what was happening and wanting to shield her as much as possible, not only from the political attacks, but also from my own outrage and disillusionment. This was a constant emotional tug-of-war, and both of us had to work hard to keep our equilibrium.
As expected, the appointment of a special prosecutor quieted the Whitewater uproar for a few days. But just as predictably, a spate of new accusations and rumors filled the scandal vacuum. Newt Gingrich and Republican Senator Al D'Amato of New York clamored for Banking Committee hearings in both the House and the Senate to probe Whitewater allegations.
Robert Fiske managed to forestall the hearings, warning the combative Republicans that they risked interfering with his investigation.
He was moving quickly, as promised, slapping subpoenas on witnesses and hauling them before grand juries in Washington and Little Rock.
Fiske questioned several White House aides about the criminal referrals against Madison Guaranty by the Resolution Trust Corporation, which was a Treasury agency. He was interested in any West Wing contacts with Deputy Secretary of the Treasury Roger Altman about the referral and about Altman's decision to remove himself from his duties as temporary head of the RTC. As I understand the sequence of events, the White House and Treasury Department discussed this matter only when press inquiries—which were the product of improper leaks from the RTC's supposedly confidential investigation—started in the fall of 1993 and required them to respond; otherwise, it never would have come to their attention. Although Fiske and subsequent investigators judged the contacts to be legal, as with so many other aspects of the Whitewater imbroglio, the Republicans kept up a steady stream of accusations against Altman and others. When the final Whitewater report was published in 2002, confirming the contacts the Bush White House had made with RTC officials in the fall of 1992,1 did not hear any similar outcry. Eventually, Roger Altman, an honest and extremely able man who served the President and the country well, resigned to return to private life, as did my old friend Bernie Nuss-baum, another dedicated public servant.
There were mornings in the spring of 1994 when I woke up aching for all the close friends, associates and relatives who had passed out of our lives or had been unfairly attacked: my father, Virginia, Vmce, Bernie, Roger. And some mornings, the press coverage was so wild that it even appeared to affect the stock market. On March 11, 1994, The Washington Post ran a story headlined Whitewater rumors push dow down 23—perception, not specifics, spook markets. On that same day, Roger Ailes, then President of CNBC and now running Fox, accused the Administration of "a cover-up with regard to Whitewater that includes . . . land fraud, illegal contributions, abuse of power . . . suicide cover-up—possible murder."
Then in mid-March, Webb Hubbell suddenly resigned from the Justice Department. Newspaper articles reported that the Rose Firm planned to file a complaint against him with the Arkansas Bar Association for questionable billing practices, including overcharging clients and padding his expenses. The allegations were serious enough for him to step down. By this time, however, I was used to fielding untrue charges, so I assumed that Webb was also being falsely accused. I met with him in the Solarium on the third floor of the White House to ask what was happening. Webb told me that he had gotten into a dispute with some of our former partners over the costs of a patent infringement case he had handled on a contingency basis for his father-in-law, Seth Ward. Webb had lost the case, and Seth refused to pay the costs. Knowing Seth, I had to admit that seemed plausible. Webb told me he was working on a settlement with the Rose partners and assured me that the dispute would be resolved. I believed him and asked what I could do to help him and his family during this period. He said he had put feelers out for business and was confident he would be fine "until this misunderstanding blows over."
The Whitewater investigations and press inquiries were now being handled by the Whitewater Response Team that Mack, Maggie and other senior staff had recommended that we set up to centralize all discussion of the issue.
There were four reasons for creating the team, nicknamed "the Masters of Disaster" and led by Harold Ickes. First, we wanted the staff to focus on the important work of the Administration. Second, if an issue is everyone's business, it becomes no one's responsibility. Third, Fiske's team was sending so many subpoenas that we had to have an organized system for searching files and providing responses. And finally, if staff members talked about Whitewater with Bill or me or among themselves, they would become more vulnerable to lengthy depositions, legal fees and general anxieties.
I was particularly worried about members of my own staff—Maggie Williams, Lisa Caputo, Capricia Marshall and others who had worked so hard and were being rewarded with subpoenas and frightening legal bills. Once Maggie was caught up in the investigation, I couldn't seek her advice about it or offer her any comfort. It's a tribute to her personal strength and the fortitude of everyone working for me that nobody complained or walked away from the challenges we faced.
David Kendall was becoming my main link to the outside world, and he was a godsend. From the very beginning, he advised me not to read newspaper articles and not to watch television reports about the investigation or any of the related "scandals." My press staff summarized what I needed to know in case I was questioned by the media. David urged me not to dwell on the rest of it.
"That's my job," he said. "One of the reasons you hire lawyers is to have them worry for you." David, of course, read everything and worried obsessively about what would happen next. I'm something of an obsessive personality myself, and these were hard instructions to follow. But I learned to let David take over the watch.
Every few days, Maggie would poke her head in my office and say, "David Kendall wants to talk to you." When he came in, she would leave the room. At each meeting, David continued to unravel the story of Jim McDougal and his personal and financial dealings, and I learned something every time.
I tried to deal with the new information by myself. I talked to Bill only when something critical came up. I tried to spare him so that he could concentrate on the duties of his office. It's often said that the President has the loneliest job in the world. Harry Truman once referred to the White House as "the crown jewel in the American penal system." Bill loved his work, but I could see the political war taking its toll, and I tried to protect him from whatever I could.
David was able to fill in most of the gaps in the record, which supported our contention that we had lost money on the Whitewater deal and were never involved in McDougal's wheelings and dealings with his S&L. David also brought us some uncomfortable news about errors he had found in our old financial documents. He had sifted through every piece of paper we could find like a miner panning for gold, and he had come up with a few lead nuggets. One was a mistake in the Lyons report that calculated our Whitewater losses at more than $68,000. We had to reduce that figure by $22,000 after David found that a check Bill had written to help his mother buy her house in Hot Springs had been incorrectly identified as a Whitewater loan payment. David also discovered that our certified public accountant in Little Rock had made an error on our 1980 tax return. An incomplete statement from a brokerage firm led him to claim a loss of $1,000 for us when, in fact, we had made almost $6,500 on trades. The statute of limitations had expired, but we voluntarily decided to make things right with the state of Arkansas and the IRS by writing a check for $14,615 for back taxes and interest.
As more of our financial records were released or found their way into the press, they generated additional stories. In mid-March, The New York Times ran a front-page article headlined top Arkansas lawyer helped hillary clinton turn big profit. The story accurately reported the profits I had made in the commodities market in 1979. But it falsely implied that our close friend Jim Blair had somehow engineered my windfall in order to gain influence with Bill Clinton on behalf of his client Tyson Foods. The story was filled with inaccuracies about Blair's and Don Tyson's relationship with Bill when he was Governor. Yet again, I wondered why such stories were printed before they were verified. If Tyson had Bill in his pocket, as the Times alleged, why did Tyson back Bill's opponent Frank White in the 1980 and 1982 Governor's races?
Jim was generous enough to share his expertise in trading commodities with his family and friends. With his help, I got into this volatile market and turned $1,000 into $100,000 in a short time. I was lucky enough to lose my nerve and get out before the market dropped. Could I have done it without Jim? No. Did I have to pay my broker over $18,000 in brokerage fees on my trading? Yes. Did my commodity trading influence Bill's decisions as Governor? Absolutely not.
Once the story about my commodity trading broke, the White House enlisted experts to review records of my trading. Leo Melamed, the former head of the Chicago Mercantile Exchange and a Republican, warned that if we asked for his opinion, he would give it, regardless of the impact. After a thorough review of my trades, he concluded that I had done nothing wrong. The controversy, in his opinion, was "a tempest in a teapot." I wasn't surprised by his conclusions. Our tax returns from 1979, which had reported the significant increase in our income from the commodity trades, had been audited by the IRS, and our records were all in order. In fact, the IRS also audited every return we filed for every year Bill was in the White House.
I now realize that the constant accusations had taken their toll on my relations with the press. I had kept the White House press corps at arm's length for too long. Because I wanted the media to report on health care reform, I offered interviews to correspondents who covered events and speeches around the country. The White House press corps, however, had little access to me. It took me a while to understand that their resentment was justified.
By the end of April 1994,1 felt confident enough in David Kendall's research and in my understanding of Whitewater and the surrounding issues that I was ready to offer the media what they wanted: me.
I called my Chief of Staff and said, "Maggie, I want to do it. Let's call a press conference."
"You know you'll have to answer all questions, no matter what they throw at you."
"I know. I'm ready."
I discussed my plan beforehand only with the President, David Kendall and Maggie. In order to prepare, I confided in Lisa, White House Counsel Lloyd Cutler, Harold Ickes and Mandy Grunwald. I didn't want a parade of advisers from the West Wing pounding on my door with advice about how to handle this question or that. I wanted to speak as directly as possible.
On the morning of April 22, the White House announced that the First Lady would take questions that afternoon in the State Dining Room. We hoped that a change of scenery would encourage a fresh approach from the media.
I didn't calculate what I would wear to this event—my choice of clothes is almost always a last-minute decision. I felt like wearing a black skirt and a pink sweater set. A few reporters immediately interpreted it as an attempt to "soften" my image, and my sixty-eight-minute encounter with the fourth estate would go down in history as the "Pink Press Conference."
I sat in front of a crowd of reporters and camera operators who filled the dining room.
"Let me thank all of you for coming," I began. "I have wanted to do this in part because I realized that despite my traveling around the country and answering questions, I did not really satisfy a lot of you in having your questions asked and answered. And last week, Helen said, T can't travel with her, so how can I ask her questions?' For that reason we are here, and, Helen, you get the first question."
Helen Thomas got right to the point:
"Do you know of any money that could have gone from Madison to the Whitewater project or to any of your husband's political campaigns?" she asked.
"Absolutely not. I do not."
"Actually, on the same theme with your commodities profits—it is difficult for a layman, and probably for a lot of experts, to look at the amount of the investment and the size of the profit. Is there any way you can explain ..."
And so I began to explain it. And explain it. And explain it again. One after another, the reporters asked me everything they could think of about Whitewater, and I answered them until they ran out of different ways to ask the same questions.
I was grateful for the questions, which gave me a chance to lay out everything I knew at that point. I was also able to address a problem that had plagued me from the beginning. I was asked if I felt that my reluctance to provide information to the press "helped to create any impression that you were trying to hide something?"
"Yes, I do," I said. "And I think that is probably one of the things that I regret most, and one of the reasons why I wanted to do this. ... I think if my father or mother said anything to me more than a million times, it was: 'Don't listen to what other people say. Don't be guided by other people's opinions. You know, you have to live with yourself.' And I think that's good advice.
"But I do think that that advice and my belief in it, combined with my sense of privacy ... led me to perhaps be less understanding than I needed to [be] of both the press and the public's interest, as well as [their] right to know things about my husband and me.
"So, you're right. I've always believed in a zone of privacy. And I told a friend the other day that I feel after resisting for a long time I've been rezoned."
That line made everyone laugh.
After the press conference, David and I had a drink together in the West Sitting Hall as the sun set beyond the window. Though everyone thought I had done well, I felt somber about the situation and as we assessed the day's events, I commented to David: "You know, they're not going to let up. They're just going to keep on coming at us, no matter what we do. We really don't have any good choices here."
That night Richard Nixon, who had suffered a stroke four days earlier, died at the age of eighty-one. In the early spring of 1993, Nixon had sent Bill a letter full of insightful observations about Russia, and Bill had read it to me, announcing that he thought Nixon was a brilliant, tragic figure. Bill invited the former President to the White House to discuss Russia, and Chelsea and I greeted him as he stepped off the elevator on the second floor. He told Chelsea that his daughters had gone to her school, Sidwell Friends. Then he turned to me:
"You know, I tried to fix the health care system more than twenty years ago. It has to be done sometime."
"I know," I replied, "and we'd be better off today if your proposal had succeeded."
One of the women in the American Spectator article had taken issue with her portrayal by the Arkansas troopers. Although she was identified in the story only as "Paula," she claimed her friends and family recognized her as the woman who supposedly met with Bill in a Little Rock hotel suite during a convention and later told a trooper she wanted to be the Governor's "regular girlfriend."
At a February convention of the Conservative Political Action Committee, Paula Corbin Jones held a press conference and appeared to identify herself as the Paula in the article. Cliff Jackson, who was trying to raise money for a "Troopergate Whistleblower's Fund," introduced her to the press. She said she wanted to clear her name. But instead of announcing a libel suit against the Spectator, she accused Bill Clinton of sexually harassing her by making unwanted advances. Initially, the mainstream press disregarded Jones's claim, because her credibility was tainted by her association with Jackson and the disgruntled troopers. We expected this story to die like the other phony scandals.
But on May 6, 1994, two days before the statute of limitations ran out, Paula Jones filed a civil suit against the President of the United States, asking for $700,000 in damages. Someone was raising the stakes in this game. It had moved from the tabloids to the courts.
WASHINGTON IS A CITY OF RITUALS, AND ONE OF the most faithfully observed is the annual Gridiron Dinner, a white-tie affair in which leading Washington journalists dress up in costumes, perform zany skits and sing songs that make fun of the current administration, including the President and First Lady. Guests at the dinner include the club's sixty members as well as their colleagues and dignitaries from the political, business and journalistic worlds. The Gridiron Club was slow to change with the times. Women were not admitted until 1975. (Eleanor Roosevelt used to throw "Gridiron Widows" parties for excluded spouses and female journalists.) In 1992, White House reporter Helen Thomas was elected the first female President. Membership in the club remains highly selective, and invitations to the spring event are among the most coveted in town. The First Couple almost always attend, seated on the ballroom dais, being good sports no matter what is said about them. Sometimes they come up with spoofs of their own.
When the 109th Gridiron Dinner rolled around in March 1994, Bill and I knew we had not sold the administration's health care plan with enough clarity and simplicity to rouse public support or to motivate Congress to act in the face of well-financed, well-organized opponents. The Health Insurance Association of America was concerned that the Administration's plan would curtail insurance companies' prerogatives and profits. To raise doubts about reform, the group launched a second round of advertisements, featuring a couple named Harry and Louise. Sitting at a kitchen table, Harry and Louise asked each other cleverly contrived questions about the plan and wondered aloud what it might cost them. As intended, the ads exploited the fears—pinpointed by focus groups—of the 85 percent of Americans who already had health insurance and worried it might be taken away.
For the Gridiron Dinner, Bill and I decided to stage a parody of the insurance lobby's TV spot, with Bill playing "Harry" and me playing "Louise." It would give us a chance to expose the scare tactics employed by our opponents and have some fun. Mandy Grunwald and comedian Al Franken wrote a script, Bill and I memorized our lines and, after a few rehearsals, recorded our version of "Harry and Louise" on videotape.
It went like this: Bill and I were seated on a sofa—he in a plaid shirt, drinking coffee, and me in a navy blue sweater and skirt—examining a massive sheaf of papers, meant to be the Health Security Act.
Bill: Hi, Louise, how was your day?
Me: Well, fine, Harry—until now.
Bill: Gee, Louise, you look like you've seen a ghost.
Me: Well, it's worse than that. I've just read the Clinton health security plan.
Bill: Health care reform sounds like a great idea to me.
Me: Well, I know, but some of these details sure scare the heck out of me.
Bill: Like what?
Me: Like for example, it says here on page 5,764 that under the Clinton health security plan, we could get sick.
Bill: That's terrible.
Me: Well, I know. And look at this, it gets worse. On page 12,743—no, I got that wrong—oti page 2 7,655, it says that eventually we 're all going to die.
Bill: Under the Clinton health plan ? You mean after Bill and Hillary put all those bureaucrats and taxes on us, we're still all going to die?
Me: Even Leon Panetta.
Bill: Wow, that is scary. I've never been so frightened in all my life.
Me: Me neither, Harry.
Together: There's got to be a better way.
Announcer: "Paid for by the Coalition to Scare Your Pants Off."
It was an atypical performance for a First Couple, and the audience loved it. The Gridiron Dinner is supposedly off-the-record, and journalists who attend are not supposed to write about it. But full-blown stories about the songs and skits routinely appear the next day. Our videotaped performance was widely covered, even replayed on several Sunday morning news shows. Although some pundits speculated that the spoof would simply attract more attention to the real Harry and Louise ads, I was glad we raised questions about the tone of the insurance lobby's campaign and the absurdity of its claims. Moreover, it just felt good to inject some levity into an otherwise humorless situation.
While our little skit gave Washington politicos and journalists a good laugh, we knew we were still losing the public relations war on health care reform. Even a popular President armed with a bully pulpit could not match the hundreds of millions of dollars spent to distort an issue through negative and misleading advertisements and other means. We also were confronting the power of the pharmaceutical companies, who feared that controlling the prices of prescription drugs would diminish their profits, and the insurance industry, which spared no expense in its campaign against universal coverage. And some of our supporters were losing enthusiasm for the plan because it didn't fulfill all of their wishes. Finally, our proposal for reform was inherently complex—just like the health care problem itself—which made it a public relations nightmare. Virtually every interest group could find something objectionable in the plan.
We were discovering that some opposition to health care reform, like Whitewater, was part of a political war that was bigger than Bill or the issues we championed. We were on the front lines of an increasingly hostile ideological conflict between centrist Democrats and a Republican Party that was swinging further and farther to the right. At stake were American notions of government and democracy and the direction our country would take for years to come. We soon learned that nothing was off-limits in this war and that the other side was far better armed with the tools of political battle: money, media and organization. Four months earlier, in December 1993, Republican strategist and writer William Kristol, a Chief of Staff to former Vice President Dan Quayle and Chairman of the Project for the Republican Future, had sent a memorandum to Republican congressional leaders urging them to kill health care reform. The plan, he wrote in the memo, is a "serious political threat to the Republican party," and its demise would be "a monumental setback for the President." He wasn't objecting to the plan on its merits; he was applying partisan political logic. He instructed Republicans not to negotiate on the bill or to compromise. The only good strategy, according to Kristol, was to kill the plan outright. The memo didn't mention the millions of Americans without insurance.
In line with the Kristol memo, Jack Kemp and former Reagan Cabinet member William Bennett helped the GOP with targeted radio and television advertising against health care reform. In cities or towns I visited to promote the plan, the airwaves in the region would be flooded with ads critical of reform.
KristoPs memo to the Republican congressional leaders had the desired effect. With the 1994 midterm elections looming in November, moderate Republicans in Congress who were committed to reform began to distance themselves from the administration's plan. Senator Dole was genuinely interested in health care reform but wanted to run for President in 1996. He couldn't hand incumbent Bill Clinton any more legislative victories, particularly after Bill's successes on the budget, the Brady bill and NAFTA. We had offered to work with Senator Dole on a joint bill and, by extension, to jointly share the credit if it passed. The Senator had suggested that we present our bill first and then work out a compromise. It never happened. Kristol's strategy was taking hold.
With every step forward, we seemed to take two steps back. Two important business groups—the Chamber of Commerce and the National Association of Manufacturers—had told Ira in mid-199 3 they could live with one key component of the bill, the employer mandate, which would require businesses with more than fifty employees to offer health insurance to their workforces. These business groups knew that most large employers already provided health insurance and concluded that the mandate would eliminate free riders who did not. By the end of March 1994, however, when a subcommittee of the House Ways and Means Committee voted 6-5 for the employer mandate, these two groups, pressured by Republicans and reform opponents, had flipped their positions. The mandate was clearly controversial, and Bill began making concessions and compromises with Congress. Although he had threatened to veto any legislation that didn't include universal coverage, he indicated that he could support something less. This was part of the natural give-and-take expected during legislative bargaining, and it opened the way for the Senate to consider a proposal, sponsored by members of the Finance Committee under Senator Moynihan, to cover 95 percent of all Americans instead of 100 percent. Even that concession didn't produce significantly more allies. In fact, we lost support among some hard-liners who felt that by agreeing to anything less than 100 percent, we were deserting the cause.
In the spring, Dan Rostenkowski was indicted on seventeen counts of conspiring to defraud the government. We lost a key ally in the House as he eventually resigned and was convicted. This followed the disappointing news that Senate Majority Leader George Mitchell had decided not to run for reelection, which meant that the most powerful Democrat in the Senate and the champion of our bill was now, in effect, a lame duck.
We also found out that health care reform represented a steep learning curve for more than a few members of Congress. Given the volume of bills they are expected to vote on, most members focus on legislation related to their committee assignments and don't have time to learn the intricacies of every issue before the House or Senate. But I was surprised to encounter more than one Congressman who didn't know the difference between Medicare and Medicaid, both federally funded health insurance programs. Others had no idea what kind of health insurance coverage they received from the government. Newt Gingrich, who in 1995 would become Republican Speaker of the House, contended during an appearance on Meet the Press in 1994 that he didn't have government health insurance but bought it from Blue Cross-Blue Shield. In fact, his policy was one of many offered to federal employees through the Federal Employees Health Benefits Plan. And the government covered 75 percent of the $400 monthly bill for Gingrich and other members of Congress.
This knowledge gap became apparent to me at a meeting I had in the Capitol one day with a group of Senators. Invited to answer questions about the Administration's plan, I had distributed a briefing book summarizing what we proposed. Senator Ted Kennedy, one of the true experts on health care and many other issues in the Senate, was leaning back on two legs of his chair as he listened to question after question posed by his colleagues. Finally, the front legs of his chair struck the floor and he barked out: "If you would just look on page thirty-four of the briefing material you'll find the answer to that question." He knew every detail—including page numbers—off the top of his head.
Even some of our allies in the advocacy community created problems. One of the most important organizations in the reform campaign was the American Association of Retired Persons, or AARP. The powerful senior citizens' lobby group began running its own ads in March 1994, insisting that Congress pass a health care reform bill that would require prescription coverage. The AARP was adamant about prescription drugs and so was I. Although the AARP intended to help us, the ad had a corrosive effect because it made people think that our plan did not contain a prescription drug provision—which, of course, it did.
I worked hard to keep the pro-reform forces together, under the umbrella of the Health Care Reform Project. But we could raise only about $15 million to run a public information campaign and to recruit speakers to fan out across the country. We were thoroughly outspent by our heavyweight corporate opponents who, according to estimates, infused at least $300 million into their campaign to defeat reform.
The insurance industry's distortions were so effective that many Americans didn't understand that key elements of reform—which they supported—were actually in the Clinton plan. One news story in The Wall Street Journal on March 10, 1994, summed up our dilemma under the headline many don't realize it's the clinton plan they like. The writer explained that while Americans strongly supported specific elements in the Clinton plan, "Mr. Clinton is losing the battle to define his own health care bill. In the cacophony of negative television ads and sniping by critics, foes are raising doubts about the Clinton plan faster than the President and Hillary Rodham Clinton can explain it. Unless the Clintons can cut through the confusion, the outlook for passage of major elements of their bill is in doubt."
While Washington was caught up in health care reform and Whitewater, the rest of the world was not. In early May, the U.N. tightened sanctions on the military junta in Haiti, and a new wave of Haitian refugees headed to American shores. A crisis was building, and Bill felt he had to ask Al Gore to fill in for him on a trip to South Africa for Nelson Mandela's presidential inauguration. Tipper and I joined Al as members of the U.S. delegation. I was thrilled at the prospect of taking part in this momentous event. During the 1980s, I had supported the boycott of South Africa, hoping that the apartheid regime would bow to international pressure. On the day Mandela walked out of prison in February 1990, Bill woke Chelsea before dawn so together they could watch the drama unfold.
I traveled in a packed plane for the sixteen-hour flight to Johannesburg. My companions stayed up all night playing cards, listening to music and talking ecstatically about the historic change we were about to witness. After serving twenty-seven years in prison for plotting against South Africa's apartheid government, Nelson Mandela had won that country's first interracial election to become its first black President. The liberation struggle in South Africa was deeply linked with the American civil rights movement and supported by African American leaders, many of whom were coming with us to honor Mandela.
We landed on the outskirts of Johannesburg, a sprawling modern city in South Africa's dry central highlands. That night we attended a performance at the famous Market Theatre, where for years Athol Fu-gard and other playwrights had defied government censors and depicted the agony of apartheid. Afterwards, we were treated to a buffet dinner featuring assorted African specialties along with the usual carved meats and salads. I wasn't as adventurous as Maggie and the rest of my staff who dared one another to sample the fried grasshoppers and grubs.
Our delegation drove north to the capital, Pretoria. Because the official transition of power didn't occur until the new President was sworn in, the President's stately residence was still occupied by F. W. de Klerk. The next morning, while Al Gore met with de Klerk and his ministers, Tipper and I had breakfast with Mrs. Marike de Klerk and the wives of other outgoing National Party officials. We sat in a wood-paneled breakfast room thickly decorated with ruffled fabrics and porcelain knickknacks. A lazy Susan in the middle of a big round table was heaped with the jams, breads, biscuits and eggs of a classic Dutch farm breakfast. Although we made light conversation about food, children and the weather, the moment was subsumed in the unspoken subtext: in a few hours, the world these women inhabited would disappear forever.
Fifty thousand people attended the inauguration, a spectacle of celebration, release and vindication. Everyone marveled at the orderly transfer of power in a country that had been so ravaged by racist fear and hatred. Colin Powell, a member of our delegation, was moved to tears during the flyover of jets from the South African Defense Force. Their contrails streaked across the sky, tinted with the red, black, green, blue, white and gold colors of the new national flag. A few years earlier, the same jets were a powerful symbol of apartheid's military power; now they were dipping their wings to honor their new black commander in chief.
Mandela's speech denounced discrimination on the basis of race and gender, two profoundly embedded prejudices in Africa and most of the rest of the world. As we were leaving the ceremony, I saw the Rev. Jesse Jackson weeping with joy. He leaned over and said to me, "Did you ever think any of us would live to see this day?"
We returned by motorcade to the President's residence to find it transformed. The long winding drive through green lawns, which just hours before had been lined with armed military men, was now arrayed with brightly costumed drummers and dancers from throughout South Africa. The mood was light and joyous, as if the air itself had changed in an afternoon. We were ushered into the house for cocktails and to mix and mingle with the dozens of visiting heads of state and their delegations. One of my challenges that afternoon was Fidel Castro. The State Department briefers had warned me that Castro wanted to meet me. They told me to avoid him at all costs, since we had no diplomatic relations with Cuba, not to mention a trade embargo.
"You can't shake hands with him," they told me. "You can't talk to him." Even if I accidentally bumped into him, the anti-Castro factions in Florida would go wild.
I frequently looked over my shoulder during the reception, watching for his bushy gray beard in the crowd of faces. In the middle of a fascinating conversation with somebody like King Mswati III of Swaziland, I'd suddenly spot Castro moving toward me, and I'd hightail it to a far corner of the room. It was ridiculous, but I knew that a single photograph, stray sentence or chance encounter could become news.
Lunch was served on the grounds under an enormous white canvas tent. Mandela rose to address his guests. I love listening to him speak in that slow, dignified manner that manages to be both formal and alive with good humor. He made the expected remarks to welcome us. Then he said something that left me in awe: While he was pleased to host so many dignitaries, he was most pleased to have in attendance three of his former jailers from Robben Island who had treated him with respect during his imprisonment. He asked them to stand so he could introduce them to the crowd.
His generosity of spirit was inspiring and humbling. For months I had been preoccupied with the hostility in Washington and the mean-spirited attacks connected to Whitewater, Vince Foster and the travel office. But here was Mandela, honoring three men who had held him prisoner.
When I got to know Mandela better, he explained that as a young man he had a quick temper. In prison he learned to control his emotions in order to survive. His years in jail had given him the time and motivation to look deeply into his own heart and to deal with the pain he found. He reminded me that gratitude and forgiveness, which often result from pain and suffering, require tremendous discipline. The day his imprisonment ended, he told me, "as I walked out the door toward the gate that would lead to my freedom, I knew if I didn't leave my bitterness and hatred behind, I'd still be in prison."
Still pondering Mandela's example the night I returned from South Africa, I joined five former First Ladies at the National Garden Gala. I was the honorary Chair of the event at the U.S. Botanic Garden to help raise funds to construct a new garden that would be a living landmark on the Mall, dedicated to eight contemporary First Ladies and honoring our contributions to the nation.
I was delighted that Lady Bird Johnson was able to attend. She and I wrote each other during my years in the White House, and she was a comforting and affirming correspondent. I admired the quiet strength and grace she had brought to her position as First Lady. She began a beautification program that spread wiidflowers along thousands of miles of U.S. highways and enhanced our appreciation of the natural landscape. Through Lady Bird's advocacy, a generation of Americans learned new respect for the environment and were inspired to preserve it. She also championed Head Start, the early learning program for dis-advantaged children. And when it came to campaigning, she barnstormed the South for her husband in his 1964 race against Barry Goldwater. Throughout a difficult time in the White House, she understood that presidential politics required commitment and sacrifice. With her intelligence and compassion, she held her own in a world dominated by Lyndon Johnson's oversize personality. Disheartened by Washington, I valued her hard-won sense of perspective.
The photos from that gala evening were keepers: Lady Bird, Barbara Bush, Nancy Reagan, Rosalynn Carter, Betty Ford and me. It was quite a sight: all the living First Ladies standing together onstage— except for one.
Some months earlier, Jackie Kennedy Onassis had been diagnosed with non-Hodgkin's lymphoma, an often deadly but sometimes slow-moving cancer. As a result, she was unable to be with us. We'd been told that she had gone through surgery, but not how quickly she had weakened. True to character, she tried to keep her dying as private as she'd kept her life.
On May 19, 1994, Jackie died in her New York apartment, with Caroline, John and Maurice at her side. Early the following morning, Bill and I went to the Jacqueline Kennedy Garden off the east colonnade of the White House to share our thoughts with a gathering of press, staff and friends. Bill recognized her contributions to our country, while I talked about her selfless devotion to her children and grandchildren: "She once explained the importance of spending time with family and said: 'If you bungle raising your children, I don't think whatever else you do matters very much.' " I could not have agreed more. I attended her funeral mass in New York City at St. Ignatius Loyola Roman Catholic Church and then flew to Washington with her family and close friends. Bill met the plane at the airport and went with us to the grave where Jackie was buried beside President John F. Kennedy, their infant son, Patrick, and an unnamed stillborn daughter. After the graveside ceremony, we joined the extended Kennedy clan at Ethel Kennedy's nearby home, Hickory Hill.
Two weeks later, John F. Kennedy, Jr., sent Bill and me a handwritten letter that I cherish. "I wanted you both to understand how much your burgeoning friendship with my mother meant to her," he wrote. "Since she left Washington I believe she resisted ever connecting with it emotionally—or the institutional demands of being a former First Lady. It had much to do with the memories stirred and her desires to resist being cast in a lifelong role that didn't quite fit. However, she seemed profoundly happy and relieved to allow herself to reconnect with it through you. It helped her in a profound way—whether it was discussing the perils of raising children in those circumstances (perilous indeed) or perhaps it was the many similarities between your presidency and my father's."
In early June 1994, Bill and I traveled to England for the commemoration of the fiftieth anniversary of the Normandy invasion that set in motion the end of World War II in Europe. Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II had invited us to spend the night on the royal yacht HMS Britannia, and I was excited by the prospect of getting to know the royal family. I had met Prince Charles the previous year at a small dinner party hosted by the Gores. He was delightful, with a quick wit and a self-deprecating humor. When Bill and I boarded the Britannia, we were taken to the Queen, Prince Philip and the Queen Mother, who greeted us with an offer of a drink. When I introduced my trip director, Kelly Craighead, the Queen Mother surprised us all by asking Kelly if she'd like to stay on the yacht to dine with her and a few of the Queen's young military aides. saiu sne wouia De delighted but would have to see it she could be released from her duties. Kelly followed me to my cabin and asked what she should do. I told her she should absolutely stay. Someone else could fill in for her at the formal dinner that night with the Queen and Prince Philip. She ran off to tell one of the military aides, only to return in a panic because she'd learned she was supposed to dress formally for dinner. Her black pantsuit wouldn't do. I pulled out all my dressy clothes and helped Kelly piece together a suitable outfit for dining with the Queen Mother.
At the grand dinner, I sat between Prince Philip and Prime Minister John Major at a head table long enough to accommodate all the Kings, Queens, Prime Ministers and Presidents in attendance. From the raised platform, I looked across the large, crowded room. Over five hundred guests were assembled to commemorate the Anglo-American alliance that proved victorious on D-Day. Among them were former Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher, whose career I had followed with great interest; Churchill's surviving daughter, Mary Soames; and his grandson, Pamela Harriman's son, Winston. Major was easy to talk to. I enjoyed chatting about personalities in the crowd and listened as he described the terrible automobile accident he'd had while working in Nigeria as a young man. He'd been immobilized for months and went through a long, painful recovery.
Prince Philip, a polished conversationalist, carefully divided his time between me and the woman on his other side, Her Majesty Queen Paola of Belgium. Literally pausing in "midchop," he turned his head from her to me and back again as he talked about sailing and the history of the Britannia.
The Queen, seated next to Bill, wore a sparkling diamond tiara that caught the light as she nodded and laughed at Bill's stories. She reminded me of my own mother in her appearance, politeness and reserve. I have great admiration and sympathy for the way she has discharged the duties she assumed as a young woman upon her father's death. Holding a demanding, high-profile role for decades through difficult and fast-changing times was hard for me to imagine in light of my more limited experience. When Chelsea was nine, Bill and I took her with us on a short vacation to London. All she wanted to do was to meet the Queen and Princess Diana, which in those days we couldn't arrange. I took her, however, to an exhibit documenting the history of all of England's Kings and Queens. She studied the display carefully, spending nearly one hour reading the description of each monarch and then going back through again. When she finished, she said, "Mommy, I think being a King or Queen is a very hard job."
The morning after our grand dinner, I met Princess Diana for the first time at the Drumhead Service, a traditional religious ceremony for "the Forces Committed," the point at which troops cannot be pulled back from battle. The ceremony was held on the grounds of a Royal Navy base, on a field surrounded by gardens that extended along an oceanfront esplanade. Among the veterans and spectators was Diana, estranged, though not yet divorced, from Prince Charles. She attended the ceremony alone. I watched as she greeted the crowd of supporters, who clearly doted on her. She had a presence that was captivating. Uncommonly beautiful, she used her eyes to draw people in, dropping her head forward to greet you while lifting her eyes upward. She radiated life and a sense of vulnerability that I found heartbreaking. Although there was little time to talk during this visit, I came to know and like her. Diana was a woman torn between competing needs and interests, but she genuinely wanted to make a contribution, to have her life count for something. She became an effective advocate for AIDS awareness and land mine eradication. She was also a devoted mother, and whenever we met, we discussed the challenge of raising children in the public spotlight.
Later that afternoon, we boarded the Britannia and sailed out into the English Channel, where we joined a long line of ships, including the Jeremiah O'Brien, one of the ships used by the U.S. government to ferry supplies to England during the war. We transferred to the USS George Washington, an aircraft carrier anchored off the French coast. This was my first visit to a carrier, a floating city with a population of six thousand sailors and Marines. While Bill worked on the speech he would deliver the next day, I took a tour that included the flight deck, one of the most dangerous workstations in the Armed Forces. Imagine the courage and training it requires to take off and land a fighter jet on that bobbing patch of American real estate in the middle of the ocean. From the captain's bridge high above the deck, I looked out over the enormous carrier and felt the power it represented. I ate dinner in the cafeteria-size galley with some of the crew members, most of whom looked about eighteen or nineteen years old. Fifty years earlier, young men their age had stormed the beaches of Normandy on D-Day.
Although I had read Stephen Ambrose's book D-Day, I was not prepared for the height of the cliffs that had to be scaled by Allied forces after they fought their way across the beaches on June 6, 1944. Pointe-du-Hoc looked impenetrable, and I listened with reverence to the veterans who had made that climb.
Bill's relationship with the military had gotten off to a rocky start, so a lot was riding on his speech about D-Day. Like me, he had opposed the Vietnam War, believing that it was misconceived and unwinnable. Because of his work during college for Senator Fulbright with the Senate Foreign Relations Committee in the late 1960s, he knew then what we all know now: The United States government had misled the public about the depth of our involvement, the strength of our Vietnamese allies, the Gulf of Tonkin incident, the success of our military strategy, casualty figures and other data that prolonged the conflict and cost more lives. Bill had tried to explain his deep misgivings about the war in a letter to the head of the University of Arkansas ROTC program in 1969. In deciding to withdraw from the program and submit to the draft lottery, he articulated the inner struggle so many young men felt about a country they loved and a war they couldn't support.
When I first met Bill, we talked incessantly about the Vietnam War, the draft and the contradictory obligations we felt as young Americans who loved our country but opposed that particular war. Both of us knew the anguish of those times—and each of us had friends who had enlisted, were drafted, resisted or became conscientious objectors. Four of Bill's classmates from high school in Hot Springs were killed in Vietnam. I knew that Bill respected military service, that he would have served if he had been called and that he would also have gladly enlisted in World War II, a war whose purpose was crystal clear. But Vietnam tested the intellect and conscience of many in my generation because it seemed contrary to America's national interests and values, not in furtherance of them. As the first modern President to have come of age during Vietnam, Bill carried with him into the White House the unresolved feelings of our country about that war. And he believed it was time to reconcile our differences as Americans and begin a new chapter of cooperation with our former enemy.
With the support of many Vietnam veterans serving in Congress, Bill lifted a U. S. trade embargo on Vietnam in 1994 and a year later normalized diplomatic relations between our countries. The Vietnamese government continued to make good faith efforts to help locate American servicemen missing in action or held as prisoners of war, and, in 2000, Bill would become the first American president to set foot on
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matic actions paid tribute to more than 58,000 Americans who sacrificed their lives in the jungles of southeast Asia and enabled our country to heal an old wound and find common ground among ourselves and with the Vietnamese people.
One of his first challenges as commander in chief became the promise he made during the campaign to let gays and lesbians serve in the military as long as their sexual orientation did not in any way compromise their performance or unit cohesion. I agreed with the com-monsense position that the code of military conduct should be enforced strictly against behavior, not sexual orientation. The issue surfaced in early 1993 and became a battleground between strongly held opposing convictions. Those who maintained that homosexuals had served with distinction in every war in our history and should be permitted to continue serving were in a clear minority in the military and the Congress. Public opinion was more closely divided, but as is often the case, those who opposed change were more adamant and vocal than those in favor. What I found disturbing was the hypocrisy. Just three years earlier during the Gulf War, soldiers known to be homosexual—both men and women—were sent into harm's way because their country needed them to fulfill its mission. After the war ended, when they were no longer needed, they were discharged on the basis of their sexual orientation. That seemed indefensible to me.
Bill knew the issue was a political loser, but it galled him that he couldn't persuade the Joint Chiefs of Staff to align the reality—that gays and lesbians have served, are serving and will always serve—with an appropriate change in policy that enforced common behavior standards for all. After both the House and Senate expressed their opposition by veto-proof margins, Bill agreed to a compromise: the "Don't Ask, Don't Tell" policy. Under the policy, a superior is forbidden to ask a service member if he or she is homosexual. If a question is asked, there is no obligation to answer. But the policy has not worked well. There are still instances of beatings and harassment of suspected homosexuals, and the number of homosexual discharges has actually increased. In 2000, our closest ally, Great Britain, changed its policy to permit homosexuals to serve, and there has been no reported difficulty; Canada ended its ban on gays in 1992. We have a long way to go as a society before this issue is resolved. I just wish the opposition would listen to Barry Goldwater, an icon of the American Right and an outspoken sup-