A Woman in Charge (50 page)

At the time, however, Hillary's outrage was concentrated as much on the Democratic political establishment as the Republican opposition. “She was furious with the Democrats because they didn't rise up and stand with her in what she tried to do,” her friend Sara Ehrman said.

There had been no “due deference” paid by the Democratic leadership to her and her husband, the president, Hillary said.

12

The Politics of
Meaning…and Family

[I]f I hadn't believed in prayer before
1992,
life in the White House would have persuaded me.

—Living History

A
T THE TIME
of his son-in-law's inauguration, Hugh Rodham was eighty-one years old, in frail health and more foul-tempered than ever. “When he turned eighty,” said his son Tony, “he figured out that he could say just about anything he wanted. Who's going to stop him?” His health had been in decline since he had suffered a heart attack during Bill's gubernatorial inaugural speech to the Arkansas legislature in 1983, after which he'd undergone a coronary bypass. Several strokes followed in the next decade, during which his wife became his caretaker. At the White House, often confined to a wheelchair, Hugh was regarded by many members of the staff and Secret Service as rude and nasty. “He was mean, mean, mean,” said one aide to the president.

On March 19, Hillary and some twenty staff members had decided to celebrate the House passage of Bill's economic stimulus package with lunch in the White House mess. It was one of the rare moments when Hillary let down her guard. It was then that Carolyn Huber whispered to her that her father had had a stroke. She traveled immediately to Little Rock to be by her father's bedside. While she was in Arkansas, Vince Foster would file an appeal to the court's decision regarding the health care task force, and Donna Shalala and Tipper Gore would take over Hillary's responsibilities at previously scheduled health care forums and tours around the country.

Hillary's days in the hospital were a painful yet transforming experience. While the press waited outside for news, Hillary talked to other family members of patients who were sick and dying, and to hospital personnel. She wrote in
Living History
that she learned of doctors distressed because their patients couldn't afford to have prescriptions filled, as well as people who had to make prescriptions last by riskily skipping doses. She said all of this buttressed her notion of how vital health care reform was.

While Hillary was away, the American Medical Association bused hundreds of doctors from every state to Capitol Hill to visit their elected representatives with a central message: universalize health insurance, stop the rise in health costs, but do not freeze physician fees as Hillary wished to do. In a closed meeting, Magaziner told about thirty House Democrats that the administration was “leaning toward requiring” that individuals pay the percentage of health insurance that their employers did not cover, or, if they were self-employed, buy their own policy. Meanwhile, under a court order, the White House released the names of the 511 federal employees, congressional aides, and outside consultants who were participating in the health care task force.

 

I
N THEIR FIRST
months in the White House, both Bill and Hillary were force-fed the unpalatable truth that, contrary to their expectations, the capital was not to be easily commanded in the same way they had dominated the politics of a small Southern state. Bill matured politically during his eight years as president, learning to achieve many of his objectives piecemeal in the face of adamant Republican opposition. But in terms of his character, he remained basically unchanged: ambitious, narcissistic, charming, brilliant, roguish, undisciplined, incredibly able—and often personally disappointing. The engine of Hillary's evolution and of her enormous capacity for change seemed sturdily bolted under the hood of her religious convictions, a set of beliefs that to some bordered on a messiah-like self-perception, to others a license to do whatever she pleased in the name of God, and to others a touchstone of spirituality that infused her notions of love, caring, and service.

Since mid-century, with the exception of the Carter years, the White House had been largely the spiritual province of such establishmentarian preachers, priests, and evangelists as the Reverend Norman Vincent Peale, Francis Cardinal Spellman, and Dr. Billy Graham. Their eminent visitations had lent an imprimatur of white Christian approval to the works of Democrats and Republicans alike. The Clinton White House, however, from the earliest days of the administration, became a welcoming beacon for a procession of less exalted reverends and rabbis, theologians and gurus, New Age spiritualists and sages, from serious to (arguably) charlatan. Eventually, Graham's role of unelected spiritual adviser to the president would be inherited by the Reverend Jesse Jackson, a comfortable and—especially during the Lewinsky affair—politically useful presence whose own sins of the flesh were of a nature quite familiar to the first couple.

Part of the changed religious dynamic of the Clinton White House was an openness to new ideas and spiritual paths plowed since the 1960s and 1970s, particularly offshoots of the movements inspired by the Reverend Martin Luther King Jr. and the black church, and the psychospiritual pseudosciences derived from twelve-step philosophy and theories of co-dependence. But most of the change was attributable to the simple fact that Bill and Hillary were both genuinely religious. Bill would say that one of the two most impressive world figures he'd met during his presidency was Pope John Paul II (the other was Yitzhak Rabin), notwithstanding the Clintons' profound disagreement with the pope's views about women's rights, abortion, and birth control.

The ambitious nature of Hillary's vision could be glimpsed vaguely through the inarticulate haze of her extemporaneous commencement remarks at Wellesley. A decade later, as a woman in her thirties, she had preached a series of Sunday school and church sermons in Arkansas (never unearthed by the national press) which were clearer evidence that she was evolving a politics that borrowed heavily from her spiritual notions. Before the presidential campaign, she had done occasional lay preaching and taught adult Bible classes. During the campaign, she had carried with her everywhere a tiny Bible.

Perhaps the most revealing interview she gave between her husband's election and inauguration was with the United Methodist News Service, though it received scant attention in the mainstream press. A single paragraph encapsulated much of what her friends found so appealing about her, and her enemies were most enraged by: her seeming moral certainty.

Methodism's “emphasis on personal salvation combined with active applied Christianity,” she said, was what she believed in. “As a Christian, part of my obligation is to take action to alleviate suffering. Explicit recognition of that in the Methodist tradition is one reason I'm comfortable in this church.”

Though Hillary had often spoken from the pulpit, never had she allowed herself so public an epiphany, or preached so grandly, as at the University of Texas Field House in Austin on April 6, 1993, with fourteen thousand congregants in attendance, while her father lay dying not far away in Little Rock. The occasion was the annual Liz Carpenter Lecture, named for Lady Bird Johnson's White House press secretary, a woman who had commanded a degree of influence, respect, and affection in Washington that few of Hillary's aides, sadly, would ever attain. Both Lady Bird Johnson and Liz Carpenter were seated on the stage with Hillary.

It had been her intent, and that of the White House political staff, to use the occasion—on the seventy-fifth day of the Clinton presidency—for her first major speech on health care reform. Instead, as she flew from Washington to Austin on Executive One that morning, she began scribbling notes that reflected both the intense internal turmoil, personal and political, of the past weeks, and the calm, purpose, and steadiness she found in scripture and religion. The stroke her father suffered eighteen days earlier had left him in extremely critical condition and the family with an imminent decision about discontinuing life support. She had rarely left his bedside for more than a day since. Newspaper photos of Hillary during the previous two weeks, taken between hospital and car, “showed the toll of universal truths about what it means to lose a loved one,” a
Washington Post
reporter wrote.

The themes of the speech she delivered in Austin, though obviously rendered more immediate and profound by the fact of her father's illness (“When does life begin?” she asked at one point, then lowering her voice, “When does it end?”), had been developing in her mind for months, maybe even years, some of her aides said later. The speech—a sermon, really—was as audacious a public address in memory by a first lady, ample evidence of how far (or not, some critics later decided) Hillary had traveled as a thoughtful human being and as a speaker since Wellesley. Instead of searching for words at the podium, as she had at her commencement, they now flowed almost perfectly, in full, often elegant sentences delivered from her handwritten notes jotted on the plane, extemporaneous bursts, and (to a much lesser extent) from an earlier draft of a health care speech she had worked on with the White House speechwriters. Yet, as she'd struggled to do since Wellesley, she was still determined to solve the mind-conservative, heart-liberal, dilemma.

Her message was as presumptuous as it was direct. The United States, she declared, was undergoing nothing less than a grave national “crisis of meaning and spirituality,” which she further diagnosed as “a sleeping sickness of the soul.” The latter phrase was that of Albert Schweitzer, she noted, who had discovered in colonial central Africa that more than the body could be ravaged by sleeping sickness.

To support her sweeping assertion of sea-to-sea affliction, she shrewdly invoked the repentant deathbed remarks of Lee Atwater, the young architect of the slash-and-burn Republican politics of the Reagan-Bush era, who when he was “struck down with cancer…said something…which I cut out and carry with me in a little book I have of sayings and scriptures that I find important and that replenish me from time to time.” Her tack, brilliantly executed, sought (not incidentally) to reclaim from the Republican right its corner on issues of so-called family values. In the twelve years since the defeat of Jimmy Carter by Ronald Reagan, the male moguls of the Democratic Party had eschewed prominent mention of God or of the old verities and virtues, which by 1992 seemed to have become an exercise of Republican divine right. Hillary meant to change that.

“Much of the energy animating the responsible fundamentalist right,” she said in an interview a few days after her Austin sermon, “has come from their sense of life getting away from us—of meaning being lost and people being turned into kind of amoral decision-makers because there weren't any overriding values that they related to. And I have a lot of sympathy with that. The search for meaning should cut across all kinds of religious and ideological boundaries. That's what we should be struggling with—not whether you have a corner on God.”

Her witness was Atwater. “He said the following,” she proclaimed to her audience in Austin: “‘Long before I was struck with cancer, I felt something stirring in American society. It was a sense among the people of the country, Republicans and Democrats alike, that something was missing from their lives—something crucial. I was trying to position the Republican Party to take advantage of it. But 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 eighties 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 don't know who will lead us through the nineties, but they must be made to speak to this spiritual vacuum at the heart of American society—this tumor of the soul.'” In fact, Hillary regarded the result of the 1992 presidential election as a cleansing of the national soul, a spiritual and political verdict.

“That, to me, will be Lee Atwater's real lasting legacy, not the elections that he helped to win,” declared Hillary Rodham Clinton, the first Democratic first lady since Lee Atwater had enunciated the postmodern Republican gospel and written the ballad of Willie Horton.
^*12
And there came from the crowd filling the arena in Austin shouts of “Amen” and “Yes, yes,” and cheering, followed by the kind of fervent murmur that, appropriately, usually attends a religious rally, not a political speech.

“[T]he debate over family values,” she declared, was “off point” and “devised for political purposes. There is no—or should be no—debate that our family structure is in trouble. There should be no debate that children need the stability, the predictability of a family. But there should be debate over how we best make sure that children and families flourish. And once that debate is carried out on honest terms, then we have to recognize that either the old idea that only parental influence and parental values matter, or the nearly as old idea that only state programmatic intervention matters, are both equally fallacious.

“Instead we ought to recognize what should be a common-sense truth—that children are the result of both the values of their parents and the values of the society in which they live…. That's the kind of approach that has to get beyond the dogma of right or left, conservative or liberal.”

Balancing the conservative-mind, liberal-heart equation, addressing “this tumor of the soul,” filling the “spiritual vacuum” that Lee Atwater had discovered on his deathbed, these notions, she suggested, would inform the Clintonian principles of governance.

“
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 makes us feel that we are part of something bigger than ourselves.”