A Woman in Charge (74 page)

Part of the money came from
Newsweek,
owned by the Washington Post Company, which had purchased the rights to excerpt the book and had intended to run a cover story on it the week of January 8. Instead, the cover line blared “Saint or Sinner?” above an unflattering picture of Hillary, and though the excerpts ran verbatim, inside, the cover story (“First Fighter”) was more focused on Whitewater, the billing records, and general questions about the first lady's honesty than on the book. That same day, the influential
New York Times
columnist William Safire—an unscathed veteran of the Watergate-era Nixon White House—wrote a column calling Hillary a “congenital liar.” Safire's epithet would become attached to the first lady for years. The president's press secretary, Mike McCurry, gave Safire's characterization enormous currency by declaring that if Bill Clinton weren't the president of the United States he would follow through with “a more forceful response to the bridge of Mr. Safire's nose,” a statement that ensured its widest possible circulation.

The next day, in the Green Room of the White House, Hillary and Barbara Walters sat serenely bathed in flattering light, attended by makeup artists, for their long-scheduled interview. “Mrs. Clinton, instead of your new book being the issue, you have become the issue. How did you get into this mess, where your whole credibility is being questioned?” Walters began.

Hillary and Walters were friends. The first lady knew that the interview would have to address the matter, so she was prepared. “Oh, I ask myself that every day, Barbara,” she said. “Because it's very surprising and confusing to me. But we've had questions raised for the last four years, and eventually they're answered and they go away and more questions come up and we'll just keep doing our best to answer them.”

And the billing records?

“You know, a month ago people were jumping up and down because the billing records were lost and they thought somebody might have destroyed them. Now the records are found and they're jumping up and down. But I'm glad the records were found. I wish they had been found a year or two ago, because they verify what I've been saying from the very beginning. I worked about an hour a week for fifteen months [on the Madison account at Rose]. That was not a lot of work for me, certainly.”

On January 15, when Diane Rehm, the host of a first-rate show broadcast over NPR from Washington, asked her about Whitewater, Hillary claimed she had consistently made public all the relevant documents—including “every document we had”—to the editors of the
New York Times
before its original Whitewater story ran in 1992.

Even her closest aides could not imagine what possessed her to say such a thing. It was simply not true, as Sherburne and the other lawyers—and the editors of the
Times,
who ran a page-one story about her latest twisting of the facts—recognized. Sherburne double-checked with Susan Thomases, the emissary who had tried to head off the original Jeff Gerth story in 1992. Told what Hillary had said, Thomases said, “Oh my God, we didn't,” and explained how they had carefully cherry-picked documents accessed for the
Times.
The White House was forced—once again—to acknowledge the first lady had been “mistaken.”

“All the work for the book, all the planning for the tour, it looked like it was going to be…the big thing to bring her back after '94. And now all of a sudden it was down the drain. Hillary was no longer depressed, per se…but was just resigned to perpetual beatings,” said Mark Fabiani. “That hadn't stopped, and apparently was not likely to stop. And obviously [she had] some deep anxiety about being indicted. She was learning to live with the idea that she was going to be damaged goods.”

It Takes a Village
was not highly regarded by the critics. Because she is a sophisticated, knowledgeable advocate of children and families, it was hoped—as the
New York Times
noted in its review—that she would have produced “something deeper, sharper, and more tough-minded” than this “tepid and limited work.” The book, however, sold well, and reached the top position on the
Times
best-seller list. The audio version, which she read herself, won a Grammy.

The book didn't reflect the serious political analysis or policy ideas of which Hillary was capable, or demonstrate any notable introspection. “There is no such thing as other people's children,” Hillary had declared in interviews and speeches: this seemed to be the book's central thesis. With the breakdown of family structures and millions of children condemned to lives of poverty from Boston to Zimbabwe, all of society's institutions—not just government, but extended families, churches, charities, civic and business organizations—had to be enlisted to save them.

It Takes a Village
is an extended Hillary-chat, the precursor of her “conversations” while running for president, delivered over the Internet from the warmth of a fireside hearth. She weaves personal anecdotes; vague, uncontroversial policy prescriptions; and pieties of the kind inscribed, in another era, on hand-sewn samplers. She describes her own and Bill's childhoods, with occasional emphasis on hardship; shows how their family members—particularly Virginia Kelley and Dorothy Rodham—persevered through difficulties and nourished their children with love; and expresses continual joy and wonderment at Chelsea and the experience she and Bill have shared as parents.

The chapter headings sound like bromides: “Security Takes More Than a Blanket,” “Child Care Is Not a Spectator Sport,” “Kids Don't Come with Instructions,” “Children Are Citizens Too,” “No Family Is an Island.”

In these chapters, she enumerates the forces that corrode the village and family structure: video games, bad television, divorce, reckless globalization, inefficient health care, crime, bad schools, teenage sex.
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There is nothing controversial enough for serious objection by any reasonable political caste. Her most vigorous advocacy is an honest reflection of her own “family values”: prayer, religious study, churchgoing and affiliation; and working at marriage, through counseling if necessary, because divorce almost invariably leaves a scar on children, who need both mothers and fathers. For her detractors and political opponents who contend that Hillary's views on abortion, marriage, and adolescent sexual restraint have been tailored to fit her presidential ambitions, and represent some sudden and cynical move toward the political center,
It Takes a Village
contradicts that.

Her “strong feelings about divorce and its effects on children” caused her “to bite my tongue more than a few times” during her marriage and to think instead about what she could do “to be a better wife and partner.” She and Bill had “worked hard at our marriage” with mutual respect and “deepening love for each other.” Chelsea “enhances our commitment.” Hillary acknowledges there are “reasons for divorce,” citing the abuse and violence that Virginia Kelley experienced as something no parent or child ought to suffer. But with divorce “as easy as it is, and its consequences so hard,” she urges parents to examine whether they have given a marriage “their best shot” and to seek more ways to make it work “before they call it quits.”

Mediating her reference to the difficulties of her own marriage are bons mots, lovingly delivered about the ironies and fun of sharing a house as a family—in this case a governor's mansion, and the White House. (“We're lucky that we ‘live above the store,' the way a lot of families used to.”) “One memorable night,” she relates, Chelsea wanted her parents to buy her a coconut. The Clintons walked to the corner market, brought home a coconut, tried hammering it open, unsuccessfully. Finally mother, father, and child went out to the parking lot of the mansion, and took turns throwing the coconut onto the pavement until it cracked open. “The guards could not figure out what we were up to, and we laughed for hours afterward.”

She tells homey stories of taking Chelsea to ballet class every Saturday and bringing her along for errands so they could spend more time together. It's as if the first lady's public stock had fallen so low that she felt compelled to prove that she is a loving mother.

The voice of
It Takes a Village
is unquestionably hers. Much of the book was composed on yellow legal pads, in longhand, after her collaborators and editors had tried to get her to dig deeper and beyond her penchant (even more evident in earlier drafts) for skimming the emotional surface with near-meaningless anecdotes.

Hillary's voice on the page was very similar to her public speaking voice. And her conversational voice, even with friends, could also mirror her public voice. Even in private, Hillary tends to articulate in whole paragraphs, rarely interrupting herself or needing to stop to struggle for the right word. This can be impressive in some settings, but other times it seems stilted, as if she is speaking from a set of sermons. Her private conversations are full of anecdotes, parables, vignettes that illustrate a point she is presenting. In both her talking and written voice there is a kind of grown-up Girl Scout–speak, full of concept words and phrases like “constructive citizenship,” “civil society,” “generational challenges.” That kind of writing, combined with clichés, produced the sort of prose that made many reviewers cringe.

It Takes a Village
is often banal: “Raising children, like most important work in our society, requires a constellation of skills and perspectives” and “Safety-minded parents keep household poisons, plastic bags, and matches out of reach.” But the idea of community had always been vitally important to her, from her upbringing in Park Ridge, in her Arkansas years, in her earliest interpretation of American history—her high school papers and her college thesis about Saul Alinsky's community organizing in the impoverished neighborhoods of South Side Chicago. Hillary rightly sensed that, as America neared the twenty-first century, much of this sense of community, so essential to generations preceding her own, had been lost. She had rediscovered it initially in Africa, and later in other Third World societies, where people with little material wealth clung to their communal values as both a means of survival and cultural richness. In America, where families were disintegrating, she urged that old-fashioned resources of the village—churches, PTAs, neighborhood associations (of the kind her father had refused to join), community centers, and athletic leagues—serve as safety nets and sources for communal engagement for the family and for children.
Pitch in and help one another. Service is an obligation of citizenship.
An article of her faith had always been that families with some sort of institutional religious tie can weather storms better than families who don't. Washington, to her, was a “village” that had lost its soul.

Many of Hillary's aides thought the book was unvarnished, heroic Hillary: commonsensical, caring, concerned, feminine. But there were dissenters: “You know, turning a tuna casserole into a metaphor for community,” said one disaffected aide who had seen too much of Hillary's other side. “Give me a break, when's the last time she took a casserole to a grieving friend?”

 

D
ESPITE
H
ILLARY'S
exile from the White House, working on the book had enabled her to discover and reconnect with aspects of her past and principles ameliorated in the years of attending disproportionately to Bill's career and worldview. The book—and the period of its preparation—turned out to be heavy on feminism, folklore, New Age concepts, human rights doctrine, traditional religion, psychology, and psychobabble. Conspicuously absent from the final text, though not from the book's original raison d'être, is realpolitik.

In some ways,
It Takes a Village
could be read as a logical extension of Hillary's Politics of Meaning speech, in which traditional values figured prominently. Yet in conception and execution,
It Takes a Village
also reflected Hillary's willingness to embrace New Age sensibilities, long an element of her spiritual quest but which in 1995 reached their ultimate expression.

The final draft reflected as never before the editorial help and thinking of Mary Catherine Bateson and Jean Houston. In November 1995, Houston had moved into the White House for weeks at a time to help Hillary on her book and offer general counsel and support. In the acknowledgments section of the book, Hillary didn't mention anyone by name, saying simply that “many people” had aided her and that she didn't want to mention individuals because she “might leave someone out.”

When Hillary talked to her mother for the book, Dorothy, now that her husband was dead, seemed to open up more than in the past about her childhood and the abuse she suffered both as a child and an adult. “I don't think she [Hillary] knew the full extent” of her mother's abuse until she wrote the book, said Betsy Ebeling. Still, in the book, Hillary describes a “normal” family life, “straight out of the 1950s television sitcom
Father Knows Best,
” and omits the true strains of her upbringing. Relatives were “a visible, daily part of the village,” with grandparents, aunts, uncles, and cousins pitching in “if illness or some other misfortune strained the family.” She does not mention such misfortunes as her father cutting his brother down from a noose. Rather, the examples of “pitching in” tend toward how, around the time she learned to walk, she grabbed a Coke bottle filled with turpentine, and started to drink it. “The adults around me reacted quickly to prevent serious consequences.” From this primeval communal experience, she draws a lesson: “Parents should be willing to go toe-to-toe with their kids over taking certain precautions, like wearing helmets to bicycle, ride a motorcycle, skateboard or Rollerblade….[W]earing helmets could prevent about forty thousand head injuries to children each year. Car safety seats, used properly, could help prevent another fifty-three thousand injuries in car accidents.”