Living History (26 page)

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 upstairs 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. I 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 goodbyes and let God take him home. Dr. Kumpuris told us he would probably die within twentyfour 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 80’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 feet 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.