Living History (43 page)

And I was canceling my appearance at a forum on First Ladies that evening, an event sponsored by George Washington University and moderated by a friend of mine, historian Carl Sferrazza Anthony. I didn’t see the point in going. Everyone listened calmly, in total silence. Then, one by one, each woman told me why I couldn’t give up or back down. Too many other people, especially women, were counting on me.

Lissa Muscatine described a talk she had given recently to a class at American University, where she explained her job as a White House speechwriter. She told the students that the President and I did more than pay lip service to women’s rights in the workplace.

The White House had hired Lissa even though she was pregnant with twins when she applied for the job. She told the students that when she came back to work for me fulltime after her maternity leave, I had encouraged her to structure her hours and to work from home if necessary so that she could spend time with her children. After the class, a dozen young women gathered around her to ask questions and say how encouraging it was to hear about working mothers in the White House.

“Young people look to you for guidance in their own lives. You’re a role model,”

Lissa said. “What kind of message would you be sending if you stopped being actively involved?”

Buoyed by my friends’ support, I dutifully trooped to the Mayflower Hotel that evening for the First Ladies forum. The audience was enthusiastic and clearly in my corner, which was heartening. I felt energized and hopeful for the first time since the election and ready to get back into the fray, particularly now that Bill would have to deal with a Republican-controlled Congress and its outspoken leaders. Eleanor Roosevelt once said, “If I feel depressed, I go to work.” That sounded like good advice to me.

Newt Gingrich handed me the perfect opportunity. The soon-to-be Republican Speaker of the House was eager to flex his political muscle. Almost immediately, his impulsiveness and rightwing bombast raised red flags for him and his party, when a minor controversy erupted over remarks he made about welfare reform and orphanages. Some Republicans had suggested that the nation could reduce welfare rolls by placing the children of welfare mothers in orphanages. The idea was to prohibit states from paying welfare benefits for two groups of children: those whose paternity was not established and those born out of wedlock to women under eighteen. The savings, according to this proposal, would be used to establish and operate orphanages and group homes for unwed mothers.

I thought this was a horrible idea. All the work I have done on behalf of children convinced me that they are almost always best off with their families, that poverty is not a disqualification from good parenting, that financial and social support for families with special problems, including poverty, should be a first step before we give up on them and take away their children. Only when children are endangered by abuse and neglect should the government intervene on their behalf and move them into alternative settings outside their homes.

In a speech before the New York Women’s Agenda on November 30, 1994, I criticized Gingrich and his Republican team for promoting legislation that punished children for circumstances over which they had no control. I said his remarks about orphanages were absurd and unbelievable. How ironic, I thought: In the 1992 campaign, Republicans had labeled me as “anti-family” because I supported removing abused and neglected children from parents who couldn’t or wouldn’t take care of them. Now Republicans were proposing that kids be removed from their parents simply because they were born out of wedlock or to poor mothers.

A few days later, Gingrich appeared on NBC’s Meet the Press and swung back: “I’d ask her to go to Blockbuster and rent the Mickey Rooney movie about Boys Town [an orphanage]…. I don’t understand liberals who live in enclaves of safety who say, ‘Oh, this would be a terrible thing. Look at the Norman Rockwell family that would break up…. I answered Gingrich with a long article in Newsweek. My conclusion: “This is biggovernment interference into the lives of citizens at its worst.”

The Newsweek article curbed the orphanages debate, but the atmosphere grew stranger after Gingrich’s mother, thinking she was speaking off-the-record, told Connie Chung in a televised interview that her son regularly referred to me as a “bitch.”

I decided to ignore the latest round of bluster and to try a different tack with Gingrich: I sent him a handwritten note inviting him and his family to a tour of the White House. A few weeks later Gingrich; his then wife, Marianne; his sister, Susan, and his mother joined me for their tour. Apart from the fact that it happened at all, the visit wasn’t memorable, save for one brief exchange while we were having tea in the Red Room.

Looking around at the period furniture, Gingrich began pontificating about American history.

His wife soon interrupted him.

“You know, he will go on and on whether he knows what he’s talking about or not,”

said Marianne.

Gingrich’s mother quickly jumped to his defense. “Newty is a historian,” she said.

“Newty always knows what he’s talking about.”

In a way, the post-election fracas was helpful to me, because it sharpened my focus on positive ways to respond to rightwing diatribes. I realized I needed to tell my own story and define my own values in a format that could be evaluated directly by people without being distorted or mischaracterized. Writing the Newsweek article had alerted me to the potential of my own voice. I began to ponder more ambitious writing projects that would lay out my views about the need for self-reliance and social support systems in improving people’s lives. I wanted to write a book about raising children in today’s world and to galvanize people around the idea that, to quote an African proverb, “it takes a village to raise a child.” I had never written a book, but I soon made the acquaintance of people who had, and they offered guidance.

Bill and I had met Marianne Williamson, a best-selling author, at one of our Renaissance Weekends, and she had suggested we get together with a group of people outside the political world to discuss Bill’s goals for the remaining two years of his term. That struck a chord with me, and we invited her to convene a gathering at Camp David on December 30 and 31.

Williamson’s guest list included Tony Robbins, whose book Awaken the Giant Within was a national best-seller, and Stephen R. Covey, who wrote the hugely popular 7 Habits of Highly Effective People. If millions of Americans were listening to their advice, I figured it might help to hear what they had to say. Williamson also invited Mary Catherine Bateson and Jean Houston. A professor, author, anthropologist and daughter of the seminal anthropologists Gregory Bateson and Margaret Mead, Bateson specializes in cultural anthropology and gender issues. I was already a fan of her 1989 book, Composing a Life, which describes how women construct their lives by combining the ingredients of day-today living that work best for them. Choices are no longer governed by the kinds of conventions that traditionally determined women’s roles. We not only can, but must imagine and improvise as we go along, taking advantage of unique talents and opportunities and responding to unforeseen twists and turns along the way.

I found myself engrossed in hours of conversation with Mary Catherine and Jean Houston, a writer and lecturer on women’s history, indigenous cultures and mythology.

While Mary Catherine is a soft spoken academic who favors cardigans and sensible shoes, Jean wraps herself in brightly colored capes and caftans and dominates the room with her larger-than-life presence and crackling wit. She is a walking encyclopedia, reciting poems, passages from great works of literature, historical facts and scientific data all in the same breath. She is also a trove of great jokes and puns and is ready to share her cache with anyone in need of a good laugh.

Jean and Mary Catherine were experts in two subjects of immediate importance to me. Both had written numerous books, and I needed help and advice from experienced authors. I also had been asked by the State Department to represent the United States on a trip to five countries in South Asia. This trip would be a watershed event for me, and I was eager to throw myself into preparations. Jean and Mary Catherine had traveled extensively in the region, so I invited them to share their impressions with me and my staff before I left for South Asia in March and again after our return.

I had resisted the idea of exploiting the First Lady title, preferring to concentrate on specific policies and actions. I distrust the way symbols can be manipulated and misused, and I’ve always believed that people should be judged on the basis of actions and consequences, not just what they say and claim to stand for. A First Lady occupies a vicarious position; her power is derivative, not independent, of the President’s. This partly explained my sometimes awkward fit in the role of First Lady. Ever since I was a little girl, I had worked to be my own person and maintain my independence. As much as I loved my husband and my country, adjusting to being a fulltime surrogate was difficult for me.

Mary Catherine and jean helped me better understand that the role of First Lady is deeply symbolic and that I had better figure out how to make the best of it at home and on the world stage.

Mary Catherine argued that symbolic actions were legitimate and that “symbolism can be efficacious.” She believed, for example, that merely by traveling to South Asia as First Lady with Chelsea would send a message about the importance of daughters. Visiting poor rural women would underscore their significance. I understood her point, and I soon became a convert to the view that I could advance the Clinton agenda through symbolic action.

My friendship with Jean came to light a year later in a book by Bob Woodward, The Choice, about the 1996 political campaign. Woodward referred melodramatically to Jean as my “spiritual adviser” and de scribed some verbal exercises she had introduced to me and my staff to help us find new ways of thinking about our work. He was particularly keen to talk about the time Jean asked me to imagine a conversation with Eleanor Roosevelt.

As I often invoked Eleanor in my speeches and even referred to imaginary conversations with her to make a point, I had no trouble responding to Jean’s suggestion, and never expected it to generate any interest. But a passage from Woodward’s book about the exercise was excerpted on the front page of The Washington Post as an expose.

That night, Jim and Diane Blair were having supper with us on the Truman Balcony, and Jim, deadpan as always, said: “Well, Hill, after this Eleanor business I guess you don’t have to worry about Whitewater anymore.”

“What do you mean?”

“Well, if they come after you now, you can always plead insanity”

The day after the Post piece, I appeared at an annual family conference hosted by Al and Tipper Gore in Tennessee. “Shortly before I arrived I had one of my conversations with Eleanor Roosevelt,” I said to gales of laughter and applause. “And she thinks this is a terrific idea as well!”

Laughing at myself was an essential survival tool, and preferable to the alternative of climbing back into the bunker―though that too was occasionally a temptation during the months after the Democrats lost control of the House and Senate.

Bill and I knew that a Republican Congress would guarantee at least two more years of Whitewater investigations and Kenneth Starr seemed to be invigorated by the election results. In late November, Webb Hubbell fell into Starr’s net.

Webb had resigned from his job at the justice Department the previous March, to avoid any controversy, he said, while he fought allegations that he had cheated on his billing of clients at the Rose Law Firm. Webb never let on that there was a shred of evidence to support any charges against him. Even when he came to Camp David the previous summer to play golf with Bill, he had assured us that he was innocent.

But on Thanksgiving Day in 1994, we were at Camp David when I heard a radio report that Webb Hubbell and Jim Guy Tucker, the Arkansas Governor who succeeded Bill, were going to be indicted. By now, I was used to inaccurate press reports. Although I was upset at the news, I assumed it was wrong. I also knew that, unsubstantiated or not, this story would spread like wildfire, and that Webb or his lawyer had to respond immediately.

Bill and I telephoned Webb at home, where he was busy roasting turkey. After wishing Webb a happy Thanksgiving, Bill handed the phone to me.

I told Webb what I’d heard about the impending indictments. “You’ve got to refute this right away,” I said. “You can’t let this misinformation stay out there. It’s terrible.”

Webb said he hadn’t gotten a letter from the prosecutors informing him he was the potential target of a criminal indictment. Then he promptly changed the subject, telling me who was coming for dinner and what he and his wife, Suzy, were cooking. I was annoyed that he seemed so nonchalant. Either he did not take the news report seriously, I thought, or he just was not going to let it bother him. That Thanksgiving phone call was the last time Bill and I spoke to Webb. In his own memoir, Friends in High Places, Webb explains that his lawyer had received a target letter the day before our phone conversation but had decided to wait until after Thanksgiving to tell Webb. He also admits that the charges against him were true and that he had stolen from the law firm in a futile attempt to get out from under a crippling debt that he had hidden from his family and friends.

On December 6, 1994, Starr’s office announced that Hubbell would plead guilty to mail fraud and tax evasion. He confessed that between 1989 and 1992, he submitted more than four hundred doctored bills to cover personal expenses, cheating his clients and partners at the Rose Law Firm of at least $394,000.

I was shocked. Webb had been a trusted colleague and was widely admired as a civic leader in Arkansas. He was a dear friend. I had spent more hours in his company than I could count. The idea that he had cheated and misled those closest to him was upsetting beyond words. His plea bargain signaled a new escalation on the Whitewater battlefield, and it was hard to take.