Living History (44 page)

During the Christmas season, I received two identical gifts. Anne Bartley, a friend and philanthropist from Arkansas who volunteered in the White House, and Eileen Bakke, whom I knew from Renaissance Weekends and my prayer group, each gave me a copy of The Return of the Prodigal Son, by Henri Nouwen, a Dutch priest. Nouwen explores the parable Jesus told about the younger of two sons who had left his father and brother to lead a dissolute life. When he finally returned home, he was welcomed by his father and resented by his dutiful older brother. During the stresses of 1993 and 1994, I had read my Bible and other books about religion and spirituality. As a family, we regularly attended Foundry Methodist Church in downtown Washington, and I drew great sustenance from the sermons and personal support offered by the congregation and its senior minister, Rev. Dr. Phil Wogaman. My prayer group continued to pray for me, as did countless other people around the world. It all helped so much. But one simple phrase in Nouwen’s book struck like an epiphany: “the discipline of gratitude.” I had so much to be grateful for, even in the midst of lost elections, failed health care reform efforts, partisan and prosecutorial attacks, and the deaths of those I loved. I just had to discipline myself to remember how blessed I was.

On a cold afternoon late in March 1995, I took my first extended trip overseas without the President. Forty-one passengers filled a vintage government jet and took off from Andrews Air Force Base for a twelve-day official visit to five countries in South Asia.

My companions included White House staff, State Department aides, members of the media, Secret Service agents, Jan Piercy, my friend from Wellesley and U.S. Executive Director of the World Bank, and best of all, Chelsea. The trip happily coincided with her spring break from school. She had just turned fifteen and was blossoming into a poised, thoughtful young woman. I wanted to share some of the last adventures of her childhood, and I wanted to watch her react to the extraordinary world we were about to enter, to see it through her eyes as well as my own.

After a seventeen-hour flight, we landed in Islamabad, Pakistan, in the late evening in a pounding rainstorm. The State Department had asked me to visit the subcontinent to highlight the administration’s commitment to the region, because neither the President nor the Vice President could make a trip soon. My visit was meant to demonstrate that this strategic and volatile part of the world was important to the United States and to assure leaders throughout South Asia that Bill supported their efforts to strengthen democracy, expand free markets and promote tolerance and human rights, including the rights of women. My physical presence in the region was considered a sign of concern and commitment.

Although we had only a short time in each country, I wanted to meet with as many women as possible to stress the correlation between women’s progress and a country’s social and economic status. Development issues had interested me since my years of working with Bill on behalf of poor, rural communities in Arkansas, but this was my first serious exposure to the developing world. I had gotten some preparation earlier in March when I traveled to Copenhagen, Denmark, to represent the United States at the United Nations World Summit for Social Development. That conference underscored my conviction that individuals and communities around the world are already more connected and interdependent than at any time in human history, and that Americans will be affected by the poverty, disease and development of people halfway around the globe.

The Chinese have an ancient saying, that women hold up half the sky, but in most of the world, it’s really more than half. Women handle a large share of the responsibility for the welfare of their families. Yet their work often goes unrecognized and unrewarded inside the family or by the formal economy. These inequities are starkly visible in South Asia, where more than half a billion people live in grinding poverty―the majority of them women and children. Poor women and girls are oppressed and discriminated against, denied education and medical care and victimized by culturally sanctioned violence.

Law enforcement often turns a blind eye to the crimes of wife beating, bride burning and female infanticide, and in certain communities, women who are raped can be jailed for adultery. Despite such traditions of prejudice, there were signs of change across the Indian subcontinent, in schools that educate girls and in micro-lending programs that give women access to credit, enabling them to earn their own incomes.

The U.S. government had supported many successful projects, but the new Republican majorities in the Senate and House were targeting foreign aid, which amounted to less than 1 percent of the federal budget, for large cuts. I had long supported the U.S.

Agency for International Development – USAID―and hoped to use the media spotlight that follows a First Lady to demonstrate the tangible impact of U.S.-funded programs in the developing world. Cutting off this aid would both harm individual women in dire straits and contradict strategies that have been shown to benefit poor countries as well as the U.S. When women suffer, their children suffer and their economies stagnate, ultimately weakening potential markets for U.S. products. And when women are victimized, the stability of families, communities and nations is eroded, jeopardizing the prospects for democracy and prosperity globally.

Violence and instability plagued every country I was scheduled to visit. Just three weeks before our arrival in Pakistan, Muslim extremists had ambushed a van carrying U.S. consulate workers in Karachi. Two of them were killed. And Ramzi Yousef, one of the main plotters in the 1993 World Trade Center bombing, had recently been arrested in Pakistan and extradited to the United States for trial.

The Secret Service was nervous about the trip and would have preferred that I restrict my travels to government compounds and isolated resorts. They were amusingly at odds with the State Department, which wanted to send me to hot spots around the world―places where ongoing conflict made security too difficult for visits by the President or Vice President. The point of my mission was to meet rural as well as urban women, to jettison the predictable itineraries and get into the villages where most people lived. Advance teams and security experts planned each stop carefully, and I was painfully aware of how difficult and disruptive it was for our host countries and our embassies to accommodate such an unorthodox trip. Their extra efforts on my behalf made me feel even more obligated to make my presence as productive as possible.

When the sun rose over the Margalla Hills, I saw Islamabad for the first time. A planned city of wide avenues rimmed by low green mountains, it is a showcase of midcentury modern architecture and reforestation projects, typical of many of the capital cities that sprang up after national independence, built on neutral soil with good intentions and foreign aid. At first I didn’t feel I was in South Asia at all. But that notion evaporated as soon as I made a courtesy call on Begum Nasreen Leghari, the wife of Pakistan’s President, Farooq Ahmad Khan Leghari.

An elegantly dressed woman, Mrs. Leghari spoke excellent English with a lilting British accent. She lived in conditions of strict isolation, known as “purdah,” never seen by men outside her immediate family. She had to be fully veiled on the rare occasions she left her house: She did not attend her husband’s inauguration but watched the ceremony on television. When she invited me to her living quarters on the second floor of the presidential residence, I could be accompanied only by female aides and Secret Service agents.

Mrs. Leghari peppered me with questions about America. I was equally curious about her life and asked whether she wanted change for the next generation of women in her family. I learned that her recently married daughter was on the guest list of a large dinner I was attending the next night in Lahore, and I asked Mrs. Leghari about the contradiction.

“That is her husband’s choice,” she said. “She’s no longer of our home. So she does whatever he chooses.” She accepted her daughter’s status and mobility because her sonin-law had chosen them on her behalf. The wife of Mrs. Leghari’s son, however, lived with her in purdah, because her son chose the traditional path of his father.

The contradictions within Pakistan became still more apparent at my next event, a luncheon hosted in my honor by Prime Minister Benazir Bhutto and attended by several dozen accomplished women in Pakistan. It was like being rocketed forward several centuries in time. Among these women were academics and activists, as well as a pilot, a singer, a banker and a police deputy superintendent. They had their own ambitions and careers, and, of course, we were all guests of Pakistan’s elected female leader.

Benazir Bhutto, a brilliant and striking woman then in her midforties, was born into a prominent family and educated at Harvard and Oxford. Her father, Zulfikar Ali Bhutto, Pakistan’s Populist Prime Minister during the 1970s, was deposed in a military coup and later hanged. After his death, Benazir spent years under house arrest. In the late 1980s, she emerged as head of his old political party. Bhutto was the only celebrity I had ever stood behind a rope line to see. Chelsea and I were strolling around London during a holiday trip in the summer of 1989. We noticed a large crowd gathered outside the Ritz Hotel, and I asked people what they were waiting for. They said Benazir Bhutto was staying at the hotel and was soon expected to arrive. Chelsea and I waited until the motorcade drove up. We watched Bhutto, swathed in yellow chiffon, emerge from her limousine and glide into the lobby. She seemed graceful, composed and intent.

In 1990, her government was dissolved over charges of corruption, but her party won again in new elections in 1993. Pakistan was increasingly troubled by rising violence and general lawlessness, particularly in Karachi. Law and order had deteriorated as the rate of ethnic and sectarian murders rose. There were also rampant rumors of corruption involving Asif Zardari, Bhutto’s husband, and supporters.

At the luncheon she hosted for me, Benazir led a discussion about the changing roles of women in her country and told a joke about her husband’s status as a political spouse.

“According to newspapers in Pakistan,” she said, “Mr. Asif Zardari is de facto Prime Minister of the country. My husband tells me, ‘Only the First Lady can appreciate it’s not true.’”

Bhutto acknowledged the difficulties faced by women who were breaking with tradition and taking leading roles in public life. She deftly managed to refer both to the challenges I had encountered during my White House tenure and to her own situation.

“Women who take on tough issues and stake out new territory are often on the receiving end of ignorance,” she concluded.

In a private meeting with the Prime Minister, we talked about her upcoming visit to Washington in April, and I spent time with her husband and their children. Because I had heard that their marriage was arranged, I found their interaction particularly interesting.

They bantered easily together, and seemed genuinely smitten with each other. Only months after my trip, accusations of corruption against them grew more harsh, and in August 1996, Bhutto elevated her husband to a cabinet post. By November 5, 1996, she was ousted amid allegations that Zardari had used his position for personal enrichment.

He was convicted of corruption and imprisoned; she left her country with her children, under threat of arrest and unable to return.

I have no way of knowing whether the accusations against Bhutto and her husband are well-founded or baseless. I do know that during the short time I was there, I was drawn into a world of unfathomable contrasts. Nasreen Leghari and Benazir Bhutto came from the same culture. President Leghari put his wife in purdah while Ali Bhutto sent his daughter to Harvard. An arranged marriage seemed to produce genuine delight. Pakistan, India, Bangladesh and Sri Lanka have all been governed by women elected as Presidents or Prime Ministers in a region where women are so devalued that some newborn girls may be ‘ killed or abandoned.

I wanted to know what would become of the future generation of ‘! educated Pakistani women, some of whom Chelsea and I met the next “ day at the Islamabad College for Girls, Benazir Bhutto’s high school. Many of their concerns were familiar to the mother of a curious and enterprising young woman. They worried aloud about how they could change their society and where they might fit into it as highly educated women.

“You’re never going to find the ideal man,” said one girl. “You have to be a lot more realistic.”

Her voice would stay with me. She was of a culture where choice in marriage was rarely the woman’s. Yet she knew enough of the realities of modern life to contemplate the uncertain options of women everywhere.

I continued that conversation about women’s choices when I visited Lahore University of Management Science, where women were studying business. The program was supported in part by Pakistani Americans who understood that Pakistan’s economy and standard of living would never advance unless women were educated and played an active role. No one could doubt the success of South Asian immigrants in America, where they flourished in business and the professions.

Their successes in our country illustrated the importance of a well-functioning noncorrupt government, a free market, a society that values individuals, including girls and women, a culture that tolerates all religious traditions and an environment free of violence and war.

No country in South Asia has yet achieved all these conditions. Men and women who could have contributed to their own country’s advancement are instead contributing to ours. Sri Lanka, for example, where I ended my trip, had a high rate of literacy for both men and women, but the country had lived in terror for years because of a guerrilla insurgence by the Hindu Tamil Tigers against the majority Buddhist Sinhalese population and government. The relentless campaign of terror undermined its potential for economic growth and foreign investment.

Before we left Islamabad, Chelsea and I paid a visit of respect to the Saudi-built Faisal Mosque, named for the former Saudi King and one of the largest mosques in the world. With its nearly three-hundred-foot tall minarets and magnificent canopy, this modem mosque was one of more than 1,500 the Saudi government and private citizens were building on six continents. We removed our shoes and padded around the vast prayer halls and courtyards designed to accommodate up to one hundred thousand believers.