Rodham

by Curtis Sittenfeld

  To speculate about the consequences of Donald running was a parlor game. To take steps to make it happen—to try, via layers of surrogates, to persuade him to enter the race—was a gambit I couldn’t see risking. Just to consider it made my pulse quicken. I heard a knock at the door and my security agent Darryl’s voice saying, “Ma’am, Veronica and Suzy are here for hair and makeup.”

  “Send them in,” I called.

  * * *

  —

  The text was from Nick Chess: What the fuck is Bill thinking?

  I had reconnected with Nick at our twenty-fifth law school reunion in 1997—not attended by Bill because he was in the class behind us—by which point I was well into my first Senate term and Nick had left politics, moved from Arkansas back to his hometown of Short Hills, New Jersey, and reinvented himself as an author of legal thrillers. In late 1992, a few months after Bill had ended his presidential campaign, Nick had written a soul-searching and disillusioned essay for The New York Times Magazine about working for Bill, and Nick had told me at the reunion that they hadn’t spoken since.

  It was inordinately satisfying to receive Nick’s text because of how upside down the campaign coverage seemed—because, frankly, I kept reading news articles and watching TV clips and wondering What the fuck is Bill thinking?

  I called Nick, and when he answered, he said, “With the caveat that when I worked for Bill I turned a blind eye to a lot of things as a survival strategy, I’d love to help you however I can.”

  “Does the name Vivian Tobin ring a bell for you?”

  “Yes.”

  “Do you think it’s true?”

  Nick hesitated. “Probably?”

  “Do you think it was an isolated event or a pattern?”

  “I really, really want to think it was an isolated event.”

  I sighed and said, “Even given everything, so do I.”

  “It’s odd,” Nick said, “because do you remember when you and I overheard Bill talking about watermelons in the law school lounge? Before I knew him, I thought he was a horse’s ass. Then I got to know him and decided he was truly exceptional. Then I went to work for him and decided, no, I was right the first time—he’s a horse’s ass. Now, seeing his smug face onscreen while he jeopardizes Democratic unity for some kind of hand job from the media, all I can think is that this is an invitation for a Republican spoiler.”

  “Would you mind having all of that engraved on a marble tablet and sending it to me?” I said. “Just to look at for my own enjoyment.”

  “I’ll make one for each of us,” Nick said.

  * * *

  —

  Back in Chicago, Greg came to my apartment. “I know this might sound like it’s out of left field,” I said, “but what if we try to convince Donald Trump to enter the race so he’ll take attention away from Bill?”

  “Wow,” Greg said. “That is not what I thought you were about to say.”

  “Obviously not in a way that’s traceable to our people. Setting aside the feasibility, what would happen if one day everyone wakes up and Donald has announced?”

  “I’ve heard his threats to run, of course, but I’ve never bought it. I want to check something.” Greg typed on his phone then said, “Yeah, this is what I thought—historically, he’s given more money to Dems than Republicans, but since 2011, he’s given more to Republicans. Just $8,500 to Dems and $630,000 to Republicans.”

  “I assume he’s an empty vessel politically. My goal here is to fight fire with fire. Fight a rich blowhard with a rich blowhard.”

  “Interesting factoid,” Greg said. “My understanding is Trump wasn’t actually rich until he became a reality TV star. His real estate deals are smoke and mirrors.”

  “Does this idea seem like a nonstarter to you?”

  “I like how conniving it is, I’ll give you that. But I worry it involves too many factors beyond our control. And if it gets back to Obama, you can kiss his support goodbye.”

  “Here’s a question for you—is there some kind of feud between Bill and Donald? I saw Donald on TV the other day, and he seemed very anti-Bill.”

  “How gratifying.” But then Greg sighed. “This makes me nervous.”

  “At least it’s an interesting thought experiment, huh?”

  “Much like the question of whether you’d run for Senate in ’92,” Greg said. “Remember how that turned out?”

  “It turned out gloriously,” I said.

  * * *

  —

  In the morning, I woke up to a text from Theresa: Just a heads-up Gwen Greenberger wrote op-ed for today’s Wash Post endorsing Kamala Harris. To my surprise, tears filled my eyes. Kamala Harris, whom I’d met just once, was the attorney general of California, had announced her Senate bid in January, and was of black and Indian descent.

  In early 1992, a week after I’d told Gwen Greenberger that I was running for Senate but before I’d publicly announced, I’d received a long letter from her. I implore you to reconsider your decision to oppose Carol Moseley Braun in the primary, Gwen had written. This is an opportunity for you to help lift not only another woman but a Black woman. To compete against her is a betrayal of your principles and undermines your commitment to both racial advancement and feminism.

  Receiving this letter devastated me—there was no one whose opinion I respected more than Gwen’s—but it didn’t change my mind, for the reason I’d already conveyed to Gwen: Although I liked Carol, I just didn’t think she had a shot at beating Alan Dixon in the primary. I wrote back saying as much, and then I didn’t have contact with Gwen until almost a year later. My campaign literature and eventual ads prominently mentioned my time with the National Children’s Initiative, but I neither asked for nor received any financial or verbal support from Gwen. When Deb at the Victoria Project suggested that we ask Gwen to cohost a fundraiser for me in Washington, I explained that I didn’t feel I could. At various junctures during the campaign—when I won the primary, when I won the election—I’d thought I’d hear from Gwen; I’d hoped that the way events unfolded would vindicate my argument.

  But I was the one who initiated contact again; in December ’92, I sent a Christmas card to the Greenbergers along with another letter just for her. I’m so sorry that we never saw eye to eye on my Senate run, I wrote. The idea of moving to Washington (three weeks from now!) and not getting to see you on a regular basis breaks my heart. After I arrive, can I please take you out for lunch and express in person how important you are to me? I sincerely believe that our friendship transcends any political or personal disagreements.

  Gwen’s response was two typed sentences: Hillary, I see nothing more for us to discuss. I hope that your time in the Senate will serve to remind you of the ideals you embraced as a young woman.

  But I knew I’d run into both Gwen and Richard eventually, and about six weeks after I was sworn in, Gwen and I attended the same reception for a teachers’ federation. When I approached her, I deliberately didn’t hug her, but it seemed preposterous to pretend we didn’t know each other well. “You can’t avoid me forever,” I said in a friendly tone, and she looked at me with an expression of contempt that I had seen before on her face but never for me. “I certainly can,” she said. From then on, on the two or three occasions a year we were in the same place, I gave her a wide berth, and the same was true with Richard, though he’d at least acknowledge me with a nod. A few years later, I had the surreal experience of asking Gwen questions when she testified before the Senate Committee on Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions, of which I was a member. Gwen was acting as an expert witness prior to the reauthorization of the National School Lunch Program. I sat at the horseshoe-shaped dais and addressed her as “Dr. Greenberger”—more than one university had given her an honorary doctorate—and she sat behind the witness table and addressed me as “Senator Rodham.” I recalled driving with her to F
ayetteville twenty years earlier, feeling pulled between her and Bill; it would have been unfathomable if I’d been told that two decades later, my relationships with both of them would be somewhere between distant and nonexistent.

  As another ten years passed, the sting of my estrangement from Gwen decreased without ever disappearing; on a long drive during my first presidential campaign, I once told Theresa the story of my friendship with Gwen, thinking that doing so would be cathartic, but instead I felt a renewed sadness. A few days later, Theresa gave me a memoir she’d read by a black woman who had grown up attending private schools where almost all the other students were white, and who had eventually become the first black law partner at a firm in Manhattan. Though Theresa didn’t flag it, there was a passage where the woman described her difficulty having deep friendships with white women, how betrayed she’d feel by their casual comments that dismissed the complexity of race for her. I read the passage several times.

  Over the next decade, I continued to reassess the falling-out between Gwen and me. I was spurred partly by how Barack Obama’s election, superficial predictions aside, did not usher in a post-racial utopia, and I saw up close how he was treated with less respect than his predecessors; I was genuinely shocked when a Republican congressman from South Carolina shouted “You lie!” during a 2009 healthcare speech Barack gave during a joint session. I also was spurred by the rising attention to police shootings of unarmed black men and boys, and the way that more and more of such shootings were captured on cellphone cameras. After the 2013 fatal shooting of a sixteen-year-old black boy in the Fuller Park neighborhood of Chicago, I participated in a community dialogue hosted by Trinity United Church of Christ. A week later, I wrote to Gwen once more.

  I regret that back in 1992, when I called to tell you I was entering the Senate primary, I didn’t convey the news with greater sensitivity. At the time, I considered myself almost immune to racism, in part due to my work with you, and I thought that my dismissal of Carol’s candidacy was wholly unrelated to race. As the years have passed, I have come to see that almost nothing is wholly unrelated to race.

  I received no response, and I understood that I wouldn’t try again.

  It was too painful for me to read Gwen’s new piece in the Post. I started it, but I couldn’t get past the first few sentences. But the fact that it was 2015 and Kamala Harris would, if elected, be the first black female senator—I saw at last how this vindicated Gwen’s perception of my original Senate race more than my election vindicated mine.

  * * *

  —

  This time, Theresa and my campaign manager, Denise, along with Greg, were part of the discussion about trying to draw Donald Trump into the race. The meeting happened at my dining room table.

  “I see the logic,” Denise said. “Don’t think for a minute I don’t. But isn’t he a literal criminal? Like a contractor-stiffing slumlord?”

  “What if people take him seriously?” Theresa said. “And he gains actual supporters?”

  “That’s the point,” I said. “He steals from Bill’s base. Either way, whether he runs as a Democrat or a Republican.”

  A poll released the day before showed 34 percent of Iowa Democrats for Bill and 35 percent for me, with similar figures in New Hampshire. That is, the numbers were trending in the wrong direction.

  Greg cleared his throat. “Incidentally,” he said, “I found out why Trump doesn’t like Clinton. In 2011, Clinton was on Good Morning America, and he answered a question about Trump’s birther accusations by saying Trump is morally bankrupt. Then Bill goes, ‘And financially bankrupt, too, I hear.’ Trump lost his shit on Twitter.”

  “See?” I said. “Let them duke it out, and we stand back and watch.”

  Denise said, “I just wonder how Jeb Bush will shake things up.” Bush was expected to announce Wednesday, and was rumored to have already raised close to eighty million dollars.

  “Here’s the thing,” Greg said. “Who does it? Who recruits Trump?”

  We were all quiet, and then I said, “Maybe I do.”

  Greg said, “And this is consistent with your leave-no-fingerprints strategy how?”

  “What if Donald and I cross paths ostensibly by coincidence? On the tarmac at an airport, or I have a donor luncheon at one of his clubs on a day we know he’ll be there. I’m very careful with the language I use but very flattering to his ego.”

  “And then he turns around and tells the New York Post?” Denise said.

  “Would anyone believe him?” I asked.

  “But it’d be true,” Theresa said. “And presumably there’d be witnesses.”

  “Then I say he misunderstood me. Why on earth would I try to get Donald Trump to run?”

  “Let’s imagine for a minute that you succeed,” Greg said. “You convince him to run yet no one has a clue you did. Clinton and Trump are yelling at each other, and it becomes a three-ring circus that drowns out all other voices, including yours.”

  Was I in fact being hubristic? Had I lost my perspective, either abruptly or, after my previous campaigns, cumulatively?

  I said, “I don’t think Trump could last more than one debate, so he’s out by mid-August at the latest. By then he’d have done damage.”

  Greg said, “We can run polls. Mix in Trump’s name with other outsiders like Mark Cuban.”

  “You know what this reminds me of?” Theresa said. “Shooting the moon in hearts. Either winning becomes inevitable or you end up with twelve out of thirteen hearts and the queen of spades.”

  I glanced among them. “If all of you are convinced it’s a bad idea, I’ll drop it. But we need to throw out the rule book. I don’t want a replay of ’08.” There was an energy, a momentum, I had watched Barack Obama take from me, and it had felt disorienting, unpleasant, and unfamiliar. Now I was watching Bill Clinton do the same, and it again felt disorienting and unpleasant. But it did not feel unfamiliar.

  Greg sighed deeply. He said, “Men are such assholes.”

  * * *

  —

  Both Clyde and Theresa told me that my appearance on Hey From My Mom’s Basement, aka Hey FMMB, had been scheduled weeks earlier and not in reaction to the chanting. It was just a coincidence, but a serendipitous one, that the satellite radio show’s core audience was decidedly bro-ish, as was the host himself, a thirty-one-year-old comedian named Danny Danielson. The show enjoyed an average of 1.2 million listeners per episode, the vast majority of them white men between the ages of eighteen and thirty-four. In preparation for my interview, I listened to two earlier episodes, one in which Danielson interviewed a Hollywood actor and one in which he interviewed a fellow comedian, also male.

  Its name notwithstanding, Hey FMMB was not recorded in a basement, Danny Danielson’s mother’s or otherwise; it was recorded in an office on the second floor of a building in downtown Los Angeles. The show would air live as well as being recorded on video for YouTube.

  A producer introduced Danny Danielson and my team, and as we shook hands, Danny greeted me by saying, “Hey.” He wore a faded black T-shirt, jeans, and flip-flops, and the scent of pot wafted off him. In the studio, Danny and I sat facing each other across a table, mics in front of us, and the production engineer was visible through a window. Theresa, the only member of my staff in the studio, sat behind me in a chair against the padded wall. Danny and I donned headphones, and I dutifully recited what I’d eaten for breakfast—a vegetable omelet with hot sauce—so the engineer could adjust my levels.

  “Heyyyyyy, Basement Nation,” Danny said when the recording had started, and I wondered how stoned he was. “You might know her as the Cookie Monster. Today we’ve got Hillary Rodham on the show, but before we get to that, lemme tell you about some other cool stuff.” He was selling tickets to a live show in Austin, apparently, and then he touted a meal-kit service. Then, for the first time since we’d sat, he made eye co
ntact with me.

  “A lady president.” He paused. “It’s an oxymoron, right? Like jumbo shrimp? Or amicable divorce?”

  In an upbeat voice, I said, “The qualities necessary for leading our country are experience, preparedness, and an ability to listen. Neither gender has a monopoly on attributes like that. And I trust you know that women are or have been heads of state in lots of other countries, including Germany, England, India, and Liberia.”

  “Have you ever borrowed a tampon from Nancy Pelosi?”

  I honestly wasn’t sure if the members of my media team would have advised me to smile or if Danny was being more extreme than they’d expected. “You know, Danny,” I said, “Representative Pelosi knows how to work across party lines to get things done for the American people, and that’s something I’ve also spent a lot of time doing.”

  “Huh,” he said. “Do you braid each other’s hair?”

  Had Danny been this rude to the Hollywood actor or the other comedian? I didn’t think so. Coldly, I said, “That’s something we haven’t done.”

  “I dunno, maybe you should?” He widened his eyes, flared his nostrils, and smiled with closed downturned lips, and the expression seemed like an acknowledgment of the degree to which his performance had nothing to do with me and instead was for the benefit of his audience. In some ways, this had always been the case with entertainers and politicians alike, but in the current election cycle, with the dominance of social media, it felt truer than ever.