Chelsea, fourteen now, listened in fascination, pausing from her work at a large table on a three-dimensional jigsaw puzzle of the White House. Periodically the adults would join her, trying to fit pieces together.
At first, Hillary remained almost silent as Houston, at Williamson’s direction, encouraged a dialogue about personal goals and strengths. Bill, however, from the beginning of the weekend, seemed much more willing to open up. Though Houston had studied psychology extensively, she rejected the term “psychologist” for herself, preferring to say she was “a midwife of human capacity, an evocator, a lifelong student of development in its various stages and types.” Once Bill got going for Houston on what he and Hillary and the administration were trying to do, and the problems they were up against, Hillary gradually became more engaged. She spent a good deal of time walking and talking with Mary Catherine and Jean, away from the others. Later, she remarked on the contrasts between the two women, comparing Bateson’s soft-spokenness and plain dress to the flamboyant manner of Houston, who draped herself in multicolored shawls and capes, and tended to dominate a room physically and in conversation—quoting from literature, reciting snippets of poetry, citing historical and scientific detail, and displaying an outsized sense of humor. Hillary was becoming increasingly convinced that these two women could help her find a way toward better communicating her vision: they were “experts in two subjects of immediate importance to me”: writing books and traveling through South Asia and Africa, where Hillary was scheduled to visit in a few months.
At one point, Houston asked Bill what his vision for the country was, and how it fit with the best aspects of his character.
He responded that he wanted to do everything he could for the country and its citizens—that was the goal of his plan for economic recovery, combined with programs to improve health and educational services, and equal opportunities for all Americans. But he was frustrated. The election results had left him feeling both rejected and trapped. He’d gotten beat up by the Republicans, who had done a better job at getting their message right. At the moment, he seemed fixated on Gingrich. “He respected him and worried what Gingrich was doing in his orchestration of all those young Republicans” who had been elected in November. Gingrich was his biggest obstacle, he said; he also talked about Ken Starr, though far less extensively or meaningfully. Houston said she told him, “I think you have the wrong focus. Starr is much more the problem than Gingrich.”
BOTH BATESON and Houston were shocked at how fragile and confused Hillary seemed: “battered…tormented” (noted Houston), lacking her customary confidence in herself, clearly exhausted—reaching out for some help, and settling on a course of making things better through prayer, travel, and writing. When Houston asked Hillary some of the same questions she had asked Bill, the first lady had hardly responded.
Later Hillary would write about summoning the strong voices inside oneself of parents, mentors, and teachers whose messages of encouragement and care helped children grow into confident, capable adults able to weather the inevitable storms of a lifetime. But at this juncture Hillary seemed depleted even of those voices.
The one voice she seemed to identify with was Eleanor Roosevelt’s. Eleanor had gone through some of the same trials and experiences—including the kind of opprobrium Hillary had been subjected to, said the first lady. She was intrigued that Houston, who was ten years older than herself, had known Eleanor. Houston’s father, Jack, a gag writer for George Burns, Bob Hope, and Henny Youngman among others, had supplied occasional jokes for FDR’s speeches, and, on half a dozen occasions as a teenager, she’d been to Eleanor’s house on the Upper East Side of Manhattan; during her tenure as U.S. ambassador to the United Nations under President Truman, Eleanor brought together young people, including Houston, to talk about their interests in international affairs.
Hillary, in her fourth week in the White House, had spoken at a dinner in Manhattan to raise funds for a statue of Eleanor Roosevelt, to be erected nearby at the entrance of Riverside Park. “I thought about all the conversations I’ve had in my head with Mrs. Roosevelt this year, one of the saving graces that I have hung on to for dear life,” said Hillary in her remarks. In these “conversations,” she looked to Eleanor for guidance, encouragement, and insight. Among the questions she had sought Eleanor’s answers to were, “How did you put up with this?” and “How did you go on day to day, with all the attacks and criticisms that would be hurled your way?”
Houston told Hillary that, like Eleanor, she was being made to suffer for functioning as a woman in a métier that was too associated with men for her to be accepted without savage criticism and resistance. It was as if she were carrying the history of womankind on her back. But now Hillary was on the cusp of almost biblical opportunity, far greater than Eleanor’s because this was an era in which a lone figure like Hillary could break through on behalf of all women. But first she needed to find her voice, to promote her powerful message that transcended mere politics: a woman’s voice, speaking about children and families and principles and policies that would make the world a better place. And on this Jean and Mary Catherine promised they could help her, by shaping the book Hillary said she was about to begin writing. “I was essentially an editor; I’d written a whole lot of books,” Houston said. “My whole life has been devoted to pushing the membrane of the possible, to push the boundaries of human capacity.” Those books included The Varieties of Psychedelic Experience: The Classic Guide to the Effects of LSD on the Human Psyche, written with her husband; The Passion of Isis and Osiris, which used Egyptian myth as a modern “design for the marriage of body and soul, life and death, the tangible and the hidden” and Godseed: The Journey of Christ, in which, through “mythology, Jungian psychology, mysticism, anthropology, new science, and just plain creativity,” Houston suggested ways to “experience the Christ life.”
This was not exactly what Hillary had in mind for the book that came to be It Takes a Village—or Simon & Schuster, the publishing house that her representative, Bob Barnett, was already negotiating with—but there were many elements of Houston’s and Bateson’s experience and counsel that fit well with her objectives. Above all else, she was very comfortable in their presence. Here was another difference between Hillary and Bill: he encouraged people with different ideas than his own to challenge his perceptions; he did not want to be surrounded by sycophants. Hillary, however, was not comfortable being challenged, especially when she was going through a difficult period. She preferred massage, from familiar hands. The few people she trusted enough to seek advice from—and almost never advice of a personal nature—were almost all either worshipful of her or in essential agreement with her.
Whatever Houston and Bateson could contribute to the book, what they felt was most important was to encourage her to “act as if” all the attacks, reproof, and disparagement were not something she absorbed and bought into (as Jean had put it), to not let it erode her own belief in herself. Her faith in her own competence and abilities had been deeply shaken, they believed. Her defenses were so weak that “hostile messages” were taking root in her being. It was important that Hillary not believe she had become the person her critics claimed she was.
Within two weeks, the press was on to the Camp David weekend, gleefully tweaking details about the first family’s “convention of New Age guru authors.” The Washington Post took special note that “personal growth guru” Jean Houston “specialized in walking on hot coals as a demonstration of the power of positive thinking,” though not on this particular weekend. Bill Clinton was not amused. His press secretary repeatedly denied that he “lacks a sense of who he is as president and where he wants to go.” The same story in the Post noted that New Age guru-ism is mostly alien to Washington’s practical political culture. None of the stories, however, covered what was discussed. Nor were the reporters who wrote them cognizant of how vulnerable and desperate for answers Hillary was.
Dick Morris had told Hillary, just afte
r the elections in November 1994, that she needed to tell her own story and define her own values in formats that, as she later put it, “could be evaluated directly by people without being distorted or mischaracterized.” In December, she had written a retort in Newsweek to Newt Gingrich on the subject of child care, after he had advocated the “Dickensian” solution of building orphanages for children whose mothers could not take care of them, rather than placing them in foster homes.
Morris suggested Hillary take another page from Eleanor Roosevelt’s book—by writing a newspaper column in which she could present her opinions. Hillary needed redefining, but not another makeover by the Thomasons.
In February 1995 Hillary interviewed and approved the hiring of the person recommended by Simon & Schuster to “help prepare the manuscript” for her book project: Barbara Feinman, a Georgetown University professor of journalism who had previously written a political memoir with Congresswoman Marjorie Margolies-Mezvinsky, and done research for books written by Bob Woodward, Ben Bradlee, and this author. Feinman saw the initial part of her job as drawing out of Hillary material suitably dramatic and revealing to hold a reader’s interest. For the next eight months, when the first lady was in Washington, Hillary and Feinman worked most days side by side in the first lady’s office in the residence, usually a few hours a day. The process started with Feinman interviewing her and Hillary jotting her ideas on yellow legal pads. The book’s title was suggested by Feinman; Hillary had once used it in a speech. It came from a well-known African proverb, “It takes a village to raise a child.”
Hillary’s desk was neat, though not compulsively so, and she tended not to chitchat while she worked. Rather, she would come prepared with a book about policy or history that she would use to make a point. There was no doubting, as all those on the project would see in the next years, that Hillary was deeply affected by the plight of the poor generally, and poor children particularly, to the point that her eyes would tear up when she would talk about what she had seen in Africa or India, South Side Chicago or Appalachia.
Eventually there would be several circles of facilitators involved in processing the notes and the full pages that Hillary drafted: Feinman and Hillary’s Simon & Schuster editor, Rebecca Saletan; members of the Hillaryland staff, including speechwriters and her closest personal aides; *22 Bill, whom Hillary frequently consulted for anecdotes and family history (and whose opinion of the book she seemed to hold the most important during its writing); and, increasingly, Marianne Williamson and the New Age women.
IN FEBRUARY 1995, Hillary gave an interview to U.S. News & World Report that announced—if an announcement was necessary—that she was moving to the back seat. Her primary job, she said, was to be a helpmate, to assist her husband so that his administration would succeed. “My first responsibility, I think, is to do whatever my husband would want me to do that he thinks would be helpful to him,” she said. “It may be something of great moment, but more likely it’s just to kick back, have a conversation or even play a game of cards and just listen to him ruminate. I mean, whatever it takes to kind of be there for him, I think is the most important thing I have to do.” By her own implication she had gone from presidential partner to pinochle player.
Bill announced soon after that Hillary would make a five-nation trip to South Asia as an expression of American interest in the region and to improve the United States’ relationship with India and Pakistan. It was Hillary’s first extended trip overseas without Bill. It was not, she said, an attempt to improve her image after the debacle of her failed health care initiative and the election. “I wished I was so clever to think that up,” she said. “But actually, I was asked more than a year ago to go to that part of the world by the State Department.” Hillary was looking forward to meeting women from other cultures. Almost anything at this point would have been preferable to Washington, but the opportunity to highlight women’s and children’s issues in another region of the world was the timeliest and most welcome of respites. It was also an opportunity for Hillary to take a trip with Chelsea, now fifteen; they needed concentrated time together, to share “some of the last adventures of her childhood,” as Hillary put it.
Hillary rarely commences an undertaking without some idea of the destination, and members of her entourage sensed that she was already trying to find a new role for herself by going abroad and communing with other women. A few weeks earlier she had represented the United States at the United Nations World Summit for Social Development, in Copenhagen. Her address to the conference emphasized “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 words sounded rote at first, but there was more than the seed of an idea there.
On the first stop on her twelve-day South Asia tour, in Islamabad, she met the wife of Pakistan’s president, Nasreen Leghari, who lived in purdah, or isolation, so that men outside her immediate family would never see her. Hillary spent more time with the country’s elected leader, Prime Minister Benazir Bhutto.
Hillary, who had always been concerned with human rights and feminist struggles, was now thrust into a world where equality between the sexes was part of a larger cultural struggle, where men were often expected to make life-changing decisions on behalf of their wives. Going from the private visit with Leghari, where only female Secret Service agents could enter, to a luncheon with Bhutto, where invited guests included women who were bankers, academics, and other accomplished professionals, felt to Hillary like “being rocketed forward several centuries in time.” While Leghari’s wife lived in isolation, Bhutto had attended Harvard. Hillary was concerned with the fate of newborn girls in the region. She took note of the elemental contradictions: Pakistan, India, Bangladesh, and Sri Lanka all had had governments headed by women, yet women are held in such disregard in their cultures that newborn girls are sometimes killed or abandoned.
Chelsea and Hillary visited rural villages in Pakistan and celebrated at more formal state parties and dinners. Mother and daughter had consulted State Department officials about proper attire, and tried out local forms of dress. Hillary brought along plenty of scarves to cover her head in case they went to a mosque or into an area governed by religious tradition. She wanted to be respectful but she also bridled at how women’s lives were limited by stifling traditions and religious strictures. Pictures of the Clinton women in exotic plumage, on the backs of elephants, in palaces as well as in squalid villages and in small gatherings at schools, were integral to news coverage of the trip. In India, Chelsea swaddled babies at Mother Teresa’s orphanage, many of whom had been abandoned on the streets because they were female. Hillary said she was impressed by the determination of those struggling to support human rights. In Nepal, Muslim women were willing to come to a Hindu village where she was speaking in spite of personal risk. Hillary also wanted to hear what they had to say.
Amazing to her, she got on better with the press. Photographers and reporters on the journey saw her at ease, as a mother, as a woman among women, an emissary, and they took note of how the people she was visiting responded to her, and vice versa. Enormous respect and some emotion appeared to course in both directions. She was at once a revered celebrity, a powerful woman who came to listen to the plight of women in primitive and misogynist societies who would take that message back to America; but she also gave something back, an earnestness and a promise that this was not just another first lady going through the motions.
Women, children, and men waited on dusty rural roads to catch a glimpse of her, to hear her give a speech—even as she was sorting out in her own mind what she would like to accomplish.
While Hillary and Chelsea were in South Asia, Bill addressed the annual dinner of the Gridiron Club, at which the elite of the Washington press corps celebrated themselves and the people they covered, in skits and roas
ts. “The first lady is sorry she can’t be here tonight. If you believe that, I’ve got some land in Arkansas I’d like to sell you,” he said. Before Hillary left for her trip, she had recorded a five-minute satirical take on the movie Forrest Gump. At the touch of the play button, there sat Hillary on a park bench in front of the White House with a box of chocolates balanced on her lap. “My mama always told me the White House is like a box of chocolates,” she said. “It’s pretty on the outside, but inside there’s lots of nuts.” Later that night when Hillary and Chelsea called the president, he told them that the taped segment had received a standing ovation.
BY WAY OF forewarning, Gingrich had declared, “Washington just can’t imagine a world in which Republicans have subpoena power.” Now they had it. Hillary and Bill had no illusions that in the next two years leading up to the 1996 presidential election they faced open-ended investigation by congressional committees, chaired by the hungry opposition, in which their Arkansas past and the Clinton White House would be chewed over mercilessly. These investigations, in turn, would feed the inquiry of the new independent counsel, Kenneth Starr, whose long arm was already reaching into the White House for documents and information. Gingrich had said as many as twenty congressional subcommittees or special task forces might be mobilized to get at the “corruption” the Clintons had brought to Washington.
The Clintons felt all of this imposed a threat to Chelsea. As an adolescent it had been possible to keep her shielded from the devastating specificity of what was being said about her parents and their marriage, their morals, and their sexuality. At age fifteen, uncommonly bright, attending school with Washington’s most privileged children in a media-centric capital, her insulation was at an end.
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