It was a hard call. Bill and I lay awake at night talking it over. The new plan no longer block granted Medicaid and food stamps and instead put more money into them, along with childcare, housing, and transportation for people moving from welfare to work. We hoped Bill’s administration would be able to fix some of the legislation’s problems in a second term and keep pressing to do more to help Americans lift themselves out of poverty. Ultimately, he decided to accept the bad with the good and sign the legislation into law.
Two of the loudest voices opposing the compromise plan belonged to Marian Wright Edelman and her husband, Peter, who was an Assistant Secretary of Health and Human Services. Marian wrote an impassioned op-ed in the Washington Post calling this the “defining moral litmus test” of Bill’s presidency. Peter resigned in protest. I respected Marian’s and Peter’s position—in fact, I expected no less from them—but it was painful to see one of the defining relationships of my life become strained.
There was never a full breach, and eventually we were drawn back together by the same shared passions that made us such close friends in the first place. Marian and I both threw ourselves into the fight to create the Children’s Health Insurance Program, which emerged out of the ashes of the Clinton administration’s failure to pass universal health care reform in 1993–1994. I learned a lot of lessons about what it takes to get things done in Congress, including how to work across the aisle and lean more effectively on outside allies like Marian. Those lessons paid off when CHIP became a bipartisan success story that continues to provide health care to millions of kids every year. Now Donald Trump proposes dismantling the program, which would be tragic.
In 1999, when I paid a visit to the Children’s Defense Fund’s farm in Tennessee for the dedication of a library in honor of the writer Langston Hughes, Marian and I went for a long walk around the grounds. It felt good to be back by her side. The next year, I watched with great pride as Bill awarded Marian the Presidential Medal of Freedom for her lifetime of advocacy.
Looking back, our disagreement over welfare reform was a testament to how deeply we both cared about policy—and to how different it is to be an advocate on the outside as opposed to a policy maker on the inside. What didn’t change, though, and what ultimately brought us back together, was the passion we shared for children.
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For me, it always comes back to children. The one core belief I’ve articulated more often and more fervently than any other in all my years in public life is that every child deserves the chance to live up to his or her God-given potential. I’ve said that line so many times, I’ve lost count. But the idea remains as powerful and motivating for me as ever. I continue to believe that a society should be judged by how we treat the most vulnerable among us, especially children, and that the measure of our success should be how many kids climb out of poverty, get a good education, and receive the love and support they deserve.
This has been a consistent through-line of my career, starting with my days with Marian at the Children’s Defense Fund, and my work as a law student on early childhood development at the Yale Child Study Center and on child abuse at Yale–New Haven Hospital. Maybe it goes back even further, to the lessons I learned from my mother about her own painful childhood. She went out of her way to help girls in our town who were in trouble, in need, or just looking for a friend, because she believed that every child deserves a chance and a champion. I came to believe that too, and in every job I’ve ever held, I’ve tried to be that champion. It’s a big part of why I ran for President and what I’d hoped to accomplish if I won.
I’m sure that in our hypercynical age, this sounds like just a lot of happy talk—the kind of thing politicians say when they’re trying to show their softer side. After all, who doesn’t love kids? Everybody professes to, even when their policies would actually hurt children. But I mean it. This is real for me.
Nothing makes me more furious than seeing kids get taken advantage of or mistreated—or not getting the opportunity, the support, the encouragement, and the security they need to succeed. You’ve already read about how hard it is for women in politics to express anger the way men do, and how I’ve struggled with the damned-if-you-do-damned-if-you-don’t double bind that presents. But for me, there’s always been an exception when it comes to children. I have zero patience for adults who hurt or neglect kids. My temper just boils over. That’s what sparked many of the big battles I’ve taken on in my career.
For example, I fought so hard for health care reform in the nineties in part because of some children I met at a hospital in Cleveland. The kids all had preexisting conditions, so their families couldn’t get insurance. One father of two little girls with cystic fibrosis told me the insurance company said, “Sorry, we don’t insure burning houses.” He pointed to his girls with tears in his eyes and said, “They called my little girls burning houses.” His words nearly knocked the wind out of me. And the thought of those kids kept me going through every stumble and setback, until we finally convinced Congress to pass CHIP.
I had a similar experience early in 2016, when I read a story in the newspaper about the water crisis in Flint, Michigan. An alarming number of children were sick with lead poisoning, apparently because state authorities had failed to properly test or treat the water supply. I spent years as First Lady and as a Senator working to reduce the danger to kids from lead paint poisoning, which threatens the health of hundreds of thousands of young children across our country. But I’d never even heard of anything like what was happening in Flint.
The city used to be a thriving center for auto manufacturing, but, as vividly documented in Michael Moore’s 1989 film Roger & Me, the city was slowly hollowed out by plant closings and job losses. By 2013, the median household income was less than $25,000, and more than 40 percent of residents, most of them black, lived in poverty. In 2013 and 2014, the city’s emergency fiscal manager appointed by Michigan’s Republican Governor came up with a plan to save a little money: instead of buying drinking water from Detroit’s municipal system, as the city had long done, it would draw from the Flint River.
Almost immediately, families in town began to complain about the color, taste, and odor of the water, as well as rashes and other health concerns. Parents brought bottles of brown, smelly water to show officials. “This is what my baby is drinking,” they said. “This is what she bathes in.” They were ignored or given false assurances that the water was safe to drink. It was the cruelest kind of indifference. It turns out the Michigan Department of Environmental Quality never treated the river water with an anticorrosive agent that would have cost just $200 a day. That violation of federal law caused lead to leach from pipes into the city’s water. Children under the age of five years old are the most vulnerable to lead poisoning, which can irreparably harm brain development and cause learning and behavioral problems. In Flint, thousands of kids may have been exposed, and the rate of lead poisoning diagnosed among children nearly doubled.
For two years or so, the state government hardly did anything about the problem. It wasn’t until a group of outside doctors performed their own testing and exposed just how toxic the water was that the public health crisis became national news. When I heard about it in January 2016, I was appalled. I asked members of my team to go to Flint right away and see if they could learn more. I also called the Mayor, Karen Weaver, and asked, “What can I do to help?” She was eager for anything that would put a spotlight on Flint and pressure on the Governor to finally help fix things.
So that’s exactly what I did. I raised a ruckus out on the campaign trail and on television, and called on the Governor to declare a state of emergency, which would trigger federal aid. Within a few hours, he did. That just made me more determined to keep banging the drum. At the end of the next Democratic primary debate, the moderator, Lester Holt, asked, “Is there anything that you really wanted to say tonight that you haven’t gotten a chance to say?” I jumped at the opportun
ity to tell a national audience about what was happening in Flint.
“Every single American should be outraged,” I said. “A city in the United States of America where the population which is poor in many ways and majority African American has been drinking and bathing in lead-contaminated water—and the Governor of that state acted as though he didn’t really care.” I was getting pretty worked up. “I’ll tell you what,” I continued, “if the kids in a rich suburb of Detroit had been drinking contaminated water and being bathed in it, there would’ve been action.”
That comment may have made some people uncomfortable, but it’s hard to deny that what happened in Flint never would have happened in an affluent community like Grosse Pointe. State authorities would have rushed to help, and resources would have poured in. By the same token, the schools in wealthy Bloomfield Hills are never going to look like the schools in Detroit, where children sit in classrooms infested with rodents and mold, with ceilings caving in and the heat barely functioning. All across the country, there are examples of poor communities and communities of color living with dangerous levels of toxic pollution—and it’s always children who pay the biggest price.
After the debate, my campaign team was thrilled. Finally, they thought I was showing the kind of passion they believed voters wanted to see. For months, we had been losing the “outrage primary.” Bernie was outraged about everything. He thundered on at every event about the sins of “the millionaires and billionaires.” I was more focused on offering practical solutions that would address real problems and make life better for people. But now, in defense of those sick kids in Flint, I was the one full of righteous indignation.
A couple weeks later, I went to Flint to see what was happening for myself. It was even more heartbreaking than I imagined. Mayor Weaver and I sat down with a group of mothers in the pastor’s office of the House of Prayer Missionary Baptist Church. I noticed that the church’s water fountains were all marked “Out of Order,” a small reminder of what this town had been living with for the past two years.
Then the mothers told me their stories. One shared that she’d been pregnant with twins when she had a reaction to the poisoned water. “It was so horrible,” she said. First, she went to the emergency room with a rash. Then she had a miscarriage and needed a blood transfusion. It was emotionally devastating. What’s more, it bothered her that every resident had to pay a hefty fee to use the water in the first place. Imagine, she said, “paying for poison.”
“I have seizures now. That’s something I didn’t have before,” another mom told me, fighting back tears. “Our lives have been just so damaged.”
“Our conversations are not about birthdays anymore. They’re not about swimming lessons,” said a third mother. “They’re about hospital visits and going to the ER.”
One mom, Nakiya, introduced me to her adorable six-year-old son, Jaylon. He was scampering around us, taking pictures with a phone, smiling from ear to ear. Nakiya told me he’d been exposed to high levels of lead and was now having trouble in school. All I wanted to do was scoop Jaylon up in my arms, hold him tight, and promise that everything was going to be okay. Later, after speaking to the church congregation, I found Nakiya and Jaylon again. Barb Kinney, our campaign photographer, asked if he’d like to try out her fancy Nikon camera. Jaylon’s eyes got big as flashbulbs, and he nodded his head. Soon he was snapping shots like a pro.
Before we left, I gave Jaylon a big hug. But I couldn’t promise that everything would be okay or that the problems in Flint would go away anytime soon. In fact, I was worried that Republicans in Michigan and Washington still weren’t taking the crisis seriously.
I wanted to do more to help. The people of Flint couldn’t wait for the next election. They certainly couldn’t wait for the Revolution. They needed change right away. “The Mayor said something that struck me,” I told a few local leaders. “Rather than have people come in from the outside, let’s hire people from the inside. Every church could be a dispensing station or an organizing hub.” We made plans to keep in touch.
As soon as I got on the plane, I turned to Maya. I was burning with frustration over what I’d seen. “How could this have happened?” I fumed. “It’s criminal! We’ve got to do something about it.” Over the next several weeks, we worked with Mayor Weaver, local pastors, the community college, the NAACP, and others to line up support and funding for a new public-private partnership that hired unemployed young people to deliver clean water to families who needed it. Chelsea made two visits of her own and helped launch the Mayor’s program. People from across the country also answered the call to help. Hundreds of union plumbers arrived to install water filters for free. Students at universities all over the Midwest raised funds for clean water deliveries. A kindergartner in New Hampshire, who lost his first tooth and received $5 from the tooth fairy, told his parents he wanted to donate it “so those little kids can have water.” His mom was so proud, she sat down right away and wrote me a letter about it.
The situation in Flint is still dire. It’s heartbreaking and outrageous. This is not something that should ever happen in America, period. It’s lousy governance and shameful politics at their worst. It took until the end of 2016 for Congress to agree on a relief package. Most of the city’s thirty thousand lead-based water pipes have yet to be replaced, forcing residents to continue to rely on bottled and boiled water. Five state officials, including the head of Michigan’s health department, have been charged with involuntary manslaughter. Meanwhile, the schools are still inadequate, there aren’t enough jobs, and too many children go to bed hungry.
This still infuriates me. But I do take some comfort in the compassion and generosity that many Americans showed when they learned about the crisis. One of the most rewarding parts of running for President was getting to see that spirit up close, in a million ways. For example, one day in September 2015, I held a town hall meeting in Exeter, New Hampshire. One of the residents who stood up to ask a question was a ninth-grade teacher, in the classroom for thirteen years, asking how we can help kids from low-income families find more opportunities for summer enrichment. Then a young woman stood up. She was just back from a year of working in a middle school in the Watts section of Los Angeles, through the AmeriCorps national service program. Next was someone who works with young survivors of commercial sexual exploitation and trafficking. Then a twenty-two-year veteran of the Navy with a son on active duty in the Marine Corps. One after another, these Americans asked me their questions, and each of them had his or her own extraordinary story of service and giving back to the community. That’s part of what I love about America. Those people in Exeter, and everyone who lent a hand to help out in Flint, are examples of how real change happens. Progress comes from rolling up your sleeves and getting to work.
To me, Flint was so much more than something to rail about on the campaign trail, even if outrage is good politics. And in this case, it’s possible that it wasn’t good politics. I don’t know if my advocacy for the heavily African American community of Flint alienated white voters in other parts of Michigan, but it certainly didn’t seem to help, as I lost the state narrowly in both the primary and the general election. Either way, that’s not what it was about for me. There were real live kids to help. Kids like Jaylon. And as I learned from Marian Wright Edelman nearly a half century ago, there’s nothing more important than that.
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Marian had one more lesson to teach me. In the dark days immediately following November 8, 2016, when all I wanted to do was curl up in bed and never leave the house again, Marian sent me a message. Come back to CDF, she said. The Children’s Defense Fund was hosting a celebration in Washington for an inspiring group of kids who had beaten the odds, thriving despite poverty, violence, and abandonment. Before the election, Marian had asked me to deliver the keynote. Now she wanted me to know that it was even more important that I come.
It was hard to imagine giving a speech so soon after conc
eding the election. But if there was anyone who knew how to pick herself up, get back on her feet, and get back to work, it was Marian. She’d been doing it all her life and helping the rest of us do it too. For decades, I’d heard Marian say, “Service is the rent we pay for living.” Well, I decided, you don’t get to stop paying rent just because things don’t go your way.
So there we were, on November 16, together again at the Children’s Defense Fund. Marian stepped to the podium, and talked about our long partnership and all we’d done together to lift up children and families. Then she pointed to her two granddaughters sitting in the audience and said, “Because of all the paths she’s paved for them, one day soon your daughter or my daughter or our granddaughters are going to sit in that Oval Office, and we can thank Hillary Rodham Clinton.” I wanted to cry and curse and cheer all at the same time.
To leave the world a bit better, whether by a healthy child, a garden patch, or a redeemed social condition; to know even one life breathed easier because you lived. This is to have succeeded.
—attributed to Ralph Waldo Emerson
Sweating the Details
“The decisions a Commander in Chief makes can have a profound and lasting impact on all Americans, but none more so than the brave men and women who serve, fight, and die for our country.” That was Matt Lauer introducing NBC’s “Commander in Chief Forum” from the deck of the aircraft carrier U.S.S. Intrepid on September 7, 2016. I was standing just offstage listening to his introduction, nodding my head.
What Happened Page 21