Part 5 (1/2)
Like the Secret Service in the future, the staff at the governor's mansion would cower at the words of abuse--and occasionally dodge objects--that the Clintons hurled at each other.
But in the end, nothing happened. The basic deal remained intact.
The other women remained, on the outside, an enormous distraction and the source of great pain and immense risk, but ultimately used and discarded. Only Hillary was the first lady. Only Hillary had the ring. Only Hillary could count on a husband whose political instincts and abilities were so fine that his White House staffwould one day call him their ”racehorse.” Only by staying married could Hillary have a husband who could win power and would be willing to fully share power with her.
One constant of their relations.h.i.+p, from the early days in Arkansas to their most recent summer vacation on Long Island, is a devotion to reading history and biographies. Scattered among murder mysteries, light fare about Faith or self-improvement, is almost always the latest biography on Franklin, Eleanor, Jack, or Jacqueline.
They are steeped in history, often to a degree that is counter-productive. Bill, according to d.i.c.k Morris, consciously patterns his marriage after FDR's marriage to Eleanor Roosevelt, seeing in Hillary a wife who is his intellectual equal.
”Sunday-morning Clinton felt no hypocrisy in marrying Hillary Rodham,” Morris writes. ”Indeed, he probably saw marrying for brains as a notch above marrying for glamour as Kennedy had done. It mimicked more closely the behavior of his other role model, FDR, who betrothed to Eleanor but tarried with Lucy Mercer.”*38 Hillary, for her part, willingly plays the role of Eleanor, obsessing on her predecessor to the point of imaginary consultations with Eleanor in the White House. In return, she is given access to power and the ability to make decisions that Eleanor could only have wished for.
The morning after losing to Hammerschmidt, Bill Clinton cheerfully went about Fayetteville shaking hands, in effect campaigning for his next election.
For Bill, the campaign had been a strenuous workout, a chance to establish himself with voters and gear up for the next race, a statewide race he'd have to win.
For Hillary, it was a lesson on life in Arkansas and life with Bill Clinton. Years later, in the aftermath of Hillary's publicly revealed ”seance” with Eleanor Roosevelt's ghost, Hillary told the Was.h.i.+ngton Post, ”When the inevitable c.r.a.p comes, which it will, in anybody's life, and, not just once but several times, there is a cus.h.i.+on of capacity there, and there is a structure that gets you up in the morning.”*39 Part of that ”structure” is her religious belief, her ideological zeal, and her persistent identification with a former first lady and her travails. Another is the knowledge of what she gets out of the basic terms of the deal she has made.
Hillary worked out this deal with Bill, just as Eleanor and Franklin did after she learned of his numerous affairs as a rising young dandy in Was.h.i.+ngton.
Over time, the union between the Clintons became, as it did for the Roosevelts, a marriage of the mind, a political convenience for two ambitious people who inhabit--or often don't inhabit--the same bedroom. Of course, the Clinton marriage takes the equation to lengths that ultimately makes the comparison utterly untenable. Bill Clinton seems unable to contain his vociferous appet.i.tes, and repeatedly sublimates his presidency, his nation, his political party, and his family to his personal wants and needs. Hillary knows that he has done so, and knows that he will continue to do so. But she stays, and she supports him because she knows that he is her ticket to the fulfillment of her own equally intense needs. They are partners. They both know that if they are to survive--and to prevail--they will do so linked inseparably together.
FIVE.
VILLAGE SOCIALISM.
”The human spirit glows from that small inner light of doubt whether we are right, while those who believe with complete certainty that they possess the right are dark inside and darken the world outside with cruelty, pain, and injustice. Those who enshrine the poor or Have-Nots are as guilty as other dogmatists and just as dangerous.”
-- SAUL ALINSKY, RULES FOR RADICALS.
The president-elect, William Jefferson Clinton, and is wife arrived in the capital before the inauguration to attend a glamorous fund-raiser at the National Building Museum. But Hillary, not the president-elect, gave the keynote address. The evening and the cause were Hillary's. The fund-raiser was for the Children's Defense Fund (CDF).
In her quarter-century of attention to ”children's issues,” Hillary focused most on the subject of children's rights. She radiates enthusiasm when she speaks on the subject, yet she does so without a trace of Alinsky's inner doubt. ”There is no such thing as other people's children,” Hillary often tells her adoring crowds.*1 Another favorite quote of hers is from John Wesley: ”Do all the good you can, by all the means you can, in all the ways you can, at all the times you can, to all the people you can, as long as you ever can.”*2 To paraphrase her husband, it depends on the meaning of the word ”good.”
For Hillary, children are the levers by which one forces social change.
Hillary found an outlet for her social agenda in the CDF, and through her long a.s.sociation with its founder Marian Wright Edelman, a leading civil rights activist and longtime FOH. Edelman's group was well-funded, well-staffed, and well-connected long before one of its leading advocates became the first lady. Its donor base is generously sprinkled with Fortune 500 patrons.
In 1973 it dawned on Edelman that the ”country was tired of the concerns of the sixties. When you talked about poor people or black people, you faced a shrinking audience .... I got the idea that children might be a very effective way to broaden the base for change.”*3 A convenient, sympathetic, photogenic, and maleable cause--how perfect. Hillary agreed.
Edelman's great insight was to put children squarely in the front of almost every domestic policy debate. This is central to the CDF's mission and a marvelous marketing tool. Throughout the Carter, Reagan, and Bush years, the CDF used a combination of shrewd inside lobbying and outside activism to protect and expand the welfare state. The CDF has browbeaten lawmakers for such programs as Head Start or the nutrition program for Women, Infants and Children, as well as expanding welfare and public housing programs, guaranteed employment, and higher minimum wages.
When critics argued that America's welfare program was subsidizing illegitimacy and creating a culture of government-dependent poverty and victimhood, the CDF countered that any attempt to reduce the welfare state was a direct a.s.sault on children.*4 This kind of high-profile political warfare brought instant status to the CDF and Marian Wright Edelman.
Named after Marian Anderson, Edelman had earned her law degree at Yale, was the first African-American woman to pa.s.s the Mississippi bar, and was a hero of the civil rights movement, organizing voter registration drives and protests against segregation.
It was Edelman's husband, Peter, a former aide to Robert F. Kennedy, who first contacted Hillary after reading about her Wellesley commencement speech in Life magazine.
Later, as a Yale law student, Hillary read a profile of Marian Wright Edelman in Time magazine. In the spring of 1970, ”in one of those strange twists of fate that enters all our lives if we're open to hear and to see them,” Hillary recalled that she noticed that Edelman was returning to her alma mater to give a speech. Hillary was in the audience and experienced the kind of minor epiphany that seems to strike her with some regularity. ”I knew right away that I had to go to work for her.”*5 It was easy to see the attraction. By 1970 Marian Wright Edelman had become a central figure of the mythic left. She used her growing clout to establish the Was.h.i.+ngton Research Project, the forerunner of the CDF. Hillary secured a small civil rights grant to go work for her. As part of her summer job, she performed research for a Senate subcommittee chaired by Walter Mondale. She traveled to migrant labor camps and interviewed workers and their families, doc.u.menting the conditions and their effect on children.
Later, Hillary worked as a volunteer in family custody cases in New Haven. Hillary, by then living with the gregarious third-year law student who would become her husband, took a fourth year to study child development at the Yale Child Study Center. There she researched her now well-known legal writings on the rights of children for the Harvard Educational Review.
After Yale, but before she went to work on the House Judiciary Committee, Hillary moved to Boston to serve a stint as a lawyer for the CDF. She joined the CDF board in 1978, and eventually served as its chairman for six years.*6 To understand Hillary's politics today, it is not enough to review her resume and her rapid a.s.sent through the then-chic liberal advocacy groups. One must read her writings from this period. It is in these samplings from her past that Hillary finds a fully developed, albeit superficial, political philosophy. All of this was set before her husband's political ambitions forced her to retract, disguise, or repackage in more benign wrapping her radical critique of society and the family.
Marian Wright Edelman opened other doors for her bright young acolyte. She helped Hillary win a coveted research position with the Carnegie Council on Children. At the Carnegie Council, Hillary worked as a research a.s.sistant on a panel chaired by Yale psychology professor Kenneth Keniston. Kenneth Keniston opened up the world of social sciences and psychology to enrich Hillary's legal agenda.
Keniston ran the Yale Child Study Center and supervised Hillary's work drafting guidelines for abused children at the Yale New Haven Hospital. More importantly, Hillary a.s.sisted Keniston with several chapters of the Carnegie panel's report on children's rights, All Our Children. This report became a kind of compendium of left-wing, pie-in-the-sky wish list, one in which Keniston advocated a national guaranteed income, a universal ent.i.tlement state, and greatly expanded procedural rights for children. Issued in 1977, this report quickly became the conventional wisdom of the time, that adult life-style choices would inevitably create different kinds of families. Moreover, rather than resist this deconstruction of the American nuclear family, the report advocated that society had best find ways to encourage, supplement, and support single-parent families.
If anything, the Carnegie Council's report took a sanguine view of the rising divorce rate and single motherhood, a view that Vice President Dan Quayle would later a.s.sail in his ”Murphy Brown” speech.
What would matter in the future of children, the Carnegie Council stated, was not the family structure, but the larger village of teachers, pediatricians, and social workers who would socialize the task of raising, supporting, and nurturing children.
The time had come for society, we were told, to see the rearing of children as less of a parental task than as a social one. It was here that the full panoply of Hillary's beliefs can be seen in microcosm, from generous family leave to universal health care. Most utopian and ultimately insidious of all were the council's proposals to develop ”public advocates” who could intervene between parents and children on the latter's behalf, reducing parents to subunits of the state. There would even be ”child ombudsmen” who would represent the rights of children in public inst.i.tutions, helped by a new cla.s.s of public interest lawyers to advocate the rights of children.*7 Thus the parents would be subordinate to judges, social workers, and bureaucrats--the real experts in the raising of children.
Hillary, ever rigorous, explored the idea of children's rights to their utmost limits.
THE CHILDREN'S CRUSADE.
During the 1992 campaign, sympathetic journalists and campaign image-masters claimed that right-wing demagogues had grossly mischaracterized Hillary's academic writings on children. Columnist Eleanor Clift informed her Newsweek readers that ”The Republicans had great fun at their convention last month ridiculing Hillary Clinton as a radical feminist who promotes left-wing causes that undermine traditional family values.” She complained that Hillary was hysterically accused ”of comparing marriage to slavery, and of favoring the rights of children to sue their parents over such mundane matters as taking out the garbage. Clinton's critics say her husband may be a moderate, but that she has a secret liberal agenda and the Rasputin-like influence to implement it.”*8 Hillary, of course, was particularly anxious to put the Republican characterizations to rest. ”There is no way that anybody could fairly read the article and say I was advocating that children sue parents over taking the garbage out,” Hillary told Newsweek.*9 John Leo wrote in U.S. News and World Report that ”The Republican attempt to demonize Hillary Clinton is shameful.” Leo added, ”She is not a radical feminist. She did not say that marriage is like slavery or the Indian reservation system.”*10 These articles, and others like them, served as a firebreak against further criticism.
Hillary completed her image-makeover on children's issues as first lady with the 1996 publication in her name of It Takes a Village.
The book was breezy, folksy, and moderate in tone, vacuous, but middle of the road on substance, stressing the importance of the larger community, of adults taking responsibility for child rearing.
It Takes a Village was seasoned with Tipperesque critiques of Hollywood culture and moralistic quotes from Bill Bennett before the Christian Coalition.
The 1992 campaign criticism of Hillary as a dangerous ideologue is now long forgotten, swept away with all the campaign bunting and failed rhetoric of President Bush's unfocused and discursive reelection campaign. But in fact, a careful reading of her work reveals a not-ready-for-primetime Hillary as radical as the Republicans said she was. Hillary's writings reveal a leftist ideologue, dedicated to centrally directed social engineering, dismissive of the traditional role of the family, and interested in children primarily as levers with which to extract political power.
”The phrase children's rights is a slogan in search of a definition,”
she declared in the opening sentence of her opus on the subject in a 1973 issue of the Harvard Educational Review. That term ”does not yet reflect any coherent doctrine regarding the status of children as political beings,” she said. She started with the unremarkable proposition that children already had limited rights as parties in lawsuits, as legatees under wills, as intestate successors. Older children had additional legal rights based on some recognition of their growing competence--including the right to drive, to drop out of school, to vote, to work, to marry.
Between the late 1940s and late 1960s, successive rulings by the U.S.
Supreme Court extended procedural protections afforded adults (against self-incrimination, the standard of reasonable doubt) to children in juvenile court. The court also ruled in favor of limited First Amendment rights for children, allowing them to refuse to salute the flag if it offended their religious beliefs, and protecting their right to wear black arm-bands to protest the Vietnam War.
But, Hillary argued, the only way to give children real power was to make their needs and interests enforceable as const.i.tutional rights.
Her solution was to use the alchemy of the law, to melt all arguments in the furnace of adversarial argument, and, as she saw it, to separate the base from the pure.
She made several a.s.sertions that still have the power, many years later, to cause jaws to drop--statements that reveal the contours of Hillary's better world.
She writes: ”The pretense that children's issues are somehow above or beyond politics endures and is reinforced by the belief that families are private, nonpolitical units whose interests subsume those of children.”
Charting the fallacies in this one sentence is quite an undertaking, but a useful one. The word ”pretense” indicates that somehow there is a conspiracy at work in the treatment of children, which the rest of the sentence indicates is somehow political. In a condescending, academic way, she snidely ridicules the belief that families are ”private, nonpolitical units” indicating that she does, in fact, reject the notion that the family is a traditional inst.i.tution that has arisen organically and stood the test of time. In her view, families are essentially low-level public ent.i.ties dedicated to explicitly political ends. If they are subunits, what is the larger unit but the state, its public programs and prevailing ideology?