Part 15 (2/2)

'EVERYTHING YOU DO FOR BILL'.

The Juanita Broaddrick interview with NBC's Lisa Meyer was a story, to push every feminist b.u.t.ton. As a ”police rape,” it fit the feminist need to seek out the ideological underpinnings of a crime.

It was the perfect example of how women at that time were reluctant to charge rape, fearing that cross-examination would reveal their most intimate and embarra.s.sing secrets. We have long been a.s.sured by feminists that women do not lie about such things.

But the very same feminists who had so savagely denounced Clarence Thomas for allegedly making off-color remarks to and asking for a date with an employee--an employee who nevertheless followed him to his next job--were willing to give Clinton the benefit of the doubt.

Susan Estrich, herself a rape victim, pointed out on Crossfire with me that the statute of limitations had long pa.s.sed, and that absent any evidence, we were just back to the he said/she said, in which case Clinton had to be considered innocent.

The Broaddrick rape story was met with glacial silence and indifference by Barbara Boxer, Gloria Steinem, and the country's leading feminist icon, Hillary Rodham Clinton.

It is highly doubtful that Hillary believes that her husband is innocent, not with a history like his.

After all that has come to light about Clinton's telling Paula Jones to ”kiss it,” the groping of Kathleen rilley in the presidential study, and the exploitation of an immature and unsteady White House intern, can Hillary be free of doubts that her husband is a rapist?

Only Andrea Dworkin, a radical feminist, seemed willing to demand that Hillary throw away the s.h.i.+eld she had erected for Clinton.

”What Hillary is doing is appalling,” she said. ”Being a feminist has to mean you don't use your intellect and your creativity to protect a man's exploitation of women.”*13 But Hillary's betrayal was of more than a mere abstraction like feminism. It was a betrayal of humanity for power. In an interview with Matt Drudge in August 1999, Juanita Broaddrick claimed that she met Hillary Rodham Clinton at a political rally in the spring of 1978, just weeks after Mrs. Broaddrick was allegedly raped by the then-Attorney General Bill Clinton.

According to Mrs. Broaddrick, Hillary ”caught me and took my hand and said, 'I am so happy to meet you. I want you to know that we appreciate everything you do for Bill.'... I started to turn away and she held onto my hand and reiterated her phrase--looking less friendly and repeated her statement--'Everything you do for Bill.'”

ELEVEN.

THE PHILOSOPHER QUEEN.

”Power is the very essence, the dynamo of life. It is the power of the heart pumping blood and sustaining life in the body.”

-- SAUL ALINSKY, RULES FOR RADICALS.

GETTING SPIRITUAL.

”You know, I'm beginning to think there must be more to life than this greasy pole, this rat race,” Hillary once said to friends in the late 1970s on a vacation to England with Bill to meet his old Oxford friends.*1 Whatever their private compromises with themselves and their consciences, the Clintons continue to project a robust religious life. They wors.h.i.+p together in Foundry United Methodist Church, where J. Philip Wogaman, a social-ethics professor and liberal pastor, can be counted on to address topics in such a way as to cause the Clintons no embarra.s.sment.

Hillary's turn to the spiritual intensified in her first year as first lady, when Hugh Rodham suffered a ma.s.sive stroke and slipped into a three-week coma.

The day before his death, Hillary gave the commencement address at the University of Texas, where she made a famous speech on America's ”crisis of meaning and spiritual vacuum,” and our national ”sleeping sickness of the soul.”

”We are at a stage in history, in which remolding society is one of the great challenges facing all of us in the West. If one looks around the Western world, one can see the rumblings of discontent, almost regardless of the political systems, as we come face to face with problems that the modern age has dealt us.”

These problems, she suggested, were the result of a ”lack of meaning”

in individual lives and society. She positioned herself between a market economy, ”which knows the price of everything, but the value of nothing” (an unintended description of the Clinton White House approach to the use of the presidency to raise reelection funds), and the ”state or government, which attempts to use its means of acquiring tax money, of making decisions to a.s.sist us in becoming a better, more equitable society .... Neither is adequate to address the challenge confronting us.” Then she cut to the chase.

”We need a new politics of meaning. We need a new ethos of individual responsibility and caring.” This could be attained, she suggested, as millions of individuals ”reject cynicism, as they are willing to be hopeful once again, as they are willing to take risks to meet the challenges they see around them, as they truly begin to try to see others as they wish to be seen and to treat them as they wish to be treated, to overcome all of the obstacles we have erected around ourselves that keep us apart from one another, fearful and afraid, not willing to build the bridges necessary to fill our spiritual vacuum.”

It was a stylistic and conceptual return to her Wellesley commencement address of 1969. As Michael Kelly pointed out in his astute ”Saint Hillary” piece in the New York Times Magazine, the speeches share ”all the same traits: vaulting ambition, didactic moralizing, intellectual incoherence and the adolescent a.s.sumption that the past does not exist and the present needs only your guiding hand to create the glorious future.”

Many were appalled by Hillary's reference to Lee At.w.a.ter's deathbed regrets--printed in Life magazine--that he had spent his short life as a campaign attack dog for the right. It was a perfect Hillary trope, to weave an attack on an opponent and his ideology into a speech that seemed to have a self-confessional tone.

”Never mind that the limits of materialism are not best learned on somebody else's dime,” objected the New Republic's Leon Wieseltier, certainly no apologist for At.w.a.ter, Reagan, or the right. ”The politics of meaning turns out to be, negatively, just an ornate rejection of Reaganism. But it is historically incorrect, and politically foolish, to mistake Reaganism for meaninglessness.”*2 Perhaps more worrying was Hillary's belief that something was so wrong in Western society that it required not reform, but a thorough ”remolding.” Re-creation, of course, from the top--by planners, reformers, experts, and the intelligentsia. Reconstruction of society by those smart enough and altruistic enough to make our decisions for us. People like Bill and Hillary Clinton. Hillary, throughout her intellectual life, has been taken by this idea, which is the totalitarian temptation that throughout history has led to the guillotine, the gulag, and the terror and reeducation camps of the Red Guard.

The phrase ”politics of meaning” was coined by Michael Lerner, who launched the magazine Tikkun as a Jewish, liberal, intellectual counterweight to Norman Podh.o.r.etz's Jewish, neo-conservative Commentary, one of the most respected and influential intellectual magazines in the country. But it doesn't stack up. To read a copy of Tikkun is to wade through a pool of self-indulgent New Age twaddle and psychobabble indistinguishable from Hillary's worst speeches or It Takes a Village.

Lerner's book, The Politics of Meaning, can readily be sized up by the subt.i.tles of its chapters, ”Give Men a Chance: Understanding h.o.m.ophobia and the Desperate Struggle to Prove One's Manliness,” or ”Overcoming Patriarchy as Family Support,” or ”The Tyranny of Couples.” At his wedding to his first wife, Lerner cut into a cake with the inscription ”Smash Monogamy.” The couple exchanged rings hammered out of metal from downed U.S. military aircraft.*3 Lerner, who liked to invoke the phrase ”Hillary and I believe,”

turned out to have an ideological bottom line in his dealings with the Clintons. As an activist whose left-wing pedigree is una.s.sailable, Lerner soon lost interest in the Clintons when he saw that polling and focus groups were leading into ”triangulation,”

welfare reform, and spending cuts.

After Kelly's lacerating ”Saint Hillary” piece appeared in the New York Times Magazine --and after another devastating review of Hillary's ”politics of meaning” came from columnist Charles Krauthammer--Hillary withdrew from Lerner, and referred to his visits to the White House as mere ”courtesy calls.” Lerner, unlike most people who are used as Clinton fodder, turned on her.*4 Lerner criticized the Clintons' apologetic triangulation. ”So here was one of the most powerful men in the world telling the rest of us that he did not have enough power to pursue his principles, and that instead he must watch out for himself. And this, sad to say, was the same man to whom the rest of the world had listened when he told us in 1992 that we as a community could move beyond self-interest to fight for a common vision of mutual caring.”*5 THE SEEKERS.

One would expect a president and first lady to arrive at the White House psychologically and spiritually mature. But Hillary and Bill dealt with national criticism of their first term by turning to, among others, fringe spiritualists. One of them was Marianne Williamson, a Jewish charismatic spiritualist from Texas who sports Armanis and presided over one of Liz Taylor's weddings. Another is Tony Robbins, known to millions of cable TV viewers as the smarmy hawker of expensive self-help videos that can help you ”awaken the giant within.” And, of course, there was Jean Houston, co-director of the Foundation for Mind Research in Pomona, New York, who believes that her personal archetypal predecessor was Athena. Dr.

Houston--who nisrepresented her doctorate, awarded by Union Inst.i.tute in Cincinnati, as coming from Columbia University--used hypnosis to guide Hillary into a seance/conversation with Eleanor Roosevelt.

The revelation of the Eleanor exercise in Bob Woodward's book The Choice was a major embarra.s.sment to a woman who prided herself on projecting intellectual and moral strength. It was widely compared with published stories a decade earlier concerning Nancy Reagan and her interest in astrology.

Hillary, however, has not fled from the comparison with Eleanor Roosevelt. At a speech at Georgetown University. in December 1998, Hillary noted: Wherever I go as first lady, I am always reminded of one thing: that usually Eleanor Roosevelt has been there before. I have been to farms in Iowa, factories in Michigan, and welfare offices in New York where Mrs. Roosevelt paid a visit more than a half-century ago. When I went to Pakistan and India I discovered that Eleanor Roosevelt had been there in 1952, and had written a book about her experiences.

In the Clintons' communion with Dr. Jean Houston, the president was advised to ”deepen the elder in himself.”*6 Dr. Houston had a deeper message for the first lady. The human race, she said, was at a five-thousand-year turning point, a moment when women were at the brink of finally achieving equal partners.h.i.+p with men. Joan of Arc had been a vital actor, the one who moved the progress of women more forcefully than anyone else. But Hillary had a special place reserved for her. It was up to her to finish the job, to be a stand-in for all of womankind at the moment of equality.

Dr. Houston told Hillary that if she could do this, Hillary would become the most consequential woman in human history.*7 Finally, a properly ambitious undertaking, but certainly not beyond the reach of someone who had done so much already.

THE CANDIDATE.

At one of her lunches with John Robert Starr at Little Rock's Cafe Saint Moritz in 1989, there was a lapse in the conversation about Bill's ambitions for national office. Starr took the opportunity to ask Hillary what she wanted to do. ”She leaned toward me,” he recounted, ”eyes ablaze, and said in as an intense voice as I have ever heard, 'I want to run something!'”*8 As a young law professor, Bill Clinton had confided in friends that he recognized that Hillary was putting her own political future into escrow by coming to Arkansas. Now the long years of waiting are over. The Monica Lewinsky scandal has, ironically, made Hillary one of the most popular women in the world. She has become a celebrated and sympathetic popular figure in another ironic turn of fate: The most powerful woman in the world cast as a victim. As her popularity rose, as the crowds became larger and more enthusiastic, Hillary could think about fulfilling her ambition for power.

Long before Hillary announced she was considering a run for the U.S.

Senate from New York, knowledgeable Democrats connected to the White House and on the Hill were talking about Hillary's real ambition to run something big. Very big. One possibility. I thought of was the World Bank. Her college roommate and close friend Jan Piercy was already there.

Though a multinational panel governs the bank, the president generally comes from its largest shareholder, the United States.

As president of the World Bank, Hillary would have tens of billions of dollars at her fingertips to effect social experimentation on a global scale. And she could be appointed without having to go through either the nastiness of a Senate confirmation process or the untidiness of a popular election. Of course she could still be appointed after the 2000 presidential election. There still would be time before the next president is sworn in.

But the real question is: Would that be enough?

Hillary in office--any office--will finally be free from the troubled trajectory of her husband's career. She will be free to take back her old name. She will be free to create her own legacy. Divorce or at least some degree of separation will allow her to establish herself as a world stateswoman, as the death of FDR at Warm Springs freed Eleanor Roosevelt to become an international figure in her own right. Then she will ”run something.”

If not politics, President Clinton could make a recess appointment to the Supreme Court. Her mother's dream would be fulfilled. It has been done before. Justice Brennan was a recess appointment. That would suit Justice Rodham Clinton just fine.

If she has her way, it could be the United States itself that will have the opportunity for rebirth in the hands of Hillary. Indeed there are rumors in Was.h.i.+ngton, surely untrue, that she is not at all disturbed by the troubles Al Gore is experiencing, because if a Republican is elected in 2000 she can be the Democratic presidential heir apparent in 2004. That is if Al Gore is unsuccessful in 2000.

We already know that in her relentless quest for power Hillary has been as financially acquisitive and ethically agile as any politician. But she also has pursued a politics of vendetta, deceit, and extremist ideology to a remarkable degree.

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