A Woman in Charge (69 page)

Bateson, the daughter of renowned anthropologists Margaret Mead and Gregory Bateson, was a highly regarded cultural anthropologist, specializing in the burgeoning field of gender studies. Hillary had read and recommended to friends Bateson's 1989 book,
Composing a Life,
which concerned itself with choices women in the post-feminist era could make in balancing and constructing their lives. Jean Houston, with her husband, Dr. Robert E. L. Masters, was co-director of the Foundation for Mind Research, in Pomona, New York, best known for research into psychedelic drugs, hypnosis, sexual behavior, and “humanistic psychology.”

She was also founder and principal teacher of “the Mystery School,” a bicoastal seminar ($2,995 per student) of “cross-cultural, mythic and spiritual studies, dedicated to teaching history, philosophy, the New Physics, psychology, anthropology, myth and the many dimensions of human potential.” She described herself as a “scholar, philosopher and researcher in Human Capacities.”

More than anything else, the weekend at Camp David was tacit acknowledgment that Hillary's hard-edge approach to governance had failed. The direction she was now inclined to test didn't leave much room for hard edges. The concept of trying to love one's opponents and enemies was, of course, a cornerstone of Christ's teachings, and Williamson eagerly applied it to politics in her work. She did not, however, recite at Camp David her published prayer, “For the Healing of America,” in which she had written: “God loves Bill Clinton and Rush Limbaugh both, and He loves them equally.” Yet, in some way, that was one of the main points the healers (Houston's term) seemed intent on making: there was only one way to overwhelm Limbaugh's prejudices and politics, which was through one's own good works, and to turn the rest over to God.

If there was one thing the New Agers were not, it was demonizers. Williamson, Bateson, and Houston (by the second day of the retreat Robbins had to make an unscheduled return to his Aspen headquarters) all had a healthy dislike for the Gingrich crowd, but they had earned their livelihoods preaching harmony. Over the next year, Bateson and, especially, Houston—who would form an unusually close relationship with Hillary—struggled to get the first lady onto a new, more “positive” track and off her “negative” woman-warrior path.

There were hardly any staff members present for the weekend, partly to keep the sessions, with their obvious potential for ridicule, from leaking. In summoning the participants, Williamson had told them that Hillary was at a “low point” and wanted to discuss, among other things, how to better communicate the administration's message in the next two years. Houston “did the major guiding” (as she later put it), which evolved into a discussion of “the communication of visions”—which, of course, harked back to the Camp David staff meeting of April 1993 in which Hillary had been so adamant both about communicating the new presidency's “vision” and concomitantly demonizing the Clintons' enemies and Democratic skeptics alike.

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.”

 

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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 after 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;
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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.