God and Hillary Clinton (12 page)

According to Wogaman, the Clintons attended the church on a regular, consistent basis from their first weeks in Washington, and
ultimately through the life of the administration, and generally sat three rows down from the front off the right center aisle. By regular attendance, Wogaman meant “more than once a month, several weeks in a row,” noting that as president, Clinton was often out of town, and could not attend every week, even if he so desired. Yet, said Wogaman, “When in town, it was always assumed he would be there.” This, he says, was true for Hillary as well.
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They generally did not miss church.

When interviewed for this book, Wogaman had more to say about Bill's faith than Hillary's, since Bill kept him busier. “I was well acquainted with Hillary,” says the pastor, “but did not get involved with the same sort of spiritual counseling.”
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He called Hillary “a born and bred United Methodist, and as far as I know has been faithful to that commitment all her life.” He noted that during her years in the White House, she formally remained a member of the First United Methodist Church in Little Rock. Wogaman added that while at Foundry, both Bill and Hillary met “periodically” with a parent group. This group was made up of the parents of children in the youth group, which included Chelsea, a regular participant.
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During one instance in early 1996, the first couple went to a meeting of the teen group in which the adolescents openly discussed what bothered them about their relationships with their parents. Said Hillary: “[I]t helped to have another child say what your child didn't want to say to you directly”
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—and presumably in front of the president and first lady.

The Politics of Meaning

At Foundry, Hillary was engaged in conventional (albeit left-leaning) Christianity, standard modern Methodism. Yet convention was put aside as she developed a keen interest outside of Methodism, a fusing of her political and spiritual worldviews, through something called
the “politics of meaning.” It was a search for truth partly inspired by a personal crisis involving the first man in her life—her father.

In 1987, Hugh and Dorothy had moved to Little Rock to be closer to their daughter—for Hugh, physically so, if not emotionally. From there, they watched their daughter and son-in-law slug their way to the Oval Office. Of course, this was not about to turn Hugh into a Democrat, and the lifelong Republican remained loyal to the GOP.

In March 1993, only weeks into the Clinton presidency, Hugh suffered a massive stroke and slipped into a coma. Hillary was obviously upset, particularly because a coma leading to death would never allow for a meaningful good-bye. The event proved a stark reminder of how difficult life can be: One minute, she was pinching herself to savor the accomplishment of earning a seat near the pinnacle of power; then came this. It was surely a reminder of what mattered most: family and faith, God and the eternal.

She thought of Hugh's faith in God, vividly recalling how he had “said his prayers kneeling by his bed every night of his life, until he had [his] stroke.”
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Over the next three weeks, she and her mother and brothers prepared for the inevitable, and Hillary gingerly got on with the business of being first lady.

That business included a major April 6, 1993, address at the University of Texas at Austin, as part of the college's annual Liz Carpenter Lecture Series. In this speech Hillary introduced a phrase to the broader public: “the politics of meaning.” The audience was expecting Mrs. Clinton to talk about health care. She had been assigned head of the president's Task Force on National Health Care Reform—an extraordinary policy responsibility for any public official, particularly a first lady. That day at the University of Texas, she spoke about health care, all right, but much, much more.

“[W]e have to begin realistically to take stock of where we are,” she began, “to be able to understand where we are in history at this point and what our real challenges happen to be.” This, she said, was not merely an American problem, but a North American prob
lem, a European problem, a Western problem. All were facing “the rumblings of discontent, almost regardless of political systems, as we come face to face with the problems that the modern age has dealt with.” According to Mrs. Clinton, the modern problem was this:

Mrs. Clinton was speaking for herself, but she was also speaking for a large number of disaffected liberals who saw the 1980s as Ronald Reagan's “Decade of Greed,” which had failed to personally inspire them, especially those for whom spiritual faith was not a factor in their lives, or no longer a factor. She continued: “We are, I think, in a crisis of meaning…. What does it mean in today's world to pursue not only vocations, to be part of institutions, but to be human?”

She cited the recent death of the Machiavellian Republican political strategist Lee Atwater, who died prematurely of cancer. In those final weeks of weakness, Atwater had issued a number of mea culpas and spoke of the need for “a little heart, a lot of brotherhood,” that he said was missing in society. Her citing of Atwater was lambasted by some conservatives as a form of political exploitation of a dying man, which was not fair to Mrs. Clinton, who merely endorsed and expanded upon what Atwater had said. Atwater had also spoken of a “spiritual vacuum,” which prompted the first lady to ask:

This, then, brought Mrs. Clinton to the high point of her speech, to her solution, to those key words that would live well beyond that lecture hall. She declared:

She was short on specifics as to precisely what that meant, a lack of elucidation that brought her much criticism. This, too, was unfair, since her point was to introduce a concept, leaving the details, particularly policy specifics, to others, and perhaps even to herself, later. That said, she rather clumsily managed to tie the theme to health care:

She talked about how “discussions” needed to be had, at home, in the workplace, in schools; about taking a “hard look” at the nation's “institutions,” media, “values,” “challenges”; about “breaking new ground,” about even, at one point, the “God-given potential” of every
child. Here her speech became very vague, as she drifted from one generality to another, almost to the point that a lot of what she said was understandably perceived as much touchy-feely ado about nothing. The speech probably struck a chord with certain liberals unable to find salvation through politics in the Reagan era, but left far more scratching their heads.

On the other hand, some of the language in the speech was clear enough to be alarmingly similar to other words from only a year earlier—Vice President Al Gore's 1992 environmental manifesto,
Earth in the Balance
. In his book, the man who shared Bill Clinton's presidential ticket urged that the rescue of the environment become the “central organizing principle” of all modern civilization, and that such a struggle would require “a wrenching transformation of society.”
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Like Gore, Mrs. Clinton served up some questionable talk about transforming human nature. In one Gore-like moment, Mrs. Clinton stated in the speech: “Let us be willing to remold society by refining what it means to be a human being in the 20th century, moving into a new millennium.”

This was a halting statement. Most Americans preferred not to remold society and redefine humanity; that was a bit beyond what they had voted for in November 1992. Nonetheless, in the final line of her address, she concluded by reiterating her objective of “remolding a society that we are proud to be a part of. Thank you all very much.”
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Don Jones got a copy of the text and read it over. He right away saw the parallels to Tillich's teachings on alienation and meaninglessness. “These were precisely the terms Hillary struck in that speech in Austin,” said Jones. He added surprisingly, “My sense of Hillary is that she realizes…that you cannot depend on the basic nature of man to be good and you cannot depend entirely on moral suasion to make it good. You have to use power. And there is nothing wrong with wielding power in the pursuit of politics that will add to the human good. I think Hillary knows this. She is very much the sort
of Christian who understands that the use of power to achieve social good is legitimate.”
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But although Hillary had created a vague manifesto about redesigning the bonds of our society, how her ideology would be received was another matter. This was the first time that she had put forth a broad idea that included both her religious and political ambitions, and the response to it would be a crucial barometer of her future initiatives. While Jones was supportive, that was not the case for most observers of the speech, as the first lady and her staff soon learned as they awaited the political feedback.

Hugh Passes Away

One cannot separate the speech's search for meaning from what was going on in Hillary's personal life at the moment: The two and a half weeks she spent in Little Rock as her father lay on his deathbed led her to give the talk.
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The very next day after the speech, on April 7, 1993, her father died, as she was returning to Washington from Austin. Sadly, Hugh was unable to give his daughter a final “I love you.”
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Hugh Rodham was eighty-two years old. His son-in-law, the president of the United States, delivered the eulogy at the funeral. Bill Clinton said that Hugh, a Republican until literally the very end, never gave up hope that his daughter's husband would join him in the GOP and support a cut in the capital gains tax.
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Now, Hillary recalled her father's old-fashioned but valuable ethical code of absolutes. “My father was no great talker and not very articulate, and wouldn't have known Niebuhr from Bonhoeffer from Havel from Jefferson,” she said, acknowledging that no-nonsense Hugh would have thought a conversation on something like the politics of meaning to be “just goofy”—surely, liberal gobbledygook. “But,” she said, “he gave me the basic tools, and it wasn't fancy philosophical stuff.”
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She harked back: “He used to say all the time, ‘I always love you but I won't always like what you do.' And, you know, as a child I would come up with 900 hypotheses. It would always end with something like, ‘Well, you mean, if I murdered somebody and was in jail and you came to see me, you would still love me?' And he would say: ‘Absolutely! I will always love you, but I would be deeply disappointed and I would not like what you did because it would have been wrong.'”
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