God and Hillary Clinton (15 page)

The Aftermath of Mother Teresa

Throughout the talk's high points on abortion—the raw nerve—the Clintons and Gores remained in stony silence. Said one attendee at
the event, a pro-life Catholic and high-level appointee in the Reagan Administration, who asked not to be named: “It was an outrage, an abomination, very rude. Mrs. Clinton in particular just sat there. I will never forget that moment. It told me all I needed to know about her.”

Hillary Rodham Clinton took her lumps for this one. So did her husband. And to his credit, Bill realized that the behavior of him, his wife, and the others was rude. According to Kathryn Spink, he apologized to Mother Teresa after the speech.
¹⁷
Hillary responded later that day—sort of. In commenting on Mother Teresa's remarks, she must have briefly given the nun hope that she, too, would speak on behalf of the unborn when she began, “I have always believed that Christ wanted us to be joyous, to look at the face of Creation and to know that there was more joy than any of us could imagine.” As the Champion of Calcutta held her breath, however, she was disappointed, as Mrs. Clinton did what she has long done; she applied the thought very selectively, restricted it solely to economics, not unborn life, as she followed: “Or as Mother Teresa told us this morning, to see the joy on the face of a homeless beggar, who is picked up off the street and brought in to die, says joyously, ‘Thank you.'”
¹⁸

Hillary's statement was an extraordinary example of the compartmentalization mastered by both her and her husband, in which they ignored the obvious and justified a cause through spiritual means that failed to take into account the clear, intended purpose. The reaction was surreal. Mother Teresa had come to give a major moral statement on abortion, and did so in a way that shocked the entire crowd. And then Mrs. Clinton literally ignored the entire message in her follow-up remarks, carefully lifting a smaller item from the nun's address, one with which she agreed; then placed it fully out of its context, and used it for an entirely separate political purpose with which Mrs. Clinton was politically satisfied.

And it was not as though Mrs. Clinton did not get the point.
“She [Mother Teresa] had just delivered a speech against abortion,” explained Mrs. Clinton in assessing the keynote address almost ten years later. In the minutes after the talk, said Hillary, the nun persisted, taking the abortion issue directly to Hillary's face: “[S]he wanted to talk to me,” said the first lady. “Mother Teresa was unerringly direct. She disagreed with my views on a woman's right to choose and told me so.”
¹⁹
In other words, there was no mistaking the message that day, or that Hillary got it unerringly.

On the other hand, Hillary later, perhaps upon further reflection with the help of an aide, identified a crucial component of the speech that she did not need to take out of context to find common ground. Mother Teresa had said: “Please don't kill the child. I want the child. Give me the child. I'm willing to accept any child who would be aborted and to give that child to a married couple who will love the child and be loved by the child.” Echoing the Malcolm Muggeridge phrase that introduced her to the West, Mother Teresa said, “I will tell you something beautiful. We are fighting abortion by adoption.”

Now that was something that Hillary could applaud. In the course of one of their subsequent conversations, Mrs. Clinton made clear that while she supported legalized abortion, she also wanted to see more adoptions as an alternative. The nun told the first lady she had placed more than three thousand orphaned babies into adoptive homes in India. Hillary said she would like to visit the orphanage in New Delhi. Several months later, she and Chelsea did just that, visiting one of the Missionaries of Charity homes in New Delhi, a facility, said a lawyerly Hillary, that “would not have passed inspection in the US” because there were too many cribs crowded together.
²⁰

Mother Teresa informed the first lady of her goal of establishing a home in Washington, D.C., where mothers could take care of their babies until they found adoptive or foster homes. In turn, Hillary went to bat for her, rounding up pro bono lawyers to do legal work, fighting through the bureaucracy of the District of Columbia, and
doing what she could to lend a hand to what became the Mother Teresa Home for Infant Children near Chevy Chase Circle, just over the Washington, D.C., line. She telephoned community leaders and pastors from nearby Baptist, Catholic, Episcopal, and Presbyterian churches, calling them to the White House to see where and how they could help. Moving the bureaucracy, Hillary later said, turned out to be harder than she had imagined.
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Mother Teresa was equally relentless on her end. When she felt the project was lagging, she sent a letter to the first lady checking on the progress. “She sent emissaries to spur me on,” recalled Hillary. “She called me from Vietnam, she called me from India, always with the same message: When do I get my center for babies?”
²²

On June 19, 1995, the shelter for children opened, the Mother Teresa Home for Infant Children. This led to a photo op of Hillary and Mother Teresa clasping hands in the newly decorated nursery and smiling at each other. A reporter could not resist asking the uncomfortable question: Yes, conceded the first lady, of course they had discussed their “philosophical differences” over abortion. Mother Teresa, ever the peacemaker, stepped in to underscore where the focus should be at that particular moment, namely, on where they agreed: “We want to save the children,” she said. The nun, slow and frail, held Hillary's arm as they toured the facility, examining the freshly painted nursery and rows of bassinets awaiting infants.
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This was not the end of the relationship, which Hillary looks back upon with fondness. In the short time she had left on earth, Mother Teresa continued to try to change Mrs. Clinton's view on abortion. According to Hillary, “she sent me dozens of notes and messages with the same gentle entreaty.” She dealt with the first lady with patience and kindness, but firm conviction: “Mother Teresa never lectured or scolded me; her admonitions were always loving and heartfelt,” wrote Hillary, adding that she had “the greatest respect for her opposition to abortion.”
²⁴
Mother Teresa saw in Hillary a potentially huge convert
to the pro-life cause, and as was her style, she never gave up hope.

Two years after their tour through the foster home in Chevy Chase, on Friday, September 5, 1997, Mother Teresa's frail heart beat its last. The funeral Mass was held at St. Thomas Church in Middleton Row, Calcutta. Hillary was there. After the memorial service, she unexpectedly found herself invited to a private meeting at the mother house, the headquarters of the order founded by Mother Teresa. As the nuns formed a circle around the coffin, where they stood in silent meditation, one of them, Sister Nirmala, Mother Teresa's successor, asked the first lady if she would offer a prayer. Later confessing to feeling inadequate to do so, Hillary hesitated and then bowed her head and thanked God for “the privilege” of having known this “tiny, forceful, saintly woman.”
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But that final good-bye to the lady from Calcutta would come later. For now, the difficult experiences of 1993 and 1994, including the blistering attacks on Hillary's plan to “socialize” medicine in the United States, were taking their toll on the first lady.

This was seen up-close by her Little Rock minister, Ed Matthews, who paid a visit to Hillary shortly after the politics of meaning issue exploded, when many were satirizing her as a sappy “New Age” believer that had never been a conventional Christian, let alone a serious one. Matthews informed her that some back home at the Methodist church in Arkansas were demanding he expel her from the congregation, as if she was a heretic to the faith of John Wesley. He even claimed to have faced threats on his life.

Hillary had seen worse. She told Reverend Matthews that if he wanted to see hardship, he should sit in her seat. “This is hard,” she told the minister. “I'm having a more difficult time…than the President.”
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Ideas have consequences. And Hillary Rodham Clinton had embraced Michael Lerner's ideas just as she began working on the task force that was reexamining the way health care was delivered in America. Lerner himself said that his politics of meaning needed to be applied to “the most visionary elements of [the] Clintons' plans for health care.”
¹
Mrs. Clinton was now ready to do exactly that, in what would become the most far-reaching and controversial element of the first two years of the Clinton presidency, one that would cost the president dearly in the 1994 midterm elections.

The 1994 midterm elections were extremely significant, as the Democrats feared losing both chambers of Congress for the first time in fifty years, foiling everything the Clintons had dreamed about: Without a Democratic Congress, President Clinton's and Hillary's legislative hopes would get nowhere. And what ultimately transpired in 1994 would silence Hillary policy-wise for the remainder of her husband's presidency.

Among the many Democratic candidates in this election year was
Hugh Rodham Jr., who was seeking a Senate seat in Florida. The former Penn State quarterback had his work cut out for him. And his big sister was happy to lend her political weight to the cause. Hillary's little-noticed role in her brother's campaign held important lessons for how she would come to integrate religion into her own later campaigns.

Hugh had given special attention to Florida's Jewish population, which was his single greatest hurdle in securing the Democratic nomination. His Democratic challenger was Mike Wiley, a radio talk-show host who had changed his last name from Schreibman, a point underscored by Hugh Jr. Wiley complained that Rodham was trying to caricature him as an “anti-Semitic Jew.” A supporter of Hugh Rodham Jr. had publicly asserted that Wiley had changed his name because he was embarrassed by his Jewish roots—a charge that incensed Wiley.

Into the picture came Hillary, who flew to Florida to campaign for her brother at a synagogue, where they attended a double bar mitzvah. This was the first of many future examples of Hillary openly campaigning for a U.S. Senate seat in a house of worship—an action that the political left usually insists should not be permissible, viewing it as a transgression of the alleged barrier separating church and state. It was fitting that Hillary's campaign work inside the synagogue received almost no major media attention, and certainly no editorials from the
New York Times
crying foul about the first lady's melding of faith and politics. As we shall see, this was the first in a long line of hypocrisy by the mainstream press in its lack of reporting on Mrs. Clinton's open use of religion for political advantage.
²

Also in 1994, there was big news for Hillary's other brother, Tony, who on May 28 married Nicole Boxer, daughter of Senator Barbara Boxer (D-Calif.), one of the most liberal members of the Senate. They were married in a ceremony at the White House, the first wedding there since that of President Nixon's daughter in 1971. Tony went on to work for the Democratic National Committee, coordinating con
stituency outreach. All three of Hugh Rodham's children had become liberal Democrats.

Clash with the Vatican in Cairo

As the midterm elections drew near in November, the last thing the Clinton administration needed was another raw issue to anger the moderates who had elected Bill in 1992. But that was precisely what came down the pike in August and September.

Since literally day one of the Clinton presidency, the Vatican had been outraged by the president's actions on abortion. Now, a showdown was scheduled, for September 5–13, 1994. The venue: the World Conference on Population Development in Cairo.

When the conference had gathered ten years earlier in Mexico City, the Reagan administration pushed hard and successfully for a statement unequivocally affirming that legitimate “family planning” did not include abortion. In the intervening years, global activists had searched for an opportunity to turn the tables. Now, with the Clintons in the White House, they had their chance, and a vice president named Al Gore would be the point man, with Hillary offering moral support (and then some) behind the scenes.

The Clinton administration had an ambitious agenda for the September meeting, and was marching in lockstep with international abortion rights groups like Planned Parenthood International. The Vatican was convinced that the U.S. delegation was using slippery, ambiguous language to try to establish an internationally defined and enforceable “human right” to abortion on demand.

As the date of the conference neared, the argument between the two sides got personal, and the Clinton administration looked like it might be backtracking because of the political hit it was taking from moderate to conservative Catholics and other pro-life Christians. The issue came to a head on August 25 when Vice President Gore, speak
ing to the National Press Club, stated definitively that the United States “has not sought, does not seek, and will not seek to establish an international right to an abortion.”

Typically, such an emphatic statement would have resolved the matter. However, this Vatican, and this pope, did not trust this administration on this issue. In an extraordinary counterresponse six days later, the pope's spokesman, Joaquin Navarro-Valls, accused Gore of bad faith, stating: “The draft population document, which has the United States as its principal sponsor, contradicts, in reality, Mr. Gore's statement.” This Vatican charge of “misrepresentation” by Gore landed on the front page of the
New York Times
and newspapers around the world.
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Importantly, the Vatican rarely mentioned a politician by name; singling out “Mr. Gore” was highly uncharacteristic.

The pope's spokesman pointed to specifics, stating that the official Cairo draft document featured a universal definition of “reproductive health care” that included the words “pregnancy termination.” This definition, claimed Valls, had been a U.S. initiative. According to the pope's biographer, John Paul II “was not displeased” with this sharp departure from the Vatican's conventional diplomatic reticence.
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The Vatican was fed up, as was, presumably, the pope.

Mrs. Clinton could not have been happy with the way all of this was unfolding. The White House was taking a political hit, and there was not the victory for women's rights that she had hoped for at Cairo. The cause of international abortion rights would need to wait another day.

Hillary Shares the Faith

There was a further political problem for the first lady: Cairo was another indicator that she was not a moderate. That positioning was crucial to Mrs. Clinton. She knew it had helped her husband win the presidency, and it was vital to her own future political prospects.

Shortly before the November vote, in this increasingly bitter midterm election in which moderates, particularly religious Democrats, were set to make a big difference, Mrs. Clinton consented to a major interview on her faith with
Newsweek
's religion editor, Kenneth Woodward, published October 31, right before the Tuesday vote.
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The piece began by noting that Mrs. Clinton had been called many things, from the right's despised radical feminist to the left's woman-genius. Yet, long before she was a Democrat, a lawyer, or a Clinton, wrote Kenneth Woodward, Hillary Rodham was a Methodist. Woodward noted that she talked like a Methodist, thought like one, and even desired to reform society just like a well-schooled Methodist churchwoman. “I am,” she affirmed to
Newsweek
, “an old-fashioned Methodist.”

In an otherwise fine article, Woodward may have exaggerated for effect when he claimed that “the Clintons are perhaps the most openly religious first couple this century has seen.” It was a faith that Mrs. Clinton, said Woodward, in the wake of the failure of health care reform, and of pundits on her side of the aisle dubbing her politics of meaning to be “flaky New Age blather,” had turned to as she felt more and more like “a battered woman.”
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In fact, Hillary was feeling so pummeled in this political season that she claimed to feel a kinship with the God-fearing evangelicals that some of her liberal friends stoned for fun: All of this had taught her, reported Woodward, a “great deal of sympathy” for fundamentalist Christians: “Like them, she believes she has to prove that she isn't a figment of other people's prejudices.”
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At one point in the interview, the first lady acquiesced to a pop quiz on the nuts and bolts of her Christian faith:

Newsweek
sought to suggest in the article that Mrs. Clinton was not doing the interview for political reasons as the vote approached. The magazine explained that for three months it had sought an interview concerning her faith, and her aides were fearful that no matter what she said, the first lady would be accused of trying to manipulate her public image for political gain. That clarification, however, may have had the opposite effect, leaving cynical readers to wonder why after three months the first lady and her staff suddenly had a change of heart just as that crucial Tuesday in November finally approached, when the Democrats had reached their lowest point in the polls in a half century.
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Mrs. Clinton told Woodward that she kept in her private quarters a copy of
The Book of Resolutions of the United Methodist Church
, along with the Bible. Curiously, she told Woodward: “I think that the Methodist Church, for a period of time, became too socially concerned, too involved in the social gospel, and did not pay enough attention to questions of personal salvation and individual faith.” This was an odd comment coming from Hillary, who took Methodism's social gospel more to heart than any other religious teaching. And indeed, Woodward aptly noted that “Mrs. Clinton's many speeches defending the universal healthcare coverage resonated with the moral rhetoric of resolutions adopted by the [Methodist] church's governing General Conference.”
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Doing what the Clintons do at campaign time, she made overtures to moderates, including on the issue about which she would always be most immoderate, telling
Newsweek
that she believes abortion is “wrong,” but, like her husband, added, “I don't think it should be criminalized.” But this was not really a concession, as the pro-life movement does not favor jailing women who have abortions—
though both Clintons often raise the concern.
¹¹
Pro-lifers would fine and imprison doctors who performed abortions illegally, but the jailing of mothers is not a goal in the pro-life movement.
¹²

Another interesting insight into Mrs. Clinton's faith was what she told
Newsweek
about the religious authors and books she was reading at this juncture in her busy life. She had time for only one magazine, the respected weekly
Christianity Today
, and authors such as Father Henri Nouwen, the Reverend Gordon MacDonald, and Tony Campolo.
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The irony was that the latter two gentlemen would soon be ministering to Mr. Clinton much more so than Mrs. Clinton.

Midterm Defeats

A few days after this interview was published, Hillary's husband and party experienced a stunning defeat, as not a single Republican incumbent in the country—at the level of congressman, senator, or governor—lost an election to a Democrat. In addition, they picked up seats from the Democrats, taking both chambers of Congress for the first time in half a century. In a backlash against the Clintons and the Democratic Party, the GOP accomplished what it could not achieve at the zenith of Ronald Reagan's popularity. The Democratic Party watched some of its best get booted from Congress, including rising stars like Representative Dave McCurdy (D-Okla.) and Representative Stephen Solarz (D-N.Y.). Among those defeated was Hugh Rodham Jr., who had managed to secure the Democratic Party nomination but lost in a landslide to incumbent Republican Senator Connie Mack—70 percent to 30 percent.

There were a number of reasons for the Democrat loss, including the brilliant tactics of House Republican Newt Gingrich (R-Ga.), who crafted a seven-point “Contract with America” that promised the American public a vote on a list of top conservative ideas that all polled at approval ratings of roughly 75 percent, and that he gave
maximum exposure by ingeniously publishing it not in the
New York Times
but in
TV Guide
, a widely read publication accessible to most Americans.

But the main reason for the crushing defeat was the leftward lurch of the new Clinton administration, most manifest in the income tax hike earlier in the presidency and, especially, in what was widely perceived as Mrs. Clinton's way left-of-center “nationalization” or “socialization” of the health care industry, which was said to constitute a “government takeover” of one-seventh of the nation's economy.

The morning after, a forlorn President Clinton stepped to the podium to humbly explain that he had gotten “the message.” He responded by hiring Dick Morris, the Republican adviser who in Arkansas taught him how to identify a few core middle-of-the-road initiatives, highlight them, and use them to get reelected. This was crucial advice, and it would work—Bill Clinton would not lose again, including in 1996, despite the fact that in November 1994 he looked like a certain one-term president.

Unfortunately for Hillary, this thrust to the center meant “policy death” for her. She was not allowed near health care or any major policy initiative again. She would need to wait six years, until she herself became a candidate.