God and Hillary Clinton (16 page)

A stoic Hillary regrouped, looking to the heavens and proudly declaring that she would “measure my choices not against the moment but against eternal values and what is significant for my life. Because that is what I'll be responsible for in the end…. It is most important to remain grounded in who you are and what you stand for. That's the only thing that saves you.”
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Even more unfortunate for Hillary Clinton was that this eventually meant that her name would again be thrust before the public not for anything to do with Bill's policies but instead for Bill's peccadilloes. If she thought the first two years of the presidency had been tough, she had no idea what was in store for her.

A practical policy result of the Clinton strategy to make moves to the middle was the historic 1995 welfare reform initiative between Bill Clinton and the new Republican Congress, which sought to decentralize the way that welfare was delivered. To this day, this remains the most genuine overture by Bill or Hillary Clinton toward a truly middle-ground initiative, widely heralded by moderate Democrats and Republicans across the board. Hillary's closest allies on the far left, from Patricia Ireland at the National Organization for Women to Marian Wright Edelman, did not share in this enthusiasm.

Edelman's Children's Defense Fund predicted nothing short of social Armageddon, with Edelman tapping into Hillary's social gospel to impugn the morality of the welfare initiative. Edelman wrote an open letter to the
Washington Post
, calling upon Bill Clinton's “unwavering moral leadership” to oppose the “tragic” and “morally and practically indefensible” welfare-reform package, “which will make more children poor and sick.” The bills, said a righteous Edelman, constituted “fatally flawed, callous, anti-child assaults” upon “voiceless children,”
and would “eviscerate the moral compact between the nation and its children and the poor.” Clinton's response would serve as the “defining moral litmus test” of his presidency.
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Throughout the 1970s and 1980s, Hillary had joined Edelman in accusing politicians who disagreed with them on poverty policy as being heartless, immoral, and against children. Now Hillary and her husband were on the receiving end. She was feeling what it was like to have someone from the religious left target one's policies as “anti-child” and “anti-Christian,” simply because of a reasonable disagreement over
means
to an end, not ends. Wrote Edelman to Hillary's husband: “Do you think the Old Testament prophets Isaiah, Micah, and Amos—or Jesus Christ—would support such policies?…There is an even higher precedent that we profess to follow in our Judeo-Christian nation. The Old Testament prophets and the New Testament Messiah made plain God's mandate to protect the poor and the weak and the young. The Senate and House welfare bills do not meet this test.”

It was a bracing display of moral arrogance by Edelman. Sure, Jesus wanted Christians to help the poor, as Christian Republicans and Christian Democrats knew, but nowhere in the Gospels did the Messiah weigh in on whether he preferred centralizing or decentralizing Medicaid. Edelman, however, was certain that Jesus did not like block grants. Meanwhile, the
Washington Post
—which usually held a strict line of separation between church and state—gave her the platform to use her faith to question these policies.

Bill Clinton signed the bills. In response, Edelman's husband and Hillary's dear friend, Peter, resigned his post in the Department of Health and Human Services, saying this was “the worst thing Bill Clinton had done.”
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Contrary to Edelman's predictions, the 1995 welfare reform proved an enormous success—maybe the greatest domestic achievement of Clinton's presidency—continuing a government safety net for the poor while weaning millions from continued federal dependency.

Nonetheless, this meant that 1995 was another difficult year for Hillary. In the previous year, the likes of Edelman had rejoiced at the prospects of a near-nationalization of the health care industry—apparently knowing with certainty that Isaiah, Micah, Moses, and Jesus were proponents of socialized medicine as well—but the public had not. This meant Bill was heading to the center.

The year also marked the Clintons' twentieth wedding anniversary. “Like any other couple that has been together a long time,” said Mrs. Clinton, “we have worked hard and endured our share of pain to make our marriage grow stronger and deeper.”
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While they would celebrate twenty years of marriage in the most public house in the country, 1995 was a year in which Hillary's spiritual views would become more of a national issue than in any year previous, causing a stir for herself and her husband's office.

Her first public show of faith that year was not unconventional, and included sentiments that the Christian right should have lauded. On February 2, 1995, the first lady offered remarks at the National Prayer Luncheon. She made a solid statement on how a public person's spiritual faith should not be restricted to events like prayer luncheons:

Despite speeches like this, a problem for Hillary was that conservatives (and many moderates as well) were not taking her faith seriously, largely because her leftist past made them suspicious of her politics. Her health care initiative had not done much to bolster their opinion of her, either, and their general distrust of her husband was not doing her any favors. As a result, many of her overtures on the matter of her faith seemed to fall on deaf ears, as the people that she seemed most interested in winning over were precisely the constituency that evaded her. For conservative Christians, that skepticism was about to receive what seemed like clear vindication, as Mrs. Clinton delved into something that sent practicing Christians—and many others—into orbit.

New Age Gurus

As Hillary's involvement with administration policy receded, she began to take up new spiritual interests within the White House. It started when she began to invite spiritual advisers who were both in and outside the mainstream to consult with her and the president on matters of belief. This seems to have started as New Year's Day 1995 approached, when the Clintons—though it is not clear exactly whose idea this was—invited a group of popular self-help and motivational authors to Camp David. The goal was to take a close examination of the first half of Bill Clinton's first term and evaluate potential ideas for his reelection prospects. Normally, such a gathering would comprise political strategists and analysts, maybe a pundit or two, a journalist, perhaps a presidential historian; the Clintons, however, were seeking something more emotional than coldly political. So, on the weekend of December 30, 1994, to January 1, 1995, the Clintons met with, among others, self-described “peak performance coach” Anthony Robbins, who on late-night paid TV commercials exhorted individuals to “awake the giant within”; the more down-to-earth
Stephen Covey, author of
The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People
; and, New Age “love” guru Marianne Williamson, who had recently presided at Elizabeth Taylor's latest wedding.

Though the three names were leaked to the press, all the meeting's participants kept the details of the get-together private. Not leaked, however, were the names of the other two advisers at the meeting, who were protected maybe in part because one of the two is highly controversial and was quite influential to Hillary. Ultimately, the two were revealed in a blockbuster scoop by Watergate reporter Bob Woodward in his 1996 best-seller,
The Choice
.
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One of the pair was Mary Catherine Bateson, an anthropology professor at George Mason University, just a few miles down the road, and daughter of the famous anthropologist Margaret Mead. She had written a book called
Composing a Life
, which profiled the lives of five different women on “non-traditional” paths, which had become one of Hillary's favorite books.

The other, and the most unusual of the group, was Jean Houston, a woman in her mid-fifties widely known for her work delving into altered consciousness, the spirit world, and psychic experiences. Houston's specialty was taking herself and her subjects back into past worlds, both real and mythical, connecting them to long-deceased individuals as a method of finding personal comfort, stability, and healing. Houston had done this for herself, concluding that her own archetypal predecessor was the Greek goddess of wisdom, Athena. Claiming to have had many lengthy discussions with Athena, Houston was said to wear a medallion of the mythological goddess around her neck, including during her sessions with the first lady.

Of all the personages in the Camp David coterie, Houston was the most outlandish. As Woodward noted, it was Houston in particular who “saw possibilities” in the Clintons' “extraordinary openness about their pain.” While on the surface Hillary might have seemed less susceptible to Houston's brand of alternative spirituality than her husband, upon their first meeting, it was evident that Hillary was
taken by this spiritual thinker. According to Bob Woodward, “Hillary and Houston clicked, especially during a discussion of how to use the office [of the first lady] for the betterment of society.” Through their dialogue, Houston had come to the conclusion that Hillary was personally carrying the burden of five thousand years of women being subservient to men; this was her cross to bear. Now, affirmed Houston, history was at a turning point, on the brink of genuine gender equality, and it was Hillary alone who could turn the tide—another Joan of Arc. Houston reportedly told Hillary that, next to Joan of Arc, she was there on the front line as arguably the most pivotal woman in all of human history. But she was a victim, a sufferer of bitter, unjustified personal attack; she was, said Houston, like Mozart, history's greatest composer, but with his hands cut off.
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“Though Houston did not articulate the image,” wrote Bob Woodward, “she felt that Hillary was going through a female crucifixion. She had perhaps never seen such a vulnerable person, but also one who was so available to new ideas and solutions.”
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Nonetheless, said Woodward, Houston told Hillary she would prevail. She must persevere, as the new possibilities for the world's women were too much for her to cast aside. Her moment would arrive when she could accept and grasp that “fullness” of self.

In addition to these suggestions, Houston helped Hillary identify the means for fulfilling her global, millennial potential: She should proceed with the book on child care that she had been contemplating (the book that would eventually become Hillary's best-seller
It Takes a Village
), and take part in a UN conference on women in 1995, specifically, the Fourth World Conference on Women in—of all places—Beijing, to be held September 4–15. Recommending that Hillary attend the conference in Beijing was interesting advice, since Bill's political consultants had specifically advised Hillary to stay out of the conference. Her first-term entanglements in political controversies had already hurt her husband's ability to appear as a New Democrat in the 1996 race; now going to the UN conference, where international
activists were campaigning for worldwide abortion rights, might yet again yank her husband and his presidency back to the left.

In the face of the campaign's political advisers, Hillary refused to be derailed from the path that Houston had set her on. According to Woodward, Houston wrote a strong letter to Hillary, underscoring her “obligation and burden, on behalf of all women, to go [to Beijing] and speak out.” She enclosed letters from two friends likewise prodding the first lady to undertake this crusade on behalf of the world's embattled women: Until women had access to birth control and abortion, they were not free. It was a stirring text that struck at the heart of Hillary's most passionate spiritual and earthly causes; Woodward reported that Hillary said she cried when she read the letters.

However, rather than easing Hillary's burden, it seemed as if Houston was adding to it. Hillary's involvement with the conference in Beijing would most likely have a negative impact on her husband's campaign, especially given the fiasco with Vice President Gore at the Cairo conference the year before. The Vatican in particular was gearing up for another fight with the Clinton administration. Recall that the year before, the official papal spokesman, Joaquin Navarro-Valls, had taken the unusual step of singling out Gore by name; it was possible that involvement by Hillary could prompt the pope's spokesman to mention “Mrs. Clinton” next.

Over these reservations from the political operatives within Bill's campaign, Hillary went to Beijing and on September 5 gave one of the most memorable speeches of her career. This was a careful address, at times redundant but presumably for the purpose of reaffirming the theme, which was that “human rights are women's rights” and “women's rights are human rights.” The only time that she used the word “abortion” was to denounce the host Chinese government for forcing women to have abortions against their will. That condemnation in Beijing demonstrated Hillary's ability to venture headfirst into confrontation, and it was such a powerful gesture that it muted some of her critics.
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Others, however, were not so easily satisfied with her remarks. While Hillary did not actually use the word “abortion” elsewhere in the talk, she used substitute phrases like “family planning.” Most alarming to her detractors, the first lady affirmed an international “right to determine freely the number and spacing of the children” that a woman desires, implying without directly stating that abortion was a basic “human right”; in fact, ZENIT, the international news agency that covers the Holy See, later reported unambiguously that she had called abortion a “human right.”
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Here Clinton had employed a clever rhetorical tool that would become her hallmark when discussing abortion in the years ahead as she pared down her language to reflect a more centrist stance on the issue. While her speech had all the markings of a typical Hillary speech, she created a linguistic sleight of hand by not mentioning abortion directly (and then only in a negative context), and that allowed the speech to rise above the anticipated criticism. The end result permitted the first lady to avoid the tidal wave of negative attention that Bill's advisers had feared and portrayed Hillary as someone who was moving to the center on this issue. She closed her speech by wishing “God's blessings” on all of those at the conference.