God and Hillary Clinton (17 page)

Although the Beijing trip and Houston's role in it appeared to be a success, it elicited a host of questions over the extent to which Hillary had been “taken in” by Houston. Her open disregard for the recommendations of Bill's political advisers demonstrated her passion for the cause, but it also provided yet another example of how Hillary—when given the right mentor—was capable of bending in ways that surprised even her closest allies. Houston's beliefs involved practices that required a suspension of Hillary's more conventional faith. Indeed, it seemed that Hillary may have latched on to Houston's views to fill the void that existed after her husband's political advisers stripped away her power. Whatever the reasons, such practices were not things that would be accepted in most houses of worship.

The Eleanor Incident

The success of the China trip reinforced Houston's rapidly escalating role as Hillary's closest spiritual adviser. At one point, says Bob Woodward, in October and November 1995, after Beijing, Jean Houston “virtually moved into the White House residence” for several days at a time to help Hillary—an encourager, an idea person, a “spirit raiser.”
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Despite the bond that Hillary seemed to be forming with Houston, this new friendship would be tested and eventually broken as less public facts about Houston's spiritual advisement began to surface.

A few months before the China trip, in the spring of 1995, Houston caught a glimpse of the large picture of Eleanor Roosevelt in Hillary's office. Houston, too, was a big fan of the former first lady, and as a teen had met Eleanor several times. As she related those encounters to Hillary, the two formed a strong connection over their shared love of the legendary woman. They talked about Roosevelt's struggles on behalf on social justice—for the poor, for victims of racism, sexism, classism. “
God
, this is really a serious Eleanor Roosevelt aficionado!” exclaimed Houston of Hillary.
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In retrospect, it seems surprising that it took Houston so long to recognize Hillary's connection to Eleanor; after all, Hillary had not been silent on her identification with FDR's first lady. Hillary routinely invoked Eleanor's name and sometimes referred to her in speeches. On February 21, 1993, Hillary had spoken at a fund-raiser for a memorial statue for Eleanor, where she went so far as to mention imaginary discussions between her and the dead wife of FDR. “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.” Rather innocently, she told the dinner crowd that she had asked Eleanor questions like, “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?”
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This imagery did not strike
most in the audience that day as strange or worrisome, especially since the current first lady, more than any before or since, brought comparisons to Eleanor Roosevelt. To many people, it was fitting that she identified with Eleanor; like Eleanor, she was strong-willed and determined, and their politics were obviously similar. Like Eleanor, she possessed a tenacious grasp on the ills of society and the steps that she believed necessary to remedy them.

Houston was willing to take these conversations much further, using them as an opening to another world. In Woodward's account, he describes how, during a visit to the White House in early April 1995, Houston proposed that Mrs. Clinton “search further and dig deeper” for her connections to Mrs. Roosevelt. As Woodward suggests, this was dangerous ground, since Houston and her work delved into “spirits and other worlds, put people into trances and used hypnosis, and because in the 1960s she had conducted experiments with LSD.” With Hillary and her husband, however, she had “tried to be careful…intentionally avoiding any of those techniques.” No LSD, mercifully.

Even without the drugs, this alternative spirituality seemed like a leap for the self-described “old-fashioned Methodist.” These ideas that Hillary seemed to be supporting were far from traditional and quite out of step with Hugh Rodham's roots. At least part of Hillary's openness to Houston's unconventional background may have come from the fact that she and Chelsea had just returned from a two-week-long trip to the Far East, the home of Eastern mysticism. This, too, may have been a deliberate move on the part of Houston, who according to Woodward had fervently encouraged Hillary to take the trip.

One day in April 1995, Houston, along with Bateson, arranged to take Hillary to the solarium atop the White House, where they sat around a circular table. The solarium was reportedly Hillary's place of choice for important meetings, a room she had personally redecorated. They were joined by a number of members of the first lady's
staff, though it is not clear if the staffers were there as nervous protectors or eager participants. One of them apparently tape-recorded the session, but the tapes have never been released.

As they were seated together at the table, Houston encouraged Hillary's thoughts about Eleanor. Woodward writes that Houston did everything she could to create a soothing atmosphere, one in which Hillary felt as comfortable as possible. Houston spoke openly to Hillary and tried “to create an atmosphere of mutual admiration.” She called on the first lady to shut her eyes, eliminate her current surroundings, and envision herself in a room with Eleanor, a room where she was free to talk to the former first lady about whatever she wanted. Hillary did so, conjuring an image of a slightly frumpy but smiling Eleanor. Woodward's story continued:

Houston was deeply moved. According to Woodward, she concluded that Hillary was facing “much greater toxicity and negativity” from her detractors, more so than Eleanor had. The current first lady “needed to unleash” her “potential.” It was through adversity that she needed to find the “seeds of growth and transformation.” Only
then, wrote Woodward in his account, would it be possible for Hillary to “inherit” from the historical figure of Eleanor Roosevelt, “and to achieve self-healing.”

But the session did not end with Eleanor. Houston next connected Hillary to Mahatma Gandhi. The first lady seized the reins, expressing reverence and respect for the Hindu leader's life and works. She found empathy with his persecution; he, too, like her, had been “profoundly misunderstood, when all he wanted to do was to help others and make peace.”

Then Houston went higher, proposing that Hillary talk with no less than Jesus Christ—“the epitome of the wounded, betrayed and isolated,” wrote Woodward, “and Houston liked to quote his words in the Gospel of Thomas, ‘What you have within you that you express will save you, and what you have within you that you do not express will destroy you.'” Here, at last, the girl from Park Ridge Methodist drew a line: She said that talking to Jesus would be too personal in this setting. Amen.

They stopped the session after an hour. Elsewhere in the building, coincidentally, something had nauseated Chelsea, and she called for her mother. Hillary left to tend to her daughter.
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Nevertheless, Houston and Bateson—Bateson, ever the anthropologist, had been an observer rather than a participant in the Hillary-Eleanor session—graciously offered their services for future encounters, and the relationship did not end. Woodward reported that later Houston and Bateson gave “a kind of seminar” for the first lady and her staff at an “evening summer barbecue” at the home of one of Hillary's staffers. Hillary continued her meetings and “in-depth discussions” with Houston and Bateson regarding the parallels between her life and Eleanor Roosevelt's. There was much more to the relationship; they became buddies, a sort of “old girls' club,” in the words of Houston.
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Some of these sessions became so powerful and important to Mrs. Clinton that Maggie Williams, chief of staff to the first lady, said
after one occasion with Houston, “Oh, Hillary's ticking. She's had her ‘Jean fix.'” In this tumultuous period, reported Woodward, Hillary had ten or eleven “confidants,” but Houston was the most dramatic.
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The Fallout

As more than one observer has noted, the revelation of the Eleanor exercise in Woodward's book
The Choice
was a major embarrassment to a woman who prided herself on projecting intellectual strength.
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Much of the country was blindsided by the book's revelations, and many Democrats—both supporters and critics—were astounded by the alternative beliefs that this devout Methodist had been engaging in.
Quoting
Eleanor was great, but
communing
with her “spirit” was something else entirely. Pundits ridiculed Hillary, saying that she was “channeling” Eleanor Roosevelt and holding a “séance” with Eleanor's ghost—allegations that the first lady and her staff vehemently denied.

Yet these suspicions were not unmerited. Both Houston and her husband, Robert E. L. Masters, had participated in channeling countless times and had placed innumerable people under hypnosis at their home. Masters has had his patients channel the Egyptian god Sekhmet. In her book
Public Like a Frog: Entering the Lives of Three Great Americans
, Houston introduced three individuals that she said were available to be contacted through a trance or altered state of consciousness: Thomas Jefferson, Emily Dickinson, and Helen Keller. Somewhere along the line, Eleanor Roosevelt also presumably made herself available.

According to Jon Klimo, an expert on channeling, there are different forms of the practice, ranging from full-trance channeling to sleep channeling, dream channeling, light-trance channeling, clairaudient channeling, clairvoyant channeling, open channeling, and physical channeling, among others. Some of these involve the use of
Ouija boards, while others manifest themselves in scary forms like levitation and voice alteration. Among them, clairaudient channeling sounds closest to what Hillary was reportedly doing with Houston; it involves relaxing oneself in either a fully conscious or mildly altered state of consciousness and then listening to one's “innerself.”
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Hillary was not, as far as we know, levitating above a table in the White House.

Nonetheless, Hillary's involvement with the practice had her treading on tenuous spiritual ground. Deeper forms of channeling to supposed spirits of deceased figures are widely condemned throughout all of Christianity, including branches that view the practice as bordering on the demonic. The more than thirty thousand Protestant denominations, not to mention the countless independent Protestant churches, disagree on endless doctrines, but are virtually unanimous in this condemnation, because the Bible itself is so clear on the matter. Certainly, mainstream Methodism does not condone such behavior. Based on Woodward's description, the Houston sessions with Hillary never ventured into the extreme forms of channeling, but they held that potential, and they seemed an odd choice for someone who had never appeared prone to such strange displays of faith. Whether it was thanks to smart politics, her conventional Methodist upbringing, or plain common sense, Hillary honored boundaries and avoided being swept up in the spiritual turbulence that seemed to follow Houston. She never went completely over the edge.

Though Hillary had kept herself in check to a degree, her behavior was unprecedented, and many in America from both the right and the left had a hard time overlooking the facts. In the wake of this episode, Hillary's legion of detractors seemed to multiply. Criticisms flew from both sides of the aisle as everyone tried to make sense of how America's first lady, the president's wife, had become mixed up in something that seemed so diametrically opposed to her stated religious beliefs.

To understand the basic rationale for her actions, many Americans
needed to look back to the events of the most recent years. The level of scrutiny that was applied to her in the wake of her ill-fated health care proposal had reached remarkable proportions, and while she had never been popular with Americans, many vilified her as never before. Whereas in years past she might have turned to the church to help her navigate this difficult time, for whatever reason she chose a new venue in Houston. But instead of offering support and comfort through this difficult period, Houston's escapades only made Hillary a subject of greater scorn and derision. It was a difficult if not paradoxical situation that Hillary found herself in, but it was one that she herself had created.

Ultimately, Hillary was forced to come clean, sheepishly admitting that she was guilty as charged. To that end, Gail Sheehy judged that Hillary handled the controversy “quite well,” citing Hillary's formal statement of explanation, in which the first lady described the meetings with Houston and others as an “intellectual exercise,” adding, “The bottom line is, I have no spiritual advisers or any other alternatives to my deeply held Methodist faith and traditions on which I have relied since childhood.” Hillary said of Marianne Williamson specifically: “She is neither my guru nor my spiritual adviser. She is a political supporter who has an intriguing view about popular culture.”
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Mrs. Clinton also tried to joke about these incidents, saying in a speech: “I have just had an imaginary talk with First Lady Roosevelt, and she thinks this is a terrific idea.”
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