God and Hillary Clinton (9 page)

Nevertheless, they were becoming known to Hillary, and it would not take long for them to change the entire dynamic of the Clintons' marriage and their relationship with God.

With the political plus of having convinced the electorate that he and his wife were churchgoing and observant Christians, Bill Clinton won gubernatorial races in 1982, 1984, and 1986, easily defeating Frank White in 1982 and 1986 and Woody Freeman in 1984. After Clinton's victory in 1986, the governor's term was wisely extended to four years, meaning that the governor would no longer be in constant campaign mode. Meanwhile, the partners in power understood that winning in 1990 could seal Bill's path to the presidency and would require a course of public moderation, even as Hillary privately remained grounded in politics that were staunchly on the left.

The first lady of Arkansas launched a public education campaign to highlight problems faced by modern teens. She singled out sexual content, stating that society was “bombarding kids with sexual messages—on television, in music, everywhere they turn.” In a throwback to the Park Ridge Hillary of the 1950s, she said that both parents and churches were failing teenagers in not doing enough to help them just say no to sex. “Adults are not fulfilling their responsibility to
talk to young people, about the future, about how they should view their lives, about self-discipline and other values they should have.”
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She added, in an interesting confession, that she herself, or, more specifically, the late-1960s Hillary, had not done enough in this regard. She was not quite sure as to how and where parents and churches had “got off the track” and had apparently jettisoned moral instruction. “Adults don't feel comfortable telling their children not to do things,” said Hillary as a mother in the 1980s, “or they don't know how to communicate that message effectively. I'm trying to.” Then, in a line that drew applause, she stated emphatically, “It's not birth control, but self-control.”
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That well-received phrase ended up as a common line in her speeches from the period, but it was an interesting if not unexpected path for her to take. For years, Hillary had purported to be strongly opposed to the Catholic Church's stance against birth control. Yet remarkably, this line might be interpreted as an example of her going along with the Catholic Church's doctrine, advocating that people rely on their own moral responsibility and the practice of abstinence rather than the use of birth control. Given her widely stated opinions on birth control, it was a curious statement, made all the more curious by the fact that listeners almost always responded with loud cheers of support. On the other hand, she might have meant that proper self-control is the real issue, not birth control. Unfortunately, she did not elaborate on what she meant.

The Governor's School

One of the most interesting discoveries concerning Hillary's activities in this period was dug up by biographer Joyce Milton, who unveiled what she called “one of the stranger footnotes to the Clintons' impact on education in Arkansas.”
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It was the so-called Governor's School, a six-week summer program for four hundred gifted high school
seniors. Bill Clinton said that the program, started in 1979, was his “dream come true.” As Milton notes, however, the summer school was the pet project of the governor's wife. Indeed, it had Hillary's fingerprints all over it, a total reflection of her life and interests.

Now nearing its thirtieth anniversary, the Arkansas Governor's School is hosted on the campus of Hendrix College, the Methodist institution in Conway, Arkansas. According to the program guide, the school is a residential program for “gifted and talented high school seniors” from all over Arkansas. There is no charge for tuition, room, board, or even classroom materials—the entire program is fully funded by the state of Arkansas.

Though it began during Bill's first term as governor, the school did not officially hit its philosophical stride until the mid-1980s. Joyce Milton speculates that the Governor's School had become a “reincarnation” of Don Jones's University of Life, or, at the least, Hillary envisioned it that way. The analogy seems apt since much of the Governor's School curriculum was more postmodern and left-leaning than a lot of what was available in the public school curriculums. Over the years, students would watch films like
Do the Right Thing
and
The Times of Harvey Milk
, read works such as Beckett's
Waiting for Godot
and Sartre's
The Flies
, and study the theories of sociologist Herbert Gans, author of the 1971 manifesto “The Uses of Poverty: The Poor Pay All,” and the book
The War Against the Poor
, which states that “The poor are far more vulnerable, and racial minorities among them even more so.”
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“Poverty can be eliminated,” wrote Gans in a 1971 work likely read by Governor's School pupils, “only when…the powerless can obtain enough power to change society.”
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One Governor's School pupil whom Milton consulted with, Eddie Madden, attended in 1980, a year that featured an appearance by Hillary, whose theme, according to Madden, was to trust big government over big business, which would have been consistent with what they were learning in their studies of Gans. Madden said that another speaker, a physicist, claimed that a scientist, or, at least, a good scien
tist, could not be a religious believer, since science and religion, and faith and reason, were mutually incompatible. “The Book of Genesis should be read, ‘In the beginning man created God,'” the speaker instructed the class, a charge that initiated an intense debate about the Book of Genesis, John's Gospel, and religion generally.
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Madden stated that another speaker at the Christian college during that summer of 1980 was a feminist named Hope Hartnuss, who he said lectured on the collapse of women, arguing that women had been fine until Christianity came along. “Christianity was anti-woman and anti-sexuality,” said Hartnuss, according to Madden. The misogynistic church had persecuted the female gender because of its “fear and hatred of women.”
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A decade later the same curriculum was still being followed and administered, only with different participants. Milton offered another example from 1991—the last year in which Mrs. Clinton could devote any time to the program—in which a feminist named Emily Culpepper reportedly fulminated against Christian patriarchy. The writing, says Milton, dismissed Christianity as “compost” and instructed the recent high school grads that belief in Christ's divinity was “no longer just implausible [but] offensive.”
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Milton interviewed a 1991 participant named Chris Yarborough, who said that the goal of the program seemed to be to “deprogram” young people away from the traditional values they had learned and to inculcate them into the brave new world of postmodernism, with special attention to “feelings” and so-called critical thinking, a critical thinking that did not include exposure to alternative viewpoints.
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While it remains unclear precisely what personal role Hillary had in shaping the curriculum, the reality is that some of what went on there seems to have run counter to her religious revitalization of the 1980s. Though she felt comfortable going from church to church speaking publicly about her Methodist values and roots in an attempt to polish her churchgoing image, these religious beliefs were hardly on display during the years when she played a key role at the school.
On the contrary, it was her political ideology that took front and center stage here, an interesting choice given the impressionable audience in attendance. Whereas during her religious speeches, she was preaching for the most part to people who were already committed Christians, at the Governor's School there existed a clear opportunity to influence a generation of young minds—much in the way that Don Jones had shaped hers. The fact that this school, in which she played such a crucial role, chose the writings of Sartre instead of John Wesley was telling.

Don Jones's Disciple

The Governor's School demonstrated that the idea of Don Jones continued to influence her faith, and in actuality the real Don Jones was still a source of spiritual guidance for Hillary. One such instance occurred for Hillary when she found herself grappling with the issue of capital punishment. For several years, Bill had been supporting capital punishment as a Southern governor, but Hillary had long had spiritual doubts about the Christianity behind supporting such a policy.

While the topic had long provided Bill with a good issue to help position himself as a moderate, Hillary seemed more ambivalent. As Jones told Judith Warner, he discussed this specific issue with Hillary when Governor Clinton was once considering whether to commute a capital sentence for a serial killer and rapist. Hillary “agonized” over the decision, and consulted Jones. Jones told her, “Well, I believe there is such a thing as punitive justice; that's part of the whole concept of justice. And I think some people have forfeited their right to life because of the heinous deed that they've committed.” In response, says Jones, Hillary told him, “Well, I think I agree with you.”

However, says Jones, it was evident that Hillary “was struggling with the question of could she conscientiously as a Christian say that.
There was a tad of uncertainty about that. And I attribute that to her faith.”
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This was not the only time that she leaned on Don Jones during her time in the Arkansas governor's mansion. In April 1987, she had some business to conduct in New Jersey on behalf of the Rose Law Firm, and so she called Don Jones, then at Drew University, to see if they could get together and chat over coffee at Newark Airport. As it turned out, Jones had class that evening, and instead they arranged for Jones to pick her up at the airport and take her to Drew, where she could speak to his business ethics class.
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Hillary seemed an odd choice for this lecture, as she had never owned, managed, or even worked for a business outside of a law firm; her entire career had been in academia, law, and nonprofits. Nonetheless, Jones liked the message that she was eager to deliver. At Drew, Hillary attacked materialism, selfishness, and excessive individualism, rooting her worldview in Don Jones's Methodism. “We are experiencing a crisis of meaning and a spiritual crisis,” said Mrs. Clinton. She spoke of “the hurt, emptiness, confusion, and loss of meaning that characterizes much of our society.”

Caricaturing the Reagan boom of the 1980s as a malevolent “Decade of Greed,” she said that corporate America was the culprit for this era of excess. The corporate world's obsession with short-term profit at the expense of morality and ethics, she said to her former teacher's students, was subverting America's moral, spiritual, and democratic values, and the family itself.
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Once again, she was delivering the social justice gospel of the religious left, focused on economics and the dangers of capitalism, exempting hot-button social-moral issues like pornography, promiscuity, marital infidelity, divorce, and abortion.

Bill's Demons

Among those touchy contemporary social-moral issues that Mrs. Clinton avoided at Drew University in New York were two she could not escape in Arkansas—promiscuity and marital infidelity. Hillary had faced challenges growing up under the roof of Hugh Rodham, but nothing like those she faced with the man of the house at her home in Little Rock. And those problems, as much as the Clintons' loyal supporters to this day prefer not to discuss them, are a central part of the story of Hillary's faith.

It is difficult to say when, exactly, Bill Clinton began his extramarital affairs. One sensational recent account goes so far as to say that his infidelity began immediately, claiming that during the Clinton wedding reception that followed at the home of friend Ann Henry, a guest caught Bill kissing another woman in one of the bathrooms.
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Whether this truly happened is something that this book cannot prove, but the story indicates the kinds of claims and anecdotes that would follow Hillary and Bill literally from the very start of their marriage.

If Bill was not cheating on Hillary by October 12, 1975, day two of their marriage, he was doing so by the 1980s. Hillary had suspicions, and rumors were rampant. Despite the accusations that swirled around Bill, there was little sense of how Hillary reacted to the situation, and how her faith was impacted by Bill's behavior. To this day, the mystery surrounding Hillary's reaction to her husband's behavior has swelled, becoming one of the great public questions of the couple's marriage. Over the years, many sources have reported that Hillary was deeply troubled by these infidelities, and she took her turmoil to God, or at least to a man of God—a minister. This would be said in the 1980s and again in the 1990s. Those who say she took it to God, or to a pastor, usually portray her sympathetically, tragically, whereas others see her as that “partner in power” who expected
this behavior from her husband and looked past it, always with her gaze fixed upon seats of political power—a trade-off.

The one source who can shed some light, if not answer many of these questions, is Hillary's pastor at the First United Methodist Church in Little Rock, Ed Matthews, who claims that Hillary did not seek him out for counseling in the 1980s. That being said, Matthews contradicted himself on certain points over the course of several different interviews, so it is possible that his version of events may be incomplete.

When interviewed in October 2005, Matthews volunteered information regarding charges of Bill Clinton's womanizing, without prompting. He said: “There was a false, fabricated story on when Clinton was governor…talking about how much time I spent [counseling] them because of his so-called womanizing. There wasn't one word of truth to that.”
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Asked if Hillary ever approached him in the 1980s when the rumors about her husband's affairs began to spread, Matthews said, “She never approached me in any way.”
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