Living History (42 page)

Bill’s actions on the world’s stage gave him a bump in the opinion polls in the last week of October, and he was urged to get out on the campaign trail to support Democratic candidates. As always, he solicited opinions from a variety of friends and confidants, formal and informal advisers.

I felt it might be better for Bill not to campaign so much if the American people preferred seeing him as a statesman, not a politician. In the end, Bill couldn’t resist the lure of the campaign trail and became campaigner-in-chief for his party.

It had been an uneasy season, both out on the hustings and back at the White House, where two unsettling incidents had occurred. In September, a man crashed a small plane into the Executive Mansion, just west of the South Portico entrance. Fortuitously, we were sleeping in Blair House that night because the renovations of the heating and airconditioning system in the residence forced us out of our private quarters. The pilot was killed in the wreck, and no one knows exactly why he staged his stunt. Apparently he was depressed and looking for attention but may not have meant to kill himself. In retrospect, the fact that he could so easily breach security should have made everyone more aware of the dangers even a small plane could pose.

Then, on October 29, I was at a campaign event with Senator Dianne Feinstein at the Palace of Fine Arts Theatre in San Francisco when the Secret Service ushered me into a small side room. The head of my detail, George Rogers, told me the President was on the phone and wanted to talk to me. “I don’t want you to worry,” Bill said, “but you’re going to hear that someone just shot at the White House.” A man in a raincoat had been lingering at the fence along Pennsylvania Avenue when he suddenly pulled a semi-automatic rifle from under his coat and opened fire. Several passersby tackled him before he could reload and, miraculously, nobody was injured. It was a Saturday, and Chelsea was at a friend’s house while Bill was upstairs watching a football game. They were never in physical danger, but it was disconcerting to learn that just before he started shooting, the gunman had seen a tall, white-haired visitor on the grounds who looked from a distance like the President. The shooter was an unbalanced gun advocate who had made threatening calls to a Senator’s office because he was angry about the Brady bill and the assault weapons ban. The new law had prevented him from buying a pistol a month earlier. By the time I red-eyed back to the White House, everything looked normal, except for a few bullet holes in the West Wing facade.

Later that day, Bill and I spoke to Dick Morris on the speakerphone in my little study next to the master bedroom in the White House. He had analyzed the polling data he’d amassed and told us we were going to lose both the House and the Senate decisively.

I absorbed the bad news that confirmed my gut instincts. Bill, too, believed Morris’s assessment. He did the only thing he thought would help, heading out to campaign even harder. That week he barnstormed Detroit, Duluth and points west and east. It didn’t make much difference.

I began my schedule on Election Day much as I would any other. I greeted Eeva Ahtisaari, First Lady of Finland, and Tipper Gore and I met with Marike de Klerk, the former First Lady of South Africa, who was visiting Washington. Toward the end of the afternoon, the mood in the White House corridors was funereal.

Bill and I had dinner with Chelsea in the little kitchen on the second floor. We wanted to be alone as we absorbed the election returns, which forecast a full-blown disaster. Although Senator Feinstein narrowly won reelection, the Democrats lost eight Senate seats and an astounding fifty-four seats in the House―ushering in the first Republican majority since the Eisenhower Administration. Democratic incumbents were routed everywhere.

Party giants like Speaker Tom Foley of Washington and Governor Mario Cuomo of New York lost their reelection bids. My friend Ann Richards lost the Governorship of Texas to a man with a famous name: George W Bush.

Chelsea eventually retreated to her bedroom to prepare for another school day. Bill and I sat alone at the kitchen table, monitoring the tallies on the television screen and trying to make sense of the results. The American people had sent us a powerful message.

The election turnout was pitifully low, with less than half of registered voters coming to the polls and significantly more Democrats than Republicans staying home. The only flicker of light for us in this dismal landscape was that the Republicans’ “huge mandate”

reflected the votes of less than a quarter of the electorate.

This fact, however, did nothing to moderate Newt Gingrich’s glee as he faced the cameras that night to claim credit for the Republican sweep. He already knew that he would become the next Speaker of the House, the first Republican to hold that position since 1954. He magnanimously offered to work with Democrats to push the Contract with America through Congress in record time. It was disheartening to imagine the next two years with a Republican-controlled House and Senate. The political battles would be even harder, and the Administration would be on the defensive to keep intact the gains already made for the country. With Republican leadership calling the shots, the Congress would likely demonstrate the accuracy of Lyndon Johnson’s aphorism: “Democrats legislate; Republicans investigate.”

Deflated and disappointed, I wondered how much I was to blame for the debacle: whether we had lost the election over health care; whether I had gambled on the country’s acceptance of my active role and lost. And I struggled to understand how I had become such a lightning rod for people’s anger.

Bill was miserable, and it was painful to watch someone I loved so much hurting so deeply. He had tried to do what he thought was right for America, and he knew that both his successes and failures had helped to defeat his friends and allies. I remembered how he felt when he’d lost in 1974 and 1980; this was worse. The stakes were higher, and he felt he’d let his party down.

It would take time, but Bill was determined to understand what went wrong with this election and to figure out how to articulate and reassert his agenda. As always, we started a conversation that would continue for months. We held meetings with friends and advisers to focus on what Bill should do next. More than anything, I wanted Bill’s Presidency to succeed. I believed in him and his hopes for the nation’s future. I also knew I wanted to be a helpful partner for him and an effective advocate for the issues I had cared about throughout my life. I just didn’t know how I was going to get there from here.

There’s an old Chinese curse, “May you live in interesting times,” that became a running joke in our family. Bill and I would ask each other, “Well, are you having an interesting time yet?” Interesting didn’t describe the experience. The weeks following the disastrous midterm elections were among the most difficult of my White House years. On my better days, I tried to view the defeat as part of the ebb and flow of the electoral cycle, akin to a political market correction. On bad days, I faulted myself for botching health care, coming on too strong and galvanizing our opponents. There were plenty of people inside and outside the White House―who were ready to point fingers. It was hard to ignore the grumbling, but Bill and I focused on what we could do to rally our forces. We had to develop a new strategy for a new environment.

One dreary November morning I stopped by my office after a meeting with Bill in the Oval Office and glanced at the framed photograph of Eleanor Roosevelt displayed on a table. I am a huge fan of Mrs. Roosevelt, and I have long collected portraits and mementos from her career. Seeing her calm, determined visage brought to mind some of her wise words: “A woman is like a teabag,” Mrs. Roosevelt said. “You never know how strong she is until she’s in hot water.” It was time for another talk with Eleanor.

I often joked in my speeches that I had imaginary conversations with Mrs. Roosevelt to solicit her advice on a range of subjects. It’s actually a useful mental exercise to help analyze problems, provided you choose the right person to visualize. Eleanor Roosevelt was ideal. I had been tracking her career as one of America’s most controversial First Ladies, sometimes quite literally. Wherever I ventured, Mrs. Roosevelt seemed to have been there before me. I have visited dust bowl towns, poor neighborhoods in New York City and outposts as remote as Uzbekistan where Eleanor already had blazed a trail. She championed many causes that are important to me: civil rights, child labor laws, refugees and human rights. She drew harsh criticism from the media and some in government for daring to define the role of First Lady in her own terms. Eleanor was called everything from a Communist agitator to a homely old meddler. She rankled members of her husband’s administration-Interior Secretary Harold Ickes, Sr. (father of Bill’s Deputy Chief of Staff), complained that she should stop interfering and “stick to her knitting”-and she drove FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover crazy. But her spirit and commitment were indomitable, and she never let her critics slow her down.

So, what would Mrs. Roosevelt have to say about my present predicament? Not much, I thought. In her view, there was no point in agonizing over day-to-day setbacks. You simply had to press on and do the best you could under the circumstances.

Controversy can be terribly isolating, but Eleanor Roosevelt had good friends she relied on for support when she felt unsure or besieged in the world of politics. FDR’s trusted adviser Louis Howe had been her confidant, as were Associated Press reporter Lorena Hickok and her personal secretary, Malvina “Tommy” Thompson.

I was fortunate to have a wonderful, loyal staff and a large circle of friends. Although I have trouble imagining Mrs. Roosevelt blowing off steam with her confidants, that’s what I did. Arkansas friends Diane Blair and Ann Henry, who visited the White House during those post-election weeks, knew me well, and they offered me personal support as well as helpful perspectives on politics and history.

Friends from around the country and overseas called to see how I was holding up.

Queen Noor, something of a news junkie, followed American politics from Amman. She phoned me shortly after the midterm elections to boost my spirits. When her family faced tough times, she told me, they told one another to “soldier on.” I liked that phrase and began using it to encourage my staff. Sometimes, though, I was the one who needed the pep talk.

One morning near the end of November, Maggie Williams called a meeting of ten women whose opinions I especially valued: Patti, my scheduler; Ann, the White House social secretary; Lisa, my press secretary; Lissa, my speechwriter; Melanne, my Deputy Chief of Staff; Mandy Grunwald; Susan Thomases; Ann Lewis, a longtime Democratic activist and shrewd political analyst who appeared often on television defending my agenda and the Administration’s; and Evelyn Lieberman, a formidable presence in Hillaryland where she ran interference on operations and logistics. She later became the first woman to serve as Deputy Chief of Staff at the White House and was subsequently appointed Undersecretary of State for Public Diplomacy and Public Affairs under Madeleine Albright. These women had been getting together once a week to discuss policy ideas and political strategies. Evelyn, in her usual brassy way, had coined a name for the all-female gatherings: “the Chix meetings.” Because they were lively, broad-ranging and completely off-the-record, I participated whenever I could.

The Chix had assembled for this meeting in the historic Map Room on the first floor of the Residence. This is where President Franklin D. Roosevelt, along with Winston Churchill and other Allied leaders, plotted troop movements during World War II on military maps displayed on the walls. Thirty years later, during the Vietnam War, then-Secretary of State Henry Kissinger and the Soviet Ambassador to the United States met in the Map Room after President Nixon ordered the mining of Haiphong Harbor. Early in the Ford Administration, the room was converted into a storage area.

When I discovered its history, I decided to refurbish the Map Room and restore its grandeur. I located one of FDR’s original strategy maps showing the Allied positions in Europe in 1945. The map had been rolled up and saved by the President’s young military aide, George Elsey, who donated it to the White House when he learned that I wanted to restore the room. I hung it over the fireplace.

The map evoked emotional reactions from visitors who had lived through World War II. When Professor Uwe Reinhardt, a Germanborn economist who advised me about health care, saw it in the Map Room, his eyes filled with tears. He told me that, as a young boy, he and his mother were trapped in Germany while his father had been sent to the Russian front. Uwe used the map to show me where he and his mother hid to avoid the fighting and bombing, and how the American soldiers had rescued them. Another time, Bill and I had dinner in front of the fireplace in the Map Room with Hilary Jones, an old friend from Arkansas who had served in the European Theater. Hilary used the map to trace the path his unit had taken as they fought their way north from Italy.

Given the history of the room, it seemed appropriate that a meeting to map my strategy should take place there. Maggie convened these meetings because she understood that in the pressure cooker of the White House it was important for me to have a place where I could say whatever was on my mind without worrying about misinterpretation, or leaks to the press. She thought these meetings would help all of us―especially me―refocus on the issues that mattered and reaffirm our commitment to the Administration’s agenda.

The women were already seated around a large square table when I walked in. Until that moment, I had been able to conceal my distress and discouragement from everyone on my staff except Maggie, who seemed to know exactly how I felt, whether I showed it or not. Now it all came out. Fighting back tears, my voice cracking, I poured out apologies.

I was sorry if I had let everyone down and contributed to our losses. It wouldn’t happen again. I told them I was considering withdrawing from active political and policy work, mainly because I didn’t want to be a hindrance to my husband’s Administration.