Living History (61 page)

I arrived in Chicago on Sunday, August 25, three days ahead of Bill, who was coming on a train from West Virginia with Chelsea. Betsy Ebeling had organized a gathering of my family and friends at Riva’s Restaurant, which sits on Navy Pier overlooking Lake Michigan. I quickly caught Chicago’s excitement about hosting the convention. Mayor Richard M. Daley, namesake and son of Chicago’s late political giant, had also done a terrific job getting the city ready: the streets were lined with newly planted trees, not with protesters demonstrating against an unpopular war, as they had been during the 1968

convention when his father was Mayor. This time everything went off without a glitch.

My scheduled speech to the delegates on Tuesday evening would mark the first time a First Lady had ever delivered a televised primetime address at a national political convention.

Eleanor Roosevelt was the first to address a convention, but that was in 1940, the pre-television era. The forty-eight hours before my speech were crammed with events. I addressed the Democratic Women’s Caucus, met with various state delegations, celebrated the opening of a park in Jane Addams’s honor and visited a community school. I also worked on the speech, which was still evolving on Monday evening, when I went to the United Center to practice on a TelePrompTer. The Center is the home of the worldchampion Chicago Bulls basketball team, which became the inspiration for one of my alltime favorite political buttons. The 1996 Bulls included the incomparable Michael Jordan, Scottie Pippen, whom I knew from Arkansas, and the NBA’s “bad boy,” Dennis Rodman.

A political button sold at the convention featured a photo of my face with Rodman’s multicolored hair and this caption: “Hillary Rodman Clinton: As Bad as She Wants To Be.”

By early Tuesday morning, I didn’t feel satisfied with my speech. I was missing Bill, who was still on the train and out of reach for the kind of reassurance and help I counted on from him. In a little over twelve hours, I would address the biggest audience of my life, and I was struggling to find the right words to convey my themes and beliefs.

Bob Dole became my unwitting savior. All of a sudden it hit me. In his acceptance speech at the Republican Convention, he had attacked the premise of my book, It Takes a Village. He mistakenly used my notion of the village as a metaphor for “the state” and implied that I, and by extension Democrats, favor government intrusions into every aspect of American life. “And after the virtual devastation of the American family, the rock upon which this country was founded, we are told that it takes a village, that is collective, and thus the state, to raise a child,” he said in his speech. “… And with all due respect, I am here to tell you it does not take a village to raise a child. It takes a family to raise a child.”

Dole missed the point of the book, which is that families are the first line of responsibility for children, but that the village―a metaphor for society as a whole―shares responsibility for the culture, economy and environment in which our children grow up.

The policeman walking the beat, the teacher in the classroom, the legislator passing laws and the corporate executive deciding what movies to make all have influence over America’s children.

I seized upon the village theme, and we swiftly drafted the speech around it. Then I went to the tiny room in the basement of the United Center for one last rehearsal with Michael Sheehan, an extraordinary media coach who made Herculean efforts to teach me to use the TelePrompTer, which I had never worked with before and couldn’t seem to master. Though I might finally have found the words I’d been searching for, I’d blow the speech if I delivered them looking like a robot, so I practiced until it felt right.

At last, it was time to go. Chelsea had spent two days with Bill on his train journey but had left him to be with me. She joined my mother and brothers, Dick Kelley, Diane Blair, Betsy Ebeling and a host of friends in a skybox suite where they had a great view of the podium.

About twenty thousand people were jammed into the convention hall, and the mood was high-pitched. Two of our party’s greatest orators―former New York Governor Mario Cuomo and civil rights leader Jesse Jackson―spoke before me, revving up the Democratic faithful with old-fashioned fire-and-brimstone speeches touting the party’s values.

As I walked out onto the stage, the crowd erupted into a frenzy of clapping, chanting and foot-stomping that touched me and helped to alleviate my nervousness. My motions to urge the crowd to sit down were futile, so I just waved and let the cheers wash over me.

Finally the roars faded, and I began to speak. My remarks were simple and direct. I asked people to imagine what the world would be like when Chelsea was my age, the year 2028. “One thing we know for sure is that change is certain,” I said. “Progress is not.

Progress depends on the choices we make today for tomorrow and on whether we meet our challenges and protect our values.”

After mentioning issues such as expanding the Family Leave law, simplifying adoption laws and passing a bill to guarantee that mothers and babies are not sent home from the hospital less than forty-eight hours after childbirth, I got to the crescendo written in response to Bob Dole:

For Bill and me, there has been no experience more challenging, more rewarding and more humbling than raising our daughter. And we have learned that to raise a happy, healthy, and hopeful child, it takes a family. It takes teachers. It takes clergy. It takes businesspeople. It takes community leaders. It takes those who protect our health and safety. It takes all of us. Yes, it takes a village.

And it takes a President.

It takes a President who believes not only in the potential of his own child, but of all children, who believes not only in the strength of his own family, but of the American family.

It takes Bill Clinton.

Again the crowd erupted. They not only believed that Bill cared about children, they understood that I was directly confronting the Republicans’ radical individualism and narrow and unrealistic view of what it took for most Americans to raise their children at the close of the twentieth century.

On Wednesday night Chelsea and I went to meet Bill, who got off the train with upsetting news. A supermarket tabloid was about to publish a story claiming that Dick Morris had paid for frequent visits by a call girl to a hotel he stayed in when he was in Washington.

The tabloid story that ran on Thursday quoted the call girl extensively. She said that Morris bragged about writing my convention speech, as well as the Vice President’s―

he hadn’t written either. Morris resigned from the campaign, and Bill issued a statement thanking him for his work and calling him a “superb political strategist.” After Morris left, the campaign went on seamlessly because Mark Penn continued to offer the thoughtful research and analysis.

Bill’s appearance before the convention to accept his nomination triggered a wild demonstration from the delegates when he walked onstage on Thursday night. From the second he began speaking, he commanded the public spotlight and used it with perfect pitch and passion to make his case to continue leading America. He reviewed America’s progress beginning with where we had been as a nation in 1992 and where we had come during his Presidency. Up in the skybox, Chelsea and I watched with enormous pride as he delivered a virtuoso performance. About two-thirds of the way through, we went down to be ready to join him onstage for the finale of the convention. By the time we got backstage, he was nearing the conclusion. He ended by harking back to his 1992 campaign and affirming that “after these four good, hard years, I still believe in a place called Hope, a place called America.” So did I.

Bill and I spent the final day of his last campaign flying around the country in a mad dash to get out the vote, living on the edge of exhaustion, taking nothing for granted until the balloting was over or, as Bill would say, till the last dog dies. With each hour, the mood on Air Force One grew lighter as we gained confidence that Bill would become the first Democratic President since Franklin Roosevelt to serve two full terms. On election eve, Bill, Chelsea and I were giddy with excitement and lack of sleep. America was in the throes of a silly dance craze that season, and somewhere over Missouri, in the middle of the night, Chelsea led our entourage in an impromptu rendition of the Macarena (all of us looking a little like campers slapping off a swarm of mosquitoes). When Mike McCurry, the President’s press secretary, briefed the press on the activities up in the front of the plane, he was careful to report that the commander in chief danced “in a presidential manner.” Sometime after 2 A.M., we began our descent into Little Rock.

There was no question that we would vote and then wait for the returns in Arkansas, where Bill’s journey to the White House had begun. We decamped in a suite of rooms at a downtown hotel, resting and visiting with friends and family. Tens of thousands of people were already gathering in Little Rock, anticipating a victory celebration when the polls closed. We kept out of sight except to go to our polling place and attend a luncheon hosted by Senator David Pryor, who was retiring that year.

I was thankful to be surrounded by familiar faces, caught up in an outpouring of support by a hometown crowd, but there was already a hint of nostalgia in the air, because everyone knew this was Bill’s last run for office. A President can serve only two terms.

The man who lived to campaign had finally reached the finish line in his last race. There was another sobering undercurrent running through the jubilant crowd. When he addressed the luncheon, Senator Pryor reminded us of the independent counsel who had set up shop across town in Little Rock two years earlier and still hadn’t wrapped up his investigation.

“I think the biggest round of applause you could get in Arkansas is to say, ‘Let’s get this election over with and let Ken Starr go home,’” he said. The investigation, he pointed out, had “ruined a lot of lives, broke a lot of people financially… . We feel it’s time for them to let us go on.”

When we learned that Bill had won the election by a solid eight percentage points, I felt it was more than a victory for the President: it was a vindication of the American people. They made sure that this election was about the things that mattered to them―work, home, family, the economy―not about old political grudges and phony scandals. Our message had cut through the toxic atmosphere in Washington to reach the voters. The campaign mantra of 1992―“It’s the economy, stupid”―was still operative, but with a new emphasis on what the rebounding economy could do to improve the lives of all Americans. We recognized that people’s personal concerns could become political if they used their voices and their votes to be heard.

Election days are torture because there’s nothing to do but wait. To divert myself, I joined some of my friends for lunch at Doe’s Eat Place, a steak restaurant that was a spinoff from the legendary Doe’s in Greenville, Mississippi. After lunch, I decided to drive over to my mother’s house in the Hillcrest section of Little Rock, and I cajoled my lead agent, Don Flynn, into sitting beside me. For some reason Don’s knuckles were white as dice by the time we arrived. I haven’t driven since.

Just after midnight, following Dole’s concession speech, Bill and I joined hands and, with the Gores, walked out of the Old State House, Arkansas’s first Capitol building, and the site of Bill’s campaign launch on October, 1991.

I could see the faces of our friends and supporters in the large crowd, and I remembered the very first time I had visited the Old State House, in January of 1977, at a reception we held for everyone who had come to see Bill sworn in as the Arkansas Attorney General. I was grateful to the people of Arkansas, who had given me so much over the years, and I felt the depth of Bill’s emotion: “I thank the people of my beloved native state,” he said. “I would not be anywhere else in the world tonight. In front of this wonderful old Capitol that has seen so much of my own life and our state’s history, I thank you for staying with me for so long, for never giving up, for always knowing that we could do better.”

Bill would have his chance to “build a bridge to the twentyfirst century,” and I would do my best to help him. My on-the-job training during the first term had taught me to use my position more effectively, both behind the scenes and publicly. I had moved from a highly visible role as Bill’s chief health care adviser, testifying before Congress, delivering speeches, traveling around the country and meeting with congressional leaders, to a more private―but equally active―role during the two years following the midterm elections in 1994.

I had begun working inside the White House and with other Administration officials to save vital services and programs targeted by Gingrich and the Republicans. I also spent two years helping the President’s top advisers refine welfare reform and stave off cuts in legal services, the arts, education, Medicare and Medicaid. As part of our continuing effort on health care reform, I lobbied Democrats and Republicans on Capitol Hill to initiate a comprehensive program to make vaccines available at low or no cost for children.

Looking ahead to Bill’s second term, I planned to speak out publicly to help shape White House policy on issues affecting women, children and families. Despite better material conditions among many in advanced economies such as ours, families were under great stress. The gap between rich and poor was growing wider. I wanted to guard the social safety net―health care, education, pensions, wages and jobs―that was in danger of fraying for citizens less able to absorb the changes resulting from the high-tech revolution and a global consumer culture. I had worked with Bill during the 1996 presidential campaign to elevate issues like family leave, student loans, health care for children and the elderly and raising the minimum wage. The public had ratified his leadership in the election, and we could concentrate on efforts to bring positive change to people’s lives. The Republican rallying cry against big government was meant to undermine people’s trust in the efficacy of widely accepted federal programs like Social Security, Medicare and public education. Through an initiative known as “Reinventing Government,” headed by Vice President Gore, the federal government was smaller than it had been since the Kennedy Administration. I knew that any continuing federal role had to be demonstrably effective, putting more police on the streets, for example, or more teachers in the classroom.