Living History (63 page)

It’s always a big production when a President goes swimming. Navy divers and Secret Service agents in flippers and masks circled us as Bill and 1 marveled at a giant clam and curtains of iridescent fish darting through turquoise waters.

There were other wonderful moments on that trip. Bill played golf with Australia’s most famous “Great White Shark,” the legendary Greg Norman, having prepared by putting up and down the aisles of Air Force One during the flight over. I visited the world famous Sydney Opera House where I spoke to an audience of distinguished women about the presidential election and the emphasis Bill and I had placed on matters concerning women and families, what some pundits called the “feminization of politics” but which I considered the “humanization.”

At a wildlife preserve, Bill cuddled a koala named Chelsea. It’s a small miracle―or an example of fortunate oversight―that he got anywhere near the animal. An overeager White House advance person had taken it upon himself to protect Bill against any possible allergy attack overseas. During a courtesy visit to the Governor-General’s house in Canberra, Bill and I stood with Sir William and Lady Deane, admiring their vast green lawn. Lady Deane turned to Bill, “We’re sorry about the kangaroos,” she said, “We think they’ve caught them all.”

Bill looked puzzled.

“What are you talking about?” I asked.

“Oh dear,” she said. “We were told to get all the kangaroos off the lawn because if one of them came near the President, it would cause an allergic reaction.”

As far as Bill knows, he isn’t allergic to kangaroos, but someone said he was, so the urge to protect him prevailed. Our loyal and dedicated advance teams were eager to help, and I’m grateful for their diligent efforts to anticipate our every need, but I felt terrible when their solicitude became an imposition on others around us. At a state dinner hosted for us by President François Mitterrand and his wife, Danielle, at the Elysée Palace in Paris in 1994, Madame Mitterrand apologized to me because the tables would look so bare without flower arrangements. “What do you mean?” I asked.

“I was told that the President was allergic to flowers.”

He isn’t allergic to cut flowers either, as he told his staff for years, usually to no avail.

We couldn’t have accomplished anything without so many wonderful staff people, but on rare occasions we got more help than we needed!

By now it was understood that when I traveled with the President, I would emphasize issues relating to women, health care, education, human rights, the environment and grassroots efforts such as microcredit to jumpstart economies. I usually branched off from Bill’s official delegation to meet with women in their homes and workplaces, tour hospitals that used innovative approaches to expanding health care to children and families and visit schools, especially those educating girls. In these settings, I learned about the local culture and reinforced the message that a nation’s prosperity is linked to the education and wellbeing of girls and women.

On our first visit to the Philippines in 1994, Bill and I had toured Corregidor, the American base that had fallen to the Japanese during World War II. There General Douglas MacArthur was forced to abandon the islands, though promising, “I shall return.” Filipino soldiers had fought valiantly alongside Americans, paving the way for MacArthur’s eventual return in 1944. The Philippines had undergone wrenching political changes in the decades since World War II and people were still recovering from the effects of twenty-one years of autocratic rule under Ferdinand Marcos. Corazon Aquino, whose husband was assassinated as a result of his opposition to Marcos, had led the way in restoring democracy in her country. “Cory” Aquino ran against Marcos for President in 1986. Marcos was declared the winner, but his victory was attributed to suspected fraud and intimidation. Popular protests drove Marcos out of office, and Aquino became President, another woman thrust into politics as a result of personal loss.

President Aquino was succeeded by Fidel Ramos, a former general educated at West Point, who brought a quick smile and sense of humor to his daunting responsibilities. He and his wife, Amelita, were our hosts for both of the trips we made to Manila. At the state lunch in 1994, he insisted that Bill play a saxophone, and when Bill demurred, he arranged for the band to call Bill up to play, accompanied on the piano by Mrs. Ramos. She also gleefully showed me one of the many closets in the former presidential residence still filled with Imelda Marcos’s shoes.

After speaking at a conference attended by thousands of women from all over the Philippines, I left Manila for the hill country of northern Thailand and was to meet Bill in Bangkok for a state visit hosted by King Bhumibol Adulyadej and Queen Sirikit that coincided with the King’s fiftieth anniversary on the throne.

Flying into the town of Chiang Rai, near the Laotian and Burmese frontier, I savored the spectacular view of green rice paddies and meandering rivers spread out below me. I was greeted on the tarmac by musicians beating drums and cymbals and playing the sah, a stringed instrument with a melancholy, piercing sound. Girls in traditional hill country tribal garb danced, while miraculously balancing the array of flowers and candles attached to their wrists. My arrival coincided with the Loy Krathong Festival, when the streets are filled with celebrants on their way to the Mae Ping River to launch floating clusters of flowers and candles into the water. The ancient custom, I was told, symbolizes the end of the troubles of one year and the hopes for the next.

The hopefulness of this ritual stood in stark contrast with the dire lives of the young girls I later visited in a rehabilitation center for former prostitutes. This region of northern Thailand was part of the “Golden Triangle,” an epicenter of trafficking of all kinds: drugs, contraband and women. l was told that 10 percent or more of the girls in the area were coerced into the sex industry. Many were sold into prostitution before they reached puberty, because clients preferred young girls, wrongly convinced that they did not carry AIDS, endemic among prostitutes. At the New Life Center in Chiang Mai, American missionaries gave former prostitutes a safe haven and a chance to learn vocational skills they needed to support themselves. I met one girl at the Center who had been sold by her opium-addicted father when she was eight years old. After a few years, she escaped and returned home―only to be sold again to a whorehouse. Now only twelve, she was dying of AIDS at the Center. Her skin hung off her bones, and I watched helplessly as she summoned all her strength to draw her tiny hands together in the traditional Thai greeting when I approached her. I knelt next to her chair and tried to speak to her through a translator.

She did not have the strength to talk. All I could do was hold her hand. She died shortly after my visit.

On a tour of a local village, I witnessed disturbing evidence of local supply-anddemand economics that brought this girl to her death. My guides explained that every house with a TV antenna sticking out of its thatched roof represented a wealthier family―

and that almost always meant one that had sold a daughter into the sex trade. Families in the poorer mud huts without televisions either refused or had no daughters to sell.

This visit reinforced my resolve to bridge the disconnect between global politics and local lives. In a meeting with representatives of the Thai government and women’s groups, I discussed the government’s plan to crack down on the trafficking of women, particularly young girls, into Bangkok’s sex trade by toughening the enforcement of its antiprostitution laws and imposing serious jail terms for brothel owners, clients and families that sell their children into prostitution. Trafficking in women is a human rights violation that enslaves girls and women and distorts and destabilizes economies of whole regions, just as drug smuggling does. Thailand was not unique. Over the course of my travels, I began to understand how vast the industry of trafficking human beings―particularly women―had become. Today, the State Department estimates that as many as four million people, often living in extreme poverty, are trafficked each year. I began speaking out about this horrific violation of human rights and pushing the Administration to assume global leadership in combating it. In Istanbul, Turkey, at the OSCE (Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe) meeting in 1999, I participated on a panel to urge international action. I worked with the State Department and members of Congress already concerned with the issue. The Trafficking Victims Protection Act, passed in 2000, is now the law of the land, helping women trafficked to the United States and providing assistance and aid to governments and NGOs combating traffic abroad.

We flew back to Washington in time for Thanksgiving and headed off for a family gathering at Camp David. Our guests included Harry and Linda, and Harry’s brother, Danny Thomason, who’d known Bill since 1968, when Danny taught school in Hot Springs.

Best of all, we now had two nephews, Tony’s son, Zachary, and Roger’s son, Tyler. The men played golf despite the freezing weather, competing for what they called the Camp David trophy. We ate our meals and spent our time in Laurel, where I had a big-screen television brought in so that every play in every football game could be seen from every corner of the room. At dinner we voted on which movie to watch that night in the camp’s theater, and in the event of a tie, or strong dissent, we sometimes ran a double feature.

The Republicans had lost nine seats in the House and two in the Senate, but they still were in control of both chambers of Congress, and they gave more leadership positions to ideologues rather than to moderates or pragmatists. The new Chairman of the House Government Reform and Oversight Committee, Rep. Dan Burton from Indiana, was the Hill’s leading conspiracy theorist. He had achieved minor celebrity for firing a .38-caliber pistol at a watermelon in his back yard as part of a bizarre attempt to prove that Vince Foster was murdered.

Several key Republicans, including Senate Majority Leader Trent Lott, had already vowed that it was their “responsibility” to continue investigating the Clinton Administration.

But the Whitewater inquiry seemed to be losing momentum. Senator D’Amato had suspended his hearings in June. Despite prolonged questioning, Kenneth Starr had failed to wrest any damning tidbit from Webb Hubbell, who was serving eighteen months in federal prison for defrauding his clients and partners.

As Bill’s second inauguration approached, there were a number of changes in the cabinet and the White House staff. Leon Panetta, Bill’s Chief of Staff, decided to return to private life in California. Erskine Bowles, a North Carolina businessman and trusted friend who was then serving as Leon’s deputy, would be taking his place. Erskine’s wife, Crandall, a savvy and successful businesswoman, had been in my class at Wellesley.

Harold Ickes, our longtime friend who started out with Bill in 1991 and did a superb job of organizing New York in the 1992 campaign, returned to his law firm and consulting business. Evelyn Lieberman took over as head of Voice of America. George Stephanopoulos left to teach and write his memoirs.

I lost my Chief of Staff too. Maggie wanted her life back. She had never intended to stay for more than one term, and I understood her decision. Maggie and her husband, Bill Barrett, were moving to Paris. I was so happy for her: Maggie had weathered the worst of abuses from the revolving investigations. Of course, she wasn’t the only person who got sucked into the whirlwind, but I saw her every day and knew what a toll the last years had extracted.

Melanne Verveer became my new Chief of Staff. She had been by my side on nearly every overseas trip and was a galvanizing force behind the international movement we were championing to train and equip women for leadership positions. Great company, Melanne has an impressive command of legislative issues as well as many friendships in Congress.

Several cabinet positions had opened up after the election, including Secretary of State. Ever since Warren Christopher announced his impending retirement in early November, Washington had been consumed with the guessing game of who would replace him. There was a list of hopefuls, each with his own constituency.

I hoped Bill would consider appointing Madeleine Albright as the first woman Secretary of State. I thought she’d done a superb job at the United Nations, and I was impressed by her diplomatic skills, grasp of world affairs and personal courage. I also admired her fluency in French, Russian, Czech and Polish, not to mention English―four more languages than I spoke. She had advocated early U.S. military engagement in the Balkans, and in many ways, her life story was reflective of Europe and America’s journey over the last half century. Madeleine identified in a visceral way with people’s yearnings for freedom from oppression and desire for democracy.

Some in the Washington foreign policy establishment were pushing their own choices and the whispering campaign against Madeleine began immediately: She was too forward leaning, too aggressive, not ready, the leaders of certain countries wouldn’t deal with a woman. Then an item appeared in The Washington Post in November 1996, claiming that the White House considered her only a “second tier” candidate. Likely planted by one of her opponents to sabotage her candidacy, the tactic backfired, drawing more attention to Madeleine’s qualifications. Now her candidacy had to be taken seriously.

I never spoke about her candidacy with Madeleine, and even my closest staff didn’t know that I was encouraging Bill to include her in his deliberations. Other than my husband, the only person with whom I discussed the appointment was Pamela Harriman, then Ambassador to France. Several days after The Washington Post piece ran, Pamela came to visit me at the White House. Despite four years in Paris as U.S. Ambassador, she was still in the thick of Washington society and gossip, and she was buzzing with curiosity about Madeleine Albright.

“I’ve been talking to everyone,” she said in that wonderful smoky British accent.

“You know, some people actually think Madeleine might be named Secretary of State.”