Living History (68 page)

and that of the Catholic Church―to birth control. However, I support the right of people of faith to speak out against abortion and try to dissuade women, without coercion or criminalization, from choosing abortion instead of adoption.

While we never agreed about abortion and birth control, Mother Teresa and I found much common ground in many other areas including the importance of adoption. We shared the conviction that adoption was a vastly better choice than abortion for unplanned or unwanted babies. At our first meeting, she told me about her homes for orphans in India and enlisted my help in setting up a similar facility in Washington, D.C., where babies could be cared for until adoption.

When I agreed to assist with the project, Mother Teresa revealed her skills as a relentless lobbyist. If she felt the job was lagging, she wrote letters asking me what progress we had made. She sent emissaries to spur me on. She called me from Vietnam, she called me from India, always with the same message: When do I get my center for babies?

It turned out to be harder than I could have imagined to move the D.C. bureaucracy to set up a home for infants who were given up by their mothers for adoption. Not even the White House had an easy time cutting red tape with the housing authorities and human services officials. Finally, in June 1995, the Mother Teresa Home for Infant Children opened in a safe, pleasant neighborhood in Washington, D.C. Mother Teresa flew in from Calcutta, and I met her for the opening ceremonies. Like a happy child, she gripped my arm in her small, strong hand and dragged me upstairs to see the freshly painted nursery and rows of bassinets waiting to be filled with infants. Her enthusiasm was irresistible.

By then I fully understood how this humble nun could move nations to her will.

The extent of her influence was in full display at the arena in Calcutta as Presidents and Prime Ministers knelt before her open casket. I could imagine her looking down at the scene and wondering how she might harness all those assembled to help the poor in all the countries represented that day.

Mother Teresa left a powerful legacy and a well-equipped successor in Sister Nirmala, a fellow Missionary of Charity who had worked with Mother Teresa for years. After the memorial service, Sister Nirmala invited me to visit their Calcutta orphanage and asked me to a private meeting at the Mother House, headquarters of their order. When I arrived, Sister Nirmala led me into a simple whitewashed room, lit only by tiers of flickering devotional candles arranged against the walls. When my eyes adjusted, I saw that Mother Teresa’s closed casket had been brought here to her home, where she would remain forever. The nuns formed a circle around the coffin and stood in quiet prayer, then Sister Nirmala asked me to offer a prayer. I was taken aback and hesitated, feeling inadequate to the occasion. Then I bowed my head and thanked God for the privilege of having known this tiny, forceful, saintly woman during her time here on earth. I had no doubt she would be watching from heaven as each of us in our own way tried to fulfill her admonition to love God and one another.

By mid-September, the occasion I had dreaded for years finally arrived: Chelsea was moving to California to start her freshman year at Stanford. To minimize my own anxiety about this bittersweet life passage, I spent weeks beforehand making lists of all the things she needed to take to school. She and I made shopping trips to Linens ‘n Things and Bed Bath & Beyond, where I bought a DustRuster, a clothes steamer, contact paper for drawers and an array of items that only a mother would think essential to dormitory life.

Our hope was that Chelsea’s arrival on campus in mid-September 1997 would be as low-key as possible. Stanford’s administration was receptive to our concerns for her privacy and had worked out security is sues with the Secret Service that would allow Chelsea as normal a college experience as feasible. Although she would have twenty-fourhour protection, it was to be unobtrusive, both for Chelsea’s sake and the university’s.

The young agents assigned to her detail would look and dress like students, and they would quietly set up residence in a dorm room near Chelsea’s. Stanford, in turn, was happy to limit media access to the campus so that journalists without credentials for specific events could not camp out near Chelsea’s dorm or follow her from class to class.

Chelsea, Bill and I arrived in Palo Alto on a gorgeous autumn day. At Stanford’s request, we had agreed to one photo opportunity our first day on campus to satisfy nearly two hundred journalists from around the world seeking pictures and comments about Chelsea’s arrival. Other than that, she was left alone by the media and began her college career much like the other 1,659 students in the Stanford Class of ‘01.

We made our way to a three-story concrete dormitory that would be Chelsea’s home away from home. The last-minute shopping and packing had left me exhausted, and as is typical of many mothers, I went into overdrive as soon as we got inside the dorm. Chelsea’s room, which she shared with another young woman, was barely big enough to accommodate bunk beds, two desks and a couple of dressers. I was on a mission, rushing around in a vain attempt to organize Chelsea’s belongings, arranging closet space, putting away linens and towels, measuring and cutting up contact paper to fit the drawers, while keeping up a nervous banter with my daughter. “What about storing your cleaning supplies under the bed? Here’s a good place to keep your toiletries. I don’t think you should arrange your desk like that.”

Bill, meanwhile, resembled most of the other fathers, who seemed to go into a slowmotion trance the moment they set foot on campus. Bill had insisted on carrying Chelsea’s luggage himself, and then, armed with a minuscule wrench, he tackled the bunk bed, which Chelsea and her roommate wanted to take apart. After deducing that the bunk first needed to be turned upside down, Bill completed the task and then retreated to the window, where he stood and stared out morosely, looking like a dazed boxer who had just been pummeled in the ring.

My own frantic method of coping with the impending separation from my daughter nearly drove Chelsea crazy, and I was relieved to be reminded that our experience was not unique. At the convocation for students and parents, Blake Harris, the student speaker, hilariously described his own mother a few years earlier: “Parents, you have done your best. And you will miss your child when you leave here tonight. And, they will miss you also in about a month and for about fifteen minutes.

Take my parents, for example. My mom cried when I went to visit colleges. When we arrived … my mom was just dying to get in that last little bit of mothering. She decided it was absolutely crucial that she line my dresser drawers with contact paper. And I let her.

I just didn’t have the heart to tell her that if my clothes were ever clean, it was unlikely they would ever find their way into a drawer.” Chelsea and I looked at each other and doubled over with laughter. At least, I felt like I wasn’t alone.

By late afternoon it was time for all the parents to leave, freeing the students to arrange and rearrange their possessions without parental interference. Most of the other mothers and I gathered up our belongings, including unused contact paper, and began to make our way to the exits. After weeks of planning, shopping, packing, unpacking and organizing, we had steeled ourselves for this moment. At some level, we were actually ready to say goodbye and let our children begin their new lives.

Watching the fathers, however, I realized that they had no such preparation. Just as it was time to leave, they seemed to awaken from their collective fog, suddenly anxious over the prospect of parting from their offspring.

“What do you mean, it’s time to leave?” Bill said. “Do we really have to go now?” He looked bereft. “Can’t we come back after dinner?”

I visited Chequers, the official country residence of Britain’s Prime Minister, in late 1997, invited by Prime Minister and Mrs. Blair to a small meeting of American and British political thinkers. Our hosts gave me a marvelous tour. Queen Elizabeth I’s ring. The table Napoleon used at St. Helena. Cromwell’s secret passage. The prison room, so called because Lady Mary Grey spent two years locked up there in the mid-1500s for marrying without permission from the throne. These were among the relics of history that a British Prime Minister lived with amidst the narrow hallways, spiral staircases and nooks and crannies of the stately sixteenth-century estate.

Tony Blair had been elected six months earlier on a platform of progressive ideas that refashioned traditional Labour Party thinking about social and economic issues. In the aftermath of his election, he had credited Bill for inspiring him and his party to chart a different direction as the United Kingdom and Europe confronted the challenges of globalization and economic and political security.

Tony and Cherie Blair had been focusing on many of the same issues that Bill and I had been thinking about for years. I first discovered this political symbiosis when Tony was still the Labour Party leader. Our mutual friend, Sid Blumenthal, an American journalist and author who had written extensively about American and British politics, insisted that we get together. Sid had been a good friend of Bill’s and mine for years, and I valued his political analysis and sharp wit. He began working at the White House in 1997, and his wife, Jackie, an experienced organizer and advocate, joined the Administration in 1996.

“You and the Blairs are political soul mates,” Sid told me. “You have to meet each other.”

When Sid and Jackie hosted a reception for Tony at their home in 1996, they invited me to come. I found Blair at the hors d’oeuvres table, where for thirty minutes we remained locked in conversation about politics and public policy in our respective countries.

I instantly felt a connection. He, too, was trying to devise alternatives to traditional liberal rhetoric, assumptions and positions in the hope of finding ways to advance economic growth, individual empowerment and social justice in the global information age.

Whether you call it New Democrats, New Labour, the Third Way or the Vital Center, Tony Blair and Bill Clinton clearly shared a political vision. But the question confronting each of them was how to invigorate a progressive movement that had lost steam through much of the 1970s and 1980s, giving rise to Reaganism in the United States and Thatcherism in Britain.

The Republican Party in the United States had been masterful at creating a groundswell for conservative ideas after Senator Barry Goldwater’s resounding defeat by Lyndon B. Johnson in the 1964 Presidential election. Shocked by the margin of their party’s losses, several Republican multimillionaires embarked on a strategy to seed conservative, even rightwing political philosophy, and to develop and advance specific policies to further it. They funded think tanks, endowed professorships and seminars and developed media channels for communicating ideas and opinions. By 1980, they had also begun financing political advertising campaigns through the National Conservative Political Action Committee, one of the first political organizations to use the mass media as a vehicle for negative campaigning. Through direct mail and television ads, NCPAC broke an accepted taboo in national and local elections, attacking opponents’ records and positions more harshly and going after Democratic candidates personally and relentlessly. This was the dark underbelly of the Republican Right, which rose to power with a very different public face: sunny, self-confident Ronald Reagan. Reagan won the Presidency twice in the 1980s, and the Republicans made significant gains in Congress.

I was skeptical about the effectiveness of negative advertising when I first saw it up close during Bill’s 1980 gubernatorial reelection campaign. But I was wrong. Negative campaigning, which everyone professes to abhor, has proven to be so effective that both parties have adopted it, though Republicans and their allied interest groups use it more effectively than Democrats. Most candidates believe they have no choice but to respond and counterpunch, but the distortions and falsehoods created by negative ads have undermined faith not only in candidates but in the political system.

We and the British have different political systems and methods of campaigning, but Bill and I shared with the Blairs the same struggle to advance more progressive ideas in the public arena. Bill’s electoral success was due to a combination of his political skills, his understanding of how stale the Democratic Party had become and the remedies he proposed.

The party had led the country through the Depression, World War II, the Cold War and the civil rights revolution. Now its leaders needed to rethink how our core values could be translated into modern solutions for the global security challenges we face at the beginning of the twentyfirst century and the changing patterns of work and family in American life. Bill tried to move Democrats beyond what he called the “brain-dead politics of the past”―right versus left, liberal versus conservative, business versus labor, growth versus environment, pro-government versus antigovernment―to craft a “dynamic center.” Working with the Democratic Leadership Council and its founder and leader, Al From, among others, Bill became one of the first Democrats in the 1980s to offer a new Democratic philosophy and to organize the party around a modern vision of how government should work. They advocated a partnership with the private sector and citizens to promote economic opportunity, individual responsibility and a greater sense of shared community.

In his effort to reform the Labour Party, Blair was outlining similar themes on the other side of the Atlantic. I remember being in London in the late 1980s and watching the annual Labour Party Convention on television. I was struck by how many speakers referred to one another as “comrades,” a linguistic throwback to a discredited past. After nearly two decades of Conservative Party dominance, Blair emerged in the 1990s as an energetic, charismatic new face of the Labour Party. After his election as Prime Minister in May 1997, Blair invited Bill to London for an official visit, where we found ourselves in nonstop conversation.