Living History (39 page)

After the graveside ceremony, we joined the extended Kennedy clan at Ethel Kennedy’s nearby home, Hickory Hill.

Two weeks later, John E Kennedy, Jr., sent Bill and me a handwritten letter that I cherish. “I wanted you both to understand how much your burgeoning friendship with my mother meant to her,” he wrote. “Since she left Washington I believe she resisted ever connecting with it emotionally―or the institutional demands of being a former First Lady. It had much to do with the memories stirred and her desires to resist being cast in a lifelong role that didn’t quite fit. However, she seemed profoundly happy and relieved to allow herself to reconnect with it through you. It helped her in a profound way―whether it was discussing the perils of raising children in those circumstances (perilous indeed) or perhaps it was the many similarities between your presidency and my father’s.”

In early June 1994, Bill and I traveled to England for the commemoration of the fiftieth anniversary of the Normandy invasion that set in motion the end of World War II in Europe. Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II had invited us to spend the night on the royal yacht HMS Britannia, and I was excited by the prospect of getting to know the royal family. I had met Prince Charles the previous year at a small dinner party hosted by the Gores. He was delightful, with a quick wit and a self-deprecating humor. When Bill and I boarded the Britannia, we were taken to the Queen, Prince Philip and the Queen Mother, who greeted us with an offer of a drink. When I introduced my trip director, Kelly Craighead, the Queen Mother surprised us all by asking Kelly if she’d like to stay on the yacht to dine with her and a few of the Queen’s young military aides. Kelly said she would be delighted but would have to see if she could be released from her duties. Kelly followed me to my cabin and asked what she should do. I told her she should absolutely stay.

Someone else could fill in for her at the formal dinner that night with the Queen and Prince Philip. She ran off to tell one of the military aides, only to return in a panic because she’d learned she was supposed to dress formally for dinner. Her black pantsuit wouldn’t do. I pulled out all my dressy clothes and helped Kelly piece together a suitable outfit for dining with the Queen Mother.

At the grand dinner, I sat between Prince Philip and Prime Minister John Major at a head table long enough to accommodate all the Kings, Queens, Prime Ministers and Presidents in attendance. From the raised platform, I looked across the large, crowded room. Over five hundred guests were assembled to commemorate the Anglo-American alliance that proved victorious on D-Day. Among them were former Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher, whose career I had followed with great interest; Churchill’s surviving daughter, Mary Soames; and his grandson, Pamela Harriman’s son, Winston. Major was easy to talk to. I enjoyed chatting about personalities in the crowd and listened as he described the terrible automobile accident he’d had while working in Nigeria as a young man. He’d been immobilized for months and went through a long, painful recovery.

Prince Philip, a polished conversationalist, carefully divided his time between me and the woman on his other side, Her Majesty Queen Paola of Belgium. Literally pausing in “midchop,” he turned his head from her to me and back again as he talked about sailing and the history of the Britannia.

The Queen, seated next to Bill, wore a sparkling diamond tiara that caught the light as she nodded and laughed at Bill’s stories. She reminded me of my own mother in her appearance, politeness and reserve. I have great admiration and sympathy for the way she has discharged the duties she assumed as a young woman upon her father’s death. Holding a demanding, high-profile role for decades through difficult and fast-changing times was hard for me to imagine in light of my more limited experience. When Chelsea was nine, Bill and I took her with us on a short vacation to London. All she wanted to do was to meet the Queen and Princess Diana, which in those days we couldn’t arrange. I took her, however, to an exhibit documenting the history of all of England’s Kings and Queens. She studied the display carefully, spending nearly one hour reading the description of each monarch and then going back through again. When she finished, she said, “Mommy, I think being a King or Queen is a very hard job.”

The morning after our grand dinner, I met Princess Diana for the first time at the Drumhead Service, a traditional religious ceremony for “the Forces Committed,” the point at which troops cannot be pulled back from battle. The ceremony was held on the grounds of a Royal Navy base, on a field surrounded by gardens that extended along an oceanfront esplanade. Among the veterans and spectators was Diana, estranged, though not yet divorced, from Prince Charles. She attended the ceremony alone. I watched as she greeted the crowd of supporters, who clearly doted on her. She had a presence that was captivating. Uncommonly beautiful, she used her eyes to draw people in, dropping her head forward to greet you while lifting her eyes upward. She radiated life and a sense of vulnerability that I found heartbreaking. Although there was little time to talk during this visit, I came to know and like her. Diana was a woman torn between competing needs and interests, but she genuinely wanted to make a contribution, to have her life count for something. She became an effective advocate for AIDS awareness and land mine eradication.

She was also a devoted mother, and whenever we met, we discussed the challenge of raising children in the public spotlight.

Later that afternoon, we boarded the Britannia and sailed out into the English Channel, where we joined a long line of ships, including the Jeremiah O’Brien, one of the ships used by the U.S. government to ferry supplies to England during the war. We transferred to the USS George Washington, an aircraft carrier anchored off the French coast.

This was my first visit to a carrier, a floating city with a population of six thousand sailors and Marines. While Bill worked on the speech he would deliver the next day, I took a tour that included the flight deck, one of the most dangerous workstations in the Armed Forces. Imagine the courage and training it requires to take off and land a fighter jet on that bobbing patch of American real estate in the middle of the ocean. From the captain’s bridge high above the deck, I looked out over the enormous carrier and felt the power it represented. I ate dinner in the cafeteria-size galley with some of the crew members, most of whom looked about eighteen or nineteen years old. Fifty years earlier, young men their age had stormed the beaches of Normandy on D-Day.

Although I had read Stephen Ambrose’s book D-Day, I was not prepared for the height of the cliffs that had to be scaled by Allied forces after they fought their way across the beaches on June 6, 1944. Pointedu-Hoc looked impenetrable, and I listened with reverence to the veterans who had made that climb.

Bill’s relationship with the military had gotten off to a rocky start, so a lot was riding on his speech about D-Day. Like me, he had opposed the Vietnam War, believing that it was misconceived and unwinnable. Because of his work during college for Senator Fulbright with the Senate Foreign Relations Committee in the late 1960s, he knew then what we all know now: The United States government had misled the public about the depth of our involvement, the strength of our Vietnamese allies, the Gulf of Tonkin incident, the success of our military strategy, casualty figures and other data that prolonged the conflict and cost more lives. Bill had tried to explain his deep misgivings about the war in a letter to the head of the University of Arkansas ROTC program in 1969. In deciding to withdraw from the program and submit to the draft lottery, he articulated the inner struggle so many young men felt about a country they loved and a war they couldn’t support.

When I first met Bill, we talked incessantly about the Vietnam War, the draft and the contradictory obligations we felt as young Americans who loved our country but opposed that particular war. Both of us knew the anguish of those times―and each of us had friends who had enlisted, were drafted, resisted or became conscientious objectors. Four of Bill’s classmates from high school in Hot Springs were killed in Vietnam. I knew that Bill respected military service, that he would have served if he had been called and that he would also have gladly enlisted in World War II, a war whose purpose was crystal clear. But Vietnam tested the intellect and conscience of many in my generation because it seemed contrary to America’s national interests and values, not in furtherance of them.

As the first modern President to have come of age during Vietnam, Bill carried with him into the White House the unresolved feelings of our country about that war. And he believed it was time to reconcile our differences as Americans and begin a new chapter of cooperation with our former enemy.

With the support of many Vietnam veterans serving in Congress, Bill lifted a U.S.

trade embargo on Vietnam in 1994 and a year later normalized diplomatic relations between our countries. The Vietnamese government continued to make good faith efforts to help locate American servicemen missing in action or held as prisoners of war, and, in 2000, Bill would become the first American president to set foot on Vietnamese soil since U.S. troops left in 1975. His courageous diplomatic actions paid tribute to more than 58,000 Americans who sacrificed their lives in the jungles of southeast Asia and enabled our country to heal an old wound and find common ground among ourselves and with the Vietnamese people.

One of his first challenges as commander in chief became the promise he made during the campaign to let gays and lesbians serve in the military as long as their sexual orientation did not in any way com promise their performance or unit cohesion. I agreed with the commonsense position that the code of military conduct should be enforced strictly against behavior, not sexual orientation. The issue surfaced in early 1993 and became a battleground between strongly held opposing convictions. Those who maintained that homosexuals had served with distinction in every war in our history and should be permitted to continue serving were in a clear minority in the military and the Congress. Public opinion was more closely divided, but as is often the case, those who opposed change were more adamant and vocal than those in favor. What I found disturbing was the hypocrisy.

Just three years earlier during the Gulf War, soldiers known to be homosexual―

both men and women―were sent into harm’s way because their country needed them to fulfill its mission. After the war ended, when they were no longer needed, they were discharged on the basis of their sexual orientation. That seemed indefensible to me.

Bill knew the issue was a political loser, but it galled him that he couldn’t persuade the joint Chiefs of Staff to align the reality―that gays and lesbians have served, are serving and will always serve―with an appropriate change in policy that enforced common behavior standards for all. After both the House and Senate expressed their opposition by veto-proof margins, Bill agreed to a compromise: the “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” policy.

Under the policy, a superior is forbidden to ask a service member if he or she is homosexual.

If a question is asked, there is no obligation to answer. But the policy has not worked well. There are still instances of beatings and harassment of suspected homosexuals, and the number of homosexual discharges has actually increased. In 2000, our closest ally, Great Britain, changed its policy to permit homosexuals to serve, and there has been no reported difficulty; Canada ended its ban on gays in 1992. We have a long way to go as a society before this issue is resolved. I just wish the opposition would listen to Barry Goldwater, an icon of the American Right and an outspoken supporter of gay rights, which he considered consistent with his conservative principles. On the issue of homosexuals in the military, he said, “You don’t need to be straight to fight and die for your country. You just need to shoot straight.”

Bill addressed the American veterans of our parents’ generation in the speech he delivered at the World War II Normandy American Cemetery and Memorial in Collevillesur-Mer: “We are the children of your sacrifice,” he said. These brave Americans joined the armies and resistance fighters of Great Britain, Norway, France, Belgium, Holland, Denmark and others in standing up to Nazism and strengthening a historic alliance that continues to bind the U.S. and Europe half a century later. The “greatest generation” understood that Americans and Europeans were united in a shared enterprise, one that led to victory in the Cold War and inspired the spread of freedom and democracy across several continents. Given the uncertainties of today’s world, America’s historic ties to Europe, so evident on those Normandy beaches, remain a key to global security, prosperity and hopes for peace.

Bill’s D-Day speech was particularly emotional for him because he had recently received a copy of his father’s military record and the history of his unit, which participated in the invasion of Italy. Following the story of his father’s service in several newspapers, Bill received a letter from a man living in New Jersey who had emigrated from Nettuno, Italy. As a young boy, he had been befriended by an American soldier who served in the motor pool of the invading army. The soldier, who had taught the youngster how to fix cars and trucks, was Bill’s father, William Blythe. Bill was thrilled to hear about his father and felt that he was connecting with that young soldier―and the father he never knew―as he tried to express our generation’s gratitude for all that he and millions of others had done for our nation and the world.

That trip had been emotional for me as well. I wanted Bill’s Presidency to succeed not simply because he was my husband and I loved him, but because I loved my country and believed he was the right man to lead it at the end of the twentieth century.

Aretha Franklin rocked the Rose Garden one unforgettable night in June as part of the In Performance concert series that we held at the White House and that were later televised.

She strolled like a queen between tables of guests, who sat in rapt appreciation as Aretha soared through a repertoire of gospel and soul with the singer Lou Rawls. Then she moved on to show tunes and leaned in close to Bill, who swayed in his seat as she sang, “Smile, what’s the use of crying…”