Living History (64 page)

“Really?”

“Yes, what do you think?” she said.

“Well, I wouldn’t be surprised if it happened.”

“You wouldn’t?”

“No, I think she’s done an excellent job, and I happen to think that all things being equal, it would be nice to have a woman in the position.”

“Well, well, I don’t know. I’m not sure. There are some other very qualified people who also want it,” Pamela cautioned.

“I know there are, but I wouldn’t bet against Madeleine if I were you.”

I knew my opinion was one among many Bill solicited. When he made a decision, it was his alone. So I listened as he mulled, and occasionally I’d interject a comment or a question. When Bill asked me about Madeleine, I told him there was nobody who had been more supportive of his policies and was as articulate and persuasive on the issues. I also added that her appointment would make many girls and women proud. I still wasn’t certain whom Bill would pick until he finally called Madeleine on December 5, 1996, and asked her to be his Secretary of State. I was delighted. After the announcement, Pamela Harriman sent me a note that said: “I’ll never bet against you or Madeleine.”

Madeleine became the first woman in history to hold the job, and, at least for her tenure, the rights and needs of women were integrated into America’s foreign policy agenda.

She made that clear when she hosted a celebration of International Women’s Day at the State Department in 1997. I was honored to share the podium with her as we discussed the importance of women’s rights to global progress. I spoke out strongly against the barbaric rule of the Taliban in Afghanistan. I believed that the United States should not recognize their government because of its oppression of women; nor should American business enter into contracts for pipeline construction or any other commercial enterprise.

I was much more relaxed for the second inaugural, and I enjoyed the events without worrying that I was about to fall asleep on my feet. At the same time, there was less of the excitement and awe that we had experienced in 1993. Of course, our world was very different now. I felt I was entering this new chapter of my life like steel tempered in fire: a bit harder at the edges but more durable, more flexible. Bill had grown into his Presidency, and it endowed him with a gravitas that showed on his face and in his eyes. He was only fifty, but his hair was almost completely white, and for the first time in his life he was looking his age. But he still had that boyish smile, sharp wit and infectious optimism that I’d fallen in love with twentyfive years before. I still lit up when he entered a room and I still found myself admiring his handsome face. We shared an abiding belief in the importance of public service, and we were each other’s best friend. Even though we’d had our share of problems, we still made each other laugh. That, I was certain, would get us through another four years in the White House.

I was not the same person who had worn the violet blue gown in 1993. Nor could I fit into it after four years of White House fare. And I had grown not only older but blonder.

The press still kept track of my changing hairstyles, but they were finally giving me a pass in the fashion department. I had become friends with the designer Oscar de la Renta and his glamorous wife, Annette, after we met at the first Kennedy Center Honors reception Bill and I hosted at the White House in 1993. I was wearing one of his dresses that I had bought off the rack, and when he and Annette went through the receiving line and saw it, he told me how flattered he was and offered his help. I loved his elegant designs, and he made me a fabulous embroidered gold tulle gown with a matching satin cape for the second round of Inaugural Balls. I also wore one of his coral-colored wool suits with a matching coat for the swearing-in ceremony. In a break with tradition, and with Oscar’s strong advice, I ditched the hat. The only fashion censure I got that day was for wearing a brooch with the coat, which was strictly my decision. I like brooches!

But I had a complaint of my own. Our sixteen-going-on-seventeen-yearold Chelsea came downstairs covered up in a calf-length coat, and I didn’t realize what was under it until we were ready to leave the White House. I caught a glimpse of her mid-thigh miniskirt and asked to see the outfit. She opened her coat, and photographer Diana Walker, who was doing a behind-the-scenes assignment for Time, caught my face. It was too late for Chelsea to change―and she might not have even if I had begged. She got a lot of attention when she walked in the parade without her coat, but she just waved and smiled and handled herself with confidence and aplomb. She had needed all of her poise―and sense of humor―earlier that day during lunch at the Capitol.

The Republicans controlled Congress, hence the Republicans determined the seating arrangements for the traditional congressional luncheon. Perhaps it was someone’s idea of a joke to seat me next to Newt Gingrich and to put Chelsea between the House Republican Whip, Tom DeLay, and the frisky nonagenarian Senator from South Carolina, Strom Thurmond. DeLay, who had been saying all kinds of awful things about Chelsea’s father, was amiable, and Chelsea reciprocated. He talked about how his own daughter worked in his office and how important it was to have your family involved in your public life. And he offered to give Chelsea a tour of the Capitol.

Strom Thurmond made small talk too. “You know how I got to live this long?” he asked Chelsea. Thurmond was ninety-five. He was the oldest serviceman to parachute behind the line in Normandy just be fore D-Day and had been married to two former beauty queens. The Senator had fathered four children in his sixties and seventies. “Pushups!

One-armed push-ups!” he advised Chelsea. “And never eat anything bigger than an egg. I eat six meals a day the size of an egg!”

Chelsea nodded politely and picked at her salad. Another course arrived.

“I think you’re nearly as pretty as your mama,” the Senator said with that silky Southern charm that had gained him quite a reputation. By the middle of the meal, he mused, “You’re as pretty as your mama. She’s real pretty and you’re pretty too. Yes, you are.

You’re as pretty as your mama.”

By the time dessert arrived, Thurmond was saying, “I do believe you’re prettier than your mama. Yes, you are, and if I was seventy years younger, I’d court you!”

My lunchtime conversation wasn’t nearly as colorful as Chelsea’s. Newt Gingrich seemed subdued. I persevered through the meal with him, talking about nothing in particular.

How’s your mother? Fine, thanks. How’s yours? It had been a bad couple of years for Gingrich.

Although he had won reelection as Speaker of the House, he had lost his national popularity and lost ground in the House. He also had recently been grilled by the House Ethics Committee for ethical lapses. Accused of improperly using tax-exempt organizations to finance a series of political lectures and then misleading the committee about the funding, Gingrich claimed it was an innocent mistake and blamed his lawyer. The committee found he had given questionable and misleading statements on thirteen occasions during the course of the investigation. He was fined and reprimanded. I doubted that Gingrich’s problems in the House would deter him from prolonging the Whitewater investigations as long as he could. In fact, I couldn’t shake the apprehension I had been feeling since the noon swearing-in ceremony.

The day was somewhat overcast and cool, and the atmosphere in front of the Rotunda felt even frostier. By tradition, the Chief justice of the Supreme Court administers the oath of office for each new President, but neither Bill nor I relished the idea of sharing such an important moment with William Rehnquist, who despised us and our politics.

Early in his career as a clerk to Supreme Court Justice Robert Jackson, Rehnquist wrote a memo which had strongly favored upholding the Court’s key pro-segregation decision of 1896, a case called Plessy v. Ferguson, which enunciated the doctrine of “separate but equal.” He endorsed a Texas law permitting white-only primary elections. “It is about time the Court faced the fact that the white people in the south don’t like colored people,”

he wrote in 1952. And in 1964, according to sworn testimony, Rehnquist led efforts to challenge the qualifications of black voters at the polls in Arizona. In 1970, as Richard Nixon’s Assistant Attorney General, he proposed a constitutional amendment to limit and disrupt implementation of the landmark Broom v. Board of Education school desegregation case of 1954. Since being named to the Court by Nixon in 1971, he consistently tried to turn back the Court’s progress on race―and by extension the country’s. His was the only vote, for example, favoring federal tax-exempt status for Bob Jones University, which banned interracial dating and had an expulsion policy on that basis. He made no effort to hide his friendships with many of the extreme conservatives who had been trying to undermine Bill’s Presidency since the first inauguration. As the country would later learn in the election-deciding case of Bush v. Gore, his lifetime tenure as a Supreme Court Justice did not inhibit his ideological or partisan zeal.

I suggested that Bill ask either of his two appointees, Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg or Justice Stephen Breyer, to administer the oath of office. But his regard for tradition prevailed.

His inaugural address, after all, touched on the theme of reconciliation and healing and specifically referred to the “divide of race” as “America’s constant curse.” Bill called on Americans to “forge new ties that bind together.”

When the time came, Chelsea and I held the Bible on which Bill laid his left hand, while he raised his right hand for the oath. When Rehnquist finished swearing him in, Bill reached over to shake the Chief Justice’s hand.

“Good luck,” Rehnquist said without smiling. Something about his tone made me think we would need it.

The second time my husband joined Greg Norman to play golf, he ended up on crutches for two months. Bill didn’t fall into a sand trap, and it wasn’t a wild swing that got him―he simply took a false step on a dark stair in front of Norman’s house in Florida, and lurched backward, tearing 90 percent of his right quadriceps. It happened just after 1 A.M.

on Friday, March 14, 1997, and he called to tell me about it on his way to the hospital. He was in terrible pain, but trying, as he said, “to put my best leg forward.” I was relieved that his sense of humor hadn’t been injured, but my worry cells went into overdrive.

Bill’s only concern was getting back to the White House and then flying to Helsinki, Finland, for a long-scheduled meeting with Boris Yeltsin the following Wednesday―no matter what the doctors said. I called Dr. Connie Mariano, Director of the White House Medical Unit and the President’s physician, to ask her opinion. She told me that Bill would need surgery, but he could safely fly back from Florida and have it done in Washington.

I met Air Force One at Andrews AFB on Friday morning and watched from the tarmac as a scrum of Secret Service agents carried my normally indestructible husband out of the belly of the plane. They placed him in a wheelchair atop a portable hydraulic lift and lowered him to the ground. I rode in a van with Bill to Bethesda Naval Hospital, where surgeons would operate on his leg. Bill was cheerful despite his excruciating pain and still totally focused on going to Helsinki. I asked him to wait until we knew how the surgery went, but he’d already decided it would be fine. Bill often reminds me of the boy who is digging furiously in a barn filled with manure. When someone asks why, he says, “With all this manure, there’s got to be a pony in here somewhere.”

He refused to have general anesthesia or to take narcotic painkillers because, as President, he had to be alert and on call twentyfour hours a day. This presented a problem. The surgery he needed to re attach his quadriceps tendon to the top of his kneecap was painful and painstaking. If he underwent general anesthesia, Bill would be required by the Twentyfifth Amendment to the Constitution to temporarily cede presidential power to the Vice President, who was standing by. There had been no such turnover since 1985, when President Reagan underwent surgery for colon cancer. Bill was determined not to invoke the transfer of powers. The upcoming meeting with Yeltsin concerned the expansion of NATO, which the Russians vehemently opposed. Bill didn’t want news reports that might signal his weakness or vulnerability. He opted for localized anesthesia and chatted with his doctors about the Lyle Lovett music piped into the operating room while the orthopedic surgeon and his team drilled holes in his kneecap, pulled the shredded quadriceps muscle through, then sutured the ends back onto the undamaged part of the muscle.

I waited anxiously during the operation in a special suite reserved for the President and his family, where Chelsea joined me after school. Our family has been blessed with good health. The only time I’d been admitted to a hospital was when I gave birth. Other than an outpatient procedure on Bill’s sinuses in the early 1980s and Chelsea’s tonsillectomy a few years later, none of us had undergone surgery. I did not take our good fortune for granted, because I knew that “there but for the grace of God go I”―or someone I love.

Finally, after three hours in surgery, Bill was wheeled into the suite at 4:43 P.M. He looked pale and exhausted, but he was in good spirits because Dr. Mariano and the surgeon told us the operation had been a success and he had excellent prospects for a full recovery. Chelsea and I had been watching a Cary Grant movie, and Bill’s first words were: “Where’s the basketball tournament?” We quickly changed the channel to a March Madness game.

Other than the Razorbacks, all Bill wanted to talk about was his trip to Finland. Dr.

Mariano and the surgeons explained the possible risks of long-distance air travel and asked me if I could talk him out of going. I said I’d try, as long as his health depended on it, but I doubted I’d be successful. I called Sandy Berger, Bill’s National Security Adviser, who, with his wife, Susan, had been our friends since the 1970s. Sandy has a firm grasp of the issues and an uncanny ability to marshal facts and arguments when presenting options for the President to consider. He encouraged my overseas work and believed that development and human rights issues were critical pieces of any foreign policy agenda. Sandy explained the importance of the Helsinki trip and why he hoped Bill could go, but he acknowledged that if Bill’s medical team said he shouldn’t fly, then he shouldn’t fly. I conveyed Sandy’s message to Bill: Sandy would regretfully concede to the doctors.