The Choices of Hillary Rodham Clinton

  

My wife has an interesting theory about the career of Hillary Clinton. Carole believes young Hillary Rodham had the intelligence and drive that would have gotten her where she is today no matter what course she had taken . . . but she was born just a few years too early to believe she could do it on her own.

Instead, Clinton chose the route taken by most of the women of her era, and it cost her more than it would have if she had gone it alone . . . or if she had been born 10 years later and grown up enjoying the full benefits of second-wave feminism.

Carole’s theory comes partly out of her reading of a 1996 biography that was written by an initially hostile conservative journalist, David Brock. Brock had already done a hatchet job on Anita Hill, and broken the story of Bill Clinton’s “Troopergate” scandal, but in the course of writing the new book, for which the Free Press gave him a $1 million advance and a tight, one-year deadline, he came to admire Hillary Clinton and wrote a largely sympathetic volume that did not sell well, The Seduction of Hillary Rodham. He had disappointed his conservative fans but carried a history that made liberals distrust him.

Six years later, Brock published Blinded by the Right, his Saul-on-the-road-to-Damascus account of his disaffection with conservatism and huge swing to the left. (The book was subtitled “Confessions of a Right-Wing Hit Man,” and Brock has since been a consultant on Hillary Clinton’s campaigns. He also called his book on Anita Hill “character assassination,” in which he “consciously lied,” and apologized to her.)

However, my wife also speaks out of her own experience as a member of roughly the same generation as Hillary Rodham. Like many other women of their time, Carole and Hillary grew up when women were trained to find a man to whom they could hitch their fortune. You located a promising husband and did everything you could to support him to achieve the mutual success you would enjoy as a couple.

Carole dropped out of college to marry her first husband. He had a successful and lucrative career that kept him moving around the country, so it took her multiple attempts to finish her schooling. We ran into a friend of the same generation at the PSU farmers market last Saturday, who told us her mother instructed her to become a secretary so she could marry the boss. (She became an actress and screenwriter instead.)

According to Brock’s biography (remember, this was written and published during Bill Clinton’s first term in office, before the Lewinsky scandal), Hillary Rodham had the kind of ambition and drive that made her classmates at Wellesley College predict she would be a U.S. senator or something equally great someday.

But the Chicago native married a boy from Arkansas: a smart, charismatic, and ambitious boy, but one that had to appeal to his constituency. When he ran for governor four years after their marriage, his advisors completely made over his wife to make him “more electable.” Though she had gotten her law degree at Yale, worked as a Congressional legal counsel, and became the first female associate and then partner of the third oldest law firm in the U.S., Rose Law Firm in Little Rock, she toed the party line.

After her marriage, Hillary had kept her own name, but Bill’s advisors made her change it. (Bill later tried to claim that it had been her idea.) The campaign also made her redo her hairstyle and wardrobe. Worse was to come. When he ran for President in 1992, allegations of her husband’s affair with a lounge singer named Gennifer Flowers forced Hillary to sit for an interview with him on 60 Minutes in order to save his campaign. (He denied having the affair, but admitted “causing pain in my marriage.”)

The following year, now with her own office in the West Wing (the first time any First Lady had had one), she was forced to endure “Troopergate,” the reports of how a pair of Arkansas state troopers allegedly arranged sexual liaisons for the governor, including Flowers and Paula Jones, who would subsequently sue Bill Clinton for sexual harassment and received an $850,000 settlement. (The story was broken in American Spectator magazine by David Brock, who later apologized to the Clintons and said his exposé had been politically motivated “bad journalism” fueled by an “anti-Clinton crusade.”)

Then came Monica Lewinsky, the 22-year-old White House intern. That story broke in January 1998, almost a year after the alleged affair ended. House impeachment proceedings took place the following winter, between December 19, 1998 and Feb. 12, 1999, when the Senate failed to achieve a two-thirds majority vote to remove the President from office.

This is where the story moves into Carole’s speculation, which starts from the question: How did Hillary Clinton—a native of Chicago, graduate of Wellesley in Massachusetts, resident of Arkansas from 1975 to 1992, and First Lady in D.C. between 1993 and 2001—become a Senator for the state of New York? She had never lived there, nor participated in the state’s politics before.

In November 1998, just as the president’s impeachment was about to commence, Daniel Patrick Moynihan, the four-term senior senator from New York, announced he would not run again in 2000. Four days after Bill was acquitted by the Senate, Hillary Clinton announced she was thinking of running.

Here’s Carole’s theory: When the Lewinsky scandal broke in 1998, Hillary had had enough. She was ready to divorce this charming rogue who had repeatedly humiliated her. But how would it look for the Democratic Party to have its first sitting president get abandoned by his wife?

Carole theorizes that party leaders asked Hillary to “sit tight; we’ll take care of you.” When Moynihan announced his retirement from the Senate (neither Illinois nor Arkansas, more sensible options given her background, had a senatorial election scheduled for 2000), Democrat officials assured Hillary they would back her. (It’s interesting to note that Moynihan voted against the 1996 Defense of Marriage Act, NAFTA, the Gulf War, and President Clinton’s welfare reform proposals, about which he was particularly critical . . . which suggests Hillary Clinton has been less progressive than her predecessor.)

Although most New York seats have been safely Democratic, there was a possibility that New York Mayor Rudolph Giuliani would run for Moynihan’s vacated office. By then, Hillary Clinton had the kind of star power that would keep the position from going Republican. Giuliani ultimately chose not to run.

In order to establish residency, the Clintons bought a house in Chappaqua, about 40 miles north of New York City, and that gave Hillary an excuse to get away from Washington and live separately from her husband, at least for a while. It was the first time since Woodrow Wilson’s wife died in 1914 that a president lived in the White House without a spouse.

I have found no discussion of this theory on the Internet. If it’s true, or if anyone else has proposed it, I have not seen evidence, so I’m crediting my wife. Though we are firm Bernie Sanders supporters, we will vote for Hillary if she is the nominee, because any possible Republican alternative is just too odious to consider. Carole thinks young female voters who castigate Clinton don’t fully understand where she came from, and all she was up against . . . although Elizabeth Warren is less than two years younger than Hillary, and she charted a different course.

Hillary Clinton could have been Elizabeth Warren. But for any number of complicated reasons, she has not. Carole’s theory may be part of the explanation.

All the above photos are in the public domain, save for the image of Hillary Clinton, from a speaking event in Des Moines, Iowa in January 2016; that image is courtesy of Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0, by photographer Gage Skidmore