10
A New Generation in the White House (1993–2008)

ON JANUARY 20, 1993, Hillary Rodham Clinton moved into the White House amid predictions that she would completely rewrite the job of First Lady. Headlines described a president’s “First Partner” who is “breaking new ground.”¹ One magazine searched the record of three administrations to fashion a composite that did her justice, finally concluding that she was a “presidential super spouse” who combined “the policy presence of an Eleanor Roosevelt [with] the sounding board of a Milton Eisenhower and the … generalship on hard decisions that Robert F. Kennedy offered during the Cuban missile crisis of 1962.”² Within months, a popular magazine outlined not “The President’s First One Hundred Days” but “A Hundred Days of Hillary.”³ The normally sedate Atlantic suggested that she was making “motherhood look good” on women’s job resumés,⁴ and the career-minded Working Woman evaluated the “ripple effect of the ‘Billary’ phenomenon” on “husband-wife business relationships” across the nation.⁵ Television viewers of CNN’s popular “Sonya Live” cheerfully offered their own opinions of the First Lady’s effect on the president and on the nation.⁶

Much about the Clinton presidency looked new. Three decades earlier Americans had listened to John Kennedy speak passionately of power passing to a generation of leaders “born in this century,” but as the year 2000 approached, the nation’s top politicos talked more of the twenty-first century. Many had matured in a time when the United States had already claimed prominence among the nations of the world. Both President Clinton and Vice President Gore, together with their spouses and closest colleagues, had come of age when atomic bombs and nuclear warfare were household words; they had grown up with computers and jet planes. They expected to play major roles in policies affecting the 2000s.

The gap between George Bush’s generation and that of Bill Clinton was bigger than is usual between one administration and the next, and for their wives the distance loomed even larger. Historians focusing on American women’s lives may one day argue that the greatest watershed of all lay in those decades separating Barbara Bush’s birth in 1925 and Hillary Rodham Clinton’s in 1947. One year younger than Barbara’s oldest child, Hillary had grown up in a very different world.

Hillary had not only graduated from college but had completed law school and then gone on to work her entire adult life. Barbara Bush dropped out of college after one year and never held a full-time job. The older woman’s choices had been defined by her husband’s jobs and by the needs of her children; the younger had begun a career first and then fit family around it. The contrast is underlined in their approach to their names. Most Americans find difficulty coming up with the maiden name of Barbara (Pierce) Bush, whereas few have trouble remembering that Hillary was born a Rodham.

It was not just that the two women had taken such remarkably different paths—in education, work, and domestic arrangements—but that so many of their contemporaries had made the same choices they had. Barbara Bush and Hillary Clinton were quintessential examples of women of their time and class. As the older woman, Bush may have had some friends whose careers resembled Clinton’s but such a path would have been as much an anomaly as a Barbara-Bush-type among Hillary’s contemporaries.

By the time the Clintons moved into the White House, young Americans showed the effect of changes in the 1970s and 1980s. In education, girls had evened out the odds, and by 1991, white females who graduated from high school were more likely to go on to college than were males.7 Old quotas that had held down the numbers of women admitted to professional and graduate schools faded or disappeared, and by 1990, women collected a sizeable fraction of degrees granted: 34 percent of those in medicine; 31 percent in dentistry; 42 percent in law; 25 percent in theology; and more than half of the doctorates awarded in education, foreign languages, health sciences, literature, psychology, and public affairs.⁸

At work, the change was reflected in the numbers of women holding full-time jobs. When Barbara Bush’s oldest child entered elementary school in 1952, it was the unusual mother in a two-parent household who went outside her home to work, especially when her children were very young. By the time Chelsea Clinton entered grade school, more than half of the nation’s mothers with children her age held a job.⁹

Young children developed strategies for managing on their own, leading to discussions of “latchkey” children, and they learned it was not necessarily their mother who should be summoned in case of emergency. Chelsea Clinton was simply doing what she had been taught when, soon after her father became president, she took sick at school and requested that he be called “because my mother’s busy.” Bill Clinton explained to amused reporters that he had generally been the more reachable parent, as governor of Arkansas, while his wife’s law practice kept her away from the phone for hours at a time.

A new generation of Americans grew accustomed to seeing women in places of power and influence: their actions covered on the front pages of important newspapers and their pictures in television programs of substance. First Ladies before 1993 had come of age when women in politics were rare and those who ventured to run for office found themselves denigrated as “hard,” “unfeeling,” and “unfeminine.” Barbara Bush grew up in a Republican household where she later admitted the name of Eleanor Roosevelt was associated with models to avoid rather than emulate. Hillary Rodham Clinton also had conservative, Republican parents, who held no great admiration for the activist Democratic First Lady but they did not allow those negative feelings to diminish their aspirations for their daughter. Her mother really hoped, she later admitted, that Hillary would be the first woman on the Supreme Court.10

Dorothy Rodham believed that barriers against women in high government jobs would lift in her daughter’s generation and she was right. Sandra Day O’Connor, the first woman to serve on the Supreme Court, was nominated by Republican President Ronald Reagan in 1981. Three years later the Democratic Party achieved a “first” of its own when it named Geraldine Ferraro of New York to run with Walter Mondale of Minnesota for the top two political jobs in the land. Female members of the president’s cabinet ceased being a novelty, and the number of women legislators climbed slowly but steadily. By the time the 103rd Congress took seats in 1993, women claimed six places in the Senate and forty-eight in the House of Representatives. On the state level, they did even better, winning nearly twenty percent of the total posts.

Some women holding high political office admitted they had entered the field because they had tired of feeling shortchanged by their government. Across the nation, a “gender gap” in political consciousness that had been predicted even before women were permitted to vote finally showed itself. Women demanded help from their legislators on a long list of problems that seemingly shaped their lives and altered their happiness more than men’s, such as health care (including the right to terminate a pregnancy), family leave, environmental concerns, and gun control. Not a few were shocked into political action by what they perceived as government’s unfair treatment of other women, including Anita Hill when she appeared before the Senate Judiciary Committee to testify on the conduct of a potential appointment to the Supreme Court, Clarence Thomas.

Mothers who had formerly been dismissed by their representatives as unimportant ladies in “tennis shoes” suddenly showed confidence to take on government—and become part of it. Patty Murray, running for U.S. Senator from Washington in 1992, flaunted as her campaign slogan a phrase that had upset her a few years earlier when she had been dismissed by a legislator as too insignificant for his attention. Now Murray asked people to “vote for a Mom in tennis shoes.” Such pairing of maternal status and legislative competence would have been ludicrous a generation earlier when women seeking political office or high corporate jobs played down their family status. Male candidates had traditionally paraded out their entire households—wife, children, even parents and pets—but women, for whom these same attachments carried fewer positive appeals, tended to hide their family links. Pat Schroeder, congresswoman from Colorado, in an exception to the rule, had greeted fellow legislators with the wry announcement that she possessed a “uterus and a brain and they both work.”

The gains women made might have been expected to change perceptions of candidates’ wives and make an activist, career-minded Hillary Rodham Clinton look particularly appealing. Voters accustomed to seeing women in high office might predictably rate a male candidate higher if an accomplished spouse ran alongside, especially if he admitted he intended to seek her advice and value her counsel. Long used to the idea that a candidate’s wife became part of his record and that her success as wife and mother entered into any evaluation of his fitness for office, Americans now had the chance to extend their scrutiny to include a woman’s professional record. Much about the Clintons encouraged speculation.

Born on October 26, 1947, in a Chicago suburb, Park Ridge, Hillary Rodham Clinton had grown up in a comfortably middle-class home. Daughter of Hugh Rodham, who owned a small fabric store, and Dorothy Rodham, full-time wife and mother, she was the oldest of their three children (and the only girl), and played the classic role of the first-born who tries so hard to please. When her parents encouraged her to do everything that her brothers did, she took them seriously. “I was determined,” Dorothy Rodham later told the Washington Post, “that just because she was a girl didn’t mean she should be limited.”11

Circumstantial evidence suggests that Dorothy Rodham may have felt that her own generation of women had been shut out. Her education had not gone beyond high school, but as an adult, she enrolled in a community college to take courses for her own satisfaction, or as a neighbor explained “just for the thrill of it, just to do something with her mind.”¹² Hillary’s desire for risk and adventure, along with her displeasure at being excluded because of her sex, may well have come from her mother. In junior high school, Hillary decided she wanted to become an astronaut, and NASA’s explanation that the job was closed to women was “infuriating” she later told the Washington Post.¹³

Hillary’s father, with the kind of scrappy personality that often marks an immigrant background and a college education (at Penn State) made possible by an athletic scholarship, prodded his daughter to try harder. She recalled that he played down her early academic successes so as to nudge her into doing more. His good judgment earned her permanent respect, and after his death, in April 1993, she lamented that she could no longer turn to him in difficult days at the White House.¹⁴

On top of the parental grounding, Hillary ingested a strong dose of Methodist training that directed her toward many of her choices. As a youngster, she attended the Methodist church, whose founder John Wesley had taken as an important creed: “Do all the good you can, in all the ways you can, in all the places you can, at all the times you can, to all the people you can, as long as ever you can.” In her case the religious training had been reinforced by other events at the time she came of age—in the 1960s—when talk of “what you can do for your country” and of the Peace Corps and community involvement drew many young people into public service. By the 1990s, when Americans came to know more of Hillary Rodham, such talk appeared dated, if not naïve and suspiciously self-serving, but two decades earlier, it had been common and often sprang from genuine conviction.

High school for Hillary included the chance to develop some of the skills and ideas that she would later transfer to the national arena. Class officer and organizer, she learned to speak in front of a student body of several hundred and when she graduated in 1965, classmates singled her out as the girl in her class most “likely to succeed,”¹⁵ an accolade that signaled both affability and perseverance. Her political philosophy was still in the making because she combined what appears to have been genuine commitment to social progress with a hearty distaste for big government. As a high school senior, she backed Republican Barry Goldwater for president, and when she entered Wellesley College in September 1965, she did so as a Goldwater Republican.

Four years at Wellesley changed her perspective, but it would be unfair to credit college alone with achieving that shift. By 1968 she was campaigning for Eugene McCarthy16 as he challenged incumbent Lyndon Johnson for the Democratic nomination for president. McCarthy’s run evolved out of the anti-war movement which, by March 1968, had helped drive Johnson out of the race, but other forces were at work challenging the old order of things. A fledgling feminist movement, a strong civil rights fight, and various other reforms aimed at improving education, cleaning up prisons, and protecting the environment had encouraged many people to rethink their lives.

The late 1960s, when Hillary Rodham was at Wellesley, could qualify as among the most exciting years of the century in which to come of age. A sense of power permeated campuses and encouraged students to think they could do anything they chose—close down a university, end a war, or send a powerful president into retirement. When Martin Luther King was gunned down, and then scarcely two months later Robert Kennedy met the same fate, individuals who had never shown much interest in government decided it was time to get involved. For those who had been nurturing an obligation to help others, the impulse grew too strong to resist.

In college, Hillary Rodham honed the leadership skills she had developed in an Illinois high school and turned them to serve her new convictions. While majoring in political science, she had the opportunity to work out some of her ideas on exactly how societal change could come about, and increasingly she turned to the idea that government should play a larger role. One of her professors wrote, in recommending her to law school, that he had “high hopes” for her. “She has the intellectual ability, personality, and character to make a remarkable contribution to American society.”¹⁷

Elected head of campus government, she and her classmates convinced the college president to break an old tradition and let a student speak at commencement. Hillary was chosen. Such student interventions in areas once firmly under the administration’s control were not unique to Wellesley. In the late 1960s many college officials learned to accommodate students’ requests for a larger role—to evaluate professors, help shape curriculum, and decide the sources from which a college got its money and the places it invested. Graduates frequently embellished their academic gowns with anti-war symbols or rejected them entirely in favor of faded dungarees and slogan t-shirts. Audiences often became vocal about their disregard for a particular speaker or for the views expressed. Heckling was common; noisier disruptions not unknown.

At Wellesley’s commencement in June 1969, the principal speaker, Massachusetts Senator Edward Brooke, had not yet fully recognized the meaning of these changes. Fifty years old and a man of considerable achievement, he had sat through many of these ceremonies where audiences expected to hear trite exhortations about “the road of life.” He gave the kind of speech that he had always given, dealing in generalities and optimism rather than alluding to the problems of the day.

Hillary Rodham, who followed Senator Brooke to the podium, decided to buck old traditions about deference and say what she thought. Her prepared remarks gained no high marks for brilliant organization or polished delivery but did raise eyebrows for their attacks on the old guard. She chastized her elders, saying the choices they had made were no longer acceptable to her generation. Their “acquisitive and competitive corporate life … is not the way of life for us. We’re searching for more immediate, ecstatic and penetrating modes of living. … “ Many in the audience, not yet used to hearing young people criticize their elders publicly, were dismayed. Among those attending were several distinguished statesmen, including Dean Acheson, former secretary of state, and Paul Nitze, deputy secretary of defense during the Vietnam years. In reporting on graduation ceremonies across the nation, Life published Hillary’s picture alongside photos of several of her contemporaries who had also spoken out.18

Law school appeared the next logical step, and by the time Hillary applied in 1969, Yale stood high among the possible choices. It had already achieved a reputation for turning out graduates geared to public service rather than profit alone, and it had begun accepting a sizeable number of female applicants. Hillary’s enrollment at Yale led to an important fortuitous meeting during her first year. As a result of a speech she heard by Yale alumna Marian Wright Edelman, an African-American only eight years her senior, Hillary redefined her career plans.

Edelman had accomplished a great deal in the few years since collecting her law degree. After working as an attorney for the NAACP, including four years at the Association’s Legal Defense and Education Fund in Jackson, Mississippi, she had helped start the Washington Research Project, a public interest group in the nation’s capital.¹⁹ Much about the quiet but inspiring Edelman appealed to Hillary. Not only did Edelman seem committed to using a prestigious law degree in public service but she evidently meant to combine career with a family of her own. Already married to another attorney by the time Hillary met her, Edelman eventually had three sons.

The Washington Research Project had no funds to pay student workers over the summers, but in 1970 Hillary got a small stipend from Yale and went to the capital. A student intern there in 1968, she now approached her second job in Washington—at age twenty-two. Assigned to study migrant workers, she became most concerned about the welfare of children who moved with their parents from one camp to the next, and by the time classes resumed in the fall, she had narrowed her career focus. Resolving to study child development and the legal issues involved in protecting children’s health and safety, she began to question old traditions, including those holding that a parent always knew best and would—or could—act to protect children. She wrestled with the topic of parental hegemony—when it should be limited and when government could justifiably step in to protect a child’s interests. To inform her answers, she turned to courses in psychology and texts in child development.

This new interest diverted some of her attention from the traditional, required courses and funneled her energy into issues related to family law. She assisted professors writing on the subject and published her own findings. Part of that effort was later incorporated into a Carnegie Council book, All Our Children: Families Under Pressure in the United States, that listed Hillary as a research associate. Much of the book reiterates old arguments about a child’s best interests being served by improving economic conditions for the entire family through better pay and flexible work schedules, but one section deals with the right of minors to challenge decisions that affect them. It advocated “due process” in the case of suspensions from school involving more than one week.20

These pursuits outside the classroom tacked another year on to what would normally have been a three-year-law degree and put Hillary Rodham’s graduation date in 1973, the same as Bill Clinton’s although he had entered one year after her. Fourteen months older than Hillary, he had followed graduation from Georgetown with a Rhodes scholarship to Oxford, before returning to the United States to enter law school. The story of their meeting, in the Yale library, is not unique in the history of presidents and their wives. Lou Henry had first encountered young Herbert Hoover in the geology lab at Stanford University, and Lou, like Hillary, had gone on to earn the same degree as her husband earned.

But unlike the Hoovers who evidently decided to link their lives soon after they met, the Clintons made their decision more slowly. By the 1970s, women had more options than in Lou Hoover’s days. While Bill returned to his native Arkansas, Hillary took a job in Washington working for the House Judiciary Committee investigating the intricacies of President Nixon’s culpability in the Watergate break-in and its aftermath. One of three women on a legal team that totaled 41, Hillary came to the job with high recommendations and plenty of zeal, and she forged friendships there that she would take with her to the White House. The legal team brought impressive credentials, and Hillary later told Washington reporter Donnie Radcliffe that working on it had been a “great experience. … What a gift! I was twenty-six years old. I felt like I was walking around with my mouth open all the time.”21

President Nixon’s resignation in August 1974, abruptly ended the work of the investigative team, and Hillary made a momentous, but not irreversible, decision about her future. Although she later admitted she had been cautioned against the effect such a move would have on her career, she relocated to Bill’s Arkansas. They did not marry until November 1975, but she had evidently made her decision a year earlier to fit her professional life around his. Had she contemplated a political career of her own, she would have been better advised to remain in the capital, return to her own state of Illinois, or put down new roots in another state more amicable to the idea of women candidates. But like many of the women who became First Lady, she recognized that political work did not always include holding office in her own name.

As Bill Clinton moved single-mindedly into politics, Hillary Rodham taught at the state university’s law school. When he won his first statewide election to attorney general and moved to the state capital, she gave up teaching and joined the Rose Law Firm in Little Rock, becoming the first woman hired by this prestigious old law firm. During her years at Rose, she forged close professional ties with people who would later assist in the campaign for president and then in running the Oval Office. Vincent Foster, a fellow attorney, served as Assistant White House Counsel until his death in the summer of 1993, and another attorney, Webster Hubbell, went to Washington as Associate Attorney General, the third highest rank in the Justice Department.²²

Had she never married, Hillary Rodham could have consoled herself in her middle years that she had a remarkably successful career. Work on corporate boards and her legal practice earned her a comfortable six-figure income, thus putting her at the very top among American professional woman at the time. Popular with colleagues at work, she was twice named to the list of “100 Most Influential Lawyers in America.”23 Garry Wills, writing in the New York Review of Books, singled her out as “one of the more important scholar-activists of the last two decades.”²⁴

But like most other women of her generation, Hillary combined this success at work with a full family life—as wife and mother. The birth of Chelsea Victoria Clinton on February 27, 1980, evidently made only a tiny glitch in her mother’s career path. Like other women who were her contemporaries, Hillary had learned to juggle the demands of household management and a stressful job, and although the events in her daily life were not those of every woman—hosting a reception at the Governor’s Mansion and arguing an important case in court—the logistics were identical. Often it seemed she had to be in two places at the same time, but she refused to complain publicly.

When Bill Clinton first announced he would try for the presidency in 1992, few observers foresaw any chance of his winning or showed much interest in his wife. President Bush’s popularity stood at an all-time high at the end of the Kuwait war, and many Americans did not think or hope that he would be denied a second term.

Among the spouses of Democrats who challenged President Bush, Hillary Rodham Clinton (as her press releases announced her at the time) did not have a high profile. She had not campaigned in 1988 when so much attention went to candidates’ spouses. The spotlight had actually turned on the women early in that race when Democrats in Polk County, Iowa, decided to sponsor a forum featuring candidates’ wives twelve months before the nominating conventions took place. Invitations went out to the headquarters of all the contenders, and six wives agreed to appear. When they arrived in Des Moines, on July 26, 1987, they found hundreds of journalists, many armed with microphones and television cameras, and an auditorium full of interested listeners.

The forum, moderated by Attorney Ruth Harkin (whose husband served in the U.S. Senate), featured an impressive lineup of speakers: attorney Harriet Babbitt, wife of Arizona Governor Bruce Babbitt; attorney Jeanne Simon, spouse of Illinois Senator Paul Simon; author Tipper Gore, who had just written a book decrying sexually explicit lyrics in rock songs; educator Jill Biden, who had completed two master’s degrees and vowed to continue teaching emotionally disturbed children even if her husband won the presidency; Kitty Dukakis, whose list of professional activities and community service totaled four pages; and Jane Gephardt, spouse of Missouri Congressman Richard Gephardt and the only speaker to present herself as a traditional wife without a career of her own. Bill Clinton had dropped out of the race one week earlier or Hillary would have participated in this panel of six mothers who were also attorneys, authors, educators, and public advocates.

Hillary’s first big opportunity for national attention came in early 1992, when the Clintons asked for a chance to respond to charges made by an Arkansas woman, Gennifer Flowers. A supermarket tabloid, the Star, had just run large headlines quoting Flowers talking about “My 12-Year Affair with Bill Clinton.”25 Had the story stopped with the Star, it might have been ignored, but when the mainstream media picked it up, Clinton staffers decided that it required a response.

In American political history, it is not unprecedented for a wife to be called on to help defend her husband against charges of marital infidelity—or to deflect the damage by seeming not to care or to have been too hurt if the candidate chooses to acknowledge other liaisons. Memories of Lee Hart’s dejected appearance in front of television cameras when Gary Hart decided to talk about his boat trip with Donna Rice were still fresh in viewers’ minds. Some even remembered Joan Kennedy’s grim expression as she appeared in public with Ted Kennedy after Chappaquiddick. But Hillary assigned herself a more difficult role—she would not only sit beside her husband while he answered questions—she would also speak for herself.

The interview involved considerable risk. Scheduled for the entire broadcast of 60 Minutes on January 26, 1992, it followed the Super-bowl game when the television audience was expected to approach 100 million. Now many of these voters would watch the Clintons closely, looking for discomfort in Hillary or evidence that Bill was lying. To put the Gennifer Flowers story to rest seemed essential to winning the nomination, but the spouse’s part in that effort equaled the candidate’s.

Years of facing television cameras and of public speaking paid off for both Clintons. While he squirmed slightly, choosing his words carefully enough so as to admit “bringing pain” to his marriage without actually confessing what he had done, she charged ahead. In a final touch of defiance that he did not quite match, she challenged voters to consider what the Clintons represented and then if they did not like what they saw, “then heck, don’t vote for him.”²⁶

The Clinton campaign hit other rough spots before Bill captured the nomination but Hillary’s name had become a household word. She remained central to her husband’s campaign, and when candidate Jerry Brown charged that she had gained professionally from her husband’s governorship, she replied that she “could have stayed home and baked cookies” but had chosen not to. Her comment was picked up by the press and repeated out of context to convey the idea that she disparaged women who had no career outside their home and families. In fact, she had gone on to say that she had made her choices with the hope that she could ease the way for other women to have more options. But the “cookies” quote dogged her steps and tagged her, in opponents’ eyes, as an enemy of traditional family values—a woman full of her own importance.27

Very quickly it became apparent that 1992, dubbed in politics “the year of the woman,” was not the “year of the wife.” Journalists still struggling with how to report on female candidates (and to discuss their ideas instead of their wardrobes) faced new questions when writing about political wives. One like Hillary Rodham Clinton, with a substantial career involved in controversial public issues, invited extra scrutiny. Yet she was not the candidate, and it seemed unfair to hold her spouse responsible for every view she had ever expressed. Candidates’ wives in the past had typically worked for their own causes and projects, but they had done so as committed volunteers and thus were less threatening. They had labored hard for beautification of highways, restoration of the White House, improved mental health benefits, and literacy—all projects that very few of their countrymen would decline to support. Their efforts had made them no enemies, except perhaps among people who disagreed on how much to spend on them.

Hillary Rodham Clinton came to the White House with weighty professional baggage. She had been packing it for twenty years. Since leaving law school she had chaired meetings, argued cases, and taken actions that affected people’s lives and made some people angry. It could not be otherwise for a practicing attorney who had also taken on an advocacy role. Critics looked particularly closely at her work with the Legal Services Corporation, set up as a federally funded non-partisan attempt to provide legal aid to the nation’s indigent. President Jimmy Carter had named Hillary to the board of directors in 1978, and she had chaired it for the next two years. Several of the board’s decisions came under fire, and conservatives were particularly chagrined when stories circulated about federal funds going through the corporation to less than mainstream causes, such as defending requests for transsexual surgery and upholding Native Americans’ claims to ownership of a sizeable chunk of the state of Maine.²⁸

Hillary’s directorship of a philanthropy, the New World Foundation, also invited scrutiny. Incorporated in 1954, the foundation had quietly handed out small grants for years, in pursuit of equal rights for minorities, avoidance of war, and development of community initiative programs. But Hillary’s new prominence focused special attention on what it had done during the two years she chaired its board. Her final report, issued in 1988, reiterated the foundation’s commitment to “citizen organizing, in groups and coalitions, to put public needs back on the national agenda and to hold bureaucracies and elected officials accountable.” In listing the hundred or so grants made during her two-year stint, she included many that were small and hardly controversial (such as $5,000 each to the MS Foundation for Women and to the Center for Puerto Rican Studies at Hunter College of the City University of New York). But other grants later rankled critics who deemed the recipients part of the “hard left.” Particularly annoying was the $2,500 award made to an admittedly anti-conservative group, Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting, and $5,000 to the Committee in Support of the People of El Salvador.29

Even Hillary’s work with the Children’s Defense Fund came under attack. While she chaired the fund, it repeatedly called attention to the increasing number of the nation’s children living in poverty, but her critics preferred to dwell on questions about who would pay to get them out.³⁰ Hillary’s earlier writings on the legal rights of minors were quoted, often out of context, so that they seemed to argue that children should be able to sue their parents over insignificant matters and that youngsters understood their welfare better than their elders.

Rather than trying to refute these charges, she generally kept quiet, but already she was getting a taste of the power of one sound “byte.” Anyone reading her work on children’s rights will be struck by the complex problems she cites, involving sad cases of children shortchanged on health care and education. The reforms she suggests reach beyond families to drastically alter the role of government and the old values of individualism sprouted on the frontier. But evidence and recommendations as dry and complicated as these are unlikely to catch the attention of most audiences, especially if they have just heard her views summarized as “giving children the right to sue their parents.” “Make your point short and catchy,” Americans seemed to say, “or you haven’t a chance of getting through to us.” Candidates running for election learn the “sound byte simplicity” but Hillary had never had to run; her work as attorney and advocate had thrived on complexity and detail.

Hillary Rodham Clinton presented a novel phenomenon in presidential history although candidates running for lesser office had earlier revealed the potential for trouble. Americans who paid so much attention to personal probity, especially after Watergate invited them to look closely at their top leaders, would find difficulty separating a candidate’s record from what a spouse did professionally or financially. As long as the candidates were males who also managed their family’s only career and all its money, responsibility was clearly assigned, but in the Clintons’ case, all evidence pointed to Hillary as the family’s chief financial planner. Money magazine even ran an article, “How Hillary Manages the Clintons’ Money,” and explained how her decisions had pulled the family into the top 3 percent of American households.31 Some observers noted that she cared more than Bill about having money, since her background was solidly middle class whereas he had grown up in poverty and ceased fearing it. Others pointed out that her work in the Rose Law Firm led to contacts with investors that Bill’s governorship did not.

No one could recall such a partnership—a male candidate and his attorney-advocate-investor wife—ever making it to the White House. Few presidential wives had taken jobs outside the home after marrying, and those who did shunned controversy. Mary Baird Bryan, the only attorney whose husband had been nominated for president, had declined to practice law but used her degree to help research and write his speeches. Those few First Ladies who had worked after their marriages had stuck to the family business (Rosalynn Carter and Lady Bird Johnson) or to teaching school (Pat Nixon). None of them had presented herself as the family’s chief breadwinner or financial decision-maker, and all had kept quiet about prickly topics if speaking out would cost their husbands votes.

Some observers reached back to 1984 and Geraldine Ferraro for a parallel to the Clintons although it was an imperfect comparison. Ferraro had distanced herself from her husband’s real estate dealings, but a male candidate found that more difficult. A wife’s disclaimer that she “knew nothing about the family’s finances” rang truer somehow, much as it infuriated those who thought it demeaning to women, than did a husband’s. The Clinton record was larger: Ferraro’s husband came under scrutiny only because of his financial dealings but Clinton’s wife had also taken strong advocacy roles that rankled a lot of Americans. Perhaps most important of all, Ferraro never presented her husband as an important advisor whereas Bill Clinton promised a “twofer” presidency: vote for one Clinton and get two.

In their coverage of Hillary during the primaries, reporters appeared uncertain what to consider. Some focused on her hair style and clothes, as though she were simply the candidate’s wife, and others looked at her record, as though she ran in her own name. Often the two approaches merged in one article, and some were extremely negative. Conservative journals attacked her pointedly under headlines “The Lady Macbeth of Little Rock”32 and “Hillary from Hell,” while other magazines dismissed her more subtly. The New Yorker ran a cartoon showing a woman entering a department store in search of a jacket that was “not too Hillary.”

Moving into new territory without a model to follow, Hillary Rodham Clinton modified her role in early 1992. She spoke out less, and at the Democratic convention, she gamely participated in a cookie bake-off, sponsored by Family Circle, that pitted her recipe for chocolate chip cookies against that of incumbent Barbara Bush. Then, as though to emphasize her domesticity, she permitted her twelve-year-old daughter, who had been shielded from public scrutiny, to appear before cameras and be featured in People magazine, thus underscoring Hillary’s role as mother. The woman who aspired to First Ladyship chose softer, “more feminine” clothing and smiled a lot, so that when television cameras focused on her during her husband’s acceptance speech at the convention, she appeared as fondly and demurely supportive as Nancy Reagan ever had.

After the nomination, Hillary continued to play down her husband’s references to her as a “full partner” in his administration, although her record as governor’s wife gave some indication of how the partnership worked. In 1983, when he wanted to improve the state’s school system, he had appointed her to chair the Education Standards Committee.³³ After meeting with teachers and parents in seventy-five counties, she and the committee advocated more rigorous course requirements, teacher testing, a longer school calendar, and increased state funding. All this evidence suggested a large public role for her in a Clinton presidency, and on the night of November 3, when the president-elect acknowledged his victory on national television, viewers were not surprised that he turned to Hillary to hand him the script of his statement.

The period between the November election and the January inauguration showed still more signs of her clout. After meeting with congressional leaders who journeyed to Little Rock to talk with the president-elect, he openly acknowledged that she had sat in all the discussions, “talked a lot and knew more than we did about some things.”³⁴ Such a confession was without precedent, and it caused speculation abroad. Curious Japanese journalists puzzled about whether or not she would sit in on cabinet meetings and they queried First Lady watchers for their view of the odds. As though to encourage speculation about her role in the new administration, she participated in interviews with prospective appointees and put forward some names of her own drawn from her huge network of professional associates.

Although Hillary’s participation in the inaugural festivities mirrored that of the most traditional First Ladies, and journalists showed great interest in the color of her daytime outfit and the cut of her evening gown, she soon made headlines of a different sort. She took an office in the West Wing of the White House, a few feet from the Oval Office. Since the entire West Wing measures only 60 by 90 and its three floors can accommodate fewer than two dozen offices, this access to the center of power appeared to be an important symbolic move.35 Her predecessors had contented themselves with space in the East Wing or the more distant Executive Office Building. Some of the most powerful First Ladies, including Nancy Reagan, set up no office for themselves outside the family residence.

As though to temper talk of too much clout in a First Lady, Hillary chose as her first in-depth interview to talk with Marian Burros, ex-food critic of the New York Times. When the nationally read newspaper ran the front page article on February 2, 1993, it included a photo of the new First Lady, glamorously clad in an off-the-shoulder black dress and leaning over a table set for a formal dinner in the State Dining Room. The article delved into her thoughts on menus, entertaining, and other traditionally domestic and “feminine” topics.³⁶ Soon other newspapers picked up on the domestic theme; they carried articles on how she had banned smoking in the executive mansion and encouraged the serving of wholesome foods, including broccoli, a vegetable that George Bush reportedly detested.

The new First Lady appointed a staff with excellent skills and long experience in Washington. Margaret Williams, chief of staff with a West Wing office near her boss, combined Capitol Hill expertise and graduate study in mass communications, but she had met Hillary while working as communications director for the Children’s Defense Fund.³⁷ Williams’s assistants brought many of her same strengths: political savvy, media insights, and long friendships with one or both of the Clintons.

Although Hillary’s staff performed much like the staffs of preceding First Ladies, another network assisted Hillary in her attempt to remake the nation’s health care system. Soon after taking office, the president had announced that she would take charge of that part of his agenda because she was the best person he knew for the job. It was an important assignment. He had made health care reform central to his campaign and had repeatedly promised to alter the medical system so that all Americans, including roughly 30 million not then covered by health insurance, would be guaranteed coverage and the costs of care for everyone would be capped. Such changes, if enacted, would significantly alter Americans’ lives. Roughly one-seventh of the nation’s gross domestic spending went toward health care, and people who profited from the current system, as well as those who suffered, stood to gain or lose a lot.

A First Lady leading such a major reform broke all precedent. Any proposals her commission reached promised far wider changes than the reforms in mental health care championed by Rosalynn Carter or the beautification program of Lady Bird Johnson. Hillary Clinton’s mandate bore no resemblance at all to Barbara Bush’s literacy program or Nancy Reagan’s “Just Say No to Drugs.” She could not be paid for her work because of a law passed in 1967, in reaction to John Kennedy’s appointment of his brother to attorney general, that prohibited government officials from employing their relatives.38 But her salary was not the problem.

Physicians who sought to participate in hearings of the Task Force on Health Care Reform quickly tested the First Lady’s status in a new way. Although keenly interested in the commission’s hearings, physicians were barred from its meetings on the grounds that the commission was formed of “government officials.” The doctors protested, saying that the First Lady did not qualify for that status, and as long as she chaired it, the commission should open its meetings to the public, including, of course, doctors.³⁹

In the initial decision, a district federal court agreed that the commission’s chair was neither a “government official” nor, as her attorneys had argued, “the functional equivalent.”⁴⁰ Presiding Judge Royce C. Lamberth ruled that meetings must be open to the public. On June 22, a federal appeals court reversed that decision, accepting the argument that there existed “a longstanding tradition of public service by First Ladies … who have acted (albeit in the background) as advisers and personal representatives of their husbands.” Judge James L. Buckley wrote a dissenting opinion in which he pointed out that the president’s wife was “greeted like a head of state, guarded by the Secret Service, and allowed to spend Federal money,” but such perks did not make her a government employee, he argued, because “she has been neither appointed to nor confirmed in the position of First Lady, she has taken no oath of office and she neither holds a statutory office nor performs statutory duties.”⁴¹

Since the Task Force had completed its work and disbanded, the court’s ruling had no immediate effect but criticism of Hillary Clinton’s involvement was not so easily quelled. Newsweek magazine’s cover queried “Who’s in charge?” The First Lady made repeated trips to Capitol Hill to woo Congress into supporting her commission’s findings, and in the fall of 1993, she broke all precedent by talking with five different congressional committees in the course of one week. Television news programs covered her talks, and newspapers and magazines printed “rave” reviews. Congresswoman Lynn Schenk of California relayed a message of admiration from her own mother who had not been so impressed since the days of Eleanor Roosevelt. Then, to an amused audience, Schenk noted: “My mother is not a woman who admires easily.”

All this attention clearly contrasted with the appearances of two previous First Ladies: Rosalynn Carter’s talk to a Senate committee in 1979 got little notice, and Eleanor Roosevelt’s appeal to legislators in the 1940s was hardly mentioned in the media. Hillary attempted to lay a cover of “feminine” concern on top of her competent recitation of health care facts: she began her comments to legislators by saying that she came before them as “mother, wife, sister, a woman.”42

In December 1993, Hillary Clinton raised objections of a different sort. Vogue magazine ran a photo essay featuring the First Lady in glamorous and seductive poses. In one she stared dreamily off into the distance and in another her clinging black dress revealed a shapely figure. No one would have argued that the photographs were indecent. In fact, they were relatively demure. She had refused to wear the black dress off-the-shoulder as the designer had intended, and she showed very little flesh. Yet the dreamy look and rather suggestive pose raised objections. Americans wrote in to say they found the pictures demeaning to women, and they were uncomfortable with evidence that a professional woman would pose for them. Mothers informed the New York Times that they thought a glamorous First Lady an inappropriate role model for their daughters while other readers applauded the prospect that a thinking woman could also care about how she looked.

By the time the “Whitewater” investment of the Clintons came to public attention a few weeks later, the First Lady may well have welcomed more attention to her appearance. Critics charged that the Clintons had acted improperly, if not illegally, in an investment that went bad in Arkansas a dozen years earlier, and then in 1993, when a related matter came under investigation by the Treasury Department, their aides had conferred privately with the investigators. Subpoenas went out for the aides—who came from the First Lady’s staff as well as that of the president. His chief counsel, Bernard Nussbaum, an old mentor of Hillary’s, resigned.

Suspicions got into print, causing Americans to muse about whether or not the suicide of Vincent Foster, Hillary’s friend and law colleague, might have been related to a “cover up” of the Clintons rather than the frantic grasp of a seriously depressed man for relief. Shredding of papers at her old law firm raised other questions. What exactly was this Arkansas real estate development that the Clintons invested in, and if they lost money, what was the fuss? To complicate the story, new evidence emerged that Hillary had traded in futures commodities in 1979 and done it very profitably, converting a tiny one thousand dollar nest egg into a hefty $100,000 bankroll, and she had accomplished this remarkable feat in a very few months.

For most Americans, Whitewater became a convenient tag for money matters too complex to comprehend or take sides on. Even seasoned television reporters frequently flubbed pronunciation of Whitewater, making it into Watergate and thus associating the Clintons with the foibles and demise of another president. The First Lady was suddenly center stage, besieged for interviews and statements, not about how she meant to redecorate or dress, but how she had handled money and instructed her aides.

Recalling an old rule of the political game—that winners should keep quiet until they sense they hold the advantage—Hillary waited, refusing all interviews or calls for press conferences. Then, on a Friday evening in April, while much of the nation’s attention was diverted to a New York hospital where former President Nixon lay dying, she invited reporters to the State Dining Room and gave her side of the story. It ran in newspapers the next day, front page, but surely to be dwarfed by stories of Richard Nixon’s death. The First Lady wore a pink sweater set that emphasized her youth and resorted repeatedly to the need for a “zone of privacy” as an explanation for not telling more of the truth sooner, but she stopped short of admitting guilt. It had been that concern for privacy, she said, that “led me to perhaps be less understanding than I need to of both the press and the public’s interest as well as a right to know things about my husband and me.” Now she had been “re-zoned” to tell more.43

A series of interviews with individual reporters followed. Meryl Gordon wrote “Hillary Talks Back” for the May issue of Elle; June’s Working Woman carried an article by Patricia O’Brien entitled “reality bites” while its cover proclaimed “Hillary Hangs Tough.” The New Yorker ran a long profile, “Hillary the Pol” by Connie Bruck, who admitted she had interviewed the president on Hillary’s first year when the First Lady could not find time to talk. In perhaps the most hostile of the batch, Leslie Bennetts wrote for June Vanity Fair about “Pinning Down Hillary.” Bennetts had not appreciated her treatment: the First Lady brought aides with her to the interview and appeared condescending to the reporter who wrote that she had spoken to her as though “I were a particularly obtuse student and she were wondering how to help me overcome my regrettable ignorance.”44

Behind this flurry of talk lay an important point. The president’s wife was being interrogated about substantive, ethical matters, touching on money and power. This was no longer a question of pillow talk with the president—but of how she had used power in her own professional and political life. On Sunday, June 13, the point was made more clearly. In what the New York Times called “extraordinary sessions,” the special prosecutor, Robert B. Fiske, who had been named to investigate the Whitewater matter and report to Congress, went to the White House to take sworn testimony from both Clintons. Anyone interested in trivia would note that Fiske spoke with the president for ninety minutes and with the First Lady for sixty.

In the end, she would be cleared of any wrongdoing in the Whitewater matter, but her troubles were far from over. When the Republicans registered big gains in the November 1994 election, taking control of both houses of Congress and winning nearly all sixty seats that switched party affiliation, the First Lady was assigned part of the blame. Did her highly publicized fight to reform health care steer voters into the Republican column? Patricia Ireland, president of the National Organization of Women (NOW), announced that it was not the shift in party control that worried her but rather “the shift in political power to enemies of women’s and civil rights.”⁴⁵

Biographer Gail Sheehy, who detected an air of defeat in Hillary at the time, noted that the First Lady well understood her connection to the angry male backlash then surfacing. “ … [F]or many of these wounded men, I’m the boss they never wanted to have … the daughter who they never wanted to turn out to be so independent,” she told Sheehy.⁴⁶ But Hillary Clinton also shrewdly noted that the changes went far beyond any one individual: “It’s not me, personally, they hate—it’s the changes I represent.”

Hillary responded immediately to the electoral setback by altering her course. Rather than continuing to carve out a new role for the presidential spouse as legislative leader, holding hearings, and shaping laws, she reverted to the model of activist First Ladies Eleanor Roosevelt, Lady Bird Johnson, and Rosalynn Carter. She would still be highly visible, giving speeches and working for the causes she believed in, but she would stick to traditional turf for a president’s wife. In the syndicated weekly newspaper column that she began writing in 1995, she rarely broached controversial subjects; her speeches promoted mainstream ideas, such as the need to improve reading test scores and make mammograms more accessible. Work progressed on her book, It Takes a Village and Other Lessons Our Children Teach Us,47 but it made very few fresh observations, repeating what she had stated in previous publications. She continued to travel widely, including one twelve-day trip to Asia, with stops in India, Pakistan, Nepal, Bangladesh, and Sri Lanka, but because she turned the trip into a mother-daughter outing with teenage daughter Chelsea, she broke no new ground.

Her highly publicized trip to Beijing in September 1995 did ruffle some feathers, if only temporarily. Her staff had been preparing for months for her to attend the UN’s Fourth World Conference on Women. Now, however, White House advisors worried that a visit to China, when it was making headlines for its poor record on human rights and brutal treatment of dissidents, might be misinterpreted. In the end, she decided to endure whatever criticism ensued rather than feel stymied into staying quietly at home. The speech she gave at the conference was anything but quiet. It included a rousing reaffirmation of women’s lives and their claim to respect, while also taking China’s leadership to task for suppressing human rights and permitting girls to be less valued than boys. China’s leadership gave no indication they even heard her, and the nation’s newspapers largely ignored her protest, but women in the audience were jubilant, “It was as good as I could have imagined,” one Tibetan woman told a reporter. “I was very encouraged.”⁴⁸

Although the success of that Beijing speech might have signaled a turning point for Hillary, the following months brought many more disappointments. In January 1996, suspicion increased about her complicity in the Whitewater affair. Doubts grew about her trustworthiness when billing records from her Arkansas law firm (originally subpoenaed by the independent counsel but reported as lost) suddenly turned up in a section of the White House where she frequently worked. William Safire, who had once written speeches for Richard Nixon, used his column in the New York Times to call her a “congenital liar.”⁴⁹ Independent Counsel Kenneth Starr subpoenaed her to testify in front of a grand jury, the first time a president’s wife had ever been required to make such an appearance. Suggestions from the Clintons and their advisers that a deposition taken from her in the White House would serve just as well—without exposing her to the indignity of having to appear in a downtown Washington court house—were rejected. She testified for four hours.

As Bill Clinton prepared to run for a second term, Hillary faced more problems. The revelation that she had followed the advice of New Age psychologist Jean Houston to boost her morale by engaging in imaginary conversations with people she admired only made temporary news. She mitigated the criticism by joking about how much she had learned from “talking” with Eleanor Roosevelt.50 But when the presidential campaign heated up, she encountered a more serious charge: she was accused of courting big donors by inviting them to the White House and rewarding the most generous givers with a chance to sleep in the Lincoln Bedroom.⁵¹ Old rumors resurfaced about her role in the firing of White House travel office employees, a possible cover-up associated with Vincent Foster’s suicide, and the Whitewater real estate investment nearly two decades earlier.⁵²

Bill Clinton won re-election easily, and Hillary embarked on what might have been a tranquil, lame duck period; it quickly turned into one of the most tumultuous terms ever served by a First Lady. A new round of revelations about her husband’s extramarital liaisons began in January 1998, with Linda Tripp. A former White House aide, Ms. Tripp informed Independent Counsel Kenneth Starr that she possessed taped conversations documenting a sexual relationship between her one-time friend, Monica Lewinsky, and the President of the United States. As soon as the national media carried the story, the First Lady went on the popular Today show to defend her husband, labeling the story a creation of a “vast right-wing conspiracy” bent on destroying him.⁵³ The president tried to distance himself from Lewinsky by announcing that he had never had “a sexual relationship with that woman.” Both statements would come back to haunt the president and First Lady. After Lewinsky presented physical evidence (a semen-stained dress) implicating him, Bill Clinton went on national television to admit that he had not told the full truth. He also admitted misleading his wife.

For the remainder of 1998, dubbed by Gail Sheehy as the “Year of Monica,” the nation’s attention stayed glued to the subject of the president’s sex life. Television talk show hosts bantered about berets and cigars; school children tittered about new additions to their vocabularies; sociologists offered their own explanations for “sexual addiction.” For months, the Lewinsky story pushed all others, including those of enormous importance dealing with the economy and foreign policy, off the front page. On December 18, the U.S. House of Representatives voted, for only the second time in American history, to impeach a president, and Bill Clinton faced trial for obstructing justice and committing perjury. After the Senate returned a verdict of “not guilty” on both counts on February 12, 1999, speculation slowly diminished but revelations of the past months had become part of the public record.

While the president was undergoing his own ordeal, public opinion changed perceptibly on his wife, now viewed as the “wronged woman.”54 Many Americans expressed dismay that anyone with her considerable resources (including a law degree and years of experience working with powerful professionals) would remain married to a man that exposed her to such humiliation.⁵⁵ Critics suggested that Hillary stayed in the marriage to satisfy her own gigantic personal ambition and to keep herself connected to the power center of the nation. Supporters worried that she had been reduced to the role of “loyal wife,” a label she had strongly rejected during the 1992 campaign when she asserted “I’m not sitting here like some little woman standing by my man like Tammy Wynette.”⁵⁶ Wendy Wasserstein, the dramatist, expressed disappointment that Hillary’s “impressive personal qualities of idealism, strength and poise under pressure [were] being used to maintain domestic tranquility, and that maintaining the dignity of her marriage [would be] seen as her greatest professional triumph.”⁵⁷ It seemed incredible that this was the same woman whom presidential historian Michael Beschloss had singled out in January 1997 as “easily the most influential First Lady in history.”⁵⁸ But many Americans apparently preferred the “loyal [subjective] wife” to the strong achiever, and the First Lady’s popularity ratings rose dramatically, to the highest level since she moved into the White House.

Although she refused to divulge much about her feelings during those difficult months, Hillary began showing signs of a new determination, a realization that her turn had come. Her husband’s second and final term would soon end, leaving both of these relatively young, highly energetic people considering how to spend the rest of their lives. Former presidents always present special retirement cases but few had faced the prospect of such an extended post–White House period as Bill Clinton; he would be only fifty-four when he left office. Theodore Roosevelt had finished his second term at age fifty, but without the ban on third terms, he could continue to try to regain the presidency until his death. For Bill Clinton, that avenue was closed, but not for his wife. Former First Ladies had typically retired beside their spouses, and only two widows, Eleanor Roosevelt and Jacqueline Kennedy, had embarked on careers of their own. None had run for public office.

When rumors began circulating in late 1998 that Hillary Rodham Clinton might seek a political office of her own, opinions were mixed. Skeptics maintained that she had never really enjoyed the flesh-pressing of a campaign or the hectic schedule of a politician. Unlike Bill, she was a “policy person” rather than a “people person.” Others insisted that her reluctance to campaign had dissipated with practice and she relished the idea of showing what she could do on her own. Election to a potent, nationally visible platform—such as the U.S. Senate—would liberate her from the shadow of a husband who had humiliated her.59

By November 1998, a coveted spot opened up when Patrick Moynihan, the professorial and respected New York Senator, announced that he would not be seeking a fifth term in 2000. Within weeks, the First Lady announced she would embark on “listening tours” throughout New York state to learn more about constituents’ needs and worries. Since she had never resided in the state, she knew she would face the same kind of carpetbagger charges that plagued Robert Kennedy in 1964; unlike Kennedy, she had more than a year to overcome those charges. By July 1999, she was ready to announce the formation of the Hillary Rodham Clinton for U.S. Senate Exploratory Committee, generally acknowledged as a first step in running for office. She doggedly persisted in learning the intricacies of economic conditions in upstate counties and ethnic conflicts in New York City. She memorized the state’s official flora and fauna choices, and read up on its authors and sports teams.⁶⁰ When the Clintons announced that they would spend part of their summer vacation in the Adirondacks, a considerably less fashionable location than Martha’s Vineyard where they had previously vacationed, it was taken as evidence that she had decided to run, although the formal announcement would not come until the following February.

Hillary Clinton thus initiated a new chapter in First Lady history—leading to new criticism. None of her predecessors had used the special vantage point of presidential spouse to launch her own election campaign.⁶¹ Charges quickly arose that she was taking advantage of White House perks to advance her own senate race. The content and budget of each trip was scrutinized. In March 2000, House Republicans released documents showing that the twenty-six trips taken by the First Lady between June and December the previous year cost $182,471 and she had reimbursed taxpayers for only about one-sixth of the total.⁶² How to decide whether it was First Lady work or a candidate’s operation? Was she still devoting adequate time to White House duties?

In order to establish residency in New York state so Hillary could run for office, the Clintons purchased a home in Chappaqua, just north of Manhattan, in late 1999. She began spending more time away from Washington. But she still had to figure out ways to meet First Lady responsibilities three hundred miles south in the capital—host state dinners and make other official appearances. Daughter Chelsea sometimes filled in, taking time off from Stanford studies, but mostly Hillary learned to divide her time, covering two fronts on the same day.63

The presumed Republican opponent, New York City Mayor Rudolph Giuliani, dropped out of the race six months before the election, when he was diagnosed with prostate cancer. Rick Lazio, a relatively unknown Long Island congressman stepped in to replace him. But Lazio quickly gained national attention as the underdog in an important race, and contributions poured in from across the country to help him mount a full campaign against a much better known candidate. Eventually this became one of the most costly senatorial races in history, with Hillary Clinton spending $29 million, including about $9.6 million in “soft” money,⁶⁴ and Rick Lazio disbursing nearly $40 million, a record for a losing candidate.⁶⁵

On November 7, 2001, Hillary entertained jubilant supporters at her victory celebration at the Grand Hyatt hotel in Manhattan by summing up the race: “Sixty-two counties, sixteen months, three debates, two opponents and six pantsuits.”⁶⁶ In fact, she had won handily, and some observers expressed surprise that she had done so well with women voters who favored her over her Republican opponent by roughly three to two. Throughout the campaign, the media focused on the “why I hate Hillary” syndrome among female voters, who disapproved of her ambition, distrusted her explanations on the lost billing records and other matters, and denigrated her decision to defend and stay with a husband who had treated her so shabbily. But the candidate’s stands on important issues, including an unequivocal support for Roe v. Wade and her hard work in the long campaign, paid off. She had defeated Lazio by 12 percentage points.⁶⁷

For the next few weeks, Hillary made history by juggling two demanding roles, lame duck First Lady and senator-elect from one of the nation’s largest states. She continued to preside over a busy presidential mansion, taking advantage of her last few weeks at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue to entertain hundreds of people at receptions and dinners. Her new book, An Invitation to the White House, dealt with typical First Lady fare, including favorite family recipes, anecdotes about invited guests, and many photos of the mansion’s interior.⁶⁸ But she also attended briefing sessions for newly elected legislators and gave her own share of interviews about what she considered the most pressing among national issues, such as health care and education. A U.S. senator needs a residence in the capital, and in December, the Clintons purchased a six-bedroom house in northwest Washington, a house big enough, she explained, to accommodate researchers examining her First Lady records. When the time came to sign a contract for her autobiography, she set another record for presidential spouses by drawing an $8 million advance.69

Her first eight months in the U.S. Senate brought few surprises and little notice. Assigned to committees dealing with some of her favorite interests, she was able to champion bills that helped her constituents with expanded school budgets and improved transportation.⁷⁰ Then, with the attacks on the World Trade Center on September 11, everything changed for the freshman senator from New York, and she moved into a far more prominent role, trying to help New York City and those most harmed.

Before she had completed two years in the Senate, Hillary Rodham Clinton was already being mentioned as a possible candidate for president in 2008. She disavowed any interest in running, but shrewd observers pointed out that her chances had improved considerably in the last few years: many voters in 2008 would have come of age recently, with little memory of her troubles in the early White House years; time and hard work would obliterate some of the negatives once associated with her; and people would see her, not as a humiliated First Lady who eventually ran for office, but as powerful New York senator who had once lived in the White House. Much would depend on how she used the Senate years.

In the 2000 presidential campaign, the candidates’ wives made a point of showing how much they differed from Hillary. In fact, they shared much with her. The four women whose husbands headed the major party tickets (Laura Bush and Lynne Cheney on the Republican and Tipper Gore and Hadassah Lieberman on the Democratic) were all well educated, with at least one graduate degree each, and Cheney boasted a Ph.D. in English literature. Two had published books and all four had run enough charities and voluntary organizations to feel confident about undertaking an executive role. All four had been coached about the most flattering makeup and clothing choices, and they had spent enough time in the nation’s power hub to feel comfortable in front of TV cameras. None suffered from the “microphone fright” that paralyzed Mamie Eisenhower or the insecurities that dogged capital newcomer Rosalynn Carter.

A comparison with their counterparts in the presidential election a century earlier shows how very much women’s lives had changed. Before their marriages, the spouses of the candidates in 1900 had all shown considerable spunk, but by the time their husbands vied with each other to lead the nation they had learned they could best advance their husbands’ political careers by keeping their mouths shut. Ida McKinley, who as a young woman had flaunted tradition by taking a job in her father’s bank, matured into a sickly, possessive, doll-like mannequin who rarely spoke but simply sat by her husband’s side wearing lavish lace and costly jewels. Edith Roosevelt, whom her brainy husband praised as better read than he, shunned interviews of any kind and avoided making comments that could be construed as even mildly controversial. Mary Bryan, who held the same law degree as her husband and often helped research and write his speeches, had already paid a price for showing she had a brain. In the previous election, when her husband had first been chosen to head the Democratic ticket, she was castigated as a “woman who aims to do too much.”71 Letitia Stevenson, wife of the Democratic vice presidential nominee (and grandmother of Adlai Stevenson who later ran twice for the presidency), had met her husband when they were both college students, but in their thirty-four years of marriage, she had learned to defer to him.

The lives of this earlier quartet of women varied in other ways from their counterparts in 2000. Although well-read and smart, none except for Mary Bryan had much formal education or any work experience outside the home. They produced far more children than their counterparts in 2000, who averaged only 2.5 children each. While divorce was a dirty word for Ida McKinley’s generation, it was a fact of life a century later when the previously divorced Hadassah Lieberman maintained a household—as did millions of other Americans—that included children that were “his,” “hers,” and “theirs.”

Because of a dispute over contested ballots, final results in the 2000 presidential election became clear much more slowly than in 1900 (when McKinley won a clear victory with 65 percent of the popular vote). Not until mid-December did Laura Welch Bush know for sure that she would be the first to claim the title of White House spouse in the twenty-first century. Her biography resembled her immediate predecessor more than that of her mother-in-law who had moved out of the White House eight years earlier. Almost a year older than Hillary Rodham Clinton, Laura Bush also boasted a work record of her own. But unlike Hillary she had waited until age thirty-one to marry and had then quit work to devote herself full time to running a household and assisting George W. Bush in his political and business career. Although she sometimes described how her agreement to marry him had included the promise that she would never have to give a political speech, no one quite believed her. When she first met George W. Bush, he was already preparing to run for Congress, and his father stood as a serious contender for the presidency. Anyone marrying into the Bush family in 1977 could expect to see a lot of politics.

The subject had rarely crossed Laura’s mind for the first thirty years of her life. Raised in Midland, Texas, as the only child of house-builder Harold Welch and his homemaker wife, Jenna Hawkins Welch, Laura had little direct exposure to political talk or campaigning. Like George W.’s parents, the Welches had settled in Midland after World War II, when a series of big oil strikes just south of town drew thousands of new settlers to the area. As the population jumped from fewer than 10,000 in 1940 to more than 62,000 in 1960,72 Harold Welch saw a chance to prosper by filling the housing shortage; with his business partner, he built hundreds of new homes.⁷³ But George W.’s father increased his personal fortune far more dramatically by going into the oil business. With their elite Eastern connections (George W.’s grandfather had been Connecticut’s U.S. Senator) and millionaire status, the Bushes did not meet the Welches, even though the two families lived only a few blocks apart in the 1950s. They attended different churches and, except very briefly, their children enrolled in different schools.⁷⁴

Both Laura and George W. later remembered Midland as an ideal place to grow up in the 1950s—when residents felt no need to lock their doors and the school’s athletic teams made the biggest news. Less than one hundred miles from the New Mexico border, Midland got its name from its location at the halfway point between Fort Worth and El Paso, the two extremes of the Texas and Pacific Railway. Whatever the hardships of the climate in western Texas, where summers could be hot, dusty, and dry, Laura developed a firm attachment to the area. In her preface to a book of poetry, Whatever the Wind Delivers, she wrote proudly that people from her part of the world “don’t simply live on or off the land; they live with it—and thrive.”⁷⁵

Although neither Harold nor Jenna Welch ever graduated from college, they both held higher expectations for their daughter and began setting aside tuition money when she was in first grade. Jenna, an avid reader herself, fostered Laura’s interest in the subject by reading to her when she was young and encouraging her to break the monotony of long rides by taking a book along. Not surprisingly, Laura decided to become a teacher while she was still very young, and later recalled that one of her earliest childhood memories was lining up her dolls and “teaching them.” Too outgoing to be dubbed a bookworm, Laura also studied ballet and enrolled in Girl Scouts, but she had already settled on a career before graduating from Robert E. Lee High School in 1964.76

At age seventeen, she appeared the healthy, happy, all-American girl—except for one ugly reminder that lives are rarely uncomplicated or neatly summed up. In November of her senior year, while driving near Midland, she went through a stop sign, struck a car driven by a classmate, Michael Douglas, and fatally injured him. For years Laura refused to discuss the incident, and when she finally confronted the subject during the 2000 presidential election, she admitted it was an extremely painful memory. “It was a horrible, horrible tragedy,” she told one interviewer. “But at some point I had to accept that death is a part of life, and as tragic as losing Mike was, there was nothing anyone could do to change that….”⁷⁷ Close friends insisted the accident had an enormous impact on her and permanently changed her views about personal responsibility. But at the time, neighbors in Midland refused to hold her responsible, and although they grieved, they attributed the death to some horrible “mishap” rather than to any fault of one of their most popular teenagers. Laura suffered no legal consequences and her driving privileges were not affected.⁷⁸

Going 300 miles away from Midland to Southern Methodist University in Dallas, Laura evidently remained unaffected by the student unrest and anti-war movements associated with many campuses during the 1960s. This conservative, private university isolated its students in their own enclave away from Dallas’s poverty and protest, and Laura remembered that smoking cigarettes and drinking beer were about the most rebellious activities that she and her friends ever engaged in. Her biographer later summed up Laura’s college years as a time of playing bridge, listening to Beatles records, and shopping with her friends and their mothers.⁷⁹ After graduation in 1968, Laura accompanied an aunt, an uncle, and a cousin on a two-week trip to Europe, the only time she had yet ventured beyond American borders (except for a summer studying in Mexico when she was still in high school).⁸⁰

Following her four college years, Laura moved frequently, changing jobs every year or so but always staying within Texas’s borders. After a short stint teaching third grade in Dallas, she moved three hundred miles south to the John F. Kennedy Elementary School in Houston. “I particularly wanted to teach in a minority school,” she later told an interviewer, and she credited those two years as opening her eyes to the inequalities in life—and a part of the world she had not seen in segregated Midland.81 Many of her African-American students came from poor homes and she found herself shocked by the limitations on their lives—barriers she had not previously understood or noticed. Rather than turning to political action or economic reforms, Laura focused on literacy and books as a way to improve students’ lives. Once again she moved, enrolling in the library-science program at the University of Texas at Austin where she earned a master’s degree in 1972.

Up until that time, she had worked in elementary schools where she had few chances to meet young single men and, at age twenty-six, she decided to change that. “I thought by working in a big public library in downtown Houston, I might have a different social life,” she told USA Today.⁸² But after one year in Houston, she returned to Austin as a librarian in a heavily Hispanic elementary school. From Austin it was only a two-hundred-and-fifty-mile drive back to Midland to visit her parents, and it was on one of those weekend trips in the summer of 1977 that old friends invited her over to share a barbecue and to meet George W. Bush, aspiring candidate for congress.

Laura later said that she had resisted earlier attempts to be introduced to one of Midland’s most eligible bachelors because she did not want to get involved with “someone real political.” One meeting with George W. quickly changed her mind, and four months later, on November 5, 1977, she married him. “I don’t know that it was love at first sight,” she recalled, “[but] it was pretty close,”⁸³ Presidential historian Lewis Gould suggested that the timing of their meeting was propitious for both—“a married congressional candidate would have an advantage over a bachelor, and for Laura Welch her future husband promised more excitement than a school librarian’s career would provide.”⁸⁴

Whatever the motivation for the match, Laura Welch brought to the spunky, athletic Bush clan a noticeably independent perspective. Her mother-in-law later recalled that the young librarian had amazed them all when, on first meeting George’s outspoken grandmother, Dorothy Bush, Laura had asserted herself. Asked what she “did,” Laura replied, “I read, I smoke and I admire.”⁸⁵ (Laura later insisted that the story was apocryphal but Barbara Bush stood by it.) The steady, word-wise Miss Welch presented a striking contrast to the young George W., who already had a reputation for rebelliousness and malapropisms.

For the first fifteen years of her marriage, Laura fit her world into a pattern common among the wives of most successful CEO’s. In 1978, George W. started his own small oil and gas company, and subsequent mergers and acquisitions increased his responsibilities considerably, along with his income. Bigger money resulted from his foray into the world of baseball. As managing partner of the Texas Rangers from 1989 to 1994, he earned a substantial salary, and eventually converted an investment of just over $600,000 into more than $10 million (helped by a new stadium paid for with tax dollars).”86 This represented a new level of wealth for Laura, and managing the household and caring for twin daughters, Barbara and Jenna, born November 25, 1981, took up most of her time.

Some friends speculated that George W.’s success in the baseball business helped him escape the long shadow cast by his high-achieving father and changed his mind about running for office. After his one unsuccessful run for congress in 1978, he stayed clear of politics (except for serving as senior adviser to his father’s 1988 presidential campaign.) By 1994, however, he was ready to test the waters himself and that year he won the governor’s mansion in Texas. One other development helped make a political career possible. Around the time of his fortieth birthday, he determined to control his alcohol problem, and although he credited religious influences with helping him, friends also singled out his wife who had, they said, a remarkably steadying effect.⁸⁷ Laura attributed the change to “enormous discipline” which he also showed in other areas of his life, such as his physical exercise regimen.

Six years in the Texas governor’s mansion provided a valuable apprenticeship for Laura, and she became very popular. The Texas Book Festival, which she started in 1996 to highlight the state’s authors, turned into her most notable achievement after it helped raise hundreds of thousands of dollars for libraries to expand their holdings. She also promoted other educational programs such as “Ready to Read” for very young children, “Reach Out and Read,” for older youngsters, and a magazine for parents, “Take Time for Kids.” Austin’s Habitat for Humanity, breast cancer awareness, and the problems of Alzheimer’s sufferers all received some of her time, but her deepest commitment remained to reading programs and literacy campaigns. Popular across party lines, she impressed Texans with her warmth and genuine friendliness, and criticism of her was, according to one Texas historian, “virtually nonexistent.”⁸⁸

By the time Republicans met in July 2000 to name George W. Bush as their presidential nominee, his wife had become such a confident and popular speaker that she seemed the obvious choice to keynote the convention. In a speech carried live on national television, Laura impressed millions of Americans with her down-to-earth comments about teaching and her enthusiastic support of her husband’s candidacy. She joked that George W.’s run for the White House was a “pretty drastic” antidote for the empty nest syndrome (their daughters were entering college that fall), and she gave examples of her family’s genuine interest in education.89 In the weeks that followed, she traveled thousands of miles and sat for dozens of interviews, many of them televised live. For a woman who insisted she had once vowed to stay clear of politics, this marked an important change, and it underlined how much Americans had come to expect a candidate’s wife to play a part in the campaign.

Throughout the six-month frenzy that characterized the 2000 presidential race, Laura Bush sometimes appeared alongside her mother-in-law (the first time a former First Lady ever campaigned for her son for the presidency) but she also asserted her own independence.⁹⁰ Whenever she was asked (and it happened often) to choose as her model either Barbara Bush or Hillary Clinton, she distanced herself a bit from both, promising, “I think I’ll just be Laura Bush.” In an interview with Barbara Walters, she eschewed the tag of “traditional First Lady” and insisted she would shape the job to suit herself.

In a pre-inaugural interview, she spoke out against reversing the 1973 Supreme Court decision Roe v. Wade guaranteeing women a right to abortion. “No, I don’t think that it should be overturned,” she told NBC news. Since that view seemed to contradict her husband’s position on the subject, it made frontpage headlines.⁹¹ She shied away from such statements in the future, proving she could be flexible. When she named her staff, she dipped into her mother-in-law’s talent pool and appointed people familiar with the capital to fill the delicate and politically sensitive jobs of social secretary and scheduler. For other posts, she chose women whom she had worked with in Texas.⁹² One of the very few First Ladies who could claim familiarity with the 132-room presidential mansion before moving in, she could truthfully quip, “I have slept in the Lincoln bedroom and the Queen’s bedroom.”⁹³

Literacy took first place on her White House agenda. When Laura launched a national initiative called “Ready to Read, Ready to Learn,” she directed much of her attention to the needs of pre-school children and to the parents who could assist them. She also put out a call to young college graduates, urging them to consider teaching as a career. Nine months into her tenure, on September 8, 2001, she opened the first National Book Festival, a joint production of the First Lady’s office and the Library of Congress.⁹⁴ Unlike the book festival in Texas, this one did not raise money but sought to draw Americans to the world of books by offering a free day of storytelling sessions, tours of the Library of Congress, and conversations with popular authors from across the nation. The First Lady used the occasion to announce the formation of the Laura Bush Foundation for America’s Libraries.95

Three days later, on the morning of September 11, Laura was on her way down Pennsylvania Avenue to meet with Senator Edward Kennedy’s subcommittee on education when the first plane hit New York’s World Trade Center. She would have become the fourth First Lady (after Eleanor Roosevelt, Rosalynn Carter, and Hillary Clinton) to testify before a congressional committee had her schedule not been so tragically altered. During the following terrible hours and days, she quietly encouraged calm and urged parents to take time to tell their children that they were safe. She encouraged families to spend more time together and gently listed her own thoughts on ways to make youngsters feel loved and secure. On September 23, the New York Post praised her for becoming “the First Mom, comforting and reassuring the entire nation.”⁹⁶

Even without the terror of September 11, Laura would have raised her popularity ratings. Americans who knew little about her and those strongly opposed to her husband’s positions found themselves drawn into her fan club because of her genuine commitment to books. Prominent historians such as Pulitzer Prize–winning biographer David Levering Lewis and feminist writer Ursula Smith, who had outspokenly opposed the president’s stance on the environment, foreign policy, and other matters, were dismayed when they received invitations from Laura Bush to speak at White House symposia on topics on which they had written. Both ended up accepting, however, and each came away from the East Room impressed with how she had managed to transform that most political of places into an arena for discussing ideas that reached beyond politics. Differences in political ideology receded in importance when symposium attendees shared admiration for the writers under discussion, such as Mark Twain and Eudora Welty. When queried on the subject, Laura Bush told New York Times reporter Elisabeth Bumiller, “There’s nothing political about American literature…. Everyone can like American literature, no matter what your [political] party.”⁹⁷

Participants in the invitation-only events insisted that the two-hour discussions often moved outside what one would ordinarily expect to hear in the president’s front room and delved into various authors’ writings on prickly subjects such as race and class in America. The First Lady typically sat in the front row, ready to comment knowledgeably on the authors being discussed, even when their books seemed critical of the Texas oil world in which she had grown up. One invited author, Patricia Nelson Limerick, admitted that she had done “Mrs. Bush a terrible disservice” thinking she was so unacquainted with the writers and naïve about how deeply critical some of their writings about America were. Arnold Rampersad, the respected Stanford professor and biographer of Langston Hughes, also confessed that he had been surprised by the First Lady’s genuine understanding of literature. After talking with her at one White House symposium, he concluded, “… it became very clear that she was seeing this world [of literature] from the inside, not the outside.”98

When the First Lady’s schedule took her away from schools and book talk, she spoke confidently on other subjects. In November 2001, she made history when she took the president’s place on his regular weekly radio address and spoke out against the Taliban’s oppression of women and children in Afghanistan.⁹⁹ Several of her predecessors, beginning with Lou Hoover in the 1930s, had used radio as a way to reach people, but this was the first time that a First Lady had stood in for the president in just this way.

“I am Laura Bush,” she began, “and I’m delivering this week’s radio address to kick off a worldwide effort to focus on the brutality against women and children by the al-Qaeda terrorist network and the regime it supports in Afghanistan, the Taliban.” After noting that 70 percent of the Afghan people were malnourished and that one in four Afghan children would die before turning five, she listed the specifics of a repressive regime that did not permit children to fly kites or women to laugh out loud. To avoid charges that she misunderstood Afghan customs, she noted that “Muslims around the world” had already spoken out against the Taliban, and she encouraged listeners of all faiths to join them. “Fighting brutality against women and children is not the expression of a specific culture; it is the acceptance of our common humanity, a commitment shared by people of good will on every continent.”¹⁰⁰

This rousing call to action came less than a year after Laura Bush moved into the White House, but it foreshadowed an international bent that became clearer in the years that followed. In the next few months she gave five more speeches on Afghanistan, all of them urging help for that nation’s women.¹⁰¹ One communications scholar noted that the phrasing of her plea combined “maternal feminism” with “liberal feminism” by justifying women’s participation in the public sphere through their maternal duties—such as overseeing their children’s education and sewing school uniforms.¹⁰² Rather than argue that Afghan women had the same rights as men, the American First Lady insisted they had rights, too, and that if allowed to exercise these rights, their entire communities would gain.

As for helping to motivate her to speak out about women’s rights in another country, Laura Bush cited friends, relatives, and people she happened to meet who told her of their concern for Afghan women. She also received encouragement from presidential advisers, especially Karen Hughes. According to the New York Times, Hughes had suggested the First Lady and the president do a joint radio address on the subject on November 17, 2001, and he had replied, “What do you need me for?”103

In speaking out, Laura Bush illustrated once again how clearly the presidency had become a two-person career, one in which, as Karlyn Kohrs Campbell explained, the wife’s functions may include “public performance” as well as “status maintenance and intellectual contributions.”¹⁰⁴ In this case, Laura Bush’s primary motive may have been to bolster morale in the war against terrorism, but in the process she brought up a feminist issue—equal rights for women.¹⁰⁵

In doing so, she made it more difficult for First Lady scholars to place her on the various scales they had developed. Myra Gutin, a communications professor and longtime student of America’s First Ladies, has argued that some presidents’ wives in the twentieth century moved beyond being ceremonial hostesses to acting as emerging spokeswomen for their husbands; other First Ladies went even further and became independent activists and political surrogates.¹⁰⁶ In Gutin’s categorization, Laura Bush fell somewhere between the second and third roles—Bush was not entirely an independent voice of her own but was more than a ceremonial hostess like Pat Nixon. Laura’s immediate predecessor, Hillary Clinton, had also spoken up for Afghan women’s rights, but she did so as part of International Women’s Day at the UN.¹⁰⁷

Laura Bush’s ambitious travel schedule underscored her commitment to Afghan women and to other international causes. Visiting seventy-five nations in eight years, she did not match Pat Nixon’s record, but unlike Pat’s ceremonial tours, these appearances promoted substantive health improvements. Press releases from Laura Bush’s office noted that she visited ten of the fifteen countries identified by the President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief [PEPFAR] as focus countries in its fight against HIV/AIDS. She also called attention to the dangers of malaria by stopping in nations where it afflicted the population. To encourage women to take control of their health and get regular breast cancer screenings, she included this topic in speeches she gave in eight countries in Europe and the Middle East.108

But it was in Afghanistan that Laura Bush’s efforts got the most attention. On her first visit in March 2005, she stayed only a few hours, visiting a teacher training institute at Kabul University where she spoke to several hundred women. Announcing a $20 million U.S. grant for new education projects, she performed a largely ceremonial role, albeit in a setting generally perceived as unsettled if not downright dangerous. But then she moved on to make observations that could not have pleased all that nation’s leaders. “We are only a few years removed from the rule of terrorists,” she reminded her audience, “when women were denied education and every basic human right.”¹⁰⁹ Democracy was gaining in Afghanistan, she continued, but “the survival of a free society ultimately depends on the participation of all its citizens, both men and women” and this is possible only if women have “the most critical tool of all … education.” On her last trip to that part of the world, in June 2008, the American First Lady made a point of meeting with Afghanistan’s only female governor, Habiba Sarabi, of the Bamiyan province.¹¹⁰ Back home, Laura Bush accepted honorary chairmanship of the U.S.-Afghan Women’s Council, a group formed to improve health and education in Afghanistan.

Burma’s oppressive government also got the First Lady’s attention. On October 10, 2007, she published an opinion piece in the Wall Street Journal, “Stop the Terror in Burma,” detailing the “shameful” abuses of that nation’s military dictatorship. A few days later, the New York Times ran a front-page article, “First Lady Raising Her Profile without Changing Her Image,” and dubbed her “the administration’s leading voice on [Burma].”¹¹¹ A few months later, when a devastating cyclone put many of Burma’s people in jeopardy, Laura Bush called a press conference and asked Burma’s government to drop its entry restrictions so that international relief workers could distribute medical supplies and food to those in need.

In August 2008 she traveled to the Mae La refugee camp, the largest of several camps along the Thai-Burma border, where she listened to people on the run for their lives.¹¹² She visited a clinic and observed how its small staff tried to meet the medical needs of the thirty-five thousand men, women, and children camped there. Speaking out for Aung San Suu Kyi, the Burmese Nobel laureate who has been imprisoned for years, Laura Bush called on the ruling junta to release all political prisoners. She urged the international community to stop buying Burmese gemstones, because the profits went to the repressive leaders rather than to the people.

Like most First Ladies who got the chance, Laura Bush showed increased confidence in her second term. With no more campaigns to worry about, she felt freer to do as she liked. The first hint of change came in the choice of her inaugural gown. Michael Faircloth, an obscure Texan, had produced the first.113 But in January 2005, Laura Bush appeared at the inaugural balls in a creation by the far more famous (and expensive) Oscar de la Renta. Then she caused a stir by firing Walter Scheb III, the White House chef for the previous eleven years, and replacing him with the first woman to hold that title—Cristeta Comerford.¹¹⁴ To underscore her determination to make her second term different, she made significant changes in her staff.¹¹⁵

Signaling that she took her projects seriously, she turned for advice to experts, including some from the West Wing. Michael Green, of the Center for Strategic and International Studies, counseled her on projects in Asia. Laura’s chief of staff during the second term, Anita McBride, boasted government experience reaching back to the Reagan years, including stints at the State Department and as Special Assistant to the President for White House Management. This impressive roster of skilled and experienced staff looked nothing like the string of social secretaries that had once worked for presidents’ wives and still managed governors’ mansions across the country.

The First Lady’s commitment to literacy did not abate—and she continued to schedule book fairs to highlight that interest. She rescheduled her appearance in front of the Senate Education Committee, postponed by 9/11, so she could reiterate her enthusiasm for encouraging reading programs. But the author events at the White House, which had begun on such a promising note, succumbed to the growing criticism of her husband’s foreign policy.

Just before the Iraq invasion, Laura Bush’s office had announced that the February 12, 2003, symposium would focus on “Poetry and the American Voice.” Almost as soon as invitations went out, word spread that some of the prospective guests meant to use the occasion to protest the administration’s plan to invade Iraq, showing once again how a First Lady’s initiatives are never viewed as entirely separate from her husband’s policies. One of the invitees, Sam Hamill, editor of Copper Canyon Press and author of more than a dozen books of verse, explained that he felt “overcome by a kind of nausea” on opening his invitation.¹¹⁶ Not only did he refuse to attend, he sent out e-mails urging other poets to join in putting together a book of antiwar poems to be presented to the First Lady.

According to one report, about three thousand five hundred poets around the world responded to Hamill’s initiative. Some read their antiwar poems at rallies organized for that purpose; others sent their compositions to the website, www.poetsagainstthewar.org . Faced with this kind of publicity, the First Lady reiterated her view that everyone had a right to express an opinion but that there was nothing political about poetry; she then canceled the event without rescheduling it.

Laura Bush shrewdly found other ways to sidestep controversy. Unlike her mother-in-law—who spoke at Wellesley’s commencement in 1990 despite student protests that a First Lady did not provide an acceptable role model—Laura pled “prior commitments” to avoid addressing Los Angeles graduates in 2002. When the protests first mounted, university officials stood by their invitation, insisting that Laura Bush’s long-standing advocacy for education made her an appropriate choice for the commencement speech. But the First Lady decided that declining to appear would serve her husband better—she would deprive his critics of a national stage.

The U.S. invasion of Iraq in 2003 multiplied prospects for protest. Public opinion often focuses on the White House in times of calamity, when citizens across the country look to the president’s wife to see what sacrifices and contributions she is making. Are her sons enlisting, as Eleanor Roosevelt’s four sons did in World War II? Is she curtailing consumption, as Edith Wilson did in 1917? Does she appear too friendly to the enemy, as rumors suggested about Mary Lincoln during the Civil War? If the war loses favor, if its entire purpose gets questioned and its execution criticized, venom can run as visibly to the distaff side of the White House as to the president’s office. While fleeing Washington in 1814, Dolley Madison was refused shelter by an irate boardinghouse keeper who blamed Dolley’s husband for starting the war. Lady Bird Johnson learned to go to sleep to the sound of chants outside her window: “LBJ, LBJ, how many kids did you kill today?”

Antiwar sentiment never reached that intensity during the George W. Bush years, and Laura Bush’s international travel, especially her trips to Muslim countries and parts of Africa where huge health problems existed, may have helped mute criticism. By putting humanitarian concerns alongside military intervention, she earned grudging respect from people who abhorred her husband’s Iraq policy. Presidents’ wives had been traveling outside the United States for more than a century, sometimes for pleasure (Edith Roosevelt in Cuba), as a ceremonial gesture (Edith Wilson at the Paris Peace talks), to represent the nation (Lady Bird Johnson at the funeral of King Paul of Greece), or to discuss substantive matters with foreign leaders (Rosalynn Carter in Central and South America). But some of Laura Bush’s trips fell outside any of these categories—she sought to put a more humane face on U.S. foreign policy.

The length of the Iraq war increased objections to it and complicated her task. Although Saddam Hussein’s statue crashed to the ground on April 10, 2003, and President Bush later declared the war won, Americans watched in dismay the continuing destruction and rising death toll in Iraq. When Iraq’s new government failed to establish order as quickly as some had predicted, debates in the U.S. Congress grew louder about how to proceed. A majority of Americans had supported the president in the early stages of the war, but now they changed their minds, sending his popularity plummeting. By June 2005, one poll showed that 53 percent of Americans disapproved of the job the president was doing, the highest disapproval rating since he took office.117 By May 2008, both CNN and the New York Times reported new polls showed the incumbent to be “the most unpopular president in history.”¹¹⁸

Presidents’ wives typically avoid low ratings by staying away from divisive issues such as war, sluggish economies, and universal health insurance to concentrate instead on such matters as White House restoration and education. An intelligent, voracious reader like Laura Bush knew this, and throughout her second term in the White House she stuck to an agenda unlikely to attract her husband’s critics. Literacy continued to figure prominently in her schedule, but she avoided situations where she might meet protestors. Her office announced her visits to schools and libraries after they had occurred, and she scheduled few book events at the White House. She spoke up for the Preserve America and America’s Treasures Act, a popular project and a favorite of legislators who wanted to bring funds to their home districts to restore art, buildings, and public records. Health issues continued to concern her, and she traveled around the country as ambassador for The Heart Truth, encouraging women to improve their chances for a long life by making healthier choices.

While tending her own image, she gave no hint of disagreeing with her husband’s policies. Whenever asked about his legacy, she insisted he would be vindicated. This stance won her fans among those who prized a woman who “stood by her man.” She already had proven a particularly effective money-raiser in her husband’s reelection campaign, raising more than $5 million by the end of February 2004.¹¹⁹

In 2006, midway through her second term, CNN/USA/Gallup reported that Laura Bush enjoyed one of the highest approval ratings of any president’s wife they had measured.120 Nevertheless, while 82 percent of Americans liked what she was doing, only 43 percent felt the same way about her husband.

Some of her husband’s harshest critics admitted they found little to fault in her, and they puzzled how husband and wife could appeal to such different camps. Novelist Curtis Sittenfeld, perhaps struck by reports that Laura had voted for Eugene McCarthy in 1968,¹²¹ popularized the view that Laura held more liberal views than her husband did, and that, given the chance, she might reveal this. Sittenfeld’s best-selling novel American Wife, which she admitted was “loosely inspired by the life of an American first lady,” describes a thoughtful, spirited woman of liberal views who marries the fun-loving son of a politically connected Republican family and ends up living in the White House.¹²² Even she seems puzzled by how it all happened. The fictional First Lady admits to voting for her husband’s opponent in both 2000 and 2004 because she “believed sincerely that his opponent would do a better job.” On the very last page of Sittenfeld’s novel, as the First Lady considers the problems facing the nation and the president’s role in them, she reminds the reader, “All I did is marry him. You are the ones who gave him power.”

In various interviews, Sittenfeld revealed she admired Laura Bush for her down-to-earth attitudes, her work for so many good causes, and her seriousness and caring.¹²³ Partisan identification did not appear on the list. Indeed, Laura frequently reached across party lines. She explained away one of Michelle Obama’s missteps during the 2008 campaign by saying Michelle was a newcomer to national politics and would soon learn to watch what she said. When asked about Hillary Clinton’s strong run for the Democratic nomination that same year, the Republican First Lady had only praise for how Hillary had widened possibilities for all women.

By the time she left the White House, with a reported contract of $1.6 million for her memoir about living there, scholars viewed Laura Bush’s record much less favorably than had Curtis Sittenfeld. In a poll released by the Siena Research Institute in December 2008, historians ranked Laura Bush #17 among post-1900 First Ladies, just above Pat Nixon, Ida McKinley, and Florence Harding.¹²⁴ In the longer list of thirty-eight women who had held the job since 1789, Laura did little better, coming in #23, well below Barbara Bush (#12) and Hillary Clinton (#4). Although above average in “background,” “integrity” and “intelligence,” she came out at the very bottom in the “own woman” category.

Eight years earlier, when asked which of her two predecessors—her traditional mother-in-law or the activist-feminist Clinton—Laura meant to emulate, she had refused to choose, saying she wanted to be “just me.” In some ways she did that. By putting enormous effort into international travel and initiatives that sought to help women and others suffering from malaria and AIDS, she exposed the role of First Lady to an international spotlight. Standing by an unpopular president without looking weak or manipulated, she won fans in quarters unfriendly to her husband. All the while, she maintained her image of a caring, intelligent, down-to-earth person. But she realized she left the job of First Lady without doing all that she could have. In an interview with People magazine, she admitted, “Maybe if I have a regret, it’s just that I didn’t do more.”125