He was a people pleaser. She was a woman who put intellect first, which meant automatically that many men—and women—would not be pleased by her. Probably one of the reasons she hooked up with Bill Clinton was because he was the first man who seemed to not be afraid of her brains, but rather challenged and attracted by them. He was determined “to marry the smartest girl in the class,” as an old Arkansas buddy of his told Roger Morris, the author of
Partners in Power.
He was sick of beauty queens. “It was Hillary or nobody,” he informed his mother, cautioning her to be nice to Hillary when he brought her home to meet the family in 1972. Though Bill apparently had nostalgia—and a use—for those beauty queens after he and Hillary were married, Hillary’s cleverness turned him on more. She excited him intellectually. I’m sure she still does.
One of the difficulties of being a smart, driven woman is finding men who are turned on by brains. Hillary’s initial attachment to Bill probably had a lot to do with the excitement of finding such a fearless man. Later, it seems, she had invested so much of herself in the marriage that she wasn’t willing to throw it all away, even in the face of his compulsive, repeated infidelities.
Here is the strangeness of the public image put forward by this revolutionary presidential couple. They were elected as a team, deliberately stressing their teammate spirit in the first campaign, but they have absolutely refused to make the
terms
of their marriage public, except to admit early and later that “he caused pain.” It is the inconsistency of this position that accounts for a great deal of the confusion. If you vote for a couple, you feel entitled to know about the bonds that hold them together. But Hillary and Bill insist those bonds are private. People resent their determination to have it both ways. But how on earth can the Clintons own up to the details of Bill Clinton’s sex life?
The more you read about Bill Clinton, the more it becomes clear that he
did
use his position to facilitate affairs and that women were not as unwilling as they protested they were. Women love players and then we love to denounce them. Let’s admit it. Men like Bill Clinton turn us on—but knowing we can’t really possess them, we have to attack them verbally. They make us feel utterly powerless. Nobody likes that.
Bill Clinton was a player long before Monica Lewinsky came along and forced the nation to look at his philandering. But can we really scream sexual harassment when it seems clear that Bill Clinton, like Jack Kennedy, was always surrounded by adoring females? Isn’t sex one of the perks of power for men? Isn’t this why the role of alpha male is so appealing? I find Bill Clinton sexy myself, not that I would ever act out my fantasies with him. His combination of boyishness and lasciviousness can be adorable. We all have fantasies of saving him from himself—getting him to treat his sex addiction and grow up—like Warren Beatty with Annette Bening, or Mr. Rochester with Jane Eyre. In the eighteenth century they used to say a reformed rake makes the best husband. I doubt we have progressed much beyond that. Look at Jack Nicholson’s character in
Something’s Gotta Give.
(I myself would have taken the young, adoring doctor, but Hollywood is still behind the times where women’s evolution is concerned.)
I assume that Bill Clinton’s erotic life is no better and no worse than any other male politician’s. At least his legislative and executive initiatives are consistently pro-woman and pro-choice. Like all of us, he’s a mixed bag. I appreciate his humanity, with all its contradictions—contradictions are, after all, the soul of humanity. Of course, I don’t approve of Bill Clinton’s piggish behavior with women, but since I assume the piggishness is merely the norm among male politicians, I’m glad his political agenda is feminist. If that seems like a copy of his own wife’s take on him, it tells you why I feel enormous empathy for Hillary Clinton. She is in the same bind as many strong, intelligent women. She has made her deal with the devil, and now she must live with it.
Hillary Clinton’s history is full of paradoxes. A baby boomer who grew up in a straight-arrow Methodist Republican family in an all-white, upwardly mobile suburb of Chicago, she became a left-leaning Democrat at Wellesley. At Yale Law, she was studious, solitary, solemn, given to wearing flannel shirts and thick glasses, noted for her brilliance and hard work. (Remember, this was the seventies—that halcyon and
brief
feminist period.) Her mother had compromised with life and did not want Hillary to do the same—a familiar mother-daughter story (it is also mine). Her father was stern, tight with money, and difficult to please.
Imagine a girl like that winning the good ol’ boy who has been dating beauty queens! It gives you an idea of how much his “locking in on her” (as one old friend put it) must have meant to her. Hillary Rodham Clinton remains an appealing figure to me because her life shows the strange compromises gifted women make. She has already changed her politics, drifted away from her parents’ reactionary Methodist attitudes. What lay ahead were other complete makeovers. Looks, name, ideals—everything would have to change for the greater glory of Bill Clinton and the pillow power he bestowed.
If Hillary Clinton used to come across as angry and unsettled, as constantly remaking her image, it was probably the case. How could she
not
be angry in Arkansas? Like an ancient Chinese noble-woman with bound feet, she had to deform even her anatomy to get where she needed to go. She hobbled her own fierce ambitions to transplant herself to Arkansas and defend his ambitions. She temporarily gave up her maiden name, reneged on her end-of-the-sixties indifference to female fashion, and compromised her passion for social justice and her native disgust with hypocrisy. Then, while he used her feminism as a shield to cover himself and his philandering, he proceeded to make a mockery of everything she believed in. Since he had always been clear about his ambition to be a top Arkansas politician and then president, his path never changed. Hers changed constantly—and with it her hair, her eyes, her name. At some point she must have had to decide that all these changes were worth it. How else can a smart woman justify such metamorphoses? Hillary had to recommit herself over and over again to life with Bill. No wonder she demanded certain paybacks—like running health care reform and his public life. She would have felt demolished otherwise. One sympathizes with her strength to
make
demands. But the power struggle of the marriage inevitably impacted the power politics of the nation, and that is what was so radically new about the Clinton presidency.
Now, as senator, Hillary is far more relaxed and affable. She’s grown and so has her husband. Good for them. I admire people who can change, who refuse to be stuck in old patterns. Nothing transforms a couple like the deaths of parents, and nothing makes a couple evolve like surviving infidelities. Not to mention having a daughter and watching her grow to womanhood. I like the Clintons more for having changed with all these changes.
George Bush the First used his first day in the presidency to publicly congratulate antiabortion marchers—even while intimating that First Lady Barbara Bush did not agree with him. George Bush the Second went further. He hobbled our choices at home while prating hypocritically of the rights of women in Afghanistan and Iraq.
No such stand for Bill Clinton. He and Hillary were joined at the hip intellectually, however much stress their marriage might be under. Their presidency redefined public and private. That is why it is so important historically. Both Clintons’ policies are in lock-step, even though their marriage may have been chronically on the rocks. And as for Dubya and Laura, you cannot but think that she thinks he’s a dunce but shuts up about it. She has her own friends, her daughters, and her own life. She probably tells him to pretend he reads. And he’s smart enough to listen to her.
“We cared deeply about a lot of the same things,” Hillary told an interviewer for the campaign film
The Man From Hope
in 1992. This revealing quote, edited out of the final film, makes the deal of the marriage clear. “Bill and I are really bound together in part because we believe we have an obligation to give something back and to be a part of making life better for other people,” Hillary went on (as quoted by Bob Woodward in
The Choice
). The tragedy of their story is that such idealism
had
to be replaced by a ruthless commitment to politics, and this deformation of principle clearly came much harder to her than to him.
Hillary Clinton’s image problem always had several root causes. One was undoubtedly the awkwardness of her early staff. Another was the undeniable factor that there is no way for a smart woman to
be
public without being seen as a treacherous Lady Macbeth figure or a bitch goddess (our failing more than Hillary’s). But the deepest problem was that Hillary at first came across on television as cold and controlled. She rejiggered her image so often, retailored it so much to please the spin doctors, that it came to seem inauthentic.
Television is an essentially crude medium. It is not much good for presenting ideas well; it tends to oversimplify and to turn subtle issues into either corn mush or screaming tabloid headlines. But it is a usually reliable litmus paper for personalities: Warm personalities like Bill Clinton’s come across as warm; cool personalities like Hillary Clinton’s public persona sometimes come across as cold.
The truth is that Bill Clinton
is
what he is—warm, tear-jerkingly populist, dying to please, woo, and pander. He’s a born salesman, “riding on a smile,” in the immortal words of Arthur Miller. Hillary Clinton, meanwhile, is a brainy girl trying to look feminine; a law school grind trying to look like the happy housewife, a fierce feminist who at first submerged her identity in her husband’s ambitions. It didn’t add up—too many contradictions—which is why we never quite believed it, at least at first. We kept expecting Lady Macbeth to reappear, rubbing the blood from her hands. I love the way Hillary has grown as senator. It shows us the way. Experience
does
count. And as long as women can’t get political experience, we can’t evolve.
We should empathize with Hillary Clinton rather than criticize her. She is a perfect example of why life is so tough for brainy women. The rapid transformations of her public image revealed the terrible contortions expected of all bright women. Look pretty but be (secretly) smart. Conform in public; cry in private. Make the money, but don’t seem to be aggressive. Swallow everything your husband asks you to swallow but
somehow
keep your own identity. Hillary Clinton demonstrated just how impossible all these conflicting demands were to fulfill. And the television camera acted like a lie detector, showing her original deep discomfort with all her forced metamorphoses.
For Hillary and my generation, “no single act came to symbolize so vividly her role and sacrifice as the surrender of her maiden name,” as Roger Morris pointed out in
Partners in Power.
Morris told the story in which Clinton aide Jim Blair suggested that the only way to make peace with Arkansas’s voting hillbillies and white trash was to “have a ceremony on the steps of the Capitol where Bill puts his booted foot firmly on [Hillary’s] throat, yanks her up by the hair, and says, ‘Woman, you’re going to go by my last name and that’s that.’ . . . Then wave the flag, sing a few hymns and be done with it.”
A humorous story, but not so humorous if you are Hillary Rodham Clinton. Refusing to be submerged in the identity of wife is a burning issue for our generation. A woman can give up on this outwardly and continue to fume inwardly. Emma Goldman once said that in politics you have to be either “a dunce or a rogue.” Hillary is certainly no dunce, and her early discomfort with her public persona showed that she was, admirably enough, a reluctant rogue. The trail of wrecked lives she and Bill Clinton left behind them—from Lani Guinier’s to Vince Foster’s to Monica Lewinsky’s—cannot be lost on her.
Hillary used to be a seething mass of contradictions, so perhaps that was why she dared let none of her feelings show. She gave off an aura of discipline and ferocious tenacity in which it was impossible to glimpse the human being beneath the mask. All those stories of Hillary’s breaking into tears or having fits of rage in private after perfect composure in public seem wholly believable. But the Hillary of today has earned her poise and is comfortable in her skin. She has earned it many times over.
What is familiar about this picture? A woman is sacrificed to her husband’s ambitions. Her personality is deformed. She takes almost all the flak in the press while he gets away with murder. You might almost say that she is taking the punishment for him—and for all women who step outside the lines prescribed for paper-doll political wives. Hillary Rodham Clinton looks more to me like Joan of Arc every day. She accepted being burned as a witch week in, week out, so her husband could rise in the polls. She often played the role of the scapegoat half of the Clinton duo, the rear end that got whipped so the smiling Clinton head could triumph. She was Iphigenia sacrificed for a propitious wind, Alcestis going across the Styx instead of her husband. She was the woman who endured humiliation and saved the marriage so that Bill Clinton could flourish. Bill Clinton owes Hillary. Big.
The only difference between him and other guys is that he seems to know it.
During the ongoing sexual scandal of the second term, Hillary Clinton grew to her full potential. Instead of looking foolish for defending Bill against charges of philandering, she looked like the only one in power who had a sense of proportion. It was as if
she
were president and he first husband. The strength and tenacity were clearly hers. She appeared to be supplying his backbone. And it was at that moment that Hillary’s fortunes definitively turned.
As the president appeared less and less capable of impulse control, the first lady rose in our estimation. We still didn’t fully understand the terms of the marriage, but it was clear she was the one who held it all together. The strength of one woman had never impacted on our country more. Now, as senator, she has triumphed. Her hard work and wisdom have never been clearer. Yet she carries them off with humor and rare serenity. She has walked through the fire and emerged untouchable.