Chapter Fifteen:
Hillary Rodham Clinton, Co-President

"I'm NOT that way, I take care of people"...HRC

I have read a total of nineteen books on the Clinton's and their Administrations, both in DC and in Arkansas. I have filtered through countless newspaper and magazine articles. I have debated and listened to the opinions of others and have watched and listened to countless hours of political pundants from the left and from the right as they debate the politics and their lives.

After mulling through all this amassed information, I have been unable to clearly define Hillary Rodham Clinton. To a collecter of word pictures like myself, she is like a 2000 piece puzzle I worked ardantly at only to get to the end and frustratingly find I purchased a box with missing pieces.

The Clinton relationship reminds me of the Gordon Lightfoot song, with Hillary never quite being able to set her husband free or herself:

IF YOU COULD READ MY MIND
If you could read my mind love
What a tale my thoughts could tell
Just like an old time movie
'Bout a ghost from a wishin' well
In a castle dark or a fortress strong
With chains upon my feet
You know that ghost is me
And I will never be set free
As long as I'm a ghost that you can't see

If I could read your mind love
What a tale your thoughts could tell
Just like a paperback novel
The kind that drugstores sell
When you reach the part where the heartaches come
The hero would be me
But heroes often fail
And you won't read that book again
Because the ending's just too hard to take

I'd walk away like a movie star
Who gets burned in a three way script
Enter number two
A movie queen to play the scene
Of bringing all the good things out in me
But for now love, let's be real
I never thought I could feel this way
And I've got to say that I just don't get it
I don't know where we went wrong
But the feelin's gone
And I just can't get it back

If you could read my mind love
What a tale my thoughts could tell
Just like an old time movie
'Bout a ghost from a wishin' well
In a castle dark or a fortress strong
With chains upon my feet
But stories always end
And if you read between the lines
You'll know that I'm just tryin' to understand
The feelin's that you lack
I never thought I could feel this way
And I've got to say that I just to get it
I don't know where we went wrong
But the feelin's gone
And I just can't get it back
Gordon Lightfoot (C) 1969, Early Morning Music

It might have served her better if Bill Clinton had given her a copy of the Lightfoot song rather than "Leaves Of Grass" in defining what their lives together would lead them to.

In all I've read and heard said of her, Hillary comes across as being shallow and unwilling to break away from the fantasy she set her life's course on. At Duke University she and Bill decided they would be President of the United States and she stayed on that course:

--even after she was confronted by the fact that her choice of "running mate" was incapable of being faithful to her. Her father told her so much after he saw for himself the number of women his soon-to-be son-in-law was carrying on with.

--even after years of rumors and her oown knowledge of her husband's infidelity after their marriage. She busied herself at the Rose Law Firm where the staff recalls that she spent too much time alone with Vince Foster. She apparently decided she could not beat Bill, so she would join him in adultery.

--even after the birth of their daughtter. When she was three, as set forth by Christopher Anderson in the book, "Bill and Hillary: The Marriage", the Clinton's decided that Chelsea might be subjected to nasty stories about her parents so they sat her down and "drilled" her. They took turns shouting horrid things about themselves at Chelsea to toughen her. They continued the drilling even past her crying.

--even after Hillary went and saw Juannita Brodderick and thanked her for everything she had done for her husband and everything she would continue to do as she clutched Juanita's hand in a forceful grip. Juanita supposed that Hillary knew Bill Clinton had raped her and she was there to ensure her silence.

--even after Hillary knew that her hussband's compulsive behavior was left unchecked and make him unfit to hold the office of the Presidency, or the Governorship, IF people knew. Anderson accounts that after Roger Clinton was arrested for the sale of cocaine, the entire family, Virginia, Bill, Roger and Hillary saw a therapist. Hillary is said to have been instrumental in leading the discussion, but she purposefully avoided the subject of her husband's constant infidelity, for fear of Virginia's wrath.

--even after the world knew that Bill Clinton and Gennifer Flowers had carried on a twelve year affair and Gennifer had tapes to prove it.

--even after she went on televison andd defended her husband and accused a Vast Right Wing Conspiracy of inventing Monica Lewinsky just to spite her husband's agenda and Bill Clinton confessed that Hillary had been wrong. He had carried on an affair at the White House, in the Oval Office, with a federal employee, an intern, as young as their daughter.

--even after the humiliation and trauma she saw the Impeachment proceedings inflicted on Chelsea, who is reported to have made several trips to the emergancy room at Stanford doubled over in abdominal pain that would be attributed to stress.

--even after she was reduced to being the national object of pity.

Hillary was in the White House. She was a President and nothing and no one was going to alter that one fact.

She allowed her personal staff to accumulate enormous legal fees as one by one they all got hauled before Congress to account for her activities.

She had carried on a "love" affair with Vince Foster, suggesting to some that he was a soul mate. Yet the night he killed himself after she had purposefully cut herself away from him because she was dissatisfied with his performance as Deputy Chief Counsel, she cried, did a little mia culpa and then methodically planned with Maggie Williams (her secretary) and Linda Bloodworth Thomases (her friend) the ransacking and removal of any and all files that pertained to her or her husband from Vince Foster's office.

She may be a bit elusive and time will define her and sort out her motivations as history tends to unravel such people, but for now, we are left with a picture of a woman who is decisively not very nice.

Gary Aldrich accounts in his book, "Unlimited Access" that she made people walk silently behind her and that she was prone to vulgar language and flights of fury. She even mandated that no one walk or be in the hall when she had need to walk through. People had to be vigilant of her presence and then scurry and dive into the nearest office to clear the hall for her.

Aldrich alleges, and says he has the photos to prove it, that she commissioned art students from across the country to design, construct and submit phallic "ornaments" with which she adorned the Christmas tree that graced her office area her first year. Her staff, (not all political appointees--some being White House staff that remained after each administration) was subjected to a daily viewing of what some may have considered blasphemous and certainly bad taste.

In several accounts, it was reported that she tended to throw things and become physically violent. On one such occasion, she hit the President of the United States. He is her husband, but while in office he is protected by the federal government, who views him as the head of the free world. She hit him hard enough to leave a mark on his face. Supposedly, questions arose as to the safety of the President around the First "Lady" and the responsibility of his assigned gaurds in intervening in the Clinton's episodes of domestic violence.

It is accounted that she was contemptuos towards the gaurds assigned to them and their areas in the White House. She spoke down to them and she often railed them with obscenities and derogatory name calling.

Aldrich accounts that some agents suggested that Chelsea adopted and shared her mothers disdain for the gaurds and also spoke quite unkindly to those assigned to protect her.

I suppose they never fully appreciated the fact that those very gaurds would willingly place their bodies in harm's way even to death for the protection of either of them. They only percieved them to be an infringement of their privacy.

She consulted with her friends from the East whom she had attended Law School and those with whom she had helped in the Impeachment against Richard Nixon as to whether she should marry Bill Clinton and remain in Arkansas. Her father and brother had warned her that he was an infidel. She had seen for herself the background he came from and the temperment he was prone to. She calculated it all and decided that she could be President of the United States because he would be.

She was willing to accept the consquences of her decision, so one can hardly feel sorry for her. She has been instrumental in damage control for the man, so that he would remain a viable candidate for the office for decades now.

I would go so far as to allege that she knew Bill Clinton had raped Juanita Brodderick and she, in fact, helped him to hide this by pressuring Juanita into remaining silent about the event. She conspired to conceal a crime, possibly more than one, to assure that her husband's name remained clear so that THEY would have a chance at this country's highest office.

But now she is our First Lady, and no one wants to face the possibility that she is less than ideal. But we will have to come to terms with the issues that have come about with the Clinton's rise and access to the Presidency.

They leave behind a Constitutional mess as their over-use of executive privelege has caused the Supreme Court to analyze and diminish the rights once assumed and loosely delegated to the branch of the Presidency.

For example, it was assumed that the Secret Service agents that work in such close proximity to the President would never be called upon as witnesses against a sitting President. And they would not have had to in the Monica Lewinsky case either had Bill Clinton told the truth in the first place or if he had not insisted that the issue be tested by the Supreme Court.

They leave behind a mess for the Democratic party that aligned itself with a a Clinton Political machine that was willing to "win" at all costs and that translated itself into various illegal activities such as:

- the selling of America's military seecrets for campaign funds from the Chinese.

- the welcoming of the Chinese Governmment into the American Political process for their own purposes.

- the accepting of illegal funds from non-Americans.

- the illegal use of Labor Union dues<

- the laundering of monies illegally ccontributed

- the depletion of the Democratic Natiional Committee's coffer's for the carrying out the the Dick Morris plan of producing and airing Issue Ads a full year before the 1996 Presidential Campaign. It was effective and did get the Clintons back into the White House, but it was very costly.

They leave behind a mess for the Feminist to try to rise above. Hillary was the self-proclaimed "First-Feminist", and as much as she protested against Tammy Wynette's insistance that a woman's place is to "Stand By Your Man", she proved that SHE was willing to do so even at the loss of her own self-respect.

They leave behind a mess in my household. As a mother of a highly creative and verbal son (now twenty), I have had to go back and analyze with him what of the Bill and Hillary era he has seen as adoptable for the creation of his own life. Thank God his answer was "Not much!" He does see the validity in long-term effort towards a desired goal, but also sees that one must be willing to maintain control in all areas in order to successfully achieve.

As a mother of two daughters (now 14 and 15), I must re-emphasize to them that the First Lady of our land does not live a life I would wish for them. I would wish for my daughters to stand firm in their self-identity and self-worth as individuals. They should always remember that they are endowed with unalienable rights by their Creator, who has left them a representation of what love should be, which makes it unnecessary for them to suffer as the First Lady undoubtedly must, because she is married to man who does not value her or honor her.

I wish for my daughters to know that they can attain their goals on thier own merits because they are American Women for whom many doors and ceiling have already been opened and more are yet to come through their efforts. It should not be necessary for them to choose to noose themselves to another individual in order to achieve what is their goal.

I wish them to know that they can contol themselves, but another human being. They are responsible for their own words and actions BUT, they should choose carefully who they will marry because they will certainly reap the consequences of what their chosen mate says and does for good or bad.

I wish for them to know that they should be careful, vigilant, Soccer Parents who choose to invest in the children's future, mindful of their place in our family lineage. They are not at the end of the line, there will more to come and there have been many who came before them who invested in them.

They should be willing to love and be loved.

All this needs to be reestablished in my household as a result of the Clinton's having occupied so much of our nations consciousness.

I am actually grateful for the opportunity to have revisited these value-premises with our children. I just wish I could forget the embarrassed-then-curious-then-impish expression I saw on one of our girls the day she heard the cigar story. She knew she was listening to something really bad-- but could not help but smirk at the badness and recklessness of it all.

History will treat Hillary very harshly, because she existed and reigned during what may be the pinacle of Feminism as we know it with the NOW gang so ferociously zealous for promoting women into positions of power.

"She could have been..." will likely be attached to all that is written of her. As difficult as that may be, moreso is knowing that she attained her goal and squandered the opportunity it gave her on having noosed herself to a man who was unreliable man and incapable of self-control.

If I could presume to wish for Hillary, I would hope she would find freedom, a love-relationship that would bring about healing with her daughter, and a sense of peace that comes from knowing that she is a person of worth and value regardless of what lofty aspirations she achieves.

@Jenni Vinson ...September 27, 1999