Rodham

by Curtis Sittenfeld

  “I want to be a workaholic.”

  She obviously wasn’t joking, but I laughed. “Really?”

  She was blinking back tears as she said, “I’ve never wanted children. I’m sure of it. Being the oldest sister, by the time I was in first grade, I was changing diapers and getting other people’s sandwiches ready and tying their shoes. Everyone always thinks not wanting kids is a temporary phase, which is so condescending. I don’t dislike them, but I don’t want my own.”

  “And Bryan does?”

  “He’s okay not having kids, but he just proposed.” Theresa was twenty-nine.

  “I’m trying to understand,” I said. “If he’s fine not having children, what’s the reason not to marry him?”

  She looked at me sideways. “You didn’t.”

  “Oh,” I said. “Well, no. But not because I objected philosophically to the institution.”

  “It’s bad for women. With housework, emotional labor, all of it.”

  “Statistically, yes, but not necessarily individually. Doesn’t Bryan actually do all the cooking and cleaning?” He had moved from Philadelphia to Washington years before, and he and Theresa shared an apartment on Capitol Hill. He still worked in construction, which meant he worked shorter hours than she did. Also, as I’d observed several times, including when I’d eaten dinner at their place, he was warm and funny and clearly adored her.

  Theresa said, “But what if that changes?”

  “Can you convey that you don’t want it to?” We had reached the Capitol Building, and we stood. “There was only one person I ever wanted to marry, and there were warning signs that it would be a bad idea. A lot of warning signs. I’m not trying to convince you to do it, but I don’t think you need to avoid marriage for the sake of avoiding it.” As we exited the monorail, I playfully whispered, “Sure, I could have gotten married, had kids, and stayed home baking cookies, but I decided to fulfill my profession.” It worked—Theresa laughed.

  Four months later, on New Year’s Eve, I was the officiant for Theresa and Bryan’s wedding ceremony. It occurred in their apartment and was attended by just forty people, most of them family members.

  Iowa

  April 27, 2015

  1:48 P.M.

  Good hitting from Kris Bryant last night, my brother Hughie had written in a text that arrived as our van parked behind a yarn shop in Des Moines. My brother Tony immediately replied, Joe Maddon is working his hippie magic!

  For several years, my brothers and I had maintained a group text chain that consisted of 90 percent the Cubs and 10 percent everything else. From preseason, in March, until the World Series, in late October, we discussed baseball; from November to February, we had little contact outside of planning whether we were getting together on Thanksgiving or Christmas.

  I almost never watched games in their entirety but tried to catch the ninth inning whenever I could. Often, after I finished a speech or fundraising dinner on a night when the Cubs were playing, I’d check my phone and find thirty or forty messages from my brothers, many of them along the lines of Awwww SHIT!

  I typed, This season does seem promising, but I’m trying not to get my hopes up. Then, because I’d learned from giving speeches that ending with the negative half of a mixed sentiment made the whole thing seem pessimistic, I deleted what I’d written and typed instead, I’m trying not to get my hopes up, but this season does seem promising.

  2008

  Between the day that I dropped out of the 2004 presidential race and the day I entered the 2008 one—I announced in January 2007—I privately courted as many rich Democrats as were willing to talk to me, and I publicly conducted a charm offensive. By the time of my official announcement, in a feat of hard work and meticulous coordination between my team and the Victoria Project, I had raised $10 million and planned to raise $70 million more. Meanwhile, though I was careful not to let these extracurricular activities get in the way of my Senate work, or keep me from Washington during votes, I accepted just about every speaking invitation I got in Iowa, New Hampshire, or any swing state. An aide created social media accounts for me. I worked with a ghostwriter to complete a second book, Midwestern Optimism—this one was heavier on policy than memoir—and went on a fourteen-city book tour that included stops in Cleveland, Columbus, and Cincinnati. On one late-night talk show, I submitted to an on-camera haircut from a beloved gay stylist; on another, I danced the tango with the host (an instructor named Raoul provided a one-hour lesson in my Senate office before the host and I more briefly rehearsed on set in New York, and, though news of the lesson never got leaked, I felt regretful about it—I paid for it myself, but I still feel I should have met Raoul in my apartment rather than my office). I also continued not only to eat crow on the cookie-baking front but to pretend that I found the opportunities to do so hilarious.

  Despite my multifronted efforts, I was both surprised and overjoyed by my polling numbers in the early days of 2007. I had unusually high favorable and unfavorable ratings—this was the time when media references to me as “divisive” and “polarizing” became de rigueur, perhaps mandatory—but my candidacy was taken seriously in a way it hadn’t been in ’04. I still didn’t realistically expect to be elected in 2008, but I thought I had a very strong shot at being the Democratic VP, especially if the nominee was either Chris Dodd or Joe Biden.

  All of which is to say that I was never under any illusions about the shifting nature of campaigns. It wasn’t that I failed to anticipate wild cards generally. It was that I failed to anticipate the rise of Barack Obama specifically.

  Perhaps I underestimated Barack because of his very proximity and familiarity. He’d become a U.S. senator from Illinois in ’05, taking Dick Durbin’s seat after John McCain appointed Dick as his one Democratic cabinet member. Barack and I regularly found ourselves on the same plane from Washington back to O’Hare on Friday afternoons or evenings—we both flew coach in those days—and I appreciated both his sense of humor and, notable among male senators, his listening skills. I also was aware of a kind of withheld or quietly coiled ambition in him; if I’d been aware of the magnitude of it, I might have enjoyed his company less.

  When Barack declared he was running for president in April 2007, I found the news irritating and—because of his relative lack of national experience, race, quirky upbringing, and strange name—not particularly threatening. Certainly I recognized his oratorical skills and general charisma, and I never ruled out the possibility that he’d be president eventually, but I thought 2008 for him would be the bruising rite of passage 2004 had been for me. Plus, he was fourteen years younger than me. On the night of the Iowa caucuses, when I came in first and he came in second, it occurred to me that Barack’s campaign was not a test run after all. Five days later, when he came in first in New Hampshire and I came in second, I was doubly disoriented—I was again startled by how well I was doing, and I was even more startled by how well he was doing.

  I suspect that the simultaneity of our historic campaigns hurt both of us and benefitted both of us—that we boosted each other because our dual presences made it seem plausible the country was changing rather than making either of us, as an individual, seem like an outlier or novelty. We also, no doubt, took votes from each other. And for voters averse to seeing the country change, together we elicited an antipathy more intense than either of us might have alone. Perhaps I believe the greater portion of the antipathy landed on me only because I am me.

  But from Iowa on, the floodgates of truly vicious coverage opened; I entered a period of bifurcation from which I have never emerged, an either/or landscape in which I was celebrated or lambasted. My comments about baking cookies were invoked constantly, usually preceding or following musings about my likability or lack thereof. Dozens of investigative reporters at different newspapers devoted months of their lives to determining whether the $29,000 I’d made by inve
sting with my 1980s futures trader boyfriend, Larry, was ill gotten. Larry had ended up serving five years in federal prison, starting in 1998, for trading fraud, so the interest he generated wasn’t incomprehensible. But I was mystified by the fact that the conclusion to the question was always no, yet this finding never dissuaded the next reporter from reinvestigating.

  It was also 2008 that saw the explosion of a cottage industry in clothing and tchotchkes whose existence hinged on my awfulness: T-shirts showing my face with the words RHYMES WITH WITCH or HILLIARY; nutcrackers made to resemble me, with plastic legs serving as the spring joints. And in February 2008, I received my first—but not my last—credible death threat. It came from a twenty-two-year-old pizza deliverer in Florence, South Carolina, who owned a firearm and who frequently posted in an online forum about his anger at so-called radical Islam and government-controlling Jews. This forum was where, a few hours prior to a prayer breakfast I was to attend in Louisville, he announced his plan to show up at the breakfast and kill me and any members of my staff who were present. Because his whereabouts were unknown when the breakfast started, I did end up skipping it, though I participated in other planned events that day while wearing a bullet-resistant vest—law enforcement never referred to it as bulletproof—which meant I needed to change into my loosest clothing: a long A-shaped jacket and floral-patterned scarf that wound around my neck and draped over my back. That also was the day I was assigned a round-the-clock security detail funded by American taxpayers. By nightfall, the man had been taken into custody. By the next morning, a spate of articles and TV segments mistaking my bullet-resistant vest for weight gain examined why eating balanced meals on the road was so challenging for presidential candidates. The three hosts of a morning news show conducted a pseudosympathetic discussion of what one of them termed “Hillary’s changing physique” and had even invited a nutritionist on the air to recommend healthy snacks. It turned out—who knew?—that hummus and carrots offered both protein and fiber and that a handful of almonds was lower in sugar than a granola bar. Given that security threats tended to inspire copycats, no one on my team refuted the weight-gain story.

  And then there was the public fascination with my friendship with James, first described in the Tribune. The rumors that we’d had an affair were persistent, and I read a few articles, including in respected publications, in which unnamed former Northwestern colleagues swore we had—that in the fall of 1991, both James’s and my office doors had constantly been closed while we had sex. Too bad we hadn’t, I sometimes thought, though it also was a relief to be able to honestly deny it on the rare occasions I was asked directly. The situation was further complicated by the facts that James’s widow, Susie, as evidenced by her on-the-record comments, clearly believed that we had been involved and clearly was a Republican.

  But what truly astonished me were the suggestions that I had killed James, either with my own hands or through an intermediary. How could anyone in their right mind believe such a thing? But people did; they genuinely did. And these delusions had the strange effect of transforming James into a symbol, a stand-in in some people’s eyes for my utter corruption and amorality and in my own eyes for the paranoia and ignorance of certain voters. In either case, he was stripped of his personhood, the distinctive qualities and habits that had made him him—his formal clothing and courtly manners, his intelligence and sweetness and wry sense of humor. First I had lost him when I’d run for Senate; then I had lost him when he’d died; and I lost him the final time when he was converted into political fodder.

  To think I’d once been bothered by a twenty-four-year-old reporter who chided me for buying expensive opera tickets!

  Iowa

  April 27, 2015

  1:53 P.M.

  The owners of the yarn shop in Des Moines were two men in their sixties who’d been a couple for forty years. One of them, Henry, was tall and slim, with a gray mustache, and the other, Norman, was short and heavy, with a black mustache. While we were still shaking hands, Norman gripped my left shoulder, peered into my eyes, and said in an impassioned tone, “Hillary Rodham, you are a beautiful goddess, and you must use your divine powers to vanquish the blight of Mitt Romney or whomever else the Republicans inflict upon us.”

  I laughed loudly—this encounter was being documented by a dozen print and television reporters and photographers—and I said, “It’s such a pleasure to meet you. Tell me about your shop.” The store was tiny, probably ten by twenty feet, and the members of the media occupied at least half of it, with the travelers standing and kneeling very close to one another. My team hovered by a large shelf where brightly colored skeins of yarn were stored.

  Norman, who was considerably more voluble than Henry, said how important my healthcare tax credit would be, and it was after he told me about their wool made from recycled water bottles that I purchased a small knit bear. I hadn’t carried a wallet for years; my body woman, Kenya, not only kept money for me but meticulously documented how it was used.

  Back in the van, I sat, as I always did, in the second row, and Theresa sat beside me, as she always did. Clyde, who was in the row behind me next to Ellie, said, “Senator, I just want to update you on something,” and his tone made me wonder if there had been a school shooting. Instead, he told me that the “on fleek” video had been viewed more than a million times, inspired a multitude of mocking memes, and was generating nonstop calls to my media team at headquarters, in Chicago, which they were ignoring.

  While he spoke, I was turned around to face him, and I glanced at Ellie and said, “Be careful what you wish for, huh? If you’d put out the video where I talked about reducing greenhouse gas emissions, how many views do you think that would have gotten?”

  “I’m very sorry that I guessed wrong on this,” Ellie said.

  “No, I’m asking literally.”

  “A few thousand?” she said, then she burst into tears. Darryl was pulling out of the parking lot behind the yarn shop, and abruptly, the van was completely silent.

  “Oh, Ellie!” I said. “Oh, please. I’ve withstood so much worse.”

  She was sniffing intensely, and I was reminded just how young she was. I tended to use Maureen’s daughter, Meredith, as a frame of comparison for my team members, and Meredith was now thirty-one—five years older than Ellie.

  “Truly,” I said. “This is background static. When there are nutcrackers made in your image, trust me, you’re not fazed by online commenters saying you’re uncool.”

  From the third row, Diwata said, “Boss, at least Norman in the yarn shop seems to have a major crush on you.”

  Amid the laughter of the others, Ellie very quietly and very stiffly said, “But really. I’m so sorry.” I could see the internal debate she was having play out on her face, her embarrassment at crying in front of all of us competing with her wish to convey remorse.

  “You know what?” I said, and, unfortunately, I knew I was telling her something true. “No one will even remember how on fleek I am once Bill announces.”

  2008

  I dropped out of the presidential race in early June 2008, and, as the world knows, Barack was elected on November 4. Though I had, in the end, campaigned vigorously on his behalf, I allowed myself the reprieve of attending neither his victory speech in Grant Park, which was a mile from my apartment, nor the celebration held afterward at a hotel. On the morning of Election Day, I’d been photographed duly casting my ballot at Ogden Elementary School, accompanied by Theresa. Two members of my security detail, Darryl and Chris, then drove us to Chicago Executive Airport, where Bitsy Sedgeman Corker’s private jet waited. Bitsy was already out in Taos, and the four of us flew to New Mexico and drove on to her adobe house situated on her twenty-thousand-acre ranch. Starting in the midafternoon mountain time, Bitsy, Theresa, and I watched the returns in the den, joined by Bitsy’s daughter, Sally, who was Theresa’s age. At intervals,
Bitsy’s housekeeper, Fernanda, who was watching something in the kitchen that wasn’t in English and also wasn’t the election, brought out trays of carne asada and salad, then cookies and fruit; she continuously replenished our wineglasses.

  As an MSNBC anchor discussed the surprisingly high number of Southern states in play for Barack, Sally said, “And all these years I believed Americans were more racist than sexist.”

  “Did you really?” I said. “Given when the Fifteenth Amendment passed and when the Nineteenth did?”

  Some of my supporters were resentful or disappointed that Barack hadn’t selected me as his running mate, but I’d known he wouldn’t, known that when he secured the party nomination, my hopes of becoming president or vice president had both been thwarted at once. How could one Illinois senator possibly select another, and, frankly, how could one historic nominee select another? Many voters still needed the soothing presence of a white man on the ticket. I wouldn’t have asked him to be my VP.

  Anyway, as much as it was about sexism, the story of 2008 was about the ascendancy of data analytics, which Obama’s team had proven distressingly more adept at than mine. They’d also, thank goodness, been more adept at data analytics than the team of Vice President Sam Brownback, who was the Republican nominee.

  A little after seven mountain time, New York, Michigan, Minnesota, Wisconsin, and Rhode Island were all called for Barack. “This has to be tough for Hillary Rodham, wherever she is,” one of the talking heads on MSNBC said. “That tonight will quite plausibly be historic but not in the way she hoped.”

  “Hmm,” Bitsy said to the TV pundit. “You think you and your colleagues had anything to do with that?”

  Another pundit—the first had been a man, and this was a woman—said, “Well, Hillary, don’t be too discouraged. There’s always 2016, right?”

  A strange feature of fame is the way that on television or in print, individuals sometimes address you directly but rhetorically-directly, clearly without imagining that you’ll ever see or read their message.