Rodham

by Curtis Sittenfeld

  Onscreen, the other pundits groaned, and one said, “Let’s just get through tonight, okay, Sheena?”

  A few minutes after nine mountain time, the networks called it: Barack Obama had been elected president. Bitsy, Sally, Theresa, and I all looked at one another, and Sally burst into tears, and the rest of us got choked up, too. It was an extraordinary moment. I could feel how they were looking to me to acknowledge the night’s profundity and magnitude; they were looking to me both because I was the political stateswoman and because they loved me and didn’t want to offend me as Barack’s former opponent. I smiled and said, “This is a remarkable milestone. I’m happy for the country.” After a few seconds, I added, “And for Barack.”

  I became aware that Darryl, one of the two Secret Service agents who’d traveled with us to New Mexico, was standing in the threshold between the hall and the den, watching the TV, and when I glanced at him, we made eye contact. Darryl was black, and his counterpart on the trip, Chris, was white. I stood, walked to Darryl, and hugged him. “Congratulations,” I said, and he nodded once in a manner that made it clear he, too, was struggling to contain his emotions. But he said nothing; agents don’t tend to be loquacious.

  For his concession speech, Sam Brownback stood onstage at a Topeka hotel with his running mate, Jim Gilmore, the Virginia governor. Brownback and I had been in the Senate together, and he was one of those men who was polite enough to interact with directly while being so conservative on matters of taxes, healthcare, and reproductive and LGBTQ rights that his disdain for anyone unlike himself was a form of cruelty; as such men often are, he was also deeply religious. Years before, a legislative assistant of mine had referred to these type of men, who were always at least fifty, always white, and only ever of middling intelligence, as PE-teacher politicians. The name was, of course, an insult to PE teachers.

  Following Brownback’s speech, which was gracious enough considering the circumstances, MSNBC switched back to the in-studio panel, whose participants talked more about the historic nature of the night. Several of the pundits were themselves visibly moved. Then we saw the stage at Grant Park where Barack would appear imminently. American flags lined the rear and sides of the stage, and bullet-resistant glass panes flanked the podium. The Obama family entered from the back, between flags, and there was thunderous cheering; well over two hundred thousand people were estimated to be in the park, which was to say a crowd fifteen times larger than my largest ever. The Obamas’ clothes were coordinated in shades of red and black: Barack’s dark suit and red-striped tie, Michelle’s black dress with bold red splashes above and below the waist, Malia’s red dress and Sasha’s black one. Barack held the hand of Sasha, the younger of the two girls, and Michelle held the hand of Malia, and they waved as the crowd began to chant, “Yes, we can!”

  How bittersweet this was to watch! Though all of us in politics must routinely perform the role of ourselves, there was a closeness and sweetness about their family that couldn’t be faked. What, I wondered as Sasha clasped her father’s hand, was it like to get both, to have a family and be elected president? All his predecessors had, too, except James Buchanan and, 140 years later, Jerry Brown, though Jerry’s girlfriend had acted as first lady. Even Grover Cleveland, who’d been elected as a single man, had during his first term married the twenty-one-year-old daughter of a friend and eventually had five children.

  And yet I couldn’t fathom standing on a stage like that next to these young humans with their personalities and appetites, their favorite TV shows and snacks, the goggles they needed for swim lessons. Even with nannies, wouldn’t I always have wondered if my ambition was detrimental to them, if the exposure was fair, if the times I was away were excessive and damaging? Did men wonder this? Not, it seemed, in such a way that it immobilized them or precluded their advancement. And even if I could have made peace with my decisions, the media wouldn’t have been able to—they’d have wondered for me, incessantly.

  Onstage, Michelle Obama beamed and waved. I’d known Michelle even before Barack entered public office—back in the nineties, she’d worked in the mayor’s office and later at a nonprofit for young people—and, like everyone else, I thought she was terrific. But for her, now what? I’d read that prior to taking a leave from her hospital-executive job, she’d earned almost double the $157,000 salary her husband and I made as senators, and, as first lady, she would be paid nothing. I knew I shouldn’t project, but did she really want to oversee White House Christmas decorating, to be Barack’s accoutrement? Maybe the opportunity to eviscerate ugly stereotypes just by existing made the personal sacrifice worth it, or maybe influencing policy through back channels didn’t seem to her like a second-rate option. But seeing her onstage was strangely like watching a younger version of myself—a taller, far more glamorous, African American version—and I wasn’t envious. Or I was envious, watching as she and Barack exchanged kisses on the cheek before she escorted their daughters backstage and he began his speech. But not envious of her. I was envious of him.

  As the camera panned the massive cheering crowd, I caught sight of three people I recognized, all of them near the stage, all of them prominent Barack supporters: Oprah Winfrey, Richard Greenberger, and Gwen Greenberger.

  Bitsy held out her wineglass toward mine. As our glasses clinked, she said, “To 2016.”

  Iowa

  April 27, 2015

  2:41 P.M.

  Of course we watched Bill’s announcement—we watched it on Clyde’s iPad in the van—and of course it went on for much too long. My own announcement had taken the form of a crisp and, if I did say so myself, beautifully shot six-minute video that started with me at Maureen’s kitchen table and concluded with a cheery pop song over a montage of Americans who were old and young and straight and gay and every shade of skin color. Bill gave a twenty-five-minute speech on the steps of City Hall in San Francisco in which he promised to bring the innovative spirit of Silicon Valley to climate change, education, and job creation, then told a few meandering and self-indulgent anecdotes about his various start-up successes and close friendships with leaders of other countries. The assembled press lobbed softballs at him about taking a pay cut as president.

  Standing behind a podium, Bill wore a cerulean blue short-sleeved button-down shirt and no tie; he looked, I thought, particularly Californian, which I hoped would work against him, though it was rare for any man’s appearance to be critiqued with real vigor.

  Theresa said, “I wish there was one word for smug San Francisco billionaire.”

  “Vegan?” suggested Suzy.

  Clyde said, “I swear to God the first time he uses the phrase plant-based diet, we’re celebrating by going to KFC.”

  I said, “And tweeting a picture of me gnawing fried chicken, I hope?”

  “No, no,” Diwata said. “Plant-forward.”

  “If he says ‘plant-forward,’ ” said Clyde, “we’re opening a bottle of Veuve Clicquot and not tweeting it.”

  But as I watched him onscreen, I honestly had no idea what motivated Bill Clinton. Was he driven by sincere patriotism and idealism? Was he bored? Was the presidency an unchecked item on his bucket list? Was his failure to be elected in 1992 his greatest regret? If my candidacy represented a bid for gender equality seventeen years in the making, his represented—what? A nostalgia tour? Surely he didn’t understand the implications of how media, social and otherwise, had changed—perhaps he understood them as a VC but not as a presidential candidate. How easily people could now record whatever you said and did, how directly an anonymous individual could now contact a journalist, how quickly rumors now spread, and how impulsively they were reported even by credible outlets. Or did none of this matter with Bill? Were there rules that applied to me but, because of his charisma and his wealth and his gender, not to him?

  And yet I was surprised when I heard myself say aloud, “The reason he sho
uldn’t be president isn’t that he’s vegan. It’s that he’s a sexual predator.”

  CHAPTER 6

  2015

  THE STUDIO AUDIENCE CHEERED WARMLY as I walked onto the Burbank, California, set of Beverly Today and toward an armchair facing that of Beverly Collins, the show’s host and a woman I’d known for almost twenty years. Before I sat, the audience continued to cheer and clap, and I waved in various directions, smiling broadly. Even when I took my seat, they still clapped, and when finally they were quiet enough for Beverly to speak, she said to me, “It’s almost like they’re excited that you’re here.”

  Again, they cheered wildly, and, though we had to wait for them to calm down, I can’t lie—it was nice to be in friendly territory.

  Turning back toward me, Beverly said, “You were last on the show in 2014. What have you been up to since then?”

  Yet again, the crowd cheered.

  After a minute, I said, “Beverly, I don’t know if you know this, but I’m running for president.”

  There was more boisterous cheering. Beverly said, “What’s that like?”

  “It’s a lot of fun,” I said. “Have you ever considered it?”

  “Now that you mention it, maybe I will,” Beverly said. “It seems tiring, though. Is it?”

  “It’s tiring sometimes,” I said. “But it’s also energizing. I meet so many wonderful people every single day, so many Americans who are working hard and who are optimistic about a better future.”

  “I’m trying to remember,” Beverly said. “Are you the only one running for president?”

  The audience chuckled, and I said, “Well, that’s not how it works in the United States. In fact, I have three Democratic opponents, and there could be as many as ten or twelve candidates in the Republican primary.”

  Her playful ignorance was, of course, planned, but it was working better than I’d expected; I could feel how much the audience was enjoying it.

  I’d first appeared on Beverly Collins Cooks!, her Chicago-based cooking show, in 1998, when I was up for Senate reelection, and we’d become fast friends both on and off the air. On that particular day, I’d joined Beverly in preparing deep-dish pizza. Standing behind a Formica counter, facing an audience, both of us wearing matching yellow aprons, I shook the oregano bottle over the pan of simmering onions and, with what appeared to be sincere alarm, she exclaimed, “Good Lord, are you not familiar with measuring spoons?” A few minutes later, as I grated mozzarella, I drew blood when I also grated my knuckle. At this, Beverly giggled and said, “The secret ingredient.” With a Band-Aid over my knuckle, I helped her punch the dough to eliminate air bubbles, and she said, “Tell the truth—are you picturing Newt Gingrich?” After the filming concluded, when we were backstage, a producer in a headset said to her, “The Newt stuff, Beverly—ideally not, okay?” To which Beverly said, “But he’s a depraved gargoyle!”

  In the years after my first appearance, Beverly’s show had expanded from the Chicago market to dozens of other cities, switched formats from a half-hour cooking show to a general hour-long talk show and from live to recorded, been renamed Beverly Today, and moved to California. But I still cooked with her whenever I returned, including making blueberry-strawberry muffins one Fourth of July. That time, I dropped the glass measuring cup in the whirring stand mixer, causing shattered glass to fly into the air. No one was hurt, and neither Beverly nor I could speak coherently for thirty seconds because we were laughing so hard. At last, while tears ran down her cheeks, Beverly said, “Obviously, that never would have happened with cookies because of how much you love baking them.”

  In 2008, Beverly came out as a lesbian in an article in People magazine, and in 2010, when she married a pediatrician named Sheila, I was a guest at the wedding, in Vermont. Beverly’s was the first gay wedding I’d attended.

  In this moment, on her set in Burbank, Beverly was saying, “Now on the Democratic side, who’s running other than you?”

  “There are four of us,” I said. “There’s me. There’s Jim Webb, who used to be a senator from Virginia. There’s Martin O’Malley, who was the governor of Maryland. And there’s Bill Clinton, who was governor of Arkansas.” A pollster named Henry Kinoshita had run focus groups to determine how I should refer to Bill. Sparingly was the obvious answer, but in cases where I needed to, I was to eschew billionaire, entrepreneur, and even businessman.

  “Now, this is interesting,” Beverly said. “I’ve heard a rumor that you and Bill Clinton once dated. Is that true?”

  How many times in the last few days had Clyde, Theresa, and I rehearsed this moment? “Occasionally, rumors you hear on the campaign trail are true.” I paused good-humoredly, or at least this was supposed to be the effect. “Very, very occasionally. Yes, I did date Bill Clinton, but here’s the crazy part. It was more than thirty years ago.” In fact, he had set his head on my shoulder in the museum courtyard forty-four years before; it had been forty years since I’d driven away from Fayetteville. But my team had decided on thirty years so as not to emphasize my age.

  “It was when we were in law school,” I said, and an enormous photo of me not at Yale but standing behind the podium at my Wellesley graduation appeared on a studio screen, next to an equally enormous photo of Bill that I recognized from his Rhodes scholar days. My team had turned down Beverly’s producers’ requests for a law school photo of Bill and me together.

  As if Bill and I were adorable puppies, the audience made a collective cooing “awww” sound.

  “Look at those two young kids,” Beverly said. “Is it odd now to be running against him?”

  “You know,” I said, “it really isn’t a big deal. I just feel so focused on what I can do to improve the lives of everyday Americans through jobs and education and healthcare that I don’t give a lot of thought to things from three decades ago. It’s like if I said to you, ‘Do you think about the person you went to high school prom with?’ ” This, too, was semiscripted, and when a photo of Beverly from her prom appeared on the screen—her male date wore a maroon tuxedo—the audience roared with delight. Beverly and I made eye contact, both of us smiling, and I felt very grateful. I often was struck by the generosity and competence with which other professionally successful women my age extended a helping hand.

  And Beverly did not, as a follow-up question, say, Okay, but what if you’re running for president against your prom date?

  Instead, she said, “I often think about my prom date, Evan Gustafson. I bet he misses me.” The audience laughed and clapped, and Beverly said, “Hillary, I know you’ll be crushed to hear this, but we don’t have a cooking segment on the show today.”

  “Beverly, I’m so disappointed,” I said.

  “Oh, you are?” She smirked. “Because I lied. We do have a cooking segment. Hey, Ryan—” And then a curtain was pulled back on the kitchen, revealing a counter set up for us to make apple pie. Once again, the audience cheered ecstatically.

  * * *

  —

  Whenever I entered my apartment after being away, my own home always seemed shockingly clean and quiet and familiar. The décor of the rooms struck me as exceptionally attractive, as if I’d had no hand in selecting it: the sunny yellow walls of the living room and the long, skirted sofa covered in a pattern of oversized red and pink roses that matched the curtains; the large maple dining room table, which was where my staff and I held meetings; my bedroom, with its tufted headboard and throw pillows. In 1999, I’d bought the smaller apartment next door to mine and knocked down the wall between them, so I now had three guest rooms, and they were often used by staffers crashing after meetings that had lasted into the wee hours.

  No matter what time of day or night I returned home, my housekeeper, Ebba, was awake to greet me and, no matter how many times I’d conveyed that it was unnecessary, to offer a snack. On this particular Saturday in early May, after the plane from L
os Angeles landed at 2:40 A.M., my body woman, Kenya, and I rode through a warm rain in an armored SUV driven by my security agent Phil, and I entered my apartment at 3:30. Kenya had texted Ebba to let her know we were near, and Ebba opened the door for us and led us to the kitchen. (Past the lovely dining room and living room—what good taste the woman who lived here had!) On the kitchen counter was a dish of mixed nuts, a quartered orange, and two glasses of water. I glugged down the water, but it was only to humor Ebba that I also took an orange quarter. Ebba had been working for me for twenty years and was close to my age, and, as always—even though it was the middle of the night—she wore black slacks and a black collared shirt. She said, “When Maureen comes tomorrow at nine-thirty, do you want breakfast first or just coffee?”

  “I’ll set my alarm for nine and have a vegetable omelet,” I said. “Kenya, you’re welcome to spend the night here.”

  Kenya shook her head. “I’m good, but need anything before I take off?”

  “Any word from Misty LaPointe in Iowa? She was going to check in after her first chemo session.”

  “I haven’t heard from her. Want me to reach out?”

  “Just text me her contact information.” I yawned, and said, “Clearly, what all of us need now is sleep.”

  By 3:45, I’d removed my makeup and contacts and brushed my teeth while gazing, as I usually did, at Barbara Overholt’s Venus of Willendorf replica. She’d sent me the statue, which I kept on the bathroom countertop, after I was elected to the Senate, along with a note that read Hurray for tough broads! Barbara was in her nineties and suffering from dementia; I no longer heard directly from her, though I occasionally exchanged emails with her daughter.

  When I entered my bedroom, I saw that Ebba had already turned down my sheet and cover and made my white-noise machine purr. The next thing I knew, the chimes ringtone of my phone was awakening me. Ebba, who hadn’t necessarily slept any more than I had, prepared an omelet with spinach and mushrooms. I read briefings from my staff as I ate, but—wondrously—I did not need to have my hair or makeup done, nor did I need to marshal energy for a speech or to shake hands or smile for photos with hundreds of people I’d never met. It was a Saturday, and I’d be attending a fundraising reception that evening at a country club in Lake Forest, but I was free until 4:00 P.M., which felt decadent to an almost unsettling degree; during my initial hours of downtime, it was always jarring to not be a few feet away from Theresa, Clyde, Diwata, and Kenya. With whom was I supposed to share incisive or preposterous tweets I saw or thoughts I’d just had about infrastructure funding? Admittedly, by the time Maureen arrived, I’d exchanged texts with all of them, as well as with Greg and my campaign manager, Denise Jacobs.