Rodham

by Curtis Sittenfeld

  Quickly, a rhythm was established, with the bulk of questions going to Bill or me. When Jim or Martin tried to break in, or even overtly complained about the uneven allotment of time, it mostly underscored their peripheralness. We were forty minutes in when Anderson said, “Senator Rodham, a woman named Jill Perkins recently accused you of sexually harassing her, including demanding that she shave your legs in a taxi in 1992. Did this incident happen, and was it sexual harassment?”

  In prep sessions, we had settled on “Jill Perkins’s accusations are categorically false. I have never sexually harassed her or anyone else, and in fact, I’ve sponsored multiple bills that fight workplace harassment and discrimination and protect harassment and discrimination victims….”

  But all at once, I felt the feeling that had been absent earlier—the Wellesley feeling, the urge to take a risk beyond which, perhaps, lay my destiny.

  I said, “It’s confounding to me that I’m standing onstage with a man who settled a sexual harassment lawsuit against him for $850,000, yet I’m the one who’s asked about this issue. But I will try to do something radical up here. I want to try to describe a complicated situation in an honest way.

  “In February 1992, on the day that I declared I was running for Senate from the state of Illinois, I was riding in a cab to do an interview at the Chicago Tribune. The people in the cab with me were a man named Greg Rheinfrank, who was then my communications director, and a woman named Jill Rossi, whose married name became Perkins, who was Greg’s assistant. I was wearing sheer pantyhose, and Greg noticed that it had been a few days since I’d shaved my legs. Out of a concern that this would look unattractive or be embarrassing, he asked the taxi driver to stop. He sent Jill Perkins into a drugstore to buy a razor and shaving cream, and when she returned, Greg suggested that she shave my legs so that I could focus on practicing my responses for the upcoming interview. For many reasons, I wish now that I’d shaved my own legs or left them unshaven. I apologize to Jill Perkins for creating an uncomfortable situation. I understand why she felt that way. At the time, I didn’t perceive what I was doing to be harassment, and certainly not sexual harassment. The reality is that an interaction can involve close physical proximity and not be inappropriate, as with a doctor or nurse, or even a barber shaving a man’s beard. Or as with tonight, when a hair stylist, Veronica Velasquez, and a makeup artist, Suzy Gunther, helped me prepare. Nevertheless, I acknowledge that in that taxi, I exercised poor judgment, and I regret it. It was an isolated event, and never in my long career as a law professor or elected official has anything remotely comparable happened.

  “Have I made mistakes? Yes. We all make mistakes. But I strongly believe that I haven’t made that many, that I’ve learned from them, and that I’m consistently respectful of other people.

  “Now, there’s a larger issue I want to address. I want those of you here tonight in Las Vegas, as well as those of you watching at home, to think of the first time you heard my name. Unless you’re from Illinois, it was probably in 2004, when a comment I made about not having stayed home to bake cookies resulted in a national backlash. It’s likely that there was never a time that you were aware that I existed without also being aware that I’m supposedly controversial, untrustworthy, or unlikable. And it’s very normal that if we’re told many times over many years that a person is untrustworthy or unlikable, we’ll believe it.

  “But why are Americans so fixated on my likability? Do we ask ourselves if Jim Webb is likable, if Martin O’Malley is likable, if Bill Clinton is likable? If you want someone very funny, you can go to a comedy club. If you want someone very attractive, you can watch a Hollywood movie. If you want someone to enjoy a beer with, you can go to a bar with your friend. But if you want someone to look out for the interests of the American people, for your family, for you—someone who understands the economy and education and healthcare and foreign policy, who has common sense and decency, someone who doesn’t believe that the normal rules and laws don’t apply to her—then vote for me. You can vote for me because you’re excited to elect a female president, but you also can just vote for me because I’ll do a good job. I promise that at every opportunity, for as many Americans as I can, in as many ways as I can, I’ll fight to make life better for you.”

  I had gone over my allotted time by more than twenty seconds, and Anderson hadn’t interrupted me. When I finished speaking, there was applause, the most applause I received that night. And I cannot lie: I felt exhilarated, but I also felt uncertain. Some haze had burned off, some distillation had occurred, and I wasn’t sure how the public would react.

  Afterward, back in the greenroom, Greg said, “Thanks for throwing me under the bus,” then he said, “You did good, Rodham.”

  “Thank you for encouraging me to run for Senate,” I said. “And for a few other things along the way.”

  Apparently, as several pundits would later point out, it was the first time the word pantyhose had been used onstage at a presidential debate.

  * * *

  —

  The narrative of my eventual election and presidency is that the first Democratic debate was when I found my voice, demonstrating an authenticity and candor that had otherwise eluded me for decades. I consider this narrative apocryphal, but when I reflect back—more than two years have passed since the debate and more than a year since my inauguration—I do think of the days after the debate as the point when I suspected I’d win, when I felt some confidence or optimism that had previously been beyond my grasp. It was when I began to securely inhabit my own lead.

  But to the extent that speaking frankly about Jill Perkins was a defining moment in the 2016 election, it’s for a reason both more concrete and more convoluted than that I abruptly became authentic. Among the fifteen million viewers of that night’s debate was Vivian Tobin—the woman in Chouteau’s parking lot—and, as she said later, the combination of my public apology to Jill Perkins and my acknowledgment of culpability motivated Vivian to come forward and tell the story of what had happened so many years before between her and Bill Clinton. She didn’t like me, Vivian Tobin told reporters, but she hated Bill. She decided to do what she could—at a high personal cost—to prevent his presidency. I will always be grateful to her, though I could only shake my head whenever I heard her oft-repeated on-the-record comment that the person she really wished would run was Donald Trump.

  Ultimately, even with a woman credibly accusing him of rape, Bill and I fought it out until early June 2016, when I officially won the majority of delegates and became the presumptive nominee. The battle preceding the general election was as ugly as the primary. My Republican opponent was indeed Jeb Bush, and the media followed his example on behaving as if his being five years my junior put us in two different generations. There were rumors that I had Parkinson’s and a traumatic brain injury and syphilis, and even Jeb himself, who was routinely congratulated in the press for his impeccably WASPy manners, regularly declared that I seemed “worn out.”

  There was also, in August 2016, a scandal when Bitsy Sedgeman Corker’s troubled forty-year-old son, Jesse, who was a major donor of mine, was arrested for involuntary manslaughter after providing the opioids that a friend of his overdosed on. Naturally, this initiated another wave of stories about my Northwestern colleague James and my supposed role in his death.

  And Donald Trump remained a thorn in my side right up until Election Day. When the race was called around 9:00 P.M. eastern time on November 8, he tweeted, Hardball Hillary, who owes her victory to me, is President. But where is my ‘Thank you’ Hillary? Now that he’s been indicted for tax fraud in New York—his trial isn’t for another few months—he’s obsessed with my pardoning him, which I absolutely won’t do.

  In spite of all this, once Bill was out of the race, everything was easier and more predictable. Certainly debating Jeb was far less stressful than debating Bill; Jeb was less charismatic, less intelligent, and I
’d never had sex with him. Plus, his supporters had never chanted “Shut her up!” at rallies. Sometimes when I saw Jeb and his VP pick, John Kasich, the governor of Ohio, I’d think of Diwata saying that Bill was pale, male, and stale. Though I had seriously considered picking Barack’s HUD Secretary Julián Castro as my VP, I ended up going with the Virginia governor, Terry McAuliffe, which is to say—Terry is a decade younger than I am—we are just pale and stale. But I genuinely like Terry’s energy and sense of humor, and he’s phenomenal at fundraising.

  It had seemed that Election Day would never arrive, and then it arrived. In the end, I won by 2.9 million votes.

  * * *

  —

  In the White House, on a typical weeknight, I make my nest in the Living Room, which is in the residence between the Master Bedroom and the Yellow Oval Room. Apparently, many presidents and first ladies didn’t share a bedroom, and the Living Room was used as sleeping quarters by, among others, Mary Todd Lincoln, Harry Truman, and John F. Kennedy. The designer I worked with—truthfully, it was primarily Maureen who came to Washington for several months to oversee his redecorations—didn’t put a bed in the room but did find a very large, comfortable tweed couch, which is where I sit at night to drink tea and read briefing papers in a leather binder and news articles on my iPad. The room’s other décor includes a seventeenth-century still life of a fruit bowl borrowed from the National Gallery of Art; on the mantel, a matching pair of ceramic horses given to Ulysses S. Grant by a Chinese diplomat; a mahogany table on which rests the white crocheted tablecloth sent to me by the Suarez family in 1971 and, set atop it, framed photos of family and close friends; and floor-to-ceiling toile drapes in a lovely seafoam shade. I try to get in bed by eleven, spend another fifteen minutes reading a book of devotionals to unwind, and turn the light out by eleven-twenty.

  My days are so hectic and stimulating and interactive, so relentless, that if I didn’t have this private evening peace, I suspect I’d become a kind of automaton, a figurehead, to the exclusion of being a person. The time alone gives me the tranquility to recollect not just my emotions but also my experiences. I know better, of course, than to try to convince the public that policy as well as poetry can arise from Wordsworth’s “spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings.” I know that something being true can’t make people believe it.

  And yet, if my Living Room nest is essential to my equilibrium, and if being president is necessarily lonely, I am less personally alone than I’ve been for much of my adulthood. For the last two years, my relationship with Albert has developed in a surprisingly natural way. He visits from New York almost every weekend, as well as acting as my date for state dinners and White House receptions around the holidays. Though I avoided taking him on international trips for the first year, I’ve relaxed my stance, and he recently accompanied me to, among other places, the G7 summit in Italy. Albert is extraordinarily accommodating of my schedule, and I honestly don’t know if this is because I’m the president, because he’s retired, or because this is who he’d always have been, if we’d met earlier and under other circumstances. We have discussed the question—one of the things I like best about him is that we can discuss anything—and we’ve both admitted we have no idea. We simply enjoy each other for now, and I think we’re both amused and grateful to experience true companionship. And also, though I’ve never mentioned it to anyone besides Maureen, fabulous sex. It’s not acrobatic, it always involves lubricant, and in Albert’s arms, under the covers, I’m overwhelmed with a particular physical happiness that I thought I had left behind long ago. Why did it take more than fifty years for me to meet a person who is kind and interesting and attractive; who is faithful; and who is single? If I wonder this occasionally, I can say with confidence that I wonder about it less than the journalists who, collectively, have written millions of words of speculation about what resides within my heart.

  At night, Albert goes to sleep earlier than I do. When he’s in New York, before he turns in, he texts me while I’m in my nest, always a variation on the same message: Goodnight, my darling, and sweet dreams. (Though I found it cute, he no longer uses salutations or sign-offs in texts, though he does still use punctuation. He also on principle refuses to even try to comprehend Albert Boyd “stanning.”) In the morning, I am generally awakened with a phone call from a valet at six-fifteen, and for this reason, Albert sets his alarm for six-ten. That way, when I wake, there’s always, in addition to my briefings, a text from him. Usually, it’s Good morning, my darling, and I hope you slept well.

  I consider the range and depth of not just my friendships but also my many work relationships to be one of the great gifts of my life; if I hadn’t met Albert, I’d still have been lucky. But there is something about another person caring when you go to sleep at night and when you wake up in the morning—caring not because of what they need from you but just because they love you—that is a novelty for me. There’s a sweetness and solace in it that I don’t take for granted.

  * * *

  —

  My inauguration took place on January 20, 2017. I wore a gray suit with—to symbolize the melding of blue and red America—a purple collar and a purple shell beneath it. It was unseasonably warm in Washington, almost fifty degrees. I know that many women, and also some men, wept as they watched me place my left hand on a Bible that had been given to my mother when she was a teenager and repeat the oath administered by Supreme Court Justice John Roberts: “I, Hillary Diane Rodham, do solemnly swear that I will faithfully execute the office of president of the United States and will, to the best of my ability, preserve, protect, and defend the Constitution of the United States, so help me God.”

  I had decided ahead of time not to cry. The presidency is a strange blend of the bureaucratic and the symbolic, and Inauguration Day was the height of symbolism; it was downright cinematic, which didn’t mean that it was false. To stand on the west front of the Capitol, facing both the Washington Monument and the Lincoln Memorial, to publicly enact the peaceful transfer of power that is the hallmark of a democracy—it was profoundly moving.

  Though other presidents have been flanked during the swearing in by family members, I chose to stand alone. But the closest seats were occupied on one side of the aisle by my brothers, their wives, and Tony’s children, and, on the other side, by Maureen and Meredith and their husbands and baby Hillary, Meredith’s one-year-old daughter. Also nearby were Theresa, Greg, Denise, Clyde, Diwata, and other staffers; and my Wellesley friends Nancy and Phyllis. Albert and his daughter, Carson, sat next to Nancy. The oath itself took about thirty seconds, and my speech afterward took twenty-three minutes. It was during the musical performances before the oath that I thought of the many people who had longed for this day and not lived to see it: the suffragists, of course, Susan B. Anthony and Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Frederick Douglass; more recently, Misty LaPointe, who passed away in May 2016; and, in the middle, my mother, born in 1919 on the day that Congress gave women the right to vote. Oh, Dorothy Rodham, I thought. Oh, Mom. How I wish you could be here. I have always been particularly touched by the proverb about the purpose of life being to plant trees under whose shade you do not expect to sit.

  I knew, on Inauguration Day, that challenges lay ahead, including gridlock in Congress and a divided electorate. Such challenges make me even prouder of the legislation my administration has gotten passed without Republican support: reversing the Hyde Amendment to allow poor women access to abortions through Medicaid; creating a path to citizenship for undocumented immigrants; exceeding the climate-change commitments in the Paris Agreement; and requiring background checks on all gun sales. There have also, of course, been disappointments and failures. None of it has been easy, even the successes. There have been good and terrible days.

  But the grassy field I often pictured while campaigning—I’ve made it to the other side. This is miraculous! Or is the miracle in how quickly it came to seem ordinary
? At first, when reporters on NPR or ABC said “President Rodham,” those words together, the honorific and my surname, sounded strange, but within a few days, they didn’t.

  If I’ll never know how much this was my path because of fate and how much because I willed it, the question is less important than that I made it across. Now other women know they, too, can make it, and not because I or anyone else tells them. They know because they’ve seen it happen.

  For L,

  with love and gratitude

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  For facts, anecdotes, and analysis, I am indebted to the following books and their authors: Living History by Hillary Rodham Clinton; What Happened by Hillary Rodham Clinton; My Life by Bill Clinton; Chasing Hillary: On the Trail of the First Woman President Who Wasn’t by Amy Chozick; A Woman in Charge: The Life of Hillary Rodham Clinton by Carl Bernstein; Strange Justice: The Selling of Clarence Thomas by Jane Mayer and Jill Abramson; Behind the Smile: A Story of Carol Moseley Braun’s Historic Senate Campaign by Jeannie Morris; Good and Mad: The Revolutionary Power of Women’s Anger by Rebecca Traister; Brotopia: Breaking Up the Boys’ Club of Silicon Valley by Emily Chang; Dear Madam President: An Open Letter to the Women Who Will Run the World by Jennifer Palmieri; Plenty Ladylike: A Memoir by Claire McCaskill; Off the Sidelines: Speak Up, Be Fearless, and Change Your World by Kirsten Gillibrand; The Truths We Hold: An American Journey by Kamala Harris; The Senator Next Door: A Memoir from the Heartland by Amy Klobuchar; and This Fight Is Our Fight: The Battle to Save America’s Middle Class by Elizabeth Warren. I am similarly indebted to the following podcasts: With Her, hosted by Max Linsky and the Clinton Foundation; Slow Burn: Season 2, hosted by Leon Neyfakh and Slate magazine; and Making Obama, hosted by Jenn White and WBEZ Chicago.