Living History by Unknown (the lemonade war series txt) 📗

Talbott, and her entire family had been friends of Bill’s since he and Strobe were Rhodes Scholars together. As soon as Bill and I became a couple, they became friends of mine. And their sons became close to Chelsea.

Brooke, who had lived in Washington and worked in journalism, brought a wealth of experience about the national media and a wry take on the absurdities of campaigns.

I learned quickly that, in a race for the Presidency, nothing is off-limits. Innocent comments or jests erupt into controversies within seconds of being reported on the news wires. Rumors become the story du jour. And while our past experiences may have seemed like ancient history to us, every detail of our lives was being sifted and combed as if we were some sort of archaeological dig. I had seen this before in other people’s campaigns: Senator Ed Muskie defending his wife in 1972 and Senator Bob Kerrey telling a risqué joke in 1992 without realizing that a boom microphone was nearby. But until you are the focus of the klieg lights, you simply cannot imagine their heat.

One evening, when Bill and I were stumping in New Hampshire, he introduced me to a crowd of supporters. Recounting my two decades of work on children’s issues, he joked that we had a new campaign slogan: “Buy one, get one free.” He said it as a way of explaining that I would be an active partner in his administration and would continue to champion the causes I had worked on in the past. It was a good line, and my campaign staff adopted it. Widely reported in the press, it then took on a life of its own, disseminated everywhere as evidence of my alleged secret aspirations to become “co-President”

with my husband.

I hadn’t had enough exposure to the national press corps to fully appreciate the extent to which the news media was a conduit for everything that happened on a campaign. Information, policy positions and quotes were filtered through a journalistic lens before they reached the public. A candidate can’t get his or her ideas across without media coverage, and a journalist can’t report effectively without access to the candidate. Thus, candidates and reporters are at once adversarial and mutually dependent. It’s a tricky, delicate and important relationship, and I didn’t fully understand it.

The “buy one, get one free” comment was a reminder to Bill and me that our remarks might be taken out of context because news reporters didn’t have time or space to provide the text of an entire conversation. Simplicity and brevity were essential to reporters. So were snappy lines and catchphrases. One of the masters of political innuendo weighed in early.

Former President Nixon’s political instincts remained finely tuned, and he commented on our campaign in an interview during a visit to Washington in early February. “If the wife comes through as being too strong and too intelligent,” he remarked, “it makes the husband look like a wimp.” He then went on to note that voters tended to agree with Cardinal de Richelieu’s assessment: “Intellect in a woman is unbecoming.”

“This man never does anything without a purpose,” I remember thinking when I saw Nixon’s comment reported in The New York Times. My service on the 1974 impeachment staff aside, I suspected that Nixon understood better than many the threat Bill posed to the Republican hold on the Presidency. He probably believed that denigrating Bill because he put up with an outspoken wife, and vilifying me as “unbecoming,” might scare voters anxious for a change but uncertain about us.

By then Bill’s entire life was under a media microscope. He already had been asked more questions about personal matters than any presidential candidate in American history.

While the mainstream press still avoided printing unsubstantiated rumors, the supermarket tabloids were offering cash for shocking stories from Arkansas. Eventually one of these fishing expeditions hooked a whale of a tale.

I was in Atlanta campaigning on January 23 when Bill called to warn me about an upcoming tabloid story in which a woman named Gennifer Flowers claimed she had a twelveyear affair with him. He told me it wasn’t true.

The campaign staff went into a tailspin over the story, and I knew that some of them thought the race was over. I asked David Wilhelm to set up a conference call for me to talk to everyone. I said that all of us were in this campaign because we believed Bill could make a difference for our country and that it was up to the voters to decide whether or not we’d be successful.

“So,” I ended, “let’s get back to work.”

Like a rampant virus, the Flowers story hopped between species of media, from the Star, a supermarket tabloid, to Nightline, a respected network news show. Despite our efforts to keep going, the wall-to-wall press coverage made it impossible for the campaign to focus attention on substantive issues. And the New Hampshire primary was just weeks away. Something had to be done. Our friend Harry Thomason, along with Mickey Kantor, James Carville, Paul Begala and George Stephanopoulos, consulted with Bill and me about what we could do. They recommended that we appear on the Sunday night television show 60 Minutes right after the Super Bowl, when we would be seen by the largest possible audience. I took a lot of convincing that such exposure was worth the risks, loss of privacy and potential impact on our families, especially on Chelsea. Finally, I was persuaded that if we didn’t deal with the situation publicly, Bill’s campaign would be over before a single vote was cast.

The 60 Minutes interview took place on January 26 in a suite at a Boston hotel starting at 11 A.M. The room had been transformed into a set, with banks of temporary lights on poles surrounding the couch where Bill and I were sitting. Partway through the interview, a heavy pole loaded with lights fell toward me. Bill saw it falling and pulled me out of the way