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

saw the sun rise in Denver, Colorado, and landed back in Little Rock, where Chelsea met us at the airport at around 10:30 A.M. After a quick stop to change clothes, the three of us went to our polling site, where I proudly cast my vote for Bill to be my President. We spent the day at the Governor’s Mansion with family and friends, making calls to supporters around the country. At 10:47 P.M., the television networks declared that Bill had won.

Though I had expected a victory, I was overwhelmed. After President Bush called Bill to concede, Bill and I went into our bedroom, closed the door and prayed together for God’s help as he took on this awesome honor and responsibility. Then we gathered everyone up for the drive to the Old State House, where the campaign had begun thirteen months before. We joined the Gores in front of a huge crowd of ecstatic Arkansans and ardent supporters from every corner of America.

Within hours, the kitchen table in the Governor’s Mansion became the nerve center of the Clinton transition. In the next few weeks, potential cabinet nominees came in and out, phones rang around the clock, piles of food were consumed. Bill asked Warren Christopher to head his transition and to work with Mickey Kantor and Veron Jordan to vet candidates for major positions. They first concentrated on the economic team, because that was Bill’s highest priority. Senator Lloyd Bentsen of Texas agreed to become Secretary of the Treasury; Robert Rubin, the co-Chairman of the investment bank Goldman Sachs, accepted Bill’s offer to become the first head of a soon-to-be-created National Economic Council; Laura D’Andrea Tyson, a professor of economics at the University of California at Berkeley, became Chair of the Council of Economic Advisers; Gene Sperling, a former aide to Governor Mario Cuomo of New York, became Rubin’s deputy and later succeeded him; and Congressman Leon Panetta, the Democratic Chairman of the House of Representatives Budget Committee, became the Director of the Office of Management and Budget. They worked with Bill to forge the economic policy that put our nation on the path to fiscal responsibility in government and unprecedented growth in the private sector.

We were also facing the more mundane challenges of any family changing jobs and residences. In the midst of forming a new Administration, we had to pack up the Governor’s Mansion, the only home Chelsea remembered. And since we didn’t own a house of our own, everything would come with us to the White House. Friends pitched in to organize and sort, piling boxes in every room. Loretta Avent, a friend from Arizona who had joined me on the campaign after the convention, took charge of the thousands of gifts that arrived from all over the world, filling a huge section of the large basement. Periodically, Loretta would shriek up the stairs: “Wait till you see what just came.” And I’d go down to find her clutching a portrait of Bill made out of seashells and mounted on a red velvet background or a collection of stuffed dogs dressed in baby clothes sent to our now famous black-and-white cat, Socks.

We had to find a new school in Washington for Chelsea, who was almost a teenager and not happy with the prospect of dismantling her life. Bill and I wondered how we could give her a normal childhood in the White House, where her new reality would include twentyfour-hour Secret Service protection. We had already decided to bring Socks to Washington, although we had been warned that he could no longer roam free, collecting dead birds and mice as trophies. Because the White House fence was wide enough for him to slip through into traffic, we reluctantly decided he would have to be on a leash whenever he was outside.

I had taken a leave of absence to campaign, but now I resigned my law practice and started putting together a staff for the office of First Lady, while helping Bill in any way I could. We were both grappling with what my role should be. I would have a “position”

but not a real “job.” How could I use this platform to help my husband and serve my country without losing my own voice?

There is no training manual for First Ladies. You get the job because the man you married becomes President. Each of my predecessors brought to the White House her own attitudes and expectations, likes and dislikes, dreams and doubts. Each carved out a role that reflected her own interests and style and that balanced the needs of her husband, family and country. So would I. Like all First Ladies before me, I had to decide what I wanted to do with the opportunities and responsibilities I had inherited.

Over the years, the role of First Lady has been perceived as largely symbolic. She is expected to represent an ideal―and largely mythical―concept of American womanhood.

Many former First Ladies were highly accomplished, but true stories of what they had done in their lives were overlooked, forgotten or suppressed. By the time I was preparing to take on the role, history was finally catching up to reality. In March 1992, the Smithsonian’s National Museum of American History revised its popular First Ladies Exhibit to acknowledge the varied political roles and public images of these women. In addition to gowns and china, the museum displayed the camouflage jacket Barbara Bush wore when she visited the troops of Desert Storm with her husband and featured a quote from Martha Washington: “I am more like a state prisoner than anything else.” The exhibit’s chief curator, Edith Mayo, and the Smithsonian were criticized for rewriting history and demeaning the “family values” of the First Ladies.

As I studied the marriages of previous Presidents, I recognized that Bill and I were not the first couple who relied on each other as partners in life and politics. Because of research done by the Smithsonian and historians such as Carl Sferrazza Anthony and David McCullough,