When I met Bill Clinton, he was the first person I ever met from Arkansas. And when I first visited Arkansas [in 1973], I really did not know what to expect. He picked me up at the airport in Little Rock. He lived in Hot Springs, which was like an hour away. We drove eight hours. He took me to all these places he thought were beautiful. We went to all the state parks. We went to all the overlooks. And then we’d stop at his favorite barbecue place. Then we’d go down the road and stop at his favorite fried-pie place. My head was reeling because I didn’t know what I was going to see or what I was expecting.
And then in ‘74, he’d asked me to marry him and he said, “I know this is really a hard choice because I’m committed to living in Arkansas.” And I’d say, “Yeah, it’s a really hard choice.” And I just finally decided, you know, this is no way to make a decision. When you love somebody, you just have to go and see what it’s like. So I moved to Arkansas and started teaching at the law school.
I had a lot of apprehension, partly because I didn’t know anybody and did not know how I’d be received. And I got to Fayetteville, Arkansas, and started teaching at the law school within the space of about 48 hours. It all happened very quickly. And I loved it. The people were warm and welcoming to me. I felt very much at home. And it was a shock to me because I had never lived in the South or in a small place before. It gave me a perspective on life and helped me understand what it was like for most people … I think I’ve had a more interesting time of it than I would have if I had chickened out and not followed my heart.
I think there was, on the part of not just my family but my friends. You know, my friends loved Bill, but they thought I was going to the end of the earth. They had no idea what life was going to be like. My father was more concerned that he was a Democrat than [from Arkansas]. Great arguments, great arguments.
From two places. My parents always had a strong sense of what was fair. Not necessarily any social content to it, but what was fair and not fair. And then one of the most influential people in my life was my youth minister when I was growing up in the Methodist church. Here we were, these white, suburban kids at the Methodist church on Sunday night, and he’d come in … and he’d say, “We’re going downtown to visit with some young people who are just like you. " And we’d go downtown and have these exchanges with Hispanic kids and black kids. We had a lot of farms still in my neighborhood in those days. And he’d set up programs so that the girls in my church group would go out and baby-sit the migrant children while their parents worked. He just was relentless in telling us that to be a Christian did not just mean you were concerned about your own personal salvation.
Well, one thing I want to say in preface to that, I think the horrors of it can be way overstated. The important thing about Bill Clinton’s upbringing is that he was always surrounded by love. He had a mother who, despite all the heartbreak and tragedy in her life, got up every day optimistic and positive and determined to try to make the best of it-and to love his children … Hard as he tried to understand his stepfather, it became a big challenge to him toward the end of his stepfather’s life, when there was a reconciliation … When Roger Clinton was dying-I think this says a lot about the kind of person Bill is-he was getting medical treatment at Duke. Bill was at Georgetown. And Bill drove down frequently to see him.
[Bill) was amazed by fatherhood. He was overwhelmed by it. I’ve heard him say that when he saw his child, he realized it was more than his own father got to do. [Clinton’s natural father died before he was born.] And he has worked very hard and has been a real supportive father.
We were in England-‘78, ‘79, can’t remember. Anyway, we were trying to have a child, something we were working on. And it was this glorious morning. We were going to brunch and we were walking through Chelsea, you know, the flowerpots were out and everythingAnd Bill started singing, “It’s a Chelsea morning.” Remember that old song? Judy Collins song.
Well, it was 1969. And some of my classmates came to me late in the spring and said we don’t think it’s right that Wellesley has never let a student speak at graduation. And we want to go to the administration and ask them to let us have a student speak because we think we deserve to have our voices heard, and we want you to do it. Anyway, it got worked out that I would be on the program after Senator [Edward] Brooke. And I was really honored that they wanted me to talk. I guess I was the natural choice because I was president of the college government. People wrote what they wanted me to say. They sent me poems. It became a real collective effort. But basically what they wanted me to do was to try to communicate what it had been like: the four years of the buildup of the Vietnam War, the assassination of Martin Luther King, Bobby Kennedy, the burning of the cities. This was an incredible time to live through. And Senator Brooke gave a very traditional, conventional speech in which he basically took a kind of Republican apologist line about what was happening, what President Nixon was doing. It was exactly the kind of message my classmates felt they didn’t want as their last remembrance of Wellesley. When I spoke, I responded to his not having really addressed the concerns of the people about to go into this world.
No, I have tried very hard to put my obligation to my daughter ahead of everything. And one of the things I have tried to do is make sure she not only had the support she needed but the time she needed. You never know in retrospect whether you did or didn’t do exactly the right thing-stay-at-home mothers, gone-away mothers, all of us worry whether we should have done something differently than we did. One of the things that I have given up completely is time with friends and social time. We talk on the phone or try to see each other on special occasions. But I couldn’t keep an active social life and do everything else.
Well, I don’t understand why uncorroborated rumors and all of the stories that are being promoted command as much attention as they seem to. So from my perspective I am bewildered by the kind of press attention that they’ve generated. But I recognize that we don’t set the rules, and that’s the way the whole situation has developed in the last couple of years. I feel very comfortable about my husband and about our marriage. We have tried to be as honest as we thought appropriate, and we have talked about who we are and where we have come from together. My view is that when you’re proud of the work and effort we have put into this marriage-it is something we value very much-and it’s ironic, the fact that we’re married and we’re willing to subject ourselves to this political process, is a subject of such concern. If Bill Clinton and I had been divorced three or four years and he were running for president, no one would ask him anyhing. So from my perspective a lot of it doesn’t make sense.
I try to take all of the questioning and all the attention seriously but not personally. I don’t want to dismiss people’s legitimate concerns out of hand. But in the final analysis, my marriage is not a creation of any external force. It is between Bill Clinton and me. And it will be between us whether he wins or loses, whatever happens. What is certain to me is that we keep our marriage on track no matter what anybody says or does. That’s what we’ve tried to do for 16 years.
I really don’t want to open that up. I don’t think that is anybody else’s concern. What is important to us is that we have always dealt with each other. We haven’t run away, or walked away. We’ve been willing to work through all kinds of problems. I’m not just talking about the rumor type of problems. I’m talking about all kinds of things that happen in a marriage. You have hard times because people overwork and they get short-tempered. Marriages go through rough times because you have problems with family members like we’ve had. It’s very stressful. There are all kinds of things that happen. And I think it is inappropriate to talk about that. I don’t believe in all of that confessional stuff because from my perspective you begin to undermine the relationship when you open it up to strangers. We don’t talk about this kind of stuff in our marriage with family and friends. It’s the way we are and how we live. And I think it’s the way most people live. We’re like a lot of couples in America right now. We’ve tried to keep our marriage together; we’ve tried to be in public life; we’ve tried to render public service. I think most people get up every day and are just grateful they’re still here and trying to keep their lives going.
We’ve talked to her ever since she was about 6 or 7 years old about campaigns and the kinds of things people say. She and I were in the supermarket last week when the story broke in one of those supermarket tabloids. I said, well, you know those magazines here may run some stories about your dad-and I told her that what we heard was going to be in one of them. We’ve tried to be real honest with her, too. We want her to feel she’s a part of this, and that we’re not protecting her from something she may find out about from a friend at school or the TV or being in a supermarket line. And she’s fully aware that in a campaign people say things about each other that are not true, and that they are accusations. We started preparing her for that back in ‘86-and Bill was going to have a contested primary, and Orval Faubus was one of his opponents-and I knew that Chelsea by that time was old enough to turn on the TV and pay attention. And we were at dinner one night and I told her, your daddy is going to run for governor again, and when people run for office, other people say things about them. And her eyes got real big-she just couldn’t imagine that-and I said, you just need to be ready for that. Now you just pretend to be your daddy and what would you say if you want to run for governor. And she said something like, “I’ve done a good job–elect me.”
I have no doubt they will try. A woman who is a friend of mine called me just aghast because a friend of hers had called her and been offered money to make up lies. We know that kind of stuff is going to go on. I believe we are as well equipped to deal with that as anybody we could nominate, in part because we are experienced in dealing with negative campaigning. In part because we are personally comfortable and secure enough to feel we can confront whatever they might come up with. And in part because Bill’s candidacy stands for something bigger than him. That is the overriding message to me, that this is not just about letting Bill Clinton live in the White House. If that was all this was about, I wouldn’t be working as hard as I’m working. People can overlook and ignore a whole lot of stuff that is thrown out into the atmosphere if they view it as irrelevant, tangential or just downright stupid and nasty. If you don’t have a view of the world that is bigger than yourself, if the only reason that you’re doing something is to fulfill your own personal ambition, then you can’t sustain a campaign against that kind of concerted attack. I think that we’re ready on all those counts.
