Women’s Hard Choices and Hillary’s Choice

The extension of rights has resulted in women gaining the vote and achieving some of the highest positions in academia, business, government, industry, and the media. This has occurred despite considerable conscious and unconscious opposition by the old boys’ clubs that had dominated these professional activities. Women today have an incredible array of choices. They can identify with and emulate stay-at-home or working mothers; go to college and graduate school; be as sexually active outside of marriage as their brothers; choose a career; find a partner and have children within or without marriage; and seek to climb up the ladder of success. In short, they can aspire to have it all—to become a super woman. However, every choice a woman—or for that matter a man—makes opens up certain possibilities and closes others. There is a cost for everything we humans do and women are often held to a higher standard than men. This article starts with this general discussion, but concentrates on the choices Hillary Clinton has made and is currently in the process of making (Hillary Rodham Clinton, Hard Choices: A Memoir, 2014, 595-596).

Although a woman may aspire to great achievement outside of her home, her husband, boyfriend, or partner may not provide the needed support or may have other ideas. Her children may consciously or unconsciously develop problems as the best way to get attention. Even if her spouse sincerely declares his desire to further her career, will he begin to give the type of support that a wife has traditionally given? Will he anticipate his spouse’s professional and personal needs and automatically pick up after her? Will he socialize effectively with the spouses of his co-workers and their bosses? In most cases the odds are against this type of meaningful backing. Will a potential super woman be willing to leave a seriously ill child for an important meeting to prove that she is as dedicated to professional advancement as any of her male competitors?

Will the high achieving Hillary Rodham Clinton choose to enter into the exhausting task of running for the presidency that, if successful, would place the burdens of that office on her in her 70^th year and beyond? Or will she decide that it is time to kick back and enjoy life as a retiree and new grandmother? As a young lawyer

Page 170

planning a separate career she reports that “I chose to follow my heart instead of my head” and leave Washington to go to Arkansas with Bill Clinton (Living History, 2003, 69). What will her heart and head be telling her as she contemplates running to succeed Barack Obama as president?

If a woman with political aspirations such as Hillary Rodham makes a deal with her husband, as Hillary did with William Jefferson Clinton, that each would support the other’s political aspirations, the man is almost certain to come first as in their case. When they were living together in Little Rock and even after their 1975 marriage, their friends were not sure who would be the first to pursue a political career. It made sense for the Arkansas-born husband to run for office before his Chicago-born wife. As governor, his cash salary was only a fifth of what his wife earned as a partner in a law firm in Little Rock, so she was the primary breadwinner. Besides opposition to the “Boy Governor’s” liberal policies and manner, the voters in this conservative state disliked their first lady keeping her own name, dressing without regard to local style, and openly playing an important role as his advisor.

In 1980 Bill Clinton went from being the youngest governor of the state to becoming the youngest ex-governor. In pursuit of reelection, among other adjustments the Clintons made, was for Bill to apologize for his mistakes and for the couple to appear traditional enough to get Bill reelected continuous times until he became president. Hillary Rodham presented herself as Mrs. Bill Clinton, shaved her legs, and paid more attention to local styles.

Politics like marriage require many compromises. The posthumously born Bill Clinton may never have known his natural father, but as governor he emulated both his idealized natural father and his stepfather, Roger Clinton, in being an unfaithful spouse. There were reports of shouting matches in the governor’s mansion in Arkansas, with the state’s first lady threatening to take their baby and leave, although in the end she did not. When Bill’s drive for the Democratic presidential nomination in early 1992 was on the verge of being derailed by the reports of his philandering, the fact that his wife had forgiven him, as displayed on the television program Sixty Minutes, was a key factor in Democratic voters forgiving him.

Nevertheless, Hillary had to deal with the reality of her husband being a womanizer who easily strayed. President Clinton may

Page 171

have convinced himself that he was true to the promise he had made his wife that he would never have sex with another woman because he did not have genital sex. The most that prosecutor Ken Starr could establish was that there were about 11 or 12 instances of oral sex he reported in the voyeuristic Starr Report. When the President declared that he did not have sex with “that woman” (Monika Lewinsky) he apparently believed his own words, but his Republican opponents and wife certainly did not. It is noteworthy that while Clinton was running for the White House in 1992, as a presidential psychobiographer I discovered his ability, and that of his mother, of forgetting inconvenient facts. Ultimately, as a good political wife, Hillary stood by her man. The President held onto his office despite the trial of impeachment and left with unusually high public opinion numbers.

The reasons why Hillary “stood by her man” are multi-determined. Her mother Dorothy’s parents had divorced and abandoned her to distant, unloving relatives, making her life a hell. “We don’t believe in divorce” was a mantra in the Rodham household (subsequently one brother divorced), even when Hillary’s friends wondered how her mother could put up with the petulant husband her mother called “Mr. Difficult” (Carl Bernstein, A Woman in
Charge: The Life of Hillary Rodham Clinton, 2008, 25). At the time his only daughter, a “Daddy’s girl,” idealized him as she—a Goldwater girl—idolized the 1964 Republican presidential hopeful. Despite all Bill’s faults, Hillary and he shared a passion for politics and each other’s careers—the dream of the White House helped hold them together, partly because divorce for a southerner would be too great an electoral negative. Hillary includes in her reasons for staying together “a love…[that] has grown through our shared experiences of parenting our daughter, burying our parents,…a lifetime worth of friends…and an abiding commitment to our country” (Living History, 75).

The world around them is not actually open to the enormous number of choices that it theoretically offers to women at the present time. In Arkansas, most voters were not enthusiastic about Bill announcing that Hillary would be a full political partner when he assumed the governorship in 1978, nor when he assumed the presidency in 1993.

The disdain of many for this approach was one of a variety of factors that resulted in Bill Clinton not being reelected as governor in 1980 and the many difficulties he had in his presidency. It

Page 172

was easier for many politicians to block Clinton’s efforts at health care precisely because Hillary was leading the effort. In many respects white Americans have become more conservative, which does not bode well for a liberal woman president.

Narcissistic blows have a way of increasing the chances for life-changing decisions. Investigative journalist and author Carl Bernstein argues that Hillary’s failure to pass the bar examination in Washington DC helped lead to her deciding to finally accept Bill’s invitation to join him in Arkansas, which would eventually result in their marriage (Bernstein, 92). Could the concussion that Hillary suffered after a recent fall have also been a narcissistic blow? At age 67, a serious concussion is a much greater reminder of her vulnerability than a concussion in her 20s would have been. The rocks that will be thrown at her in running for president may be figurative, but at her current age her ability to deal with them may be another matter. If Hillary has definitely decided to run it is also likely that she is postponing an announcement because the scrutiny and political abuse she receives upon joining the contest will intensify enormously.

Although there have been a fair number of women presidents and prime ministers, the first woman leader of a country that has major military responsibilities or one that is threatened militarily is expected to be tougher than the average male president. Indira Gandhi (president—1966-1977, 1980-1984) was subjected to enormous pressure before being assassinated in 1984. Golda Meir (premier—1969-1974), the only woman in the Israeli cabinet and said to be the only member who had “balls,” had to face the test of the 1973 Yom Kippur War, and Margaret Thatcher (prime minister—1979-1990), the “Iron Lady,” was tested by the Argentine generals in the 1982 Falkland War. Thatcher’s low public opinion ratings would have shortened her period of leadership, but these ratings skyrocketed as a result of her successful conduct of the war. However, when her public opinion ratings dropped again the old boys’ club within the Conservative Party itself forced her into retirement. These examples are used to illustrate that the first woman president has to be tougher than the male presidents because, in all probability, she will be tested more than a man.

Former President Clinton may not have been a loyal husband, but he is loyal to the deal he made with his wife Hillary Rodham in supporting her political aspirations after he had his turn. Should Hillary decide to run for President in the 2016 election and

Page 173

be successful, there is a great advantage to having a former occupant of the White House as her spouse. If Hillary Rodham Clinton becomes our next president, it could be very beneficial that her chief informal advisor will be the man who was known in Arkansas as “Slick Willy” because of his ability to wiggle out of tight situations. He can help her find symbolic ways of proving that both she and the country are not weak at a time when hounds of war are shouting for a dangerous foreign war or her head.

The actor turned president, Ronald Wilson Reagan. dealt with the painful blow of 241 U.S. marines being blown up in Lebanon on October 23, 1983 by going to war against Granada only two days later, allegedly to protect some American medical students from Cuban communist advisors to the left wing government. The medical students had to be told that they were in danger since there had been no actions or threats against them by the left wing government. After the retreat of the left wingers the American public went to bed thinking of the strength of their country and its leader, rather than the vulnerability that had killed the 241 young American military personnel. The cynicism involved in this decision is deplorable, but its political effectiveness can’t be ignored.

Hillary, who has built a strong presidential candidate resume as a senator, secretary of state, and policy advocate before long must either step aside into the life of a retired grandmother or assume the intense scrutiny and added abuse as a front running candidate. That she was nicknamed “fearless” by a friend in her early 20s (Bernstein, 86) may be an indication that she will once again take the plunge into the messy business of presidential politics.

Page 174