On April 4, with Hugh still hanging on, Hillary had to return to Washington, too, to get Chelsea back to school after spring break, and to get back to work. She had promised to give a speech on April 6 at the University of Texas at Austin for Liz Carpenter, who had been Lady Bird Johnson’s press secretary. Liz pressed her not to cancel, and she decided to go. At a time when she was grief-stricken, she reached deep inside herself to say that, as we moved into the new millennium, “we need a new politics of meaning. We need a new ethos of individual responsibility and caring. We need a new definition of civil society which answers the unanswerable questions posed by both the market forces and the governmental ones, as to how we can have a society that fills us up again and makes us feel that we are part of something bigger than ourselves.” Hillary had been moved to make this argument by reading an article written by Lee Atwater shortly before he died at forty of cancer. Atwater had become famous and feared for his ruthless attacks on Democrats while working for Presidents Reagan and Bush. As he faced death, he found that a life devoted only to getting power, wealth, and prestige left a lot to be desired, and he hoped that in a parting shot, he could push us to a higher purpose. In Austin, on April 6, bearing her own sorrow, Hillary tried to define that purpose. I loved what she said and was proud of her for saying it. The next day, Hugh Rodham died. We had a memorial service for him in Little Rock, then took him home to Scranton for the funeral at the Court Street Methodist Church. I eulogized the man who had put aside his Republican convictions to work for me in 1974, and who, through a lifetime of learning from personal experience, had let go of all the bigotries he had grown up with. He lost his racism when he worked with a black man in Chicago. He lost his homophobia when he was befriended and looked after by his gay neighbors, a doctor and a nurse, in Little Rock. He had grown up in football-fanatical eastern Pennsylvania, where the Catholic stars went to Notre Dame and the Protestant ones like him played for Penn State. The divide revealed a prejudice against Catholics that was also part of Hugh’s upbringing. He gave that up, too. We all thought it fitting that his last days were spent in St. Vincent’s Hospital, where the Catholic nuns took loving care of him.
THIRTY-TWO
T hough most of the headlines of my early months in office concerned the effort to define, defend, and pass my economic plan; gays in the military; and Hillary’s health-care work, foreign policy was always there, an ever-present part of my daily routine and concern. The general impression among Washington observers was that I wasn’t too interested in foreign affairs and wanted to spend as little time as possible on them. It’s true that the overwhelming focus of the campaign had been on domestic issues; our economic troubles demanded that. But, as I had said over and over, increasing global interdependence was erasing the divide between foreign and domestic policy. And the “new world order” President Bush had proclaimed after the fall of the Berlin Wall was rife with chaos and big, unresolved questions. Early on, my national security advisor, Tony Lake, had declared that success in foreign affairs is often defined by preventing or defusing problems before they develop into headaches and headline grabbers.
“If we do a really good job,” he said, “the public may never know it, because the dogs won’t bark.”
When I took office, we had a whole kennel full of barking hounds, with Bosnia and Russia howling the loudest, and several others, including Somalia, Haiti, North Korea, and Japan’s trade policy, growling in the background.
The breakup of the Soviet Union and the collapse of communism in the Warsaw Pact nations raised the prospect that Europe might become democratic, peaceful, and united for the first time in history. Whether it would happen turned on four great questions: Would East and West Germany be reunited; would Russia become a truly democratic, stable, nonimperial nation; what would happen to Yugoslavia, a cauldron of diverse ethnic provinces, which had been held together by the iron will of Marshal Tito; and would Russia and the former Communist countries be integrated into the European Union and the transatlantic NATO alliance with the United States and Canada?
By the time I became President, Germany had been reunited under the visionary leadership of Chancellor Helmut Kohl, with the strong support of President Bush and despite reservations in Europe about the political and economic power of a resurgent Germany. The other three questions were still open, and I knew that one of my most important responsibilities as President was to see that they were answered correctly.
