First Women: The Grace and Power of America's Modern First Ladies by Kate Andersen Brower Read Free Book Online

inner circle were all “very angry at the time. . . . It was a very complicated time and she handled it all with such grace.” It took a heavy toll on Hillary, especially knowing that their daughter, Chelsea, had read the Starr Report detailing her husband’s transgressions. Chelsea was the glue that bound them together, and the day after the President admitted the affair to the country, it was Chelsea who held hands with both of them as they crossed the lawn to Marine One for their annual Martha’s Vineyard summer vacation. For the first time,Bill sought help for his reckless behavior when counselors were smuggled into the White House.
    Hillary’s aversion to divorce stemmed in part from years of witnessing its effects among her friends. Rumors flew that she had hyperventilated when she discovered Bill’s cheating back in Arkansas. When an old friend told her that she was considering getting a divorce, Hillary said, “You need to be prepared. . . . If you are not prepared to stand on your own, the man gets the deal and you’ll get the shaft.” She then recited a list of their mutual girlfriends who had gotten a divorce and had struggled financially ever since.
    With divorce off the table, Hillary transferred much of her anger and frustration to what she called “the vast right-wing conspiracy.” In a 1999 interview published in Talk magazine, Hillary does not object when the reporter calls her husband’s cheating “an addiction.” But when asked if she agrees that it is indeed an addiction, she replies, “That’s your word. I would say ‘weakness.’ Whatever it is, it is only part of a complex whole.” She makes excuses for him, saying that the Lewinsky affair occurred at a difficult time after the deaths of his mother, her father, and their friend Vincent Foster. She considered her husband’s cheating a “sin of weakness” not a “sin of malice.” She even compared their situation to when Peter betrayed Jesus three times. “Jesus knew it but loved him anyway.”
    In the living quarters of the White House there was deep pain. Hillary had been through this before, even carefully choreographing camera angles during her first 60 Minutes interview in 1992, when she sat beside her husband, who was asked difficult questions about his alleged twelve-year affair with Arkansas state employee and cabaret singer Gennifer Flowers. The biggest headline of the interview was not anything he said, however; it was when Hillary broke from the script. “I’m not sitting here, some little woman standing by my man like Tammy Wynette.” She had known abouthis cheating and she wasn’t about to let it stand in the way of their chance to win the presidency. But six years later, she was less forgiving. “That Monica Lewinsky thing really tore her up,” said former White House Maître d’ George Hannie. Hillary herself said that the problem was that her husband hadn’t gone “deep enough” or worked “hard enough” when he had tried to change ten years before Monica. Usher Worthington White recalled the tension in the White House during that time and said that he felt like a kid whose parents almost got divorced. “There were a lot of tough times, but those times when mom and dad were fighting we don’t talk about. That’s how we all felt; we all tried to make them smile. All in our desperate way trying to inject a little humanity.” Life went on inside the White House—even as Independent Counsel Kenneth Starr was deposing the President, the staff was setting afternoon tea.
    One of the women in Hillary’s inner circle was overheard complaining about the double standard. “If she had done that [cheated on Bill] she would have been the bitch of the universe!” For the six butlers who work on the second and third floors of the White House and pride themselves on their discretion, it was a stressful time. “We never uttered a word about that,” Hannie says. “You didn’t know what to say.” Hannie was even