Making clear that she will not slip into the customary role of the seen-but-seldom-heard political spouse, Hillary Clinton will mark the President-elect’s first post-election trip to Washington by delivering a speech tonight to the annual dinner of the Children’s Defense Fund–the high-profile liberal advocacy group whose board of directors she used to chair.
Although the speech is expected to be brief, it will be symbolic–the first major public appearance by a woman who has recently become one of the most speculated-about in America.
Aides to President-elect Bill Clinton view the speech as a first step in reconciling what will almost certainly be her active role in the new Administration with the public’s longstanding uneasiness about first ladies who depart too much from the role provided for them by history and tradition.
“Ease and comfort with the transition are important,” Clinton communications director George Stephanopoulos said. The speech “fits into that. It will give the American people a chance to get a sense of her special gifts,” he said.
Already, the President-elect has made it clear that he believes his wife’s gifts include an ability to judge policy matters. He has consulted her frequently in the first two weeks of his transition.
“We just sort of sit down here around the table and talk. She’s part of it,” Clinton said Tuesday when asked about his wife’s participation in his meetings with key transition advisers and congressional leaders. When he and his team met with Democratic leaders of the House and Senate last weekend, the President-elect said, Mrs. Clinton participated actively throughout the sessions.
Clinton aides have been eager to cast her speech today in terms of the overall subject matter: the welfare of children–a topic that falls well within the “traditional” sphere of activities for a First Lady. But the choice of this forum–an address to one of the capital’s best-known advocacy groups–makes clear that, although Hillary Clinton’s interests may fit easily into longstanding notions of a First Lady’s role, her approach will be different.
For unlike past presidents’ wives, she comes to Washington with a prominent and independent career of her own, including the realm of public policy. “I think she would have gone to the dinner regardless of the outcome of the election,” said Mrs. Clinton’s press secretary, Lisa Caputo, noting that she has attended the annual dinner for many years.
“But the outcome of the election puts her in a different position now,” Caputo said.
The position into which Mrs. Clinton will soon step is one that has long been surrounded by ambiguous public feelings, an ambiguity that has only deepened as America’s political life has begun to reflect the changes in women’s roles that have revolutionized nonpolitical workplaces for more than two decades.
Hillary Clinton has cited as her own ideal Eleanor Roosevelt, a woman whose activism and independence brought her adoration and, at times, vicious abuse in her day.
In the past, however, even first ladies far less prominent than Mrs. Roosevelt have found themselves in what appeared to be no-win situations. Lady Bird Johnson was lambasted for her championship of a cause as benign as beautification of the countryside. Rosalynn Carter was criticized for merely sitting in on Cabinet meetings. Nancy Reagan was chastised for finishing the President’s sentences.
Three decades of feminism–and tightening economic circumstances–have made the two-career family the norm all across the United States, but they have not changed the public’s mistrust of a First Lady’s power.
The Clintons learned that lesson the hard way during the campaign, when her derisive comments about serving tea and baking cookies backfired. After initially touting themselves as a “buy one, get one free” bargain, the couple backed away from any suggestion that she might be in line for a Cabinet post or other high-ranking position.
“She became a caricature of some people’s worst fears about professional women . . . . Americans are only willing to move so quickly in accepting the role of a career woman as (presidential) spouse,” said USC law professor Susan Estrich, who was Michael S. Dukakis’ 1988 campaign manager.
Even her smallest gestures are still being plumbed for significance. On election night, for instance, few commentators missed the fact that the President-elect read his acceptance speech from cards that his wife had fished from her suit pocket.
Hillary Clinton’s influence remains a sensitive subject with those who are closest to the transition. Asked about it in an interview on CNN, transition director Warren Christopher first tried to dodge, saying, “I think it’s best for you to ask Gov. Clinton about that. I’ve seen her only briefly as I’ve gone in and out of the mansion.”
He then quickly added that Hillary Clinton’s role seemed to be that of a “traditional . . . wife, a very active, very talented wife.”
Since the election, she has been virtually invisible. She quietly resigned her job at a prestigious Arkansas law firm and has made only one public appearance–to accept an award from a Little Rock YWCA. There, she spoke not of her political future, but of the days she spent raising money for the local chapter’s youth and family programs.
Few doubt, however, that she is making her influence felt behind the scenes.
“She knew more than we did about some things,” Bill Clinton said Monday in telling reporters about his wife’s participation in his meetings Sunday night with congressional leaders. “I think they would agree with that.”
It is clear that social issues ignite her strongest passions and that she has been a major influence in shaping her husband’s views.
“I worry about the country,” she said in an interview with The Times earlier this fall. “I worry a lot that, if we don’t have a different attitude in the country and a different level of commitment to solving problems, that the country I know and the experiment in democracy we know is really going to be at risk.”
During the campaign, for example, the candidate often cited a Tampa, Fla., affordable-housing program as a model for turning decrepit buildings into livable low-income housing. But it was Hillary Clinton who visited the program to see it firsthand.
She also has unflinching trust in her own political instincts.
“You know, back in New Hampshire, when everybody was saying that Bill was continuing to drop and there was just no end in sight, I was out there campaigning and I was looking in people’s eyes and I was talking to them and I just kept saying to Bill every night . . . ‘There’s something really good going on out there,’ ” she said in that September interview.
Yet there is irony in the fact that Hillary Clinton has come to personify the notion that a woman is an equal partner in a marriage. In many ways she has been the most traditional of political wives.
There was never a question of whether his ambition or hers would come first. Although she could have had her pick of jobs out of Yale Law School, she followed Bill Clinton and his political career back to Arkansas. When people there objected to her using her own last name, she took his. Though she has little interest in fashion, she transformed herself from mousy brunette to a more glamorous blonde and then softened her look by ditching the preppy headbands that were attracting comment.
Perhaps most important, when reports of his marital infidelities threatened to torpedo the campaign, she neutralized the transgressions as a campaign issue by standing at his side and declaring that the Clintons’ private life was relevant to no one but them.
How Hillary Clinton will alter the role of First Lady remains open to speculation, but few doubt that she will.
Carl S. Anthony, author of a two-volume book on first ladies, contended that it is particularly fitting for a woman such as Hillary Clinton to move into the East Wing at a time when feminism has finally boiled down, for most women, to a question of options.
“Perhaps,” he said, “it really is time for the American people to fully permit this last holdout of female expectations, this role of First Lady, to also be one in which a woman has choices.”
Times staff writer Ed Chen contributed to this story.
Profile: Hillary Rodham Clinton
Born: Oct. 26, 1947.
Hometown: Park Ridge, Ill.
Education: Graduated with a bachelor’s degree from Wellesley College in 1969 and Yale Law School in 1973.
Career highlights: After passing bar exam in 1973, she was hired as a member of House Judiciary Committee impeachment inquiry staff, investigating President Richard M. Nixon. From 1974 to 1977 she was a law professor at University of Arkansas. In 1977, Clinton was made partner at the Rose Law Firm in Little Rock, Ark. (She resigned recently). In 1983, she was appointed head of the state committee that pushed through substantial changes in Arkansas public education system. In 1991, the National Law Journal named her as one of the 100 most influential lawyers in the United States. The future First Lady has resigned as chairwoman of the Children’s Defense Fund but remains on the board. She recently resigned from the boards of several other companies, including Wal-Mart Stores Inc.
Personal: Married in 1975; one daughter, Chelsea, 12.