What is going on with the United States?
It’s a question spat across dinner-tables the world over.
How did Trump get this far?
Is it possible he will win?
What about Hillary Clinton?
The Australian Women’s Weekly sat down with Hillary Clinton before she had kicked off her Presidential campaign. In a candid interview, she revealed the rough road she has walked to get to the top.
You see, the line Hillary’s opponents like to put around is that she can’t win the US election because she is too old.
So, let’s cut to the chase, shall we: Hillary Clinton is not young. She’s 68, but how old is that in the context of the US Presidency?
Well, if Hillary were to win, she’d be 69 before she was able to move into the White House.
That’s 20 years older than Barack Obama was, but it is younger, by some months, than Ronald Reagan was when he got elected.
Mr Reagan deflected questions about his age with tremendous wit, saying he refused to use the youth and inexperience of his opponents against them.
Hillary tells The Weekly that she intends to make an asset of her experience, too.
“Age is a factor that voters have a right to take into account,” she says, settling back into a lovely old armchair in her room at an historic New York hotel, where she’s surrounded by books and flowers, and security guards.
“But I think people should be judged on who they are and not how old they are.
“My mother lived a very vital, fully intelligent life until the age of 92. Plus, I still feel pretty much the same on so many fronts like when I was 21. At the same time, I feel really grateful for all the experiences I’ve had.”
Ah yes, the experiences. Where even to begin? Hillary’s back story is well known in the States, perhaps less so in Australia.
She’s rich now, but doesn’t come from a wealthy background.
Hillary and husband Bill Clinton
Hillary’s father, Hugh Rodham, was a draper.
Her mother, Dorothy Howell Rodham, was a stay-at-home mother whose own background was terrible (abandoned by her own mother at the age of eight, Dorothy was sent by train with her three-year-old sister across America to live with her harsh grandmother).
As a child, Hillary was bright and, after blitzing through her local public high school, ended up at Wellesley College and then Yale, where she met Bill Clinton.
He hadn’t had it easy, either, having been raised by his grandparents and a single mum in the Southern state of Arkansas.
The Clintons were still in their early 20s when they hooked up.
Hillary had already been featured in Life magazine for being an outstanding young student, but she had never been overseas.
Bill took her to England, where he had studied at Oxford, and opened her world.
The couple married in 1975 and their daughter, Chelsea, was born in 1980.
Hillary was by then 33, ancient for the times.
She has never spoken all that much about why she had only one child and she’s had to put up with people saying it’s because she was ruthless in her political ambitions, but in his book, My Life, published in 2004, Bill Clinton said they “badly wanted to have a child and had been trying for some time without success”.
In the summer of 1979, by which time he was already Governor of Arkansas, they made an appointment with a fertility specialist in San Francisco, but before they could get there, Hillary got pregnant.
Her waters broke, three weeks early, at the Governor’s mansion.
State troopers got her to hospital as she sucked on cubes of ice to help manage the pain.
Chelsea was breech and Hillary needed a caesarean section.
They were never able to have another baby.
Hillary tells The Weekly that her daughter’s arrival was joyous, but the early weeks were as difficult for her as they can be for anyone.
“I remember when Chelsea was just a little baby and she was having one of those baby times when she was crying inconsolably,” she says.
“I was rocking her and I finally said, ‘You know, Chelsea, you’ve never been a baby before and I’ve never been a mom before, and we are going to have to work this out together.’”
Now, Chelsea has grown up and has a baby of her own with husband Marc Mezvinsky.
Given that Hillary knows first-hand how difficult those early years of motherhood can be – here comes a bombshell – if Chelsea at any point reached out and said, “Mom, I’m not coping. I just need you”, Hillary is adamant that she would immediately withdraw from the Presidential race.
“I would do anything for my daughter,” she says and, for a moment, she’s fierce.
“I will be there. I mean that. In any way that she wants.”
Then Hillary laughs and adds, “But she will probably be saying the opposite, ‘Enough, Mom! You can move out now!’ I’m hoping that she wants me there as often as I want to be there, so that I can help her, as my mother helped me.”
Hillary and Bill with their granddaughter, Charlotte.
Hillary’s writes about her own mother in her book, Hard Choices.
“Mom was a fighter her entire life, but it was finally time to let go … I spent the next few days going through her things at home, paging through a book, staring at an old photograph, caressing a piece of beloved jewellery.
“I found myself sitting next to her empty chair in the breakfast nook and wishing more than anything that I could have one more conversation, one more hug.”
She tells The Weekly that “everything is profoundly different” now that her mother – her chief supporter – is gone.
“I’m so well aware of how lucky I was. I had my mother for so long. I have friends who lost their mothers as children, or young adults, and I can hardly imagine the pain and anguish they have lived with, trying to imagine what it would have been like to have their mother at their wedding or their graduation,” she says.
“So I was very fortunate. My mother lived to 92. She was vibrant, intelligent, good company until the very end. I miss her every day, I think about her all the time.”
And Hillary still hears her, in her own voice, just as she’s done her whole life.
“I remember when Chelsea was about four and she was running outside to play, and I said, ‘Chelsea, don’t forget, put on a sweater’, and she goes, ‘But I’m not cold’, and I go, ‘But, please put it on’, and she goes, ‘Mom, if you’re cold, you put on a sweater’. [That’s when] you start to hear your own mother in your voice,” she says.
Hillary took four months’ maternity leave in the Governor’s mansion after Chelsea was born. As Governor, Bill was able to work from home.
The delicious privilege of such an arrangement caused pangs of guilt.
One of the first things Bill Clinton did as President was sign a bill to extend (unpaid) maternity leave to more Americans.
Unfortunately for Hillary, it was also in the White House that Bill left what has proved to be an inerasable blot on his copybook: he had a fling with an intern, Monica Lewinsky, and in the process, tore both his legacy and almost his marriage apart.
Hillary’s distress and dismay at those events was laid bare in an earlier book, Living History, published in 2003.
She could “hardly breathe”, she said then, when Bill told her that rumours of an affair were true.
“I started crying and yelling at him, ‘What do you mean? Why did you lie to me?’ ’’ she wrote.
“I was furious and getting more so by the second. He just stood there saying over and over again, ‘I’m sorry. I’m so sorry. I was trying to protect you and Chelsea’.”
Hillary says she felt “nothing but profound sadness, disappointment and unresolved anger” in those days after the affair was revealed, but time has gone by and her book since, makes plain that she’s put it behind her.
Bill encouraged Hillary to run for the Senate in New York and he offered immense support when she became Secretary of State (after which, she stopped telling him her secrets, including the fact that the US was about to try to kill bin Laden.)
Probably they thought the affair was behind them, but then Monica popped up again in 2014, in a glamorous photo shoot for Vanity Fair, going over all the old ground again.
It feels awkward to bring up the affair in the interview with Hillary, but she makes it easy, coolly acknowledging the distress it caused and the fact that she has moved on – on Bill’s last day in office, she waltzed down the halls of the White House in his arms.
For this couple, facing the trauma head on paid enormous dividends.
While Hillary wouldn’t presume to lecture anyone else about their partnerships, she does have some advice for those people who are facing personal challenges.
“I don’t think it’s possible to speak for every person,” she says.
“It’s so unique. There may be common experiences [in long marriages], but everyone feels them differently. My view has always been that I support my friends – I support women – to make responsible choices. And sometimes, the responsible choice is to stay.”
She pauses, then adds, “Not always. Sometimes, the responsible decision will be to go. It’s hard to make broad, generalised statements about when that might be appropriate because it’s so personal. But that’s what friends are for. You need somebody who will listen and support you, to offer ideas, but not substitute their judgement.”
There were people who thought Hillary should leave Bill, but she still loved him.
And when she saw how horribly humiliated he was, she wanted not only to throttle but to comfort him, and so the marriage survived.
By many if not all accounts, they now live amiably together, walking the dogs and watching political dramas, which makes it sound like they’re retired.
They’re not.
She’s definitely not.
When The Weekly met with Hillary she had just finished her Hard Choices book tour (during which she was much criticised by the media for the use of Gulfstream jets and Presidential suites, but members of the public queued for hours to see her.)
She had launched a new initiative, No Ceilings, designed to break down those barriers that prevent half the population – women – from achieving their potential.
It’s an issue about which she’s passionate.
As Secretary of State, Hillary encountered leaders who would not shake her hand because she was a woman.
Still, of all the countries she might have criticised for entrenched sexism, it was Australia that got a special mention in her book.
0“It’s an unfortunate reality that women in public life still face an unfair double standard,” Hillary wrote.
“The former Prime Minister Julia Gillard of Australia has faced outrageous sexism, which shouldn’t be tolerated in any country.”
Hillary tells The Weekly that she was acutely aware of the attacks on Ms Gillard because the two women met several times while Ms Gillard was in office, and Hillary was dismayed to see her friend being described as a witch on placards, as “deliberately barren” by political opponents and as having “small breasts, huge thighs and a big red box” on a stunt menu, distributed as some kind of nasty joke at a fundraising dinner for a conservative politician.
For Hillary, it was akin to watching an old movie.
She has copped criticism for her hair (while Secretary of State, she took to wearing scrunchies because who can really be bothered with hot tongs and blow-dryers when you’ve got 112 countries to visit?); her clothes (pantsuits are so much easier when you’re on the move); and her weight (it fluctuates, which apparently matters to somebody).
Hillary used to get upset, but now, like Germany’s steely Angela Merkel, she tends to let it slide, for the drivel that it is.
Was Ms Gillard’s mistake to let the criticism get to her?
“It’s a very hard question to answer,” Hillary says.
1“You have to stand up to it. You have to try to make it unacceptable, beyond the pale, in political discourse.
But how you do it and the impressions that your efforts leave are often unpredictable.
“Humour is always a good tool, but not always sufficient. Much of the attack, as I saw it from afar, on Prime Minister Gillard, was really beyond that, beyond the bounds of appropriate political discourse. It’s one thing if a shock jock on the radio – we have a lot of those – says something that’s sexist, but when people in governmental positions or elected positions join in, then it’s not just disrespecting one woman, it’s disrespecting all women.”
Hillary says she encouraged the former PM to get on the front foot and was impressed when Ms Gillard launched into the so-called “misogyny speech” on the floor of Parliament, attacking then Opposition Leader Tony Abbott.
“I thought it was very brave,” she says.
“I thought that it was a well-argued rebuttal of the sexism that had been deployed against her, but also putting it into a larger context, by pointing out that it should not be acceptable to engage in that kind of discriminatory speech and behaviour.”
Of course, Hillary is keenly aware of the fact that Mr Abbott has said many things over the years that have made women cringe, such as the time he told The Weekly that a woman’s virginity was the greatest gift she could give her husband and when he prefaced some remarks about the cost of electricity by saying, “What the housewives of Australia need to understand as they do the ironing …”
Asked directly what Australian women should do about a bloke who says things like that, Hillary looks firm.
2“Laugh,” she says.
Laugh at the Prime Minister?
“I think that may be the best response,” she says, nodding grimly.
Indeed, she speaks warmly throughout the interview of Australia – she visits fairly often and has a close friend from college now living in Adelaide – and more generally of Australians, with perhaps one exception, Julian Assange.
Hillary was Secretary of State when Assange leaked tens of thousands of top-secret diplomatic cables, in which US diplomats spoke in sometimes withering tones about politicians in their host countries.
What punishment does he deserve?
“Oh, I don’t know that I would use that phrase,” Hillary says. “He caused us a lot of bother. People’s names were mentioned in sensitive cables that could have resulted in quite dire consequences.
“We had to move people. We had to bring home ambassadors because of their honest reporting about [former Libyan leader Muammar] Gaddafi and others. So he [Assange] caused a lot of annoyance and we certainly reacted to that.
3This story originally appeared in The Australian Women’s Weekly.
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