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Fast-forward twenty years, to early 1991. I’d gotten what I’d always dreamed of—a loving family, a fulfilling career, and a life of service to others—plus more that I had never imagined. I was the First Lady of Arkansas. Every part of that statement would have surprised my college-age self. Now my husband was thinking about running for President of the United States. I didn’t know if he could win—George H. W. Bush’s approval rating surpassed 90 percent after winning the Gulf War—but I was sure the country needed him to try. The Reagan years had rebuilt America’s confidence but sapped its soul. Greed was good. Instead of a nation defined by “habits of the heart,” we had become a land of “sink or swim.” Bush had said some of the right things, calling for a “kinder, gentler” country and celebrating the generosity of our civil society as “a thousand points of light.” But conservatives used that as an excuse for government to do even less to help the less fortunate. It’s easy to forget what this was like. Now that the Republican Party has moved so far to the extreme right in the years since, the 1980s have taken on a retrospective halo of moderation by comparison. And it’s true that Reagan gave amnesty to undocumented immigrants, and Bush raised taxes and signed the Americans with Disabilities Act. But their trickle-down economic policies exploded the deficit and hurt working families. I thought they were wrong on most issues, and still do.

In those days, I still read Life magazine, and in the February 1991 issue, I came across something that caught me totally by surprise. It was an article by Lee Atwater, the Republican mastermind who’d helped elect Reagan and Bush with slash-and-burn campaigns that played to our country’s worst impulses and ugliest fears. He was the man behind the infamous race-baiting “Willie Horton” ad in 1988, the man who believed in winning at any cost. He was also mortally ill with brain cancer and not yet forty years old.

Atwater’s piece in Life magazine read like a death-bed conversion. The bare-knuckled political brawler was having an attack of conscience. And despite coming from someone with whom I disagreed about virtually everything, it was like reading my own thoughts printed out on the page. Here’s what he wrote that made such a big impression on me:

Long before I was struck with cancer, I felt something stirring in American society. It was a sense among the people of the country, Republicans and Democrats alike, that something was missing from their lives—something crucial. I was trying to position the Republican Party to take advantage of it. But I wasn’t exactly sure what it was. My illness helped me to see that what was missing in society is what was missing in me. A little heart, a lot of brotherhood.

The ’80s were about acquiring—acquiring wealth, power, prestige. I know. I acquired more wealth, power, and prestige than most. But you can acquire all you want and still feel empty. What power wouldn’t I trade for a little more time with my family? What price wouldn’t I pay for an evening with friends? It took a deadly illness to put me eye-to-eye with that truth, but it is a truth that the country, caught up in its ruthless ambitions and moral decay, can learn on my dime.

I don’t know who will lead us through the ’90s, but they must be made to speak to this spiritual vacuum at the heart of American society—this tumor of the soul.

This was exactly how I felt! Atwater was getting to a question that had been gnawing at me for years. Why, I wondered, in the wealthiest, most powerful country on earth, with the oldest, most successful democracy, did so many Americans feel like we lacked meaning in our individual lives and in our collective national life? What was missing, it seemed to me, was a sense that our lives were part of some greater effort, that we were all connected to one another and that each of us had a place and a purpose.

This was part of why I thought Bill should run for President. Filling America’s “spiritual vacuum” wasn’t a job for government, but it would help to have strong, caring leadership. Bill was starting to think about how to root a campaign in the values of opportunity, responsibility, and community. Eventually he’d call it a “new covenant,” a biblical concept. He hoped it would speak to this feeling, articulated so well by Atwater, that something important was missing in the heart of American life.

I cut out the Life magazine article and showed it to Bill.

(I wonder what Lee Atwater would say about Donald Trump. Would he admire the chutzpah of a campaign that stopped blowing dog whistles and spoke its bigotry in plain English for all to hear? Or would he see Trump as the embodiment of everything he hated about the eighties: one big tumor of the American soul?)