فصل 92

92

Fast-forward again, this time to April 1993. My eighty-two-year-old father was lying in a coma in St. Vincent’s Hospital in Little Rock. It had been two weeks since he suffered a massive stroke. All I wanted to do was keep sitting by his bedside, hold his hand, smooth his hair, and wait and hope for him to open his eyes or squeeze my fingers. But nobody knew how long his coma would last, and Chelsea had to get back to school in Washington. For reasons passing understanding, I also had a commitment I couldn’t get out of: a speech to fourteen thousand people at the University of Texas at Austin.

I was, to put it mildly, a wreck. On the plane to Austin, I leafed through the little book I keep of quotations, Scripture, and poems, trying to figure out what I could possibly say. Then I turned the page and saw the cutout from Lee Atwater’s Life article. Something missing from our lives, a spiritual vacuum—this is what I would talk about. It wouldn’t be the most articulate or coherent speech I’d ever given, but at least it would come straight from my wounded heart. I began sketching out a new appeal for the “mutuality of respect” I’d talked about in my graduation speech at Wellesley, a return to de Tocqueville’s “habits of the heart.”

When I got to Texas, I spoke about the alienation, despair, and hopelessness I saw building just below the surface of American life. I quoted Atwater. And to his question—“Who will lead us out of this spiritual vacuum?”—I answered, “all of us.” We needed to improve government and strengthen our institutions, and that’s what the new Clinton administration was trying to do, but it wouldn’t be enough. “We need a new politics of meaning,” I said, “a new ethos of individual responsibility and caring.” And that would take all of us doing our part to build “a society that fills us up again and makes us feel that we are part of something bigger than ourselves.” I cited de Tocqueville and talked about the importance of networks of family, friendship, and communities that are the glue that hold us together.

There had been so much change in our country, a lot of it positive but also much of it profoundly unsettling. The social and cultural upheaval of the 1960s and 1970s, followed by the economic and technological shifts of the 1980s and 1990s, with the rise of automation, income inequality, and the information economy, all of it seemed to be contributing to a spiritual hollowing out. “Change will come whether we want it or not, and what we have to do is to try and make change our friend, not our enemy,” I said.

The changes that will count the most are the millions and millions of changes that take place on the individual level as people reject cynicism; as they are willing to take risks to meet the challenges they see around them; as they truly begin to try to see other people as they wish to be seen and to treat them as they wish to be treated; to overcome all of the obstacles we have erected around ourselves that keep us apart from one another, fearful and afraid, not willing to build the bridges necessary; to fill that spiritual vacuum that Lee Atwater talked about.

People in politics don’t normally talk this way. Neither do First Ladies. I soon discovered why.

The day after my speech, my father died. I returned to Washington and found that many in the press had hated my attempt to talk unguardedly about what I thought was wrong in the country. The New York Times Magazine put me on the cover with the mocking headline “Saint Hillary.” The writer described the Texas speech as “easy, moralistic preaching couched in the gauzy and gushy wrappings of New Age jargon.”

I learned my lesson. Over the next few years, I kept thinking about a “new ethos of individual responsibility and caring,” but I didn’t talk about it much. I read as much as I could, including a new article by Harvard professor Bob Putnam, which later became a bestselling book titled Bowling Alone. Putnam used declining membership in bowling leagues as an evocative example of the breakdown in America’s social capital and civil society—the same problems I’d been worrying about.

I decided to write a book of my own. It would speak to these concerns in a less “gauzy and gushy” way than my Texas speech and offer a practical, kitchen-table vision for what we could do about it. The focus would be the responsibility we all had to help create a healthy, nurturing community for children. I’d call it It Takes a Village, after an African proverb that captured something I had long believed.

I wrote about how frantic and fragmented American life had become for many people, especially stressed-out parents. Extended families didn’t provide the support they used to. Crime was still a big problem in a lot of communities, making neighborhood streets places of danger rather than support and solidarity. We were spending more time in our cars and in front of the television and less time participating in civic associations, houses of worship, unions, political parties, and, yes, bowling leagues.

I believed we needed to find new ways to support one another. “Our challenge is to arrive at a consensus of values and a common vision of what we can do today, individually and collectively, to build strong families and communities,” I wrote. “Creating that consensus in a democracy depends on seriously considering other points of view, resisting the lure of extremist rhetoric, and balancing individual rights and freedoms with personal responsibility and mutual obligations.”

Once again, the response from some quarters was brutal. Republicans caricatured my appeal for stronger families and communities as more big-government liberalism, even “crypto-totalitarianism” in one magazine’s words. “We are told that it takes a village, that is collective, and thus the state, to raise a child,” Bob Dole said, his voice dripping with disdain, in his acceptance speech at the 1996 Republican National Convention. “I am here to tell you it does not take a village to raise a child. It takes a family to raise a child.” The crowd went wild.

You might think it’s a little odd for the nominee of a major political party to take time out of the most important speech of the campaign to take a swipe at a book about children written by the First Lady—and you would be right.

It was becoming painfully clear that there was no room in our politics for the kind of discussion I wanted to have. Or maybe I was the wrong messenger. Either way, this wasn’t working.

I found more receptive audiences overseas. In a speech at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, in 1998, I tried to explain how my “village” concept fit together with a broader global agenda of political and economic reform. I used the metaphor of a three-legged stool, which I’d come back to many times in the years that followed. An open and thriving economy was one leg. A stable and responsive democratic government was a second leg. And the third, too often undervalued in serious foreign policy discussions, was civil society. “It is the stuff of life,” I said. “It is the family, it is the religious belief and spirituality that guide us. It is the voluntary association of which we are a member. It is the art and culture that makes our spirits soar.”

Another twenty years went by. Now I was running for President in a time of deep division and smoldering anger. On the news, there was a seemingly endless series of terrorist attacks and mass shootings. Young black men kept getting killed by police. A candidate for President called Mexican immigrants rapists and encouraged violence at his rallies. On the internet, women were harassed frequently, and it was impossible to have a conversation about politics without enduring a blizzard of invective.

In late May 2015, I was campaigning in Columbia, South Carolina. In between events, we squeezed in a quick stop at the Main Street Bakery so I could get a cupcake and shake some hands. There was only one customer in the place, an older African American gentleman sitting alone by the window, engrossed in a book. I was reluctant to disturb him, but we made eye contact. I walked over to say hello and ask what he was reading.

The man looked up and said, “First Corinthians 13.”

I smiled. “Love is patient, love is kind,” I said, “it does not envy, it does not boast, it is not proud.”

His name was Donnie Hunt, and he was a minister at the First Calvary Baptist Church, getting ready for the day’s Bible study. He invited me to sit down.

He told me how rewarding he found it to read these familiar lines again and again. “You always learn something,” he said.

“Well, it’s alive,” I replied. “It’s the living word.”

We sat and talked for a long time—about books, his church, the local schools, racial tensions in the community, his hope to one day visit the Holy Land. “It’s on my bucket list,” he told me.

A few weeks later, I was back in South Carolina. This time it was Charleston. I visited a technical college and talked with apprentices hoping their training would lead to a good job and a happy life. It was a diverse group—black, white, Hispanic, Asian—all young, all incredibly hopeful. I listened to their stories and heard the pride in their voices.

I got on a plane for Nevada and didn’t hear the news until I landed. A young white man trying to start a race war had massacred nine black worshippers at an evening Bible study at Mother Emanuel Church in Charleston. Emanuel means “God with us,” but the news made it hard to feel that way. Nine faithful women and men, with families and friends and so much left to do and contribute in their lives, cut down as they prayed. What is wrong with us? I thought. How did we let this happen in our country? How did we still allow guns to fall into the hands of people whose hearts were filled with hate?

Two days later, police brought the murderer into court. One by one, grieving parents and siblings stood up and looked into his blank eyes, this young man who had taken so much from them, and they said: “I forgive you.” In its way, their acts of mercy were more stunning than his act of cruelty.

A friend of mine sent me a note. “Think about the hearts and values of those men and women of Mother Emanuel,” he said.

“A dozen people gathered to pray. They’re in their most intimate of communities, and a stranger who doesn’t look or dress like them joins in. They don’t judge. They don’t question. They don’t reject. They just welcome. If he’s there, he must need something: prayer, love, community, something. During their last hour, nine people of faith welcomed a stranger in prayer and fellowship.”

My friend said it reminded him of the words of Jesus in Matthew: “I was hungry and you gave me food. I was thirsty and you gave me drink. I was a stranger and you welcomed me.”

In a speech in San Francisco, I read my friend’s note out loud. Then I looked up, and I said what I was feeling in that moment: “I know it’s not usual for somebody running for President to say what we need more of in this country is love and kindness. But that’s exactly what we need.”