فصل 97

97

I woke up early on May 26. I had spent the previous evening with Bill and a few former campaign aides, eating Thai food, drinking white wine, and working on my speech. I wanted this one to be good. It would be my first big speech since the concession, and I knew a lot of my supporters across the country were eager to hear from me. Many were scared, angry, and hungry for inspiration. Most of all, the graduates deserved a memorable graduation.

It was raining in Chappaqua, and the weather report said it was drizzling in Boston, too. I felt for all the families at Wellesley who surely had been hoping for a perfect day. I had graduated under a brilliantly clear New England sky. Oh well; some people say rain on a wedding day is good luck. Maybe the same is true for graduations.

I got dressed in Wellesley blue, had a cup of coffee, and found a sweet note from Bill. He had stayed up to all hours reading the latest speech draft and scribbled on the top of the page, “H—I like this speech. Hope these suggestions help make it better—wake me and we’ll go over it—I love you.” I thought for the ten millionth time how glad I was that I had married my best friend and biggest cheerleader. And yes, like always, his edits made my speech better.

Puttering, I turned on the news and quickly regretted it. Overnight, a Republican congressional candidate in Montana who had body-slammed a reporter for asking tough questions about health care had won his special election. At the NATO summit across the Atlantic, Donald Trump had shoved the prime minister of Montenegro out of the way so he could get a better spot in a group photo. I watched the clip several times, like rubbernecking at a car wreck. It was hard not to see the two stories as related, both symbols of our degraded national life in the Age of Trump. I sighed, turned off the television, gathered my things, headed to the airport, and flew to Massachusetts.

Even in the rain, seeing the old redbrick buildings of Wellesley made me feel better. The campus was humming with the familiar rituals of graduation. Parents and grandparents were fawning over their embarrassed children. Younger siblings were soaking in everything, imagining when it would be their turn. Some of the grads had decorated their mortarboards with flower crowns and rainbow flags. Others sported “I’m With Her” stickers and “Love Trumps Hate” pins, which made me smile. By tradition, every Wellesley class is assigned a color. As it happened, both 1969 and 2017 were green classes. As a result, it felt a little like Saint Patrick’s Day all over campus.

President Johnson, whom I knew and admired for her work in medicine and on public health issues, met me and brought me to the aptly named Green Hall, a lovely old Gothic building. There I found my academic robes and tasseled cap. As a general rule, I don’t wear silly hats in public, but this was an exception. I resolved to see it as jaunty.

To my delight, before the graduation ceremony began, I was able to steal a few minutes with an old friend. When I was a student at Wellesley, Rev. Paul Santmire was the college chaplain and became an important mentor for me. In my ’69 commencement speech, I cited him as a model of integrity at a time when we didn’t trust authority figures and hardly anyone at all over thirty. Now, in his early eighties, Paul was as sharp and humane as ever. We embraced, and he told me that he’d driven up to New Hampshire in the fall to go door-to-door for my campaign. We reminisced about the old days when I was a wide-eyed student activist, and he mentioned my favorite line from John Wesley, the call to “Do all the good you can.” I assured him it was closer to my heart than ever and that my faith had been a rock in this period when everything else felt topsy-turvy.

I also had a chance to visit briefly with a young woman named Lauren, who was the president of the Wellesley Republicans club—a post I had held as a student myself before realizing my evolving views and values were taking me in a different direction. Lauren seemed to be going through similar soul-searching. Wellesley was a lonely place to be a conservative, but she told me her classmates had been eager to talk through their differences in an open and supportive way. Lauren wasn’t a Trump fan and was torn about what to do after he won the nomination. The Wellesley Republicans withheld its endorsement. But like most people, Lauren assumed Trump would lose and things would go back to normal. Now she was wrestling with what it all meant. Join the club, I thought. (Or, quit it! Seriously, if anyone is thinking of quitting the Republican Party, now would be a good time.)

There was one more person to meet. Tala Nashawati was chosen by her classmates to be the student speaker at graduation, just as I was in 1969. The American daughter of Syrian immigrants living in Ohio, she was graceful and poised, with a warm smile. Like so many Wellesley students, Tala was ridiculously accomplished and well rounded: a Middle Eastern Studies major, sought-after kickboxing instructor, and soon-to-be medical student. The night before my graduation speech in 1969, I had stayed up all night writing, pacing, and thinking, and in the morning, I was still in a barely controlled panic. But Tala appeared calm. She had been up late putting the finishing touches on her speech, but she had known for a long time what she wanted to say. And now she was ready.

Tala had brought a photo for me to sign. It was from 1969. There I was, standing at the podium, leaning ever so slightly in toward the microphone, my hair swept back into a bun that I remember thinking was very grown up, big glasses perched on my nose. So young. Behind me, a row of gray-haired faculty and trustees looking very serious. Some of them were probably wondering why President Ruth Adams had allowed a student to speak at graduation at all, something that had never happened before. Or they were struggling to follow my passionate but somewhat incoherent remarks. At the bottom of the photo was printed a quote from my speech: “The challenge now is to practice politics as the art of making what appears to be impossible, possible.”

I had borrowed that line from a poem written by a friend. It captured the idealism so many of us felt, despite the war and assassinations and unrest all around us. We really believed we could change the world. Forty-seven years later, I had planned to use the line again in the victory speech I hoped to deliver on election night. “I’m older now. I’m a mother and a grandmother,” I would have said. “But I still believe with all my heart that we can make the impossible, possible. Look at what we’re celebrating tonight.”

But in the end, there was nothing to celebrate. The glass ceiling held. The impossible remained so. I looked at Tala. We had never met before this moment, but in so many ways, I felt like I had been fighting for her and millions like her my entire career. And I had let them all down.

Yet here she was, bright-eyed and full of spirit, asking me to sign this black-and-white photo. It meant something to her. So did those words. Despite my defeat, she still believed in making the impossible possible.

It was time to go. There was a long walk through the snaking halls of the old academic building to get out to the tent where the graduation ceremony would be held. President Johnson and I lined up behind the college’s trustees, and the procession began.

We turned a corner and saw young women in black robes lining both sides of the hall. They began to clap and cheer wildly. Around another corner were more students. They went on and on, hundreds of them, the entire senior class, lined up like an honor guard. Their cheers were deafening. It was like they were letting months of pent-up feelings pour out—all the hope and hurt they’d felt since November or perhaps since long before. I felt loved and lifted, carried aloft on a wave of emotion.

Finally, we emerged out into the misty air, with waiting parents and news cameras and all the pomp and circumstance of a college commencement. Sitting on the stage, I tried to compose myself, but my heart was still beating fast. Soon Tala was standing at the podium, just like me in the photo. She looked great up there, and her speech was graceful and heartfelt.

Noting that green was the 2017 color, she compared her classmates to emeralds. “Like us, emeralds are valuable, rare, and pretty durable,” she said. “But there’s something else emeralds are known for: their flaws. I know it’s hard to admit, especially as Wellesley students, but we all have a lot of flaws. We are incomplete, scratched up in some places, jagged around the edges.”

I leaned in, curious. This is not what I had expected to hear.

“Flawed emeralds are sometimes even better than flawless ones,” Tala went on, “because the flaws show authenticity and character.”

There was that word again, authenticity. But she was using it as a balm instead of a bludgeon. Flawed. How often had I heard that word over the past two years. “Flawed Hillary.” But here was Tala defiantly reclaiming the word, insisting on the beauty and strength of imperfection.

Now her classmates were leaning in, too. They snapped their fingers instead of clapping, as Tala smiled and built to her close.

“In the words of Secretary Clinton, never doubt that you are valuable and powerful and deserving of every chance in the world to pursue your dreams,” she told the class of 2017. “You are rare and unique. Let yourself be flawed. Go proudly and confidently into the world with your blinding hues to show everyone who’s boss and break every glass ceiling that still remains.”

Now the snaps gave way to cheers. I was among the loudest. I stood and applauded and felt hope and pride rising in my heart. If this was the future, then everything had been worth it.

Things are going to be hard for a long time. But we are going to be okay. All of us.

The rain was ending. It was my turn to speak.

“What do we do now?” I said. There was only one answer: “Keep going.”