Living History Unknown (best books to read fiction .txt) 📖

the class, a dozen young women gathered around her to ask questions and say how encouraging it was to hear about working mothers in the White House.

“Young people look to you for guidance in their own lives. You’re a role model,”

Lissa said. “What kind of message would you be sending if you stopped being actively involved?”

Buoyed by my friends’ support, I dutifully trooped to the Mayflower Hotel that evening for the First Ladies forum. The audience was enthusiastic and clearly in my corner, which was heartening. I felt energized and hopeful for the first time since the election and ready to get back into the fray, particularly now that Bill would have to deal with a Republican-controlled Congress and its outspoken leaders. Eleanor Roosevelt once said, “If I feel depressed, I go to work.” That sounded like good advice to me.

Newt Gingrich handed me the perfect opportunity. The soon-to-be Republican Speaker of the House was eager to flex his political muscle. Almost immediately, his impulsiveness and rightwing bombast raised red flags for him and his party, when a minor controversy erupted over remarks he made about welfare reform and orphanages. Some Republicans had suggested that the nation could reduce welfare rolls by placing the children of welfare mothers in orphanages. The idea was to prohibit states from paying welfare benefits for two groups of children: those whose paternity was not established and those born out of wedlock to women under eighteen. The savings, according to this proposal, would be used to establish and operate orphanages and group homes for unwed mothers.

I thought this was a horrible idea. All the work I have done on behalf of children convinced me that they are almost always best off with their families, that poverty is not a disqualification from good parenting, that financial and social support for families with special problems, including poverty, should be a first step before we give up on them and take away their children. Only when children are endangered by abuse and neglect should the government intervene on their behalf and move them into alternative settings outside their homes.

In a speech before the New York Women’s Agenda on November 30, 1994, I criticized Gingrich and his Republican team for promoting legislation that punished children for circumstances over which they had no control. I said his remarks about orphanages were absurd and unbelievable. How ironic, I thought: In the 1992 campaign, Republicans had labeled me as “anti-family” because I supported removing abused and neglected children from parents who couldn’t or wouldn’t take care of them. Now Republicans were proposing that kids be removed from their parents simply because they were born out of wedlock or to poor mothers.

A few days later, Gingrich appeared on NBC’s Meet the Press and swung back: “I’d ask her to go to Blockbuster and rent the Mickey Rooney movie about Boys Town [an orphanage]…. I don’t understand liberals who live in enclaves of safety who say, ‘Oh, this would be a terrible thing. Look at the Norman Rockwell family that would break up…. I answered Gingrich with a long article in Newsweek. My conclusion: “This is biggovernment interference into the lives of citizens at its worst.”

The Newsweek article curbed the orphanages debate, but the atmosphere grew stranger after Gingrich’s mother, thinking she was speaking off-the-record, told Connie Chung in a televised interview that her son regularly referred to me as a “bitch.”

I decided to ignore the latest round of bluster and to try a different tack with Gingrich: I sent him a handwritten note inviting him and his family to a tour of the White House. A few weeks later Gingrich; his then wife, Marianne; his sister, Susan, and his mother joined me for their tour. Apart from the fact that it happened at all, the visit wasn’t memorable, save for one brief exchange while we were having tea in the Red Room.

Looking around at the period furniture, Gingrich began pontificating about American history.

His wife soon interrupted him.

“You know, he will go on and on whether he knows what he’s talking about or not,”

said Marianne.

Gingrich’s mother quickly jumped to his defense. “Newty is a historian,” she said.

“Newty always knows what he’s talking about.”

In a way, the post-election fracas was helpful to me, because it sharpened my focus on positive ways to respond to rightwing diatribes. I realized I needed to tell my own story and define my own values in a format that could be evaluated directly by people without being distorted or mischaracterized. Writing the Newsweek article had alerted me to the potential of my own voice. I began to ponder more ambitious writing projects that would lay out my views about the need for self-reliance and social support systems in improving people’s lives. I wanted to write a book about raising children in today’s world and to galvanize people around the idea that, to quote an African proverb, “it takes a village to raise a child.” I had never written a book, but I soon made the acquaintance of people who had, and they offered guidance.

Bill and I had met Marianne Williamson, a best-selling author, at one of our Renaissance Weekends, and she had suggested we get together with a group of people outside the political world to discuss Bill’s goals for the remaining two years of his term. That struck a chord with me, and we invited her to convene a gathering at Camp David on December 30 and 31.

Williamson’s guest list included Tony Robbins, whose book Awaken the Giant Within was a national best-seller, and Stephen R. Covey, who wrote the hugely popular 7 Habits of Highly Effective People. If millions of Americans were listening to their advice, I figured it might help to hear what they had to say. Williamson also invited Mary Catherine Bateson and Jean Houston. A professor, author, anthropologist and daughter of the seminal anthropologists Gregory Bateson and Margaret Mead, Bateson specializes in cultural anthropology and gender issues. I was already a fan of her 1989