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

got to refute this right away,” I said. “You can’t let this misinformation stay out there. It’s terrible.”

Webb said he hadn’t gotten a letter from the prosecutors informing him he was the potential target of a criminal indictment. Then he promptly changed the subject, telling me who was coming for dinner and what he and his wife, Suzy, were cooking. I was annoyed that he seemed so nonchalant. Either he did not take the news report seriously, I thought, or he just was not going to let it bother him. That Thanksgiving phone call was the last time Bill and I spoke to Webb. In his own memoir, Friends in High Places, Webb explains that his lawyer had received a target letter the day before our phone conversation but had decided to wait until after Thanksgiving to tell Webb. He also admits that the charges against him were true and that he had stolen from the law firm in a futile attempt to get out from under a crippling debt that he had hidden from his family and friends.

On December 6, 1994, Starr’s office announced that Hubbell would plead guilty to mail fraud and tax evasion. He confessed that between 1989 and 1992, he submitted more than four hundred doctored bills to cover personal expenses, cheating his clients and partners at the Rose Law Firm of at least $394,000.

I was shocked. Webb had been a trusted colleague and was widely admired as a civic leader in Arkansas. He was a dear friend. I had spent more hours in his company than I could count. The idea that he had cheated and misled those closest to him was upsetting beyond words. His plea bargain signaled a new escalation on the Whitewater battlefield, and it was hard to take.

During the Christmas season, I received two identical gifts. Anne Bartley, a friend and philanthropist from Arkansas who volunteered in the White House, and Eileen Bakke, whom I knew from Renaissance Weekends and my prayer group, each gave me a copy of The Return of the Prodigal Son, by Henri Nouwen, a Dutch priest. Nouwen explores the parable Jesus told about the younger of two sons who had left his father and brother to lead a dissolute life. When he finally returned home, he was welcomed by his father and resented by his dutiful older brother. During the stresses of 1993 and 1994, I had read my Bible and other books about religion and spirituality. As a family, we regularly attended Foundry Methodist Church in downtown Washington, and I drew great sustenance from the sermons and personal support offered by the congregation and its senior minister, Rev. Dr. Phil Wogaman. My prayer group continued to pray for me, as did countless other people around the world. It all helped so much. But one simple phrase in Nouwen’s book struck like an epiphany: “the discipline of gratitude.” I had so much to be grateful for, even in the midst of lost elections, failed health care reform efforts, partisan and prosecutorial attacks, and the deaths of those I loved. I just had to discipline myself to remember how blessed I was.

SILENCE IS NOT SPOKEN HERE

On a cold afternoon late in March 1995, I took my first extended trip overseas without the President. Forty-one passengers filled a vintage government jet and took off from Andrews Air Force Base for a twelve-day official visit to five countries in South Asia.

My companions included White House staff, State Department aides, members of the media, Secret Service agents, Jan Piercy, my friend from Wellesley and U.S. Executive Director of the World Bank, and best of all, Chelsea. The trip happily coincided with her spring break from school. She had just turned fifteen and was blossoming into a poised, thoughtful young woman. I wanted to share some of the last adventures of her childhood, and I wanted to watch her react to the extraordinary world we were about to enter, to see it through her eyes as well as my own.

After a seventeen-hour flight, we landed in Islamabad, Pakistan, in the late evening in a pounding rainstorm. The State Department had asked me to visit the subcontinent to highlight the administration’s commitment to the region, because neither the President nor the Vice President could make a trip soon. My visit was meant to demonstrate that this strategic and volatile part of the world was important to the United States and to assure leaders throughout South Asia that Bill supported their efforts to strengthen democracy, expand free markets and promote tolerance and human rights, including the rights of women. My physical presence in the region was considered a sign of concern and commitment.

Although we had only a short time in each country, I wanted to meet with as many women as possible to stress the correlation between women’s progress and a country’s social and economic status. Development issues had interested me since my years of working with Bill on behalf of poor, rural communities in Arkansas, but this was my first serious exposure to the developing world. I had gotten some preparation earlier in March when I traveled to Copenhagen, Denmark, to represent the United States at the United Nations World Summit for Social Development. That conference underscored my conviction that individuals and communities around the world are already more connected and interdependent than at any time in human history, and that Americans will be affected by the poverty, disease and development of people halfway around the globe.

The Chinese have an ancient saying, that women hold up half the sky, but in most of the world, it’s really more than half. Women handle a large share of the responsibility for the welfare of their families. Yet their work often goes unrecognized and unrewarded inside the family or by the formal economy. These inequities are starkly visible in South Asia, where more than half a billion people live in grinding poverty―the majority of them women and children. Poor women and girls are oppressed and