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

go hand-in-hand, since all life and economic activity ultimately depend on our stewardship of our natural surroundings. During the White House years, I supported the “greening” of the White House, a project aimed at improving the environmental performance of the building complex through lower energy use, comprehensive recycling and other measures. Through a program I started, Save America’s Treasures, I raised money for our parks and visited many. I supported Bill and Al’s commitment to protecting more land, cleaning up the air and water, tackling global climate change and pursuing conservation and alternative energy sources. But my principal focus became the effects of environmental factors on our health. My study of the illnesses of Gulf War veterans and my work on the rising incidence of asthma among children and breast cancer among women persuaded me that environmental effects on health begged for long-term research.

The Republican Convention opened in San Diego on August 12. By tradition, the party holding its convention gets unfettered publicity while nominating its candidates and unveiling its campaign message. The other party’s candidate stays quietly on the sidelines, which was fine with me since I thought we all needed some time off. l didn’t watch the speeches on television, but I quickly heard from friends about Elizabeth Dole’s remarks to delegates on the second night of the convention. The former Reagan and Bush Cabinet Secretary had waded into the crowd, microphone in hand, and spoken lovingly about her husband, his career and his beliefs. Poised and intelligent, she was a lawyer by training and a political pro whose presence and eloquence strengthened her husband’s campaign.

And though Bob Dole was a tough opponent for us, I was glad to see a woman under pressure rise to the occasion and get the praise she deserved. It’s a strange twist of fate that we now both serve in the Senate.

Mrs. Dole’s speech inevitably provoked comparisons between us, and she had barely exited the stage before my staff was bombarded with questions about how I intended to handle my speech at the Democratic Convention. Reporters wondered whether I would stand at a podium or wander into the crowd, as she did. Tempting as it was to try something new, I felt that I was better off sticking to my own themes and style.

I arrived in Chicago on Sunday, August 25, three days ahead of Bill, who was coming on a train from West Virginia with Chelsea. Betsy Ebeling had organized a gathering of my family and friends at Riva’s Restaurant, which sits on Navy Pier overlooking Lake Michigan. I quickly caught Chicago’s excitement about hosting the convention. Mayor Richard M. Daley, namesake and son of Chicago’s late political giant, had also done a terrific job getting the city ready: the streets were lined with newly planted trees, not with protesters demonstrating against an unpopular war, as they had been during the 1968

convention when his father was Mayor. This time everything went off without a glitch.

My scheduled speech to the delegates on Tuesday evening would mark the first time a First Lady had ever delivered a televised primetime address at a national political convention.

Eleanor Roosevelt was the first to address a convention, but that was in 1940, the pre-television era. The forty-eight hours before my speech were crammed with events. I addressed the Democratic Women’s Caucus, met with various state delegations, celebrated the opening of a park in Jane Addams’s honor and visited a community school. I also worked on the speech, which was still evolving on Monday evening, when I went to the United Center to practice on a TelePrompTer. The Center is the home of the worldchampion Chicago Bulls basketball team, which became the inspiration for one of my alltime favorite political buttons. The 1996 Bulls included the incomparable Michael Jordan, Scottie Pippen, whom I knew from Arkansas, and the NBA’s “bad boy,” Dennis Rodman.

A political button sold at the convention featured a photo of my face with Rodman’s multicolored hair and this caption: “Hillary Rodman Clinton: As Bad as She Wants To Be.”

By early Tuesday morning, I didn’t feel satisfied with my speech. I was missing Bill, who was still on the train and out of reach for the kind of reassurance and help I counted on from him. In a little over twelve hours, I would address the biggest audience of my life, and I was struggling to find the right words to convey my themes and beliefs.

Bob Dole became my unwitting savior. All of a sudden it hit me. In his acceptance speech at the Republican Convention, he had attacked the premise of my book, It Takes a Village. He mistakenly used my notion of the village as a metaphor for “the state” and implied that I, and by extension Democrats, favor government intrusions into every aspect of American life. “And after the virtual devastation of the American family, the rock upon which this country was founded, we are told that it takes a village, that is collective, and thus the state, to raise a child,” he said in his speech. “… And with all due respect, I am here to tell you it does not take a village to raise a child. It takes a family to raise a child.”

Dole missed the point of the book, which is that families are the first line of responsibility for children, but that the village―a metaphor for society as a whole―shares responsibility for the culture, economy and environment in which our children grow up.

The policeman walking the beat, the teacher in the classroom, the legislator passing laws and the corporate executive deciding what movies to make all have influence over America’s children.

I seized upon the village theme, and we swiftly drafted the speech around it. Then I went to the tiny room in the basement of the United Center for one last rehearsal with Michael Sheehan, an extraordinary media coach who made Herculean efforts to teach me to use the TelePrompTer, which I had never worked with before and