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

couldn’t seem to master. Though I might finally have found the words I’d been searching for, I’d blow the speech if I delivered them looking like a robot, so I practiced until it felt right.

At last, it was time to go. Chelsea had spent two days with Bill on his train journey but had left him to be with me. She joined my mother and brothers, Dick Kelley, Diane Blair, Betsy Ebeling and a host of friends in a skybox suite where they had a great view of the podium.

About twenty thousand people were jammed into the convention hall, and the mood was high-pitched. Two of our party’s greatest orators―former New York Governor Mario Cuomo and civil rights leader Jesse Jackson―spoke before me, revving up the Democratic faithful with old-fashioned fire-and-brimstone speeches touting the party’s values.

As I walked out onto the stage, the crowd erupted into a frenzy of clapping, chanting and foot-stomping that touched me and helped to alleviate my nervousness. My motions to urge the crowd to sit down were futile, so I just waved and let the cheers wash over me.

Finally the roars faded, and I began to speak. My remarks were simple and direct. I asked people to imagine what the world would be like when Chelsea was my age, the year 2028. “One thing we know for sure is that change is certain,” I said. “Progress is not.

Progress depends on the choices we make today for tomorrow and on whether we meet our challenges and protect our values.”

After mentioning issues such as expanding the Family Leave law, simplifying adoption laws and passing a bill to guarantee that mothers and babies are not sent home from the hospital less than forty-eight hours after childbirth, I got to the crescendo written in response to Bob Dole:

For Bill and me, there has been no experience more challenging, more rewarding and more humbling than raising our daughter. And we have learned that to raise a happy, healthy, and hopeful child, it takes a family. It takes teachers. It takes clergy. It takes businesspeople. It takes community leaders. It takes those who protect our health and safety. It takes all of us. Yes, it takes a village.

And it takes a President.

It takes a President who believes not only in the potential of his own child, but of all children, who believes not only in the strength of his own family, but of the American family.

It takes Bill Clinton.

Again the crowd erupted. They not only believed that Bill cared about children, they understood that I was directly confronting the Republicans’ radical individualism and narrow and unrealistic view of what it took for most Americans to raise their children at the close of the twentieth century.

On Wednesday night Chelsea and I went to meet Bill, who got off the train with upsetting news. A supermarket tabloid was about to publish a story claiming that Dick Morris had paid for frequent visits by a call girl to a hotel he stayed in when he was in Washington.

The tabloid story that ran on Thursday quoted the call girl extensively. She said that Morris bragged about writing my convention speech, as well as the Vice President’s―

he hadn’t written either. Morris resigned from the campaign, and Bill issued a statement thanking him for his work and calling him a “superb political strategist.” After Morris left, the campaign went on seamlessly because Mark Penn continued to offer the thoughtful research and analysis.

Bill’s appearance before the convention to accept his nomination triggered a wild demonstration from the delegates when he walked onstage on Thursday night. From the second he began speaking, he commanded the public spotlight and used it with perfect pitch and passion to make his case to continue leading America. He reviewed America’s progress beginning with where we had been as a nation in 1992 and where we had come during his Presidency. Up in the skybox, Chelsea and I watched with enormous pride as he delivered a virtuoso performance. About two-thirds of the way through, we went down to be ready to join him onstage for the finale of the convention. By the time we got backstage, he was nearing the conclusion. He ended by harking back to his 1992 campaign and affirming that “after these four good, hard years, I still believe in a place called Hope, a place called America.” So did I.

SECOND TERM

Bill and I spent the final day of his last campaign flying around the country in a mad dash to get out the vote, living on the edge of exhaustion, taking nothing for granted until the balloting was over or, as Bill would say, till the last dog dies. With each hour, the mood on Air Force One grew lighter as we gained confidence that Bill would become the first Democratic President since Franklin Roosevelt to serve two full terms. On election eve, Bill, Chelsea and I were giddy with excitement and lack of sleep. America was in the throes of a silly dance craze that season, and somewhere over Missouri, in the middle of the night, Chelsea led our entourage in an impromptu rendition of the Macarena (all of us looking a little like campers slapping off a swarm of mosquitoes). When Mike McCurry, the President’s press secretary, briefed the press on the activities up in the front of the plane, he was careful to report that the commander in chief danced “in a presidential manner.” Sometime after 2 A.M., we began our descent into Little Rock.

There was no question that we would vote and then wait for the returns in Arkansas, where Bill’s journey to the White House had begun. We decamped in a suite of rooms at a downtown hotel, resting and visiting with friends and family. Tens of thousands of people were already gathering in Little Rock, anticipating a victory celebration when the polls closed. We kept out of sight except to go to our polling place and attend a luncheon hosted by Senator David Pryor,