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

House Ethics Committee for ethical lapses. Accused of improperly using tax-exempt organizations to finance a series of political lectures and then misleading the committee about the funding, Gingrich claimed it was an innocent mistake and blamed his lawyer. The committee found he had given questionable and misleading statements on thirteen occasions during the course of the investigation. He was fined and reprimanded. I doubted that Gingrich’s problems in the House would deter him from prolonging the Whitewater investigations as long as he could. In fact, I couldn’t shake the apprehension I had been feeling since the noon swearing-in ceremony.

The day was somewhat overcast and cool, and the atmosphere in front of the Rotunda felt even frostier. By tradition, the Chief justice of the Supreme Court administers the oath of office for each new President, but neither Bill nor I relished the idea of sharing such an important moment with William Rehnquist, who despised us and our politics.

Early in his career as a clerk to Supreme Court Justice Robert Jackson, Rehnquist wrote a memo which had strongly favored upholding the Court’s key pro-segregation decision of 1896, a case called Plessy v. Ferguson, which enunciated the doctrine of “separate but equal.” He endorsed a Texas law permitting white-only primary elections. “It is about time the Court faced the fact that the white people in the south don’t like colored people,”

he wrote in 1952. And in 1964, according to sworn testimony, Rehnquist led efforts to challenge the qualifications of black voters at the polls in Arizona. In 1970, as Richard Nixon’s Assistant Attorney General, he proposed a constitutional amendment to limit and disrupt implementation of the landmark Broom v. Board of Education school desegregation case of 1954. Since being named to the Court by Nixon in 1971, he consistently tried to turn back the Court’s progress on race―and by extension the country’s. His was the only vote, for example, favoring federal tax-exempt status for Bob Jones University, which banned interracial dating and had an expulsion policy on that basis. He made no effort to hide his friendships with many of the extreme conservatives who had been trying to undermine Bill’s Presidency since the first inauguration. As the country would later learn in the election-deciding case of Bush v. Gore, his lifetime tenure as a Supreme Court Justice did not inhibit his ideological or partisan zeal.

I suggested that Bill ask either of his two appointees, Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg or Justice Stephen Breyer, to administer the oath of office. But his regard for tradition prevailed.

His inaugural address, after all, touched on the theme of reconciliation and healing and specifically referred to the “divide of race” as “America’s constant curse.” Bill called on Americans to “forge new ties that bind together.”

When the time came, Chelsea and I held the Bible on which Bill laid his left hand, while he raised his right hand for the oath. When Rehnquist finished swearing him in, Bill reached over to shake the Chief Justice’s hand.

“Good luck,” Rehnquist said without smiling. Something about his tone made me think we would need it.

INTO AFRICA

The second time my husband joined Greg Norman to play golf, he ended up on crutches for two months. Bill didn’t fall into a sand trap, and it wasn’t a wild swing that got him―he simply took a false step on a dark stair in front of Norman’s house in Florida, and lurched backward, tearing 90 percent of his right quadriceps. It happened just after 1 A.M.

on Friday, March 14, 1997, and he called to tell me about it on his way to the hospital. He was in terrible pain, but trying, as he said, “to put my best leg forward.” I was relieved that his sense of humor hadn’t been injured, but my worry cells went into overdrive.

Bill’s only concern was getting back to the White House and then flying to Helsinki, Finland, for a long-scheduled meeting with Boris Yeltsin the following Wednesday―no matter what the doctors said. I called Dr. Connie Mariano, Director of the White House Medical Unit and the President’s physician, to ask her opinion. She told me that Bill would need surgery, but he could safely fly back from Florida and have it done in Washington.

I met Air Force One at Andrews AFB on Friday morning and watched from the tarmac as a scrum of Secret Service agents carried my normally indestructible husband out of the belly of the plane. They placed him in a wheelchair atop a portable hydraulic lift and lowered him to the ground. I rode in a van with Bill to Bethesda Naval Hospital, where surgeons would operate on his leg. Bill was cheerful despite his excruciating pain and still totally focused on going to Helsinki. I asked him to wait until we knew how the surgery went, but he’d already decided it would be fine. Bill often reminds me of the boy who is digging furiously in a barn filled with manure. When someone asks why, he says, “With all this manure, there’s got to be a pony in here somewhere.”

He refused to have general anesthesia or to take narcotic painkillers because, as President, he had to be alert and on call twentyfour hours a day. This presented a problem. The surgery he needed to re attach his quadriceps tendon to the top of his kneecap was painful and painstaking. If he underwent general anesthesia, Bill would be required by the Twentyfifth Amendment to the Constitution to temporarily cede presidential power to the Vice President, who was standing by. There had been no such turnover since 1985, when President Reagan underwent surgery for colon cancer. Bill was determined not to invoke the transfer of powers. The upcoming meeting with Yeltsin concerned the expansion of NATO, which the Russians vehemently opposed. Bill didn’t want news reports that might signal his weakness or vulnerability. He opted for localized anesthesia and chatted with his doctors about the Lyle Lovett music piped into the operating room while the orthopedic surgeon and his