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

team drilled holes in his kneecap, pulled the shredded quadriceps muscle through, then sutured the ends back onto the undamaged part of the muscle.

I waited anxiously during the operation in a special suite reserved for the President and his family, where Chelsea joined me after school. Our family has been blessed with good health. The only time I’d been admitted to a hospital was when I gave birth. Other than an outpatient procedure on Bill’s sinuses in the early 1980s and Chelsea’s tonsillectomy a few years later, none of us had undergone surgery. I did not take our good fortune for granted, because I knew that “there but for the grace of God go I”―or someone I love.

Finally, after three hours in surgery, Bill was wheeled into the suite at 4:43 P.M. He looked pale and exhausted, but he was in good spirits because Dr. Mariano and the surgeon told us the operation had been a success and he had excellent prospects for a full recovery. Chelsea and I had been watching a Cary Grant movie, and Bill’s first words were: “Where’s the basketball tournament?” We quickly changed the channel to a March Madness game.

Other than the Razorbacks, all Bill wanted to talk about was his trip to Finland. Dr.

Mariano and the surgeons explained the possible risks of long-distance air travel and asked me if I could talk him out of going. I said I’d try, as long as his health depended on it, but I doubted I’d be successful. I called Sandy Berger, Bill’s National Security Adviser, who, with his wife, Susan, had been our friends since the 1970s. Sandy has a firm grasp of the issues and an uncanny ability to marshal facts and arguments when presenting options for the President to consider. He encouraged my overseas work and believed that development and human rights issues were critical pieces of any foreign policy agenda. Sandy explained the importance of the Helsinki trip and why he hoped Bill could go, but he acknowledged that if Bill’s medical team said he shouldn’t fly, then he shouldn’t fly. I conveyed Sandy’s message to Bill: Sandy would regretfully concede to the doctors.

“Well, I won’t,” said Bill. “I’m going.”

I called Dr. Mariano from Bill’s bedside.

“Look, he wants to go,” I told her. “So we have to figure out how we’re going to get him there and back safely.”

“But he can’t be on an airplane so long,” she protested. “There could be blood clots.”

I looked over at my fuming husband, and thought that he might throw a clot if they didn’t let him go.

“What are they saying?” he demanded. “Can’t Yeltsin come here?” I asked him. “No!

I’ve gotta go.”

“He’s going to Helsinki,” I told Dr. Mariano. “Just make sure he doesn’t get a blood clot.”

“We’ll have to pack him in dry ice.”

“Fine, pack him in dry ice.”

Dr. Mariano finally relented and began assembling a flying medical team for the trip to Finland.

Chelsea and I left Bill’s bedside later that evening so she could get ready to attend the Viennese Opera Ball sponsored by the Austrian Embassy. She had taken waltz lessons, and her dad insisted she go. On Saturday, I went back to the hospital after doing a tour of our living quarters, looking for all the obstacles someone in a wheelchair or on crutches would face. With the help of a Navy physical therapist, I made a list of the work that had to be done before Bill came home: rugs and cords had to be taped down, a shower guardrail had to be installed, furniture had to be moved. This exercise gave me insight into what life is like every day for people in wheelchairs, including a prior White House occupant, Franklin Delano Roosevelt.

On Sunday, Bill arrived at the White House in a wheelchair-compatible van, his leg stretched out in front of him. He went right to bed, but instead of falling asleep, he gulped down extra-strength Tylenol and watched the remaining college basketball finals on television.

I had been scheduled to leave with Chelsea on Saturday for Africa. I thought I should cancel the trip and accompany Bill to Helsinki or, at least, postpone our departure until he left on Tuesday. He wouldn’t hear of it. If we changed our plans, he reasoned, some people might think his operation hadn’t been a success. We arrived at a compromise: Bill would head to Helsinki on schedule, and Chelsea and I would leave for Africa on Sunday, only one day late.

In addition to the journalists and photographers who usually accompanied me, Vogue magazine sent acclaimed photographer Annie Leibovitz to chronicle our journey. Although she was famous for her portraits of celebrities, she threw herself into capturing the beauty and majesty of Africans and the landscape they inhabited. I had agreed to write the article that would accompany the Leibovitz photographs, and I wanted to shine a spotlight on self-help efforts supported by American foreign assistance and private charities, speak out about women’s rights, support democracy and encourage Americans to learn more about Africa. The importance of this last objective was illustrated when a journalist asked me before the trip, “What is the capital of Africa?” Bringing Chelsea along was, as always, a special treat for me, and her presence sent a message in places where the needs and abilities of young girls were too often overlooked: The President of the United States has a daughter whom he considers valuable and worthy of the education and health care she needs to help her fulfill her own God-given potential.

Chelsea and I first stopped in Senegal, ancestral home of millions of Americans who had been sold into slavery through Goree Island off the coast of Dakar, the Senegalese capital. At the small fort where slaves were held, leg irons and chains were still attached to the walls of musty cells, stark reminders of the human capacity for evil. This was where innocent people, ripped from home and family and reduced to chattel, were herded through the Door