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

dinner turned out to be a grand success, with the few flaws visible hopefully only to us. The mostly American-grown feast included smoked marinated shrimp, roast tenderloin of beef, baby vegetables in a zucchini basket and Yukon Gold potatoes with Vidalia onions. We ate goat cheese from Massachusetts and drank American wines. Our guests seemed genuinely pleased, particularly with the after-dinner Broadway-style revue put together at the last minute by our Tony Award-winning friend James Naughton and featuring Lauren Bacall and Carol Channing. I heaved a big sigh of relief.

The Burros story ran on the front page of The New York Times on February 2, and it broke some minor news. I announced that we were banning smoking in the Executive Mansion as well as the East and West Wings, that broccoli would return to the White House kitchen (having been exiled by the Bushes) and that we hoped to make the White House more accessible to the public. Accompanying the text was a photo of me wearing a bare-shoulder, black Donna Karan evening dress.

To me, the story and the photo seemed harmless enough, but they inspired a lot of commentary. The White House press corps was not happy that I had granted an exclusive interview to a reporter whose beat was not White House politics. In their view, my choice signaled my determination to avoid challenging questions about my role in the policy arena. Some critics suggested that the story was contrived to “soften” my image and portray me as a traditional woman in a traditional role. Some of my most ardent defenders also took exception to the interview and the picture because neither reflected their conception of me as First Lady. If I was serious about substantive policy issues, they reasoned, why was I talking to a reporter about food and entertainment? Conversely, if I was really worrying about floral centerpieces and the color of table linens, how could I be substantive enough to head a major policy effort? What kind of message was I sending, anyway?

It seemed that people could perceive me only as one thing or the other―either a hardworking professional woman or a conscientious and caring hostess. Iwas beginning to catch on to what Kathleen Hall Jamieson, a distinguished professor of communications and Dean of the Annenberg School of Communications at the University of Pennsylvania, would later term “the double bind.” Gender stereotypes, says Jamieson, trap women by categorizing them in ways that don’t reflect the true complexities of their lives. It was becoming clear to me that people who wanted me to fit into a certain box, traditionalist or feminist, would never be entirely satisfied with me as me-which is to say, with my many different, and sometimes paradoxical, roles.

My friends lived the same way. On any given day, Diane Blair might be teaching a political science class hours before preparing dinner for a huge crowd at the Blairs’ lakefront home. Melanne Verveer might be running a White House meeting one minute and talking on the phone with her granddaughter the next. Lissa Muscatine, a Rhodes Scholar from Harvard who gave birth to three children while working for me at the White House, might be on an airplane revising speeches or changing diapers at home. So who was the “real” woman? In fact, most of us took on all those roles and more every day of our lives.

I know how hard it is to integrate the many disparate demands, choices and activities women pursue and face every day. Most of us live with nagging voices questioning the choices we make and with loads of guilt, whatever our choice. In my own life I have been a wife, mother, daughter, sister, in-law, student, lawyer, children’s rights activist, law professor, Methodist, political adviser, citizen and so much else. Now I was a symbol―

and that was a new experience.

Bill and Ihad worried about the problems we would face when we moved into the White House, but I never expected that the way I defined my role as First Lady would generate so much controversy and confusion. In my own mind, I was traditional in some ways and not in others. I cared about the food I served our guests, and I also wanted to improve the delivery of health care for all Americans. To me, there was nothing incongruous about my interests and activities.

I was navigating uncharted terrain―and through my own inexperience, I contributed to some of the conflicting perceptions about me. It took me awhile to figure out that what might not be important to me might seem very important to many men and women across America. We were living in an era in which some people still felt deep ambivalence about women in positions of public leadership and power. In this era of changing gender roles, I was America’s Exhibit A.

The scrutiny was overwhelming. Ever since I had become a Secret Service protectee at the Democratic Convention in New York in July 1992, I had been trying to adjust to my loss of anonymity. Occasionally, I snuck out of the White House wearing sweats, sunglasses and a baseball cap. I loved walking through the Mall, looking at the monuments, or riding my bike along the C&O Canal in Georgetown. I bargained the Secret Service down to only one agent, dressed in casual clothes, walking or biking behind me. I soon learned, though, that they had one of those big black fully loaded vans trailing somewhere nearby just in case. If I moved fast, even people who thought they recognized me weren’t sure. One morning, a touring family asked me to take their picture as they posed in front of the Washington Monument. I quickly agreed, and as they stood together smiling, I snapped a photo. As I was leaving, I heard one of the children saying, “Mom, that lady looks familiar.” I was out of earshot before I heard whether they guessed who their photographer was.

These moments of quiet anonymity were fleeting, and so was