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

out my mother around the house. When Bill and I came to visit, the military and Secret Service used their house as the command center. One night my parents were watching a television show that featured gay characters. When my father expressed his disapproval of homosexuals, my mother said, “What about Dillard and Larry?”

“What do you mean?” he asked.

So my mother explained to my father that his dear friends and neighbors were a gay couple in a long-lasting committed relationship. One of my father’s last stereotypes fell.

Larry and Dillard visited my father in the hospital as he lay in a coma. One night Larry relieved my mother for a few hours so she could go home and get some rest. And it was Larry who held my father’s hand and said goodbye as he died. Perhaps fittingly, my father spent his last days at St. Vincent’s, a wonderful Catholic hospital, a sign that another of his prejudices had disappeared.

Early the next morning, Bill, Chelsea and I, joined by an intimate group of family and friends, flew back to Little Rock for a memorial service at the First United Methodist Church. With us were my brother Tony, his future wife, Nicole Boxer, my dear friend Diane Blair, who had been staying with us, Bruce Lindsey, Vince Foster and Webb Hubbell.

I was touched that Al and Tipper flew down with Mack McLarty, one of Bill’s best friends from growing up and now White House Chief of Staff, along with Mack’s wife, Donna. The church on that Good Friday was filled for “A Service of Death and Resurrection”

led by the church’s senior minister, the Rev. Ed Matthews, and the minister who had married Bill and me, the Rev. Vic Nixon. After the service, our family, joined by Dillard and Larry, Carolyn and Dr. John Holden, one of my brothers’ best friends from Park Ridge, took my father home to Scranton. In character, my father had chosen and paid for his gravesite years before.

We had a second funeral service at the Court Street Methodist Church, down the street from the house where my dad had grown up. Bill delivered a loving eulogy that conveyed Hugh Rodham’s brusqueness and devotion:

“In 1974 when I made my first political race, I ran in a congressional district where there were a lot of Republicans from the Middle West. And my future fatherin-law came down in a Cadillac with an Illinois license plate; never told a living soul I was in love with his daughter, just went up to people and said, ‘I know that you’re a Republican and so am I. I think Democrats are just one step short of communism, but this kid’s all right.’

“

We laid him to rest in the Washburn Street Cemetery. It was a cold, rain-drenched April day, and my thoughts were as gloomy as the leaden sky. I stood listening to the Military Honor Guard’s bugler playing taps. After the burial, we went with some of my father’s old friends to a local restaurant, where we reminisced.

We were supposed to be celebrating my father’s life, but I was overwhelmed with sadness for what he would now be missing. I thought about how much he enjoyed seeing his son-in-law serve as President and how much he wanted to watch Chelsea grow up.

When Bill was preparing his eulogy on the plane from Little Rock, we were all telling stories. Chelsea reminded us that her PopPop had always said that when she graduated from college, he would rent a big limousine and pick her up wearing a white suit. He had many dreams that wouldn’t be realized. But I was thankful for the life, opportunities and dreams he passed along to me.

VINCE FOSTER

Bill, Chelsea and I wanted to spend Easter at Camp David, and we invited our immediate family and the friends who had come to Scranton. We all needed time to unwind after the funeral and the long weeks of worry, and Camp David was the only haven where we would have the peace and privacy we craved. Jackie Kennedy Onassis had encouraged me to shelter my intimate family life in this protected retreat, surrounded by a forest preserve in Maryland’s Catoctin Mountains. Her simple, pragmatic advice, as always, had proved invaluable. I was also pleased that my father had visited the retreat after the inauguration.

We could remember his presence in its rustic cabins and his delight in seeing the place that President Eisenhower had renamed for his grandson, David. Now we were with my father’s grandchild, Chelsea, to mourn his passing.

That Easter weekend was cold and rainy, and it fit my mood perfectly. I went for a long walk in the drizzle with my mother, and I asked her if she wanted to live with us in the White House. In her characteristically independent manner, she said that she would stay awhile, but that she wanted to go home to attend to all the issues accompanying my father’s death. She thanked me for inviting Dillard Denson and Larry Curbo to Camp David. She knew they would continue to be valuable friends as she faced her life alone.

We attended Easter service in the recently built Evergreen Chapel, an A-frame of wood and stained glass that fits beautifully into its wooded setting. I sat in my pew and thought of how my father used to embarrass my brothers and me with his loud, off-key hymn singing. I share his tone deafness, but that morning I sang out, hoping the discordant notes might reach the heavens.

Physically and emotionally drained, I probably should have taken more time to rest and to let myself grieve. But I couldn’t ignore the call back to work. Ira had been sending me SOS signals, warning that the health care initiative was being sidelined by budgetary battles. And there was Chelsea, who needed to return to school and to her life. After sharing Easter dinner together with our guests, Bill, Chelsea and I returned to Washington.

The moment I walked into our bedroom on