Living History by Unknown (best non fiction books of all time .txt) 📕

chemicals used in redecorating, Chelsea developed a frightening respiratory reaction shortly after Easter, and I was more eager than ever to be near her all the time. We tried to keep her condition private, and few people knew how worried I was.

Chelsea recovered as we got the allergies under control. To cheer us both up, I took her to New York to see the American Ballet Theatre perform Sleeping Beauty. That was when my hair got me into more trouble. Susan Thomases told me I just had to try this wonderful stylist Frederic Fekkai. I was game and asked if he could stop by our room at the Waldorf-Astoria hotel before we went out that night. I liked him right away, so I agreed to try something new, a “carefree” cut similar to broadcast journalist Diane Sawyer’s.

It certainly was shorter, and a dramatic change. International headlines ensued.

Lisa Caputo, my press secretary, learned about the haircut in a late night phone call from Capricia Marshall, who was with me in New York.

“Don’t be mad at me,” said Capricia. “She cut her hair off.”

“What!”

“Susan just brought this guy into her hotel room, and when she came out, her hair was gone.”

“Oh, my God.”

The problem for Lisa was not a momentary public relations gaffe―she was used to handling hair stories―but a more complicated media concern. Since my staff once thought that there would be a health care package to present by May, I had agreed to let Katie Comic and her Today show crew trail me around the White House in advance of a major sit-down interview. NBC had spent hours taping me the prior week as a First Lady with a shoulder-length flip. The First Lady about to be interviewed live by Katie Couric had a new look. And there was no way to reshoot the earlier footage so I would look the same throughout the program.

Katie never blinked when she arrived at the White House and found me in my new ‘do. Nor did she complain that my pink suit did not exactly complement her salmoncolored outfit. I had always liked watching her on TV, and I was happy to find that she was as down-to-earth in real life as she seemed on the screen―and a good sport too.

I was still learning the ropes and still discovering what it meant to be America’s First Lady. The difference between being a Governor’s wife and a President’s is immeasurable.

Suddenly the people around you spend a lot of time anticipating what will make you happy. Sometimes those people don’t know you well or misread you. Everything you say is amplified. And you have to be very careful what you wish for, or you’ll get it by the caseload.

I was taking one of my first solo trips as First Lady when a young aide asked me, “What would you like to drink in your suite?”

“You know, I really feel like a Diet Dr Pepper,” I said.

For years afterward, every time I opened a fridge in a hotel suite, it was loaded with Diet Dr Pepper. People would come up to me with frosty glasses of it. I felt like the sorcerer’s apprentice, the Mickey Mouse character in the classic animated film Fantasia: I couldn’t turn off the Dr Pepper machine.

This is a benign story, but the implications were sobering. I had to recognize how many people wanted to do whatever they could to please me and how seriously they might misinterpret what I wanted. I simply could not say, “Well, look into it,” when presented with a problem. Maybe I should have figured that out earlier. But I didn’t, until I was stuck with the consequences of an offhand comment I made after hearing about concerns of financial mismanagement and waste in the White House Travel Office. I said to Chief of Staff Mack McLarty that if there were such problems, I hoped he would “look into it.”

“Travelgate,” as it came to be known in the media, was perhaps worthy of a two-or three-week life span; instead, in a partisan political climate, it became the first manifestation of an obsession for investigation that persisted into the next millennium.

Before we moved into the White House, neither Bill nor I nor our immediate staff had known that there was a White House Travel Office. The travel office charters planes, books hotel rooms, orders meals and generally takes care of the press when they travel with the President. The costs are billed to the news organizations. Although we didn’t know much about what the office did, we certainly didn’t want to ignore or appear to condone allegations of misuse of funds anywhere in the White House. An audit by KPMG Peat Marwick had discovered that the Director of the Travel Office kept an offbook ledger, that a minimum of $18,000 of checks had not been properly accounted for and that the office’s records were in “shambles.” Based on these findings, Mack and the White House Counsel’s Office decided to fire the travel office staff and reorganize the department.

These actions, which seemed like no-brainers to the decision makers involved, ignited a firestorm. When Dee Dee Myers, the President’s press secretary―and the first woman to hold that position―announced the dismissals in her morning briefing on May 19, 1993, we were surprised by the reaction in the press room. The administration was trying to look out for the media’s financial interests, as well as the country’s, while some members of the press were focused on the fact that their friends in the travel office, who serve at the pleasure of the President, had been fired. The Administration was charged with amateurism and cronyism due to the fact that a White House employee, who was one of Bill’s distant relatives and had experience making travel arrangements, was temporarily put in charge of the revamped travel office. Bill Kennedy, my former law partner who also worked in the counsel’s office, had called on the FBI to investigate the case, further inflaming some of