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

the White House press corps at arm’s length for too long. Because I wanted the media to report on health care reform, I offered interviews to correspondents who covered events and speeches around the country. The White House press corps, however, had little access to me. It took me a while to understand that their resentment was justified.

By the end of April 1994, I felt confident enough in David Kendall’s research and in my understanding of Whitewater and the surrounding issues that I was ready to offer the media what they wanted: me.

I called my Chief of Staff and said, “Maggie, I want to do it. Let’s call a press conference.”

“You know you’ll have to answer all questions, no matter what they throw at you.”

“I know. I’m ready.”

I discussed my plan beforehand only with the President, David Kendall and Maggie.

In order to prepare, I confided in Lisa, White House Counsel Lloyd Cutler, Harold Ickes and Mandy Grunwald. I didn’t want a parade of advisers from the West Wing pounding on my door with advice about how to handle this question or that. I wanted to speak as directly as possible.

On the morning of April 22, the White House announced that the First Lady would take questions that afternoon in the State Dining Room. We hoped that a change of scenery would encourage a fresh approach from the media.

I didn’t calculate what I would wear to this event―my choice of clothes is almost always a last-minute decision. I felt like wearing a black skirt and a pink sweater set. A few reporters immediately interpreted it as an attempt to “soften” my image, and my sixtyeight-minute encounter with the fourth estate would go down in history as the “Pink Press Conference.”

I sat in front of a crowd of reporters and camera operators who filled the dining room.

“Let me thank all of you for coming,” I began. “I have wanted to do this in part because I realized that despite my traveling around the country and answering questions, I did not really satisfy a lot of you in having your questions asked and answered. And last week, Helen said, ‘I can’t travel with her, so how can I ask her questions?’ For that reason we are here, and, Helen, you get the first question.”

Helen Thomas got right to the point:

“Do you know of any money that could have gone from Madison to the Whitewater project or to any of your husband’s political campaigns?” she asked.

“Absolutely not. I do not.”

“Actually, on the same theme with your commodities profits―it is difficult for a layman, and probably for a lot of experts, to look at the amount of the investment and the size of the profit. Is there any way you can explain…”

And so I began to explain it. And explain it. And explain it again. One after another, the reporters asked me everything they could think of about Whitewater, and I answered them until they ran out of different ways to ask the same questions.

I was grateful for the questions, which gave me a chance to lay out everything I knew at that point. I was also able to address a problem that had plagued me from the beginning.

I was asked if I felt that my reluctance to provide information to the press “helped to create any impression that you were trying to hide something?”

“Yes, I do,” I said. “And I think that is probably one of the things that I regret most, and one of the reasons why I wanted to do this…. I think if my father or mother said anything to me more than a million times, it was: ‘Don’t listen to what other people say.

Don’t be guided by other people’s opinions. You know, you have to live with yourself.’

And I think that’s good advice.

“But I do think that that advice and my belief in it, combined with my sense of privacy … led me to perhaps be less understanding than I needed to [be] of both the press and the public’s interest, as well as [their] right to know things about my husband and me.

“So, you’re right. I’ve always believed in a zone of privacy. And I told a friend the other day that I feel after resisting for a long time I’ve been rezoned.”

That line made everyone laugh.

After the press conference, David and I had a drink together in the West Sitting Hall as the sun set beyond the window. Though everyone thought I had done well, I felt somber about the situation and as we assessed the day’s events, I commented to David: “You know, they’re not going to let up. They’re just going to keep on coming at us, no matter what we do. We really don’t have any good choices here.”

That night Richard Nixon, who had suffered a stroke four days earlier, died at the age of eighty-one. In the early spring of 1993, Nixon had sent Bill a letter full of insightful observations about Russia, and Bill had read it to me, announcing that he thought Nixon was a brilliant, tragic figure. Bill invited the former President to the White House to discuss Russia, and Chelsea and I greeted him as he stepped off the elevator on the second floor. He told Chelsea that his daughters had gone to her school, Sidwell Friends. Then he turned to me:

“You know, I tried to fix the health care system more than twenty years ago. It has to be done sometime.”

“I know,” I replied, “and we’d be better off today if your proposal had succeeded.”

One of the women in the American Spectator article had taken issue with her portrayal by the Arkansas troopers. Although she was identified in the story only as “Paula,”

she claimed her friends and family recognized her as the woman who supposedly met with Bill in a Little Rock hotel suite during a convention and later told a trooper she wanted to be the Governor’s “regular girlfriend.”

At a February convention of the Conservative Political Action Committee,