Living History, Unknown [books to read in your 20s female TXT] 📗

says, “It just got too hard.” Hanks replies, “It’s supposed to be hard. If it wasn’t hard, everyone would do it―the hard is what makes it great.” After years as a political spouse, I had no idea whether I could step from the sidelines into the arena, but I began to think that I might enjoy an independent role in politics. All over the United States and in scores of countries, I had spoken out about the importance of women participating in politics and government, seeking elective office and using the power of their own voices to shape public policy and chart their nations’ futures. How could I pass up an opportunity to do the same?

Many of my friends weren’t persuaded. One afternoon in the spring, Maggie Williams and I went for a long walk. One of my closest friends and advisers, Maggie is a woman of great political acumen. She knew time was running out on making a decision, and for more than an hour she listened to me talk about whether I should enter the race.

“I just don’t know what to do,” I told her.

“I think it’s kooky,” she said. “And anyone who cares about you will tell you the same thing.”

“Well, I think I might do it,” I said.

I wasn’t surprised by Maggie’s reaction. She was protective and didn’t want me to be hurt. But by trying to talk me out of it, Maggie helped me think through and face the reasons to go forward.

Some people said that serving in the Senate might be a letdown after the White House. But all the issues I care about are affected by the United States Senate. And if I wasn’t a Senator, I certainly would be trying to influence those who were. “The U.S. Senate is the most important democratic body in the world,” Bob Rubin told me. “It would be an honor to be elected and to serve.” I agreed.

The mechanics of a campaign began to seem more manageable, too. I thought I could win if I could raise the $25 million needed for a statewide race in New York. Our good friend Terry McAuliffe, a native of Syracuse and an experienced and effective fundraiser, told me that if I were willing to work harder than I ever had in my life, I could win. That was encouraging. I also thought that I could make inroads in traditional Republican bastions.

Parts of upstate New York reminded me of neighboring Pennsylvania, where my father had his roots. And many of rural New York’s problems were similar to those that had plagued Arkansas: hard-pressed farmers, disappearing manufacturing jobs and young people leaving for better opportunities. Besides, Mayor Giuliani didn’t seem eager to spend time outside New York City, which was still predominantly Democratic. If I proved to New York voters that I understood the issues their families faced and was determined to work hard for them, I just might be able to do it.

If electoral politics sometimes seemed to be a universe of its own, I still had plenty of doses of reality to keep things in perspective throughout the late spring and early summer of 1999. Susan McDougal was finally acquitted of obstruction of justice in the Whitewater case on April 12, 1999, having served eighteen months in jail for refusing to testify before the Whitewater grand jury. Over the course of her trial, other witnesses had stepped forward to say they too had been pressured by Starr. It was another repudiation of Starr’s legal tactics, but I hated the inordinate price Susan McDougal had paid. She steadfastly maintained that Starr had pressured her to falsely implicate Bill and me, and when she refused, she was held in contempt and imprisoned, doing some of her time in solitary confinement. In Jung Chang’s Wild Swans, the story of three women’s ordeals in China from before the Communist takeover to the Cultural Revolution, I ran across another Chinese saying that summed up my opinion of Starr’s investigations: “Where there is a will to condemn, there is evidence.”

Then on April 20, two students at Columbine High School in Colorado opened fire on their classmates and held their school under siege for hours before turning their guns on themselves. Twelve students and one teacher died in the massacre. The teenage killers reportedly felt alienated at their school and had meticulously planned the attack as a demonstration of their own power and desire for revenge. They were able to obtain a small arsenal of pistols, shotguns and other weapons, some of which were concealed in their trench coats when they went into the school.

A month after the shootings, Bill and I went to Littleton, Colorado, to visit with the families of victims and survivors. It was gut wrenching to see the faces of parents who were living through their worst night mare, dealing with the loss of their own children in such a senseless, disturbing act of violence. Parents and teenagers alike asked Bill and me to make sure these horrible losses were not in vain. “You can give us a culture of values instead of a culture of violence,” Bill told a gathering of Columbine students in the gymnasium of a neighboring high school. “You can help us to keep guns out of the wrong hands. You can help us to make sure kids who are in trouble―and there will always be some―are identified early and reached and helped.”

The Columbine tragedy was not the first, nor the last, episode involving gun violence at an American high school. But it ignited a call for more federal action to keep guns out of the hands of the violent, troubled and young―a lethal combination. Bill and I convened an event attended by forty members of Congress from both parties to announce a White House proposal to raise the legal age of handgun ownership to twenty-one and limit purchases of handguns to one per month. And I spoke out again about the pervasiveness of violence on television, in