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

quote him in my address before the fourteen thousand people gathered for the Liz Carpenter lecture.

“Long before I was struck with cancer, I felt something stirring in American society,”

Atwater wrote. “It was a sense among the people of the country―Republicans and Democrats alike―that something was missing from their lives―something crucial…. I wasn’t exactly sure what ‘it’ was. My illness helped me to see that what was missing in society is what was missing in me: a little heart, a lot of brotherhood.

“The 80’s were about acquiring―acquiring wealth, power, prestige. I know. I acquired more wealth, power and prestige than most. But you can acquire all you want and still feet empty. What power wouldn’t I trade for a little more time with my family? What price wouldn’t I pay for an evening with friends? It took a deadly illness to put me eye to eye with that truth, but it is a truth that the country, caught up in its ruthless ambitions and moral decay, can learn on my dime… .”

I drew on different sources to put together a statement about the need to “remold society by redefining what it means to be a human being in the twentieth century, moving into a new millennium….

“We need a new politics of meaning. We need a new ethos of individual responsibility and caring. We need a new definition of civil society which answers the unanswerable questions posed by both the market forces and the governmental ones, as to how we can have a society that fills us up again and make us feel that we are part of something bigger than ourselves.”

I suggested a response to Lee Atwater’s poignant question: “Who will lead us out of this ‘spiritual vacuum?”‘ The answer, I said, is: “All of us.”

When I finished the speech, I hugged Liz Carpenter, Governor Ann Richards and Lady Bird Johnson. Then I headed to the airport to return to the White House, check on my daughter and see my husband before leaving again to help my mother face the reality of moving my dad into a nursing home.

It was a relief to have given the speech, and I thought that would be the end of it. But within weeks, my words were derided in a New York Times Magazine cover story facetiously titled “Saint Hillary” The article dismissed my discussion of spirituality as “easy, moralistic preaching” couched in the “gauzy and gushy wrappings of New Age jargon.” I was grateful when many people called to thank me for raising questions about meaning in our lives and in society.

The day after my speech in Austin, my father died.

I couldn’t help but think how my relationship with my father had evolved over time. I adored him when I was a little girl. I would eagerly watch for him from a window and run down the street to meet him on his way home after work. With his encouragement and coaching, I played baseball, football and basketball. I tried to bring home good grades to win his approval. But as I grew older, my relationship with him inevitably changed, both because of my experiences growing up, which occurred in such a different time and place from his, and because he changed. He gradually lost the energy that got him outside throwing football pass patterns to me and Hugh as we ran around the elm trees in front of our house. Just as those magnificent elms succumbed to disease and had to be cut down in neighborhoods like ours throughout the country, his energy and spirit seemed to wane over time.

More and more, his immediate world seemed to shrink as he lost his father and both brothers in a few short years in the mid-sixties. Then he decided in the early seventies that he had made and saved enough money, so he quit working and dismantled his small company. During my high school and college years, our relationship increasingly was defined either by silence, as I searched for something to say to him, or by arguments, which I often provoked, because I knew he would always engage with me over politics and culture―

Vietnam, hippies, bra-burning feminists, Nixon. I also understood that even when he erupted at me, he admired my independence and accomplishments and loved me with all his heart.

I recently reread letters he wrote me when I was at Wellesley and Yale, usually in response to a despondent collect call home in which I expressed doubts about my abilities or confusion about where my life was heading. I doubt anyone meeting my father or being on the receiving end of his caustic criticism would ever have imagined the tender love and advice he offered to buck me up, straighten me out and keep me going.

I also respected my father’s willingness to change his views, although he would rarely admit he had. He started out in life inheriting every prejudice imaginable in his workingclass, Protestant family against Democrats, Catholics, Jews and blacks―and anyone else considered outside the tribe. When I got exasperated by these attitudes during our summer visits to Lake Winola, I would announce to all the Rodhams that I intended to grow up and marry a Catholic Democrat―a fate they considered the worst I could meet. Over time, my father softened and changed, largely because of personal experiences with all kinds of people. He owned a building in downtown Chicago with a black man whom he came to respect and admire, causing him to change his views on race. When I grew up and fell in love with a Southern Baptist Democrat, my father was bewildered, but he rallied and became one of Bill’s strongest supporters.

When my parents moved to Little Rock in 1987, they bought a condo next door to the one owned by Larry Curbo, a nurse, and Dr. Dillard Denson, a neurologist. They were among my mother’s closest friends and began checking in on my parents, visiting with my dad, talking about the stock market or politics and helping