HILLARY CLINTON:
the former presidential candidate is still fighting for a better world
She was almost the first female US president, criticised for her steely smarts in the face of Trump’s bald populism. In a candid interview, James Mottram finds Hillary Clinton warm, sincere, still fighting for a better world and besotted with her grandchildren.
T he double doors swing wide open. In walks Hillary Rodham Clinton, 5ft 5in tall and full of energy. It’s just days before coronavirus will lock down Europe and America, making such personal encounters all but impossible. She greets me with a firm handshake – one that’s gripped thousands of voters’ hands in her time. “Hi! Nice to see you!” she cries, flashing a bright smile as her eyes glint Democratic blue. She’s sincere, welcoming.
We’re in a suite at the Adlon, the famous Berlin hotel where Michael Jackson once dangled his child out of the window. In the corner, Huma Abedin, Hillary’s personal aide and close friend, sits tapping on her phone. Security stands outside. Protection is something the former First Lady is used to. “I’ve had it for so long,” she says. “I’ve had it since 1992. It just becomes part of the tapestry of my life.”
Back then, her husband Bill Clinton, the two-time governor of Arkansas, graduated to the most powerful job on the planet, President of the United States. As the new four-part documentary Hillary – the reason for our get-together today – shows, she was never one to stay in the shadows. In 2016, she famously ran on the Democratic ticket in a bid to become the first ever female occupant of the White House.
Why she lost to Donald Trump on that November night is – partly at least – tied up with who Hillary is.
The most polarising politician in American public life, you’re either passionately for her or vehemently against her. “When people say I’m not authentic … what you see is what you get!” she exclaims to the film’s director, Nanette Burstein. “I’m sorry if I’m not brilliantly charismatic on TV, but I am the same person I’ve always been.”
Spanning four hours, Hillary is an exhaustive look into the life and times of its subject, but it didn’t start that way. Originally it was set to be a warts-and-all campaign movie, culled from 2000 hours of behind-the-scenes footage from the 2016 election. But Nanette had other ideas, reports Hillary. “She came back and said, ‘There’s a bigger story here’.” It was a chance to look at a divided America.
Two months after we meet, that becomes crystallised – with America ravaged by over 120,000 deaths from COVID-19 and beset by protests over the unlawful police killing of George
Floyd. When President Trump used tear gas to clear away protestors in order that he could walk to St John’s Church and hold up a Bible for a photo op, Hillary tweeted what many felt – calling it a “horrifying use of presidential power”.
Ironically, as supporters of Black Lives Matter stage rallies around the US, it’s a reminder that Hillary too had encounters with the movement – as shown in the film when two activists interrupt a private fundraising event. The protest was concerning comments she made in the 1990s in support of her husband’s crime bill, notably when she referred to “super-predators” – later seen as a slight on young African-Americans.
“I was talking about gang members … you don’t hear me putting race on it at all,” she explains in the documentary – just one of many times this most misunderstood woman in America tries to set the record straight. She spent 35 hours being interviewed across several sessions, facing questions on everything from the 2016 email scandal, when she was vilified for using a private server for government business, to her husband’s infidelity.
Will audiences understand more about her now? Clearly, she’s spent years pondering why she’s so divisive. “It started when my husband ran for president,” she explains. “I was living a fairly normal life before then. I was active in all kinds of causes, activities, but I was never the subject of just a drum beat of negativity.” After she campaigned to reform healthcare when Bill was in office, the vitriol began. In Kentucky in 1994, an effigy of her was burned.
The opposition against her was always highly organised, she says. Back then, it was right-wing corporate interests – health insurance and pharmaceutical companies, mainly. “When I went out around the country, talking about how we needed to have universal healthcare, what was then the frontlines of the right-wing voice – the radio people, the shock jocks – they were urging their listeners to go out and protest against me and be very outspoken.”
More recently, the alleged Russian interference in the 2016 election – with hacked email accounts and the spread of fake news across the internet – was instrumental in the tide turning against her. Facebook-posted stories, for example, suggested she was close to dying, compounding rumours that she was concealing Parkinson’s disease. “I try not to get too upset about it – although I do, obviously,” she says.
It was not just a defeat for her. “The role that social media now plays in
propagating terrible conspiracies and weird controversies that people end up believing is something that every democracy is going to have to deal with,” she adds, “and I find that very disturbing.” But then future candidates will – hopefully – never face an outlier like Trump. “He believes nothing,” she sighs. “The thing you have to understand about him is he believes nothing. Except … he wants power.”
As blunt as she can be in public – she seems much softer with the cameras turned off – at times she was left punch-drunk by Trump’s aggressive style. “He made some very strategic decisions from the very first day he ran – to scare people about immigrants and migrants and refugees. He made a lot of statements he had no intentions of keeping: build a wall and make Mexico pay for it; we’re going to give you the greatest healthcare. All he did was try to take away healthcare!”
“There are a percentage of voters not comfortable with a woman president.”
Today, Hillary shows none of the scars of that bruising election campaign. She looks stately for her 72 years.
Her ash-blonde hair (which for years became an obsession for the media) is neatly styled. She sports an elegant black-and-white jigsaw-patterned coat, fitted over a cream top, and around her wrist dangles a gold coin bracelet. “She’s not a confider,” one friend notes in the film, but in person there’s nothing remote or icy about her.
She speaks enthusiastically and openly about her upbringing in the Chicago suburb of Park Ridge, where she was raised the eldest of three by her father Hugh, who ran a textile business, and her mother Dorothy, a homemaker. Her parents were United Methodist and politically conservative. “It was an all-white suburb,” she says. “Everybody was pretty much the same. Our fathers were all veterans of World War II. Our mothers all stayed home.”
It was through her church that she first learnt about inequality. “I had a youth minister whose stated mission was to open our eyes and expand our horizon, so he introduced us to a lot of information, starting when I was 13 or 14, about the civil rights movement in our country, about war, about inequality, about racism.” When she was 15, she met civil rights icon Dr Martin Luther King at a rally in Chicago.
Hillary’s formative years were a time of great upheaval in America, and not just within the black community. Women faced huge challenges, as she discovered when she applied for law school. “Part of our challenge … if we wanted to go to law school, as I did, or pursue some other profession, [was that] you knew you had to work really, really hard. You had to outperform all of the men. Any deviation from just putting your head down and doing the work would be seen as a weakness.”
She vividly recalls her law school admission test. “I’m with a handful of other girls, and the whole huge lecture hall at Harvard is only men and just us and the boys are harassing us: ‘You take this test, you get into law school, I’ll get sent to Vietnam, and I’ll die ... how dare you?’ It was clearly meant to rattle us and you just couldn’t respond … You had to be focused.”
While she began dating handsome fellow law student Bill in 1971, Hillary was exactly that – laser-focused, quashing emotions. After graduating, she found her way into the team researching the impeachment of then President Richard Nixon during the Watergate scandal. Her rise coincided with the feminist movement, as abortion was made legal, women were finally allowed to hold credit cards in their own name and the Pregnancy Discrimination Act protected women from being fired for getting pregnant.
To Hillary, feminism’s core message is simple. “That women have the same rights as men,” she says. “That we are equal in the economy, in politics, in society – not better and not worse. And that we should strive for that equality being enshrined in law and in practice.” When she married Bill in 1975, she didn’t take his surname – “A small [I thought] gesture to acknowledge that while I was committed to our union, I was still me,” she later wrote in her book Living History.
While this caused controversy, so did her infamous remarks in 1992 about being a working woman: “I suppose I could have stayed home and baked cookies and had teas.” It didn’t necessarily endear her to stay-at-home mothers, prompting accusations of elitism, but her achievements speak volumes. In 2000, she was elected to the Senate from New York – the first ever former First Lady to hold political office. She later became Secretary of State under President Barack Obama.
Even now, it’s hard to explain why she lost to Trump (not least since she received almost three million more votes). “Gender played a role,” she says. “I was aware it was playing a role – I thought I could overcome it. There are a percentage of voters who just are not comfortable with a woman president … I think that there is a lot of unconscious bias. When I was running, people would say, ‘I’d vote for a woman, just not that woman’ – meaning me.”
Intriguingly, she garnered support from younger women – particularly little girls, desperate to see the first female president – but her relationship to those of her own generation is more complex. “I don’t know why some felt that way and others didn’t, but y’know, that’s politics,” she shrugs. “People can feel any way they want so I don’t have any criticism of that. I do think there are some concerns [among]
older women who still are trying to figure out: ‘Do I want to support a woman for president?’”
The film does suggest the anger many women felt when Hillary stuck by her husband during the Monica Lewinsky scandal, when his affair with the intern led to his impeachment. “I was just devastated. I could not believe it,” she says, almost choked, in the film. Going public with her feelings was never easy for such a private person. “We had challenges like any married couple would have,” she adds. “I’m not gonna go any further than that.”
Yet she and Bill remained together. These days, they live in their well-appointed home in Chappaqua, a small hamlet 50 kilometres north of New York
City. It’s a life of long walks and visits with family. Has she found happiness? “People ask me that all the time: ‘How are you doing?’” she replies. “I say personally I’m great. Having this time with my family, my husband, daughter and particularly my grandchildren is a joy.”
Hillary and Bill’s only child Chelsea, now 40, married investment banker Marc Mezvinsky a decade ago. They have three children: Charlotte, five, Aidan, three, and Jasper, born last July. As with any doting grandparent, they are unquestionably the light of Hillary’s life, a balm for the chaotic world. “There is no substitute for that,” she says. “I think about my grandchildren to go to sleep, because that’s a very peaceful, wonderful, joyous subject.”
Chelsea played an active part in the 2016 election campaign and speaks in the documentary about Hillary being attacked as a bad mother when she was young. “I thankfully remember that being totally ludicrous, to tell me anything about my mom, who is this super-present, super-warm, amazing mom.” Last year, they co-authored
The Book of Gutsy Women: Favorite Stories of Courage and Resilience – a title that could fit them both.
Is Hillary of the belief that the world would be better if run by women?
“My daughter thinks so! My daughter definitely thinks so!” she exclaims.
“I’m not one who says that women are superior human beings, but I do say that women’s experiences, our life experiences and some of our struggles, should be much more represented in every aspect of our societies.” In her eyes, it’s time that America elected a female president. “I think it is way overdue.” Of course, that won’t happen anytime soon
– with Joe Biden now the confirmed Democratic nominee to take on Trump in the 2020 election. For the moment, Hillary simply wants to see a Democrat elected to the Oval Office to “basically stop the bleeding” in a country that’s been left divided by four years of Trump’s rule. “All I care about is defeating Donald Trump.”
Some might call it bitterness, but she points to the bigger picture. “I think damage is being done to our country domestically, and to our leadership and what we stand for internationally,” she says. “Unaccountable power – I don’t care where it’s located, far right, far left – it’s bad. It undermines the free press, and it undermines freedom of thought and assembly, and it destroys institutions and we’re faced with that right now.” She cares, it seems, so much that it hurts.
There’s no sense that Hillary is bowing out of public life. She’s started Onward Together – an organisation dedicated to supporting electoral voting by mail, which she believes will get more people to the polls. It’s about time, she thinks, that Republicans who punched the ballot for Trump four years ago realised that “he’s not really producing what he promised he would”. Her voice takes on a chilly tone. “We’ll see whether people believe that or not.” AWW
Hillary airs on September 16 on SBS and SBS On Demand.
“Having this time with my family … is a joy.”