HILLARY - IT NEVER ENDS
By armen pandola
A very good friend of mine, a generation older, hated Hillary Clinton. He was a very liberal, progressive man who was one of the fairest people I knew - except where Hillary Clinton was concerned. Strangely, it wasn't only men I knew who hated her; women were the biggest haters. They hated a fellow female who had done more for empowering women than any public figure I have known.
It all started with a name. Why women take their husbands' last name is something I have never understood. Hillary and I were each married in the late 1970s and my spouse kept her own name with my wholehearted support. But Hillary was married to the soon-to-be Arkansas Governor and her decision became political. So, when Bill Clinton became Governor, then lost the next election, Hillary was told that part of the reason he lost was her name - so she changed it to Hillary Rodham Clinton. In many ways, in coming years, the fact that she was married to Bill Clinton hurt more than helped her, but her haters never saw it that way.
HULU's new documentary HILLARY directed by Nanette Burstein, traces its subject's life from her growing up in Chicago to excelling in school and becoming part of the first generation of women to be admitted into America's elite colleges - in her case, Yale Law School. The idea that Hillary got anything because of her relationship to Bill is quickly demolished by the facts. Arkansas in the late 1970s was NOT a very liberal place, but Bill tells us that the law school where he taught offered her a job on the spot and that, later, when she worked for the prestigious Rose Law Firm, she was its first female partner.
While Hillary and Bill are both interviewed (separately), many others who were present at the events described in HILLARY were also interviewed. The picture it paints of the most visible women in American political life since Eleanor Roosevelt is clear - Hillary loves three things: her daughter Chelsea, her husband Bill and politics. Not the kind of politics of smoke-filled backrooms, but the new politics of inclusion and neoliberalism. And she was a very important part of Bill Clinton's team - in fact, he would say that with them, you 'buy one, get one free.'
In the 1980s in Arkansas, she was appointed by her Governor-husband to an education reform task force and was able to get support for a state-wide change in education that more than doubled expenditures. So, when the Clintons got to Washington in 1993, promising to reform the incredibly expensive and less than efficient health insurance system, Hillary was the obvious choice to head that task force. As Bill relates, they discovered that Arkansas was far less resistant to having its chief executive's wife in a position of power than Washington.
The documentary is full of facts and stories that were unknown, like the way that Bill, at first, lied to Hillary about his affair with a White House intern, then admitted it when he had no choice. Placing these events into a time frame is also important. The Monica Lewinski scandal and Clinton's impeachment for it was part of the 1998 midterm election issues and, for the first time ever, the incumbent President's party gained seats in both the House and Senate. People didn't like the fact that the Republicans were impeaching a President for having an affair. After the election, Ken Starr issued his Whitewater Report, finding that years of investigation and millions of dollars and reams of print had been expended for nothing - there was no Whitewater or Travelgate or Foster murder scandal. The Clintons had done nothing wrong. But, as Hillary points out, what does that matter - most people thought that they must have done something wrong given all the screaming headlines about it. Years later, when FBI Director Comey, just a few weeks before the 2016 election issued a letter to Congress saying that he was re-opening the whole Hillary email investigation because new emails were found, she went from having a commanding lead over Trump to a virtual tie. Two days before the election, Comey issued a statement saying, 'Nevermind,' but the damage was done.
That email fiasco is one of the telling incidents in the documentary and offers a clue as to who Hillary is. Those new emails came to light from the computer of the apt-named Anthony Weiner who was being investigated for unwanted sexual texting. Weiner was married to Huma Abedin, Hillary's longtime assistant. When the news broke, Huma was devastated, hysterical because it looked like her ex-husband had tanked Hillary's presidential campaign. Instead of firing her at once or blaming her, Hillary spent the day trying to comfort her assistant and friend. Is there any doubt that if a similar incident had happened in the Trump camp, the boss would have used his trademark response - you're fired!
It is not shocking that Hillary is somewhat reticent when dealing with the Press given how often it has cried wolf then when all the allegations were dropped whispered, sorry. More than 20 years after the Whitewater fiasco, the Press was once again making something out of nothing - Hillary's emails. The fact is that many people in government used or kept their private email account - Colin Powell being the most prominent. More importantly, what were those emails going to show? Thousands of them were examined and they contained - nothing. And today, many prominent members of the Trump White House, including his daughter and son-in-law use private email servers.
HILLARY is not an apologist film for Clinton stalwarts. It reveals how Hillary can be very righteous in her judgments. Often, she says things that are very easy to take out of context - like Trump's deplorables. What the documentary is spot on about is the role of women in our society and how that has changed in the last 50 years. Hillary is a great subject for such a film since she was one of the best educated, most articulate and powerful women of her times. If the world has treated her less than fairly because of her gender - and is there any doubt that it has - then, imagine what it is like for the rest of women.
In a telling moment early in the series, Hillary and Bill separately relate that in 1992, Bill received a call from a person who worked for then-President George Bush. In 1992, Bush was thought to be unbeatable in his campaign to be re-elected President. The US had just won the first Iraqi War and Bush's poll numbers were high. The person warned Bill not to run, saying that they would destroy him if he did. Hillary told Bill that if he could be put off by a threat, then he didn't deserve to be President.
And so the ‘vast right-wing conspiracy’ started. You think that's silly? Think about it or better, turn on your TV and watch. To paraphrase Margot Channing, fasten your seat belt, it's been a bumpy life.