Fast-forward twenty years, to early 1991. I’d gotten what I’d always dreamed of—a loving family, a fulfilling career, and a life of service to others—plus more that I had never imagined. I was the First Lady of Arkansas. Every part of that statement would have surprised my college-age self. Now my husband was thinking about running for President of the United States. I didn’t know if he could win—George H. W. Bush’s approval rating surpassed 90 percent after winning the Gulf War—but I was sure the country needed him to try. The Reagan years had rebuilt America’s confidence but sapped its soul. Greed was good. Instead of a nation defined by “habits of the heart,” we had become a land of “sink or swim.” Bush had said some of the right things, calling for a “kinder, gentler” country and celebrating the generosity of our civil society as “a thousand points of light.” But conservatives used that as an excuse for government to do even less to help the less fortunate. It’s easy to forget what this was like. Now that the Republican Party has moved so far to the extreme right in the years since, the 1980s have taken on a retrospective halo of moderation by comparison. And it’s true that Reagan gave amnesty to undocumented immigrants, and Bush raised taxes and signed the Americans with Disabilities Act. But their trickle-down economic policies exploded the deficit and hurt working families. I thought they were wrong on most issues, and still do.
In those days, I still read Life magazine, and in the February 1991 issue, I came across something that caught me totally by surprise. It was an article by Lee Atwater, the Republican mastermind who’d helped elect Reagan and Bush with slash-and-burn campaigns that played to our country’s worst impulses and ugliest fears. He was the man behind the infamous race-baiting “Willie Horton” ad in 1988, the man who believed in winning at any cost. He was also mortally ill with brain cancer and not yet forty years old.
Atwater’s piece in Life magazine read like a death-bed conversion. The bare-knuckled political brawler was having an attack of conscience. And despite coming from someone with whom I disagreed about virtually everything, it was like reading my own thoughts printed out on the page. Here’s what he wrote that made such a big impression on me:
Long before I was struck with cancer, I felt something stirring in American society. It was a sense among the people of the country, Republicans and Democrats alike, that something was missing from their lives—something crucial. I was trying to position the Republican Party to take advantage of it. But 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 ’80s 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 feel 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 don’t know who will lead us through the ’90s, but they must be made to speak to this spiritual vacuum at the heart of American society—this tumor of the soul.
This was exactly how I felt! Atwater was getting to a question that had been gnawing at me for years. Why, I wondered, in the wealthiest, most powerful country on earth, with the oldest, most successful democracy, did so many Americans feel like we lacked meaning in our individual lives and in our collective national life? What was missing, it seemed to me, was a sense that our lives were part of some greater effort, that we were all connected to one another and that each of us had a place and a purpose.
This was part of why I thought Bill should run for President. Filling America’s “spiritual vacuum” wasn’t a job for government, but it would help to have strong, caring leadership. Bill was starting to think about how to root a campaign in the values of opportunity, responsibility, and community. Eventually he’d call it a “new covenant,” a biblical concept. He hoped it would speak to this feeling, articulated so well by Atwater, that something important was missing in the heart of American life.
I cut out the Life magazine article and showed it to Bill.
(I wonder what Lee Atwater would say about Donald Trump. Would he admire the chutzpah of a campaign that stopped blowing dog whistles and spoke its bigotry in plain English for all to hear? Or would he see Trump as the embodiment of everything he hated about the eighties: one big tumor of the American soul?)
Fast-forward again, this time to April 1993. My eighty-two-year-old father was lying in a coma in St. Vincent’s Hospital in Little Rock. It had been two weeks since he suffered a massive stroke. All I wanted to do was keep sitting by his bedside, hold his hand, smooth his hair, and wait and hope for him to open his eyes or squeeze my fingers. But nobody knew how long his coma would last, and Chelsea had to get back to school in Washington. For reasons passing understanding, I also had a commitment I couldn’t get out of: a speech to fourteen thousand people at the University of Texas at Austin.
I was, to put it mildly, a wreck. On the plane to Austin, I leafed through the little book I keep of quotations, Scripture, and poems, trying to figure out what I could possibly say. Then I turned the page and saw the cutout from Lee Atwater’s Life article. Something missing from our lives, a spiritual vacuum—this is what I would talk about. It wouldn’t be the most articulate or coherent speech I’d ever given, but at least it would come straight from my wounded heart. I began sketching out a new appeal for the “mutuality of respect” I’d talked about in my graduation speech at Wellesley, a return to de Tocqueville’s “habits of the heart.”
When I got to Texas, I spoke about the alienation, despair, and hopelessness I saw building just below the surface of American life. I quoted Atwater. And to his question—“Who will lead us out of this spiritual vacuum?”—I answered, “all of us.” We needed to improve government and strengthen our institutions, and that’s what the new Clinton administration was trying to do, but it wouldn’t be enough. “We need a new politics of meaning,” I said, “a new ethos of individual responsibility and caring.” And that would take all of us doing our part to build “a society that fills us up again and makes us feel that we are part of something bigger than ourselves.” I cited de Tocqueville and talked about the importance of networks of family, friendship, and communities that are the glue that hold us together.
There had been so much change in our country, a lot of it positive but also much of it profoundly unsettling. The social and cultural upheaval of the 1960s and 1970s, followed by the economic and technological shifts of the 1980s and 1990s, with the rise of automation, income inequality, and the information economy, all of it seemed to be contributing to a spiritual hollowing out. “Change will come whether we want it or not, and what we have to do is to try and make change our friend, not our enemy,” I said.