Annar Cassam
31 July 2008
opinion
Ten years ago, in May 1998, I had the pleasure of meeting Hillary Clinton, then the First Lady of the US, for a few minutes in Geneva during the World Health Organisation's 50th Anniversary Assembly. She was one of the VIPs invited to celebrate this event at the WHO which had just passed under the leadership of its first woman Director-General, Dr. Gro Haarlem Brundtland, former Prime Minister of Norway.
Mrs. Clinton's presence was in recognition of her unsuccessful,but commendable attempt, during her husband's first presidential term,to convince her country's legislators to introduce some form of medical insurance for American citizens, some 40% of whom had no medical cover then, and still do not, to this day.
During her visit, she was also given a prize at a special ceremony at the Palais des Nations to which I and other colleagues from the the UN system were invited; in my case, as representantive of UNESCO. And it was on this occasion that I first saw and heard Hillary speak in public. She looked, as she still does, much younger than her age, dressed very attractively in a pale pink Oscar de la Renta trouser suit. She was smaller than expected and carried herself with an easy sense of self-assurance.
The perfect presidential trophy wife, I said to myself as I watched her face the packed Palais audience; until she began to speak. Her voice was the first thing I noticed as being distinctly untrophy-like: it was a voice with presence; it immediately commanded one's attention. This voice was also distinct and deliberate in its delivery, and smooth and even of pitch. Then one noticed the content of her speech, the vocabulary and the structured sentences, all spoken with a perfect command of the English language. My ears, jaded from years of listening to boring UN speeches translated to and from six languages, perked up with relief!
She gave a perfectly appropriate talk about her commitment to the principle of medical insurance for her fellow citizens and about the importance of the work of the WHO, especially in developing countries. She thanked the jury for the prize and ended by saying that she had decided, after careful consideration, to give the prize-money(about 40.000 dollars) to a mother-and-child clinic in a village which she had recently visited in the West Lake Region of Tanzania.
In the evening, at the reception given in her honour, I lined up with the rest of the guests to shake her hand and say congratulations. When my turn came, I also added my sincere thanks on behalf of Tanzania. I said I was very touched that she chose this clinic, of all the many she must have visited the world over.
The reaction was immediate and warm; her eyes lit up, her face smiled and, placing her other hand on mine, she told me how much she had enjoyed her visit to Tanzania.
As for the prize, she said it had not been a difficult choice to make and had she had more funds, she would have given them to another such clinic in the country.
I asked her what had so pleased her about Tanzania during her visit; she replied that she and Chelsea, her daughter,had been most impressed by the friendliness of the people, their pride in their country,the peace and stability that was evident inspite of the poverty and of course, she added, the physical beauty of the place. I hoped she would come again on another visit very soon; she replied that she certainly would.
We could have chatted on but there was a long line of guests behind me and so I said goodbye and moved on, with this little exchange and the impression of the woman firmly printed in my memory.
Later on, I thought about her speech of support for the work of the WHO and the UN system, as well as her obvious affection for Tanzania and wondered how she would have explained the Clinton Administration's failure to resume her own country's membership of UNESCO. The US, a founder member of this institution, had withdrawn from it in anger in 1983, during the dark days of the Reagan presidency when the anti-UN agenda of the Heritage Foundatio had gripped the minds of policy-makers in Washington.
(As it happened, the US resumed its membership thanks to George W. Bush who,for reasons only known to himself, suddenly announced the news in March 2003 just before the invasion of Iraq.)
I even began planning a trip to Washington to interview her and ask her how she had resolved the contradiction, so evident to me, between her concern for mothers and children in a remote corner of East Africa and her husband's bombing of Iraq which was leading to the death of thousands of very young Iraqi children.
The subject of Iraqi children dying at the staggering rate of more than 700 a week as a result of US-UK bombs and severe economic sanctions (imposed by the West through the UN) could not be avoided by the international community in Geneva during the course of 1998. The UN Humanitarian Coordinator in Baghdad had given briefings on this horrendous situation and colleagues from some major NGOs were saying the same thing.
On this subject, I would also have asked Mrs. Clinton to explain what her husband was doing in Iraq anyway and why he and Prime Minister Blair were continuing this so-called peacetime bombing of Iraq in 1998, a full seven years AFTER the end of the first Gulf War waged by the Republican George Bush the Father.
And last but not least, I would have asked for her reaction to the words uttered on American TV in 1996 by the then US Ambassador to the UN, Madeleine Albright,herself a mother and grand-mother, when she was questioned (on the programme Sixty Minutes) the Clinton policy of bombing Iraq in order "to contain" Saddam.
"We have heard that half a million Iraqi children have died.....thats more than died at Hiroshima. Is the price worth it?" asked the TV journalist.
Albright's answer should surely be engraved on her tombstone: "This is a very hard choice but yes, we think the price is worth it."
As we all know, Mrs. Albright was subsequently appointed her country's first woman Secretary of State by President Clinton.
Needless to say, these questions remained in the realm of my imagination. But later that year, as events moved on for the Clintons in the form of the Lewinsky scandal, my brief contact with Hillary made me follow that story with particular interest.
The President of the world's only super-power became a laughing stock across the globe as that pathetic saga unfolded; poor Hillary looked crushed and humiliated in the little that one saw of her on TV. Then, in December 1998, there followed what must surely be one of the most degrading episodes in recorded presidential history, namely the attempt to organise a vote in the House of Representatives aimed at indicting President Clinton for perjury and obstruction of justice in the investigation of his relations with this White House intern. For months before that, we had been spared no detail in an epic inquiry carried out with rottweiler-like tenacity and relish by the Special Invesigator,the Republican Kenneth Starr.
Watching her husband being excoriated all day and every day must have been an ordeal for Hillary , to put it mildly. Bill Clinton survived the vote but his credibility and reputation disintegrated over the following months as his presidency limped to its close in December 1999.
During the scandal period, many journalists had asked why Hillary had kept silent; why she had not left her husband,nor booted him out for the disgrace he had brought on their marriage AND on the highest office of the land.
She did not answer, she did not explain; she stood by her man and she saw it through. And after leaving the White house, she did not get angry or bitter; she got to be US Senator for New York and a very good one at that, by all accounts.
One does not have to be a psycho-analyst to see that the wounds caused by the Lewinsky affair to Hillary's pride as a woman, as the First Lady and as a partner in her and her husband's joint career in politics came to be the main motivation for a new career for herself after leaving Washington.
As Carl Bernstein explains in his biography of Hillary, "Woman in Charge", in marrying Bill so soon after univeristy, she gave up the chance of an independent career for herself where her considerable intellectual gifts could have found fulfilment. However, if she chose to hitch her wagon to Bill's political star, it was within a partnership of equals where their combined talents were to be harnessed in order to serve a shared ambition to reach the highest spheres in US politcs.
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