My uncles and aunts, my grandfather and grandmother are buried in Nat Cemetaries. Dad has a Bronze Star. Grandpa was gassed during WWI. My Uncle Chuck is buried at a National Cementary somewhere up in upstate Oregon along with Aunt Maureen. Dad was in WWII, Korea and VN. Our family went all over the States and the world as he was a USAF officer. Was it fun? Sometimes. But I remember to troopsupporter: My father and mother are in the Riverside National Cemetary, along with my Uncle Cal and Aunt Clare, and when his only sister sent a telegram to Mom while Dad was in VN and Mom's first thought was he'd been killed. My Uncle Dick will also go to a National Cemetary when he goes. My old "vaudville jokes" might seem stupid to you, but when I was 10 in Frankfurt, Germany, in 1965, that's the already 20 some year old radio shows we got on Airmed Forces Networks. Stars and Stripes was our only newspaper. We had no real clue as young pre-teens/teenagers of what was happening in the U.S. in the mid-60s. We were already worrying about our dads having to go to VN, but we didn't know why. I do remember reading the Stars and Stripes and the long, damn discussion about the "shape of the table" that the North VN argued about.. My partner's father was a flame thrower on Tarawa. Her uncle was a prisoner in Germany. We had a family friend that would never leave his house without a couple of pieces of bread in his pocket, in case. A girl in high school lost her dad, as a pilot, over VN in 1965. They've never found him. Yes, my family also fought in the Rev War and the Civ War. I don't think my patriotism needs to be questioned anymore. I wear my dad's USAAF Bombiader ring every day. I drive back to SoCal and stop at the Riverside National Cemetary every time. But, I believe we had no business in Iraq. They had nothing to do with 9/11. Were they an awful government? Of course. But, I don't see us invading N Korea or Cuba, 90 miles off our coast. We should have put the 150+ troops in Afganistan and gotten that rat bastard Bin Laden. I suspect, however, he's dead. P.S. I used to work for an insurance company that services the military community. Some younger coworkers have been redeployed for their second and third times. My jokes are old-fashioned, because I didn't hear "new"stuff in the 60s. I listened to Armed Forces Radio shows that were from the 30s and 40s. Still, pull my finger makes me giggle and I do like Beavis and Butthead and "Two and a Half Men." But my male relatives and our families have sacrificed. I went to a junior high in Frankfurt on Anne Frank Strasse that had a bomb scare, evacuating all of us, in 1967. The interesting part was watching and listening to the black classmates, girls, that were sitting in a circle listening and singing along with a little record player to The Supremes. "Stop, In the Name of Love . . ." I wouldn't trade those 40 year old memories.
Not Really Feeling It
A new book tries to make sense of the gripping, grating psychodrama that is the Clintons' marriage.
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Never mind the man she's married to, Hillary Clinton isn't big on feelings. "Unthinking emotion," she wrote a friend in college, "has always been pitiful to me." In "For Love of Politics," Sally Bedell Smith's new book on Bill and Hillary Clinton's marriage during their White House years, the First Lady is a woman determined not to surrender to emotion, even when her husband and the nation have. While President Clinton idles away an hour hugging his way through a rope line at a Democratic Leadership Council fund-raiser, his wife, backstage, waits patiently to depart. As the president admits on TV to an affair with Monica Lewinsky, the First Lady waits in the White House solarium and greets staffers with a smile. Chelsea, the dutiful daughter, tries hard to mimic mom: "Emotions aren't rational," she tells friends.
Now Senator Clinton is moving toward the Democratic presidential nomination, and emotions have little place in her campaign. Even discussions about her marriage, that gripping, grating psychodrama, come off as cerebral and qualified—when the candidate and her staff choose to have them at all. The Clintons' marriage is important, they say, because it gave her the unparalleled experience of seeing a presidency up close. Except not "up close" in the dynastic sense; Clinton, they say, is an accomplished senator and an independent woman. Except not "independent" in the separate-lives/marriage-of-convenience sense; theirs, they say, is in every way a real marriage. Either way, the Clintonites contend, all that is irrelevant now.
Smith does not agree. A biographer who's written on Pamela Harriman, Princess Diana and Jackie and Jack Kennedy, she has a keen instinct for history made inside of marriages. She knows the irrational is often most important. Her book is narrower than other recent Clinton biographies, which deal with the nuts and bolts of her career, but is perhaps more relevant. Certainly, it is more subversive. Homing in on "the push and pull" between them and their love of politics, Smith presents a story Clinton isn't eager to remember: how her marriage made and then nearly wrecked her career.
Smith's Hillary Clinton wants only to be a public woman, a wonk and a warrior for the Clintons' noble causes. Arriving in the White House, she and her husband make her status clear; staffers call her "the Supreme Court," mindful that the First Lady had the final say. She strives for cool detachment, but her husband's coterie sees the cracks. They are "wimps," she tells them in tirades, men who "don't have balls" and "don't know how to fight." (Neither Clinton talked to Smith.) Quickly, her real target emerges, the president himself. "She knew how to push his buttons," a senior official tells Smith.
The president seeks comfort, often in the wrong places. Smith dispenses with the global do-gooder Bill Clinton of recent years in favor of the old rake known so well in the '90s. He is dazzled by Harriman, his septuagenarian ambassador to France—"seventy-five years old, and she has really nice legs"—and he fiddles with the seating chart at a New York City fund-raiser to sit next to the fawning actress Sharon Stone. Hillary hears talk about alleged infidelities, but takes "refuge in denial," even in the storm of Lewinsky. "She knew intellectually there was a problem, an addiction," a close friend tells Smith, "but she still believed he could never be that insane."
Some of Smith's juiciest material concerns the supporting cast trying to make sense of Hillary and Bill's dynamic. Most intriguing is the portrait of Chelsea, informed by rare reporting inside her circle of friends. Smith's Chelsea is a serious, self-conscious girl who worries over her diet and appearance and struggles in school during the dark days of impeachment. She adopts her parents' worst coping mechanisms, feeling the pressure to be "always grown up." During Monica, "she couldn't say, 'This is awful and I hate you'," one friend tells Smith. "She had her image to preserve."
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