The Clintons Up Close: A Friendship Between Two Couples Yields Insights Into a Presidency and a Marriage
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As the current presidential campaign winds down and the major-party candidates drearily accentuate the negative, has it dawned at last on Bill Clinton’s critics, and even some of his old political enemies, that the Clinton era wasn’t so bad after all? The former president is now perhaps the most admired political figure in the country. If so, an old adage has been vindicated: truth is the daughter of time, and as a rule Americans tend to think better of their presidents when they’re well out of office and the irritants and errors are forgotten.
The two of us had the good fortune to be witnesses, a quarter of a century ago, at the creation of the Clinton era. As chairman of the National Governors Association, Clinton was first among equals at a conference of local and state officials, American and Italian, who gathered in Florence in the early autumn of 1987 to compare notes on shared problems. The conference stretched over several days in the shadow of the Medici Palace and other matchless landmarks of art and architecture. In that comfortable setting we first witnessed the capacities of Governor Clinton and his wife, Hillary, two very different people who yet seemed to us knit in an extraordinary, and unbreakable, partnership.
It may now be time to share a few intimate memories that afford an unusual vantage into what the Clintons were like, close up, in private settings.
Jane Yoder: We met the Clintons as guests on a trip to Florence in October of 1987. Bill Clinton came bounding up to me in the airport in New York like an overeager puppy dog, as politicians sometimes did while my husband was writing a nationally syndicated column. Since I identified myself as a moderate Republican—a Howard Baker-Lincoln Republican from east Tennessee—I was not likely to be swept off my feet by the attractive Democratic governor from Arkansas. I needn’t have worried. As I soon discovered, Bill Clinton has a preternatural ability to sense mood and read body language. In my psychotherapy practice, I’ve often noticed this sensitivity in patients who have grown up in emotionally troubled homes. To protect themselves, they learn early to read the environment. Seeing my stone face, he quickly adjusted.