From the Capitol dais, the brilliant poet Amanda Gorman, only twenty-two but wise beyond her years, read from her poem “The Hill We Climb”:
We’ve seen a force that would shatter our nation, rather than share it,
Would destroy our country if it meant delaying democracy.
And this effort very nearly succeeded.
But while democracy can be periodically delayed,
It can never be permanently defeated.
They were stirring, much-needed words to hear just two weeks after the attack. Listening, I hoped the people who stormed our seat of government would be held accountable under the law, Republican elected officials would stand with their Democratic colleagues to repudiate Trump and his enablers, and the country would move on.
Sadly, that’s not what happened. Yes, hundreds of insurrectionists have been tried and convicted. But after a brief moment of hesitation, Republicans rallied around Trump and his alternative-reality narrative. Healing, moving on, growing stronger together? Not a chance.
President Biden called the 2020 campaign a battle for the soul of America. Today the battle continues, fiercer than ever.
ONE IS SILVER AND THE OTHER’S GOLD
Labor Day 2022. We were all a little wobbly that Monday morning—Ann, Bonnie, Judy, Patsy, Allida, and I—as we stepped aboard a vintage wooden motorboat in the waters of Lake Geneva, Wisconsin. We were on the last leg of a nonstop three-day extravaganza celebrating Ann’s seventy-fifth birthday. There were cocktails and brunches, a costume dance party and a sunset dinner cruise. And, because Ann and I are mission-driven kindred spirits, there were also informative and inspiring conversations led by and about women who stepped up to lead. Our final-day excursion was meant to give us a look at the property on Williams Bay where Ann is building the eight-acre Women’s Leadership Center that has been her passion project for several years. Given the choice between sleeping in or rallying at sunrise, we rallied. We zipped up fleece jackets in the morning chill and shoved off. Our friend was making her dream come true, and we were there to cheer her on.
I was seven years old when I first met Ann in our shared hometown of Park Ridge, Illinois, about sixty miles southeast of Lake Geneva. Ann was the tall, smart girl with brown hair who went to a different elementary school but connected with me in ballet class at the Dorothy Lykle Dance Studio and in Sunday school and confirmation classes at First United Methodist Church, just a six-block walk from my home. As teenagers, Ann, Judy, and I bused together to summer church camp on the shores of Lake Geneva and did all the camp things that make for gauzy childhood memories. We swam off the little dock at the sandy beach. We sat cross-legged on the floor of the candlelit lodge to sing hymns (yes, “Kumbaya” was one) and ponder with our youth minister, the Reverend Don Jones, all the pressing questions of an idealistic youth: God, justice, peace, and civil rights. In our cabin at night, stacked up in bunk beds and waiting for sleep to come, we whispered our secrets and our dreams, which included living lives of service—the “do all the good you can” ethos of Methodism founder John Wesley—that Reverend Jones was helping us to imagine.
Now, some sixty years later, we were back at that lake, back together—along with three other high school friends, Bonnie, Patsy, and Hardye, and Allida, a historian and Memphis native who seamlessly fit right into our gang almost a decade earlier, when she supported my 2008 presidential campaign and interviewed many of my longtime friends. Summer 2022 proved difficult for Hardye, who was in treatment for lung cancer. When she woke on Sunday feeling ill, she skipped the rest of the weekend itinerary to head home to Chicago. On the boat that Monday morning, the rest of us worried over how frail Hardye seemed. We commiserated about our aging bodies and reminisced about old times, feeling blessed to still have one another. Then something so familiar caught my eye. “There’s our dock!” I yelled, fumbling for my phone to get a photo of the nondescript speck on shore. (It hadn’t yet occurred to me that we could ask the boat captain, Ann’s friend Charles, to pull us closer for a good look.) While Ann, Judy, and I giddily snapped pictures, I asked Ann, “Do you remember the Prell?” She laughed. “How could I forget?” Prell was the iconic shampoo of our teen years. At the end of a camp day of sports, singing, swimming, and sunning, we girls would lather up our hair with Prell and jump off the dock to rinse the shampoo out in the lake. I shudder now to think of the environmental implications, but we thought ourselves hilariously practical back then.
Our memories of days past were framed that Labor Day weekend by Ann’s plans for nurturing the women leaders and explorers of tomorrow. She had dubbed the three-day celebration “Close Encounters of a New Kind,” a shout-out to her favorite movie, Steven Spielberg’s Close Encounters of the Third Kind. Ann had cleverly mined the 1977 science-fiction classic for a party theme—the film’s “We Are Not Alone” tagline was printed on rainbow cards that decorated the table settings—and an excuse to have us dress up in futuristic, space-themed costumes. Our birthday girl was stunning in a red jumpsuit just like those in the movie. The ever-sunny Patsy, a retired speech and language pathologist, dressed as the center of our solar system. Bonnie, the stylish artist of our pack and designer of some of my favorite pieces of jewelry, dressed as an astronaut—albeit one accessorized with a perfectly cut blazer. And me? In a flowy purple robe decorated with gold stars, I guess you could say I was dressed as an interplanetary wizard. (Ann decided I looked like Harry Potter’s Professor McGonagall—close enough!) Singing along with a fabulous cover band, we danced in a circle to vintage hits like Stevie Wonder’s “Signed, Sealed, Delivered (I’m Yours)” like we were sixteen again.
We are not alone. The double entendre resonated with me—and not just because, like Ann, I’ve always been fascinated by the possibility of other life-forms in the universe. (When I was thirteen, and excited about President John F. Kennedy’s space mission, I wrote NASA to inquire about being an astronaut. They passed. No girls allowed, they wrote.) It resonated because there on the dance floor, encircled by just a few of the women who have blessed my life with their friendship, my heart was full. I saw once again how, throughout the wild ride of my life—whether it was on steep uphills or even steeper downfalls, in front of energizing crowds or soul-sucking critics—I have never been alone.
Bill was in the middle of a press conference with White House reporters in December 1997 when he took a question about his former advisors and allies, George Stephanopoulos and Dick Morris, who were publicly writing off Bill’s second term as a lame-duck snooze. Bill jokingly replied that, as President Harry Truman famously said, “if you want a friend in Washington you need to get a dog,” and then announced that we had decided to name our new chocolate Lab puppy Buddy, after Bill’s favorite uncle who had recently died.
Politics, especially in the nation’s capital, can be a lonely, backstabbing business. Sure, you have a huge contacts file of people you identify as friends—supporters, donors, advisors, and celebrities—who are generous with their time and talents and will always take your call. But it’s an emotionally fraught irony of public life that, even in a crowded room of these well-intentioned friends, you can feel lonely. In that room, you’re a symbol, a vessel for others’ aspirations, activism, and investments. I don’t say this with any regret. It’s just reality. It’s what people like Bill and me sign up for when we step up to lead change-making. In that crowded room, you’re genuinely grateful for the people who support you. You feel real affection for them (most of them, anyway). But in that room, you’re “on.” Always on. Projecting confidence, optimism, and impeccable affability. It’s the complex, flawed—and sometimes just plain exhausted—human being inside who is left feeling unseen. And, from time to time, even lonely.
In an interview with Essence three years before her death in 2014, Maya Angelou described once being asked by another magazine to do a photo shoot for its special issue on friendship. “The editor wanted me to bring Oprah,” Maya said, going on to explain why she objected. “I have 30 years on Oprah. She calls me her friend, her mother, all that. I am very close to her in a motherly way.” Maya told the editor she would instead be photographed with the three dear women—none of them famous—whom she called her “sister friends.” “Most people really don’t become friends. They become deep and serious acquaintances.” Sister friends are different. They know your spirit. Your values coincide. They see the real you and love you anyway.
This is the story of my sister friends. From my childhood and young adulthood. From my hippie days at Wellesley College and Yale Law School, and my earliest days of building a career and family. Friends whose bonds were forged in the white-hot crucible of presidential politics. And some I found only recently, when a lot of us who are older might give up on making new friends. I cannot fit in these pages all the stories of all the women dear to me. But I hope to capture, in these few snapshots, the special magic of girlfriends that’s possible at any age—and no matter who you are—if your heart is open and generous and willing to do the work of meaningful friendship.
Decades ago, when I was preparing to move our family from the Arkansas governor’s mansion to the White House, several people warned me against inviting new people into my life. The power and fame that attach to the White House attract opportunists and sycophants, I was told. Trust no one. Beginning a friendship is a trust fall. You make yourself vulnerable, tip backward, and trust that the other person will be at your back to catch you before you fall. I had already encountered a fair share of ulterior motives in Arkansas politics and fully expected even more in the nation’s capital. But it seemed an unnatural way to live, shutting yourself off. And so I kept making friends all along—in the White House, among the hardworking and fun-loving women staffers known as Hillaryland, and on the campaign trail. There, I happily found that high-stakes politics, starting with Bill’s 1992 campaign for president and going through my races for the Senate and White House, introduced me to amazing women who, over our time in the trenches together, became lasting friends.
Women who campaigned for and with me, raised money, won over voters, and gave public talks about me even though they were afraid at first. Women whose homes I’ve stayed in, whose breakfast tables have seen me in my robe and slippers, and with whom I’ve traveled the world, long after the campaigns ended. We remain involved in each other’s lives and each other’s causes. I cannot imagine my life any other way.
Old friends, new friends, sister friends. Together, these special women are one big reason, even before our beloved dog Buddy (and then Seamus and Tally and Maisie), I was never lacking for loving support, nor shy about giving it.
Even in Washington, D.C.
Cheryl, Patsy, and I first met in the first-grade Sunday school class taught by my mother, Dorothy, at First United Methodist Church of Park Ridge. Cheryl, who is now a writer (and author of a wise guide to grandparenting, Good to Be Grand: Making the Most of Your Grandchild’s First Year), once confessed to me that it was only my mother who made an impression: “I don’t remember you at all from Sunday school,” she said, “but your mother was fantastic!” The following year, when I was in second grade at Eugene Field Elementary School, I joined a Brownie troop with another eight-year-old named Sukie. In the school cafeteria, the moms who volunteered as troop leaders, with Sukie’s mother, Pixie, at the helm, taught us the words to the famous Girl Scout song: “Make new friends, but keep the old. One is silver, and the other’s gold.” (I still sing those lines to Sukie whenever I see her now.) Sukie would come to my house to play and marvel at how our thick, floor-length drapes made our living room look like the inside of Disney’s Cinderella castle. It was the highest compliment to my father and his small drapery business.
Sixth grade (1958–59) was the game changer for all of us. That was the year when a boy named Dennis and I traded dog tags. It was the fad back then to wear a personalized aluminum dog tag on a bead chain, and if a boy liked you—like liked you—he asked you to trade tags and tie a knot in your chain to signify that you were “spoken for.” And so it happened that sixth grade was also when Sukie found out how fast I could run. I had always been sporty—softball, swimming, tennis, ice skating—but when someone noticed the knot in my chain one morning before the first bell, I took off running before anyone could get a look at Dennis’s name on the tag. Sukie, who made her career in administration at NASA, still laughs about it: “You took off like a bullet!” Judy, a retired teacher who was, so many years later, in the Lake Geneva motorboat with us, laughs about it, too. By high school, Dennis had eyes only for her. They married in 1969. So, she ended up with his dog tag.
Even more monumentally, sixth grade was when a magnetic girl named Voda—but we called her Betsy—moved with her family to Park Ridge. She landed in Mrs. King’s classroom with Sukie and me. “Voda…” Sukie wondered, sounding out the new girl’s exotic name. “Could that be Russian?” (Turns out it meant “water” in Slavic languages.) We were dazzled. Big eyes, brown curly hair. Smart, funny, kind, and mischievous, Betsy quickly became one of Mrs. King’s favorites. And mine. Betsy and I were joined at the hip in class, on the playground, and in and out of each other’s houses. We would walk to the Pickwick Theatre on Saturday afternoons, once sitting mesmerized through Lover Come Back, starring Doris Day and Rock Hudson, three times in a single day. After the movies we’d order olive burgers from the nearby Pickwick Restaurant, which I loved so much I later took ABC’s Barbara Walters there for an interview while I was promoting my book Living History. When vanity struck (which was often enough) and I didn’t want to wear the Coke-bottle glasses I needed to correct my terrible nearsightedness, it was Betsy who led me through the school corridors or around town like a Seeing Eye friend.
With our bigger friend group, we delighted in birthday parties and sleepovers. The girls would tease me—and still do!—for being asleep already whenever the slumber-party fun turned to practicing hairstyles, which would be a lifelong conundrum for me (the hairstyling, not the sleeping). One time, Sukie staged a “surprise kidnap breakfast,” where she conspired with all our mothers for permission to come to our houses on a Saturday morning, wake us up, and whisk each of us off to her house for pancakes. The catch: We couldn’t change out of our sleep clothes; we could only brush our teeth. I’d gone to bed with rollers in my hair, and so, with an embarrassed shriek, off I went to breakfast in pajamas and curlers.
It was Betsy who nudged me to take chances and follow the call to activism that I felt deep inside. The day after the 1960 presidential election between Nixon and Kennedy, our junior high social studies teacher, Mr. Kenvin, came to school with bruises, telling us that he’d been beaten at a polling place in Chicago when he tried to monitor the poll workers. That got Betsy and me riled up. We went to the pay phone outside the school cafeteria and called the mayor’s office, asking to speak to Mayor Daley about what had happened to Mr. Kenvin. The very nice woman who answered said she would be sure to give the mayor our message. About a week later, Betsy, always the instigator, showed me a full-page newspaper ad looking for volunteers to fact-check voter rolls in Chicago by going door-to-door. We told our parents we were going to the movies and then hopped a bus to downtown Chicago to the Drake Hotel, where we were handed sheets of voter information and then assigned to two strangers with cars—Betsy to one, me to the other. We were dropped off in different Chicago precincts to knock on doors, alone, and verify that people were really living where they were registered. Did I mention we were thirteen years old? Only by the grace of God did the two of us make it back to the Drake that day, having done our duty to democracy and Mr. Kenvin. Our parents were not impressed and grounded us both.
After high school, adulthood inevitably scattered us. Many in our circle went to college and settled back in Illinois. Our friend Kathleen took to the skies as an airline stewardess (the correct term at the time) for Continental and flew many times accompanying young American soldiers back and forth from service in Vietnam. I was the only one to cross the Allegheny River for college and then stay on the East Coast. I spent four wonderful years at Wellesley College, a world-class women’s college in Massachusetts. After attending a large public high school, I savored the chance to study with young women who, like me, cared about getting a great education, even if I didn’t know yet what I would do with it. The greatest gift of those four years, though, was bonding with women who would become lifelong friends. Together we’ve celebrated weddings, babies, new jobs, promotions, and retirements. The women of Wellesley have been generous with their friendship and support through all my campaigns—some expat classmates even rounded up American voters overseas—and my nonprofit work. Every five years, we hold a reunion on campus (except for our twenty-fifth, which I was delighted to host at the White House), and I attended our fifty-fifth in 2024. Each time, I am impressed by and grateful for my classmates whose friendships have sustained me over the years.
Back in the day, while I shared new adventures with new friends on Wellesley’s faraway campus, Betsy was the glue that held our hometown crew together. She was our ringleader, the one who tracked every birthday and milestone and would gather the gang for pizza or a drink whenever I was back home in Illinois. Every five years, on the occasion of our high school reunions, Cheryl and Ann alternated hosting a pre-party for that core group of us Park Ridge girls (and the lone guy in our pack, Ricky, whom I’ve known since we walked home from kindergarten together). Over time, those gatherings expanded to include husbands. Betsy and hers, Tom, drove almost seven hundred miles through the night to stand beside me as Bill and I wed in 1975 in Fayetteville, Arkansas. Then came children. And, eventually, one Arkansas governor.
As Bill climbed higher in elective politics—state attorney general, governor, president—my girlfriends found every way they could to help. Kathleen threw a hometown fundraiser, gathering some of our 1992 campaign’s earliest donations, some of which were as high as $500, a lot of money in those days. I remember feeling so humbled that my friends, who were building their own lives and families, could be so generous. Others stepped out of their comfort zones to canvass door-to-door. Betsy, as our self-described “herder of cats” who organized everyone’s interest in volunteering, made sure there were friendly, familiar faces at as many of my own campaign stops as possible. “She needs us,” Betsy told the gang. She knew that even before I did.
The faces that I knew and loved so well were there in the crowd in Little Rock on election night 1992 and then in Washington for Bill’s first inauguration in January 1993. Patsy and Cheryl remember seeing me at the inaugural concert at the Lincoln Memorial, separated from my friends by a wall of bulletproof glass. “That’s when I knew that your life had changed and things would never be the same,” Patsy told me many years later. Those big events with their massive crowds were a blur for me, but there was one clear takeaway: I would have to be extra intentional (with Betsy’s organizational and planning help) about staying connected to the people whose friendships I treasured.
I hosted a proper “Park Ridge Girls” celebration in July 1993, when I invited the whole group to the White House. I was still finding my legs as First Lady and as a mom trying to make that grand historic residence a home for Chelsea. What a treat it was to see the place through my old friends’ wide eyes. Everything was new and exciting to them: the pastry kitchen, the family theater, the florist’s studio. Patsy was even taking pictures of doorknobs! For me, the familiar and comfortable were what mattered most that girls’ weekend. My friends weren’t buzzing about any of the controversies already nipping at me (the West Wing office, my role putting together a universal health care bill, so-called Travelgate). We were all just excited to be together, like old times. Talking about our kids and how hard it was to get them to do chores. (Try enforcing chores when there’s a whole household staff at your teenager’s service! To Chelsea’s credit, she stepped up even then.) Talking about our parents, the books we were reading, the vacations we dreamed of. I felt at home. At one point, Kathleen and I were riding the elevator from the state floor to the second-floor private residence. I looked at the usher manning the elevator and asked, “Do you know what all these women are here for?” He looked at me with a nod. “Slumber party, ma’am.”
November 2016. “Next year in Val-Kill” was a running joke—part consolation prize, part rallying cry—between Betsy and Allida ever since I lost the Democratic presidential nomination to Barack Obama in 2008. For eight years, whenever something went blessedly right or horribly wrong for one of us girlfriends—an electoral defeat for me or, much more serious, a cancer diagnosis for Betsy and then for Hardye—Betsy and Allida would pledge to each other that they were going to sweep me off to Val-Kill, Eleanor Roosevelt’s serene cottage in the woods of Hyde Park, New York. There, we would either celebrate or drown our sorrows in a contraband bottle of champagne, right in the former First Lady’s living room.
Now, this story will make the most sense if I back up a bit and note that Allida is an Eleanor Roosevelt scholar. It’s one of the reasons I, an ardent admirer of the former First Lady, was drawn to Allida when she sought my help when I was First Lady to finish cataloging Mrs. Roosevelt’s papers. Allida is the founder of the Eleanor Roosevelt Papers Project, the editor of The Eleanor Roosevelt Papers, and a trustee of the Franklin D. Roosevelt Presidential Library. She always has a project she’s tackling, a friend she’s helping—like so many of us do. Meanwhile, I went from the 2008 presidential campaign to the State Department to grandmother to the 2016 presidential campaign. Life just kept putting off Allida and Betsy’s fantasy getaway—hence their catchphrase: “Next year in Val-Kill!”
At last, 2016 was going to be the year we made it happen. Despite her failing health after a recent cancer diagnosis, Betsy had been with me throughout the ugly campaign against Donald Trump. In the roll call of state delegates at the Democratic National Convention in Philadelphia that July, it was Betsy who cast Illinois’s ninety-eight votes for me, saying, “My sweet friend… this one’s for you, Hill.” Then, on October 28, she was traveling with me when then FBI director Jim Comey upended our campaign eleven days before Election Day by announcing that the investigation into my emails that he had closed in July was being reopened. We were on a plane, headed to a women’s rally in Cedar Rapids, Iowa. We landed and got into a car. Neither one of us spoke. Betsy understood that what had just happened was devastating and unfair. But there was no venting, no hysterics. She just sat there, holding my hand and holding on to faith that I could still win.
On election night, Betsy again herded cats—some thirty friends from the Park Ridge pack, plus one friend Betsy had made just two months earlier, the Canadian mystery writer Louise Penny—inside New York City’s Javits Center, where my campaign threw a returns-watching party under a massive glass ceiling. It was important to me that they were there, the women who were with me in the very beginning and never left. The women who never cast a cynical side-eye at my commitment to serve or doubted my motivations. To commemorate all that we had shared leading up to that historic night, Betsy suggested I commission the Chicago glazeware artist Mary McLaughlin to create for each of my longtime girlfriends a porcelain dish inscribed with the words we’d learned all those years ago in Sunday school: “Do all the good you can, by all the means you can, in all the ways you can, in all the places you can… to all the people you can.” Betsy and Mary presented the dishes over lunch that day, and then everyone scattered to get ready for victory-night festivities. That was before the Electoral College canceled the party.
I was ready to be president, had developed policies and plans that were ready to go once I was in the White House—to do all the good I could for every American, no matter whom they voted for.
Now what?
“Dammit! We are going to do this,” Allida told Betsy sometime in January 2017. We had all been down in the dumps for weeks. There was Trump’s inauguration. Betsy’s cancer. My ruminating about the campaign. (I actually wrote a book about it, What Happened.) My friends’ worry for Betsy and for me, for different, loving reasons. “Next year in Val-Kill” was now. “Let’s just go,” said Allida. “Let’s go get sloshed in Eleanor’s living room.” (Did I mention Allida is a brassy one? And no, we didn’t get sloshed.)
