Betsy and Allida thoughtfully planned the whole day and included some of the other women closest to me, some of whom worked with me in the White House and at the State Department: Maggie, Huma, Cheryl M. (another Cheryl, not the one I grew up with), and Heather. Some special men who are also like family to me—Oscar, Brendan, Rocco, and Maggie’s husband, Bill—came too, along with a new friend, Louise. It was the first Tuesday in March, and our first stop was the Franklin D. Roosevelt Presidential Library, where, in a private reading room, Allida had asked the archivist to lay out specially selected readings from Mrs. Roosevelt’s papers for each of us to see. One was an accounting of Eleanor’s days after Roosevelt died of a cerebral hemorrhage on April 12, 1945. She had to bury her husband and pack up their things in the White House, making way for Vice President Harry Truman to move in. Another was the last letter Eleanor wrote, to her friend and confidante Lorena Hickok, before leaving the White House for good on April 19, 1945. Eleanor, too, was pondering, What now? I bent low to read the type: “Franklin’s death ended a period in history and now in its wake… we have to start again under our own momentum and wonder what we can achieve.”
Almost seventy-two years after Eleanor wrote those words, that’s exactly what I felt, mourning a different kind of loss and wondering what I could yet achieve. As I straightened up from the table, the reading room was quiet. Our group had been in a sort of morose suspended animation all afternoon, still shell-shocked from the events of the past several months. Heck, the whole previous year was traumatizing. We fought so hard to beat back Trump; Betsy was fighting for her life; and Louise had recently lost her husband, Michael, after a years-long goodbye during which dementia stole him away. I looked around, amazed. Here we are, I thought. Together. Having each other’s backs. Whatever I can yet achieve, we’ll do it together.
Then we visited the current exhibit at the Roosevelt Library and watched a film on the internment of Japanese Americans during World War II. In the dark of the theater, I found Allida’s hand and gave it a squeeze to thank her for arranging our time there. The day was much-needed therapy for us all. And it concluded just as Allida and Betsy had dreamed it would. Down the road from the Roosevelt Library, in the living room of Eleanor’s home at Val-Kill, Allida produced from her backpack a bottle of champagne and a dozen plastic flutes. She and Betsy made toasts whose exact words elude me now, but which boiled down to one essential truth: We love you.
Looking back on that emotionally intimate experience now, I marvel at how awkward it might have been for Louise. She and I had met for the first time the prior weekend, but I felt as though I already knew her from reading all her books. Louise and Betsy had become friends in August, at the apex of the 2016 White House race, when Louise’s publisher arranged a get-together after reading a newspaper story that included the fact that Betsy and I were both in the middle of Louise’s latest mystery novel. I didn’t get to meet Louise until the first week of March, when she and Betsy came to Chappaqua to stay with Bill and me for a couple of days. It was like I had known Louise forever. The writerly Louise puts it more evocatively: “It’s like you were saving a place at the table for me all along.”
By that summer, she was hosting us in Quebec, in the area where she sets her stories. It was Betsy and Tom, Bill and me, Chelsea and Marc and their two children, Charlotte and Aidan (Jasper wouldn’t arrive until 2019). We were also joined by a few other good friends—Susie Buell, Terry and Dorothy McAuliffe, Brian and Myra Greenspun—to celebrate Bill’s birthday that week. Louise took us on a tour of the sites that feature in her popular Armand Gamache series. “I’ve never been on a vacation Murder Tour before,” Bill joked. We swam in the middle of Lake Massawippi and savored the mountain air. It was the perfect getaway. That fall, Louise joined us again in Chappaqua for our annual family Thanksgiving with those of Chelsea’s and Marc’s friends who aren’t Americans or can’t travel to be with their own families. We pushed four tables together to fit some thirty of us around a massive dinner table. Before digging into the buffet set up in the kitchen, we each took turns sharing one thing for which we were especially thankful. With a nod to me and then Louise, Bill raised his glass and said what I was feeling: What an extraordinary gift it is, at this time in life, to be making new friends.
Amen.
October 2023. You know that reflexive uh-oh you feel in the pit of your stomach when your phone rings in the dead of night? That’s what I felt when this appeared on my calendar for Friday, October 20 (and even before you ask, yes, my life is scheduled—down to the precise minute, thanks to Lona, my extraordinary scheduler):
10:01 a.m.–10:14 a.m.: Phone Call with Cheryl Mills, Capricia Penavic Marshall, and Minyon Moore
I feared that something was wrong in Hillaryland. Someone sick. Or worse.
Hillaryland is the nickname for the tight-knit network of women who have worked with me in the White House, Senate, and State Department and stuck with me through the years. It dates to Bill’s 1992 presidential campaign, which was headquartered in Little Rock. Capricia, who started as an advance aide there—then worked with me in the White House and, later, the State Department—is the unofficial mayor of Hillaryland. If one of our own is having a wedding, baby, midlife crisis, divorce, or major surgery, Capricia will know about it and rally our troops—for showers, flowers, or happy hours; meals, prayers, and hugs.
Capricia, Cheryl M., and Minyon, along with Maggie, Melanne, Lona, Huma, Lissa, Karen, Tamera, Neera, Patti, Ann S., Evan Lisa, Kelly, Jen, Rachel, Ann O., Kiki, Tina, Aprill, and other stalwarts, are the still-beating heart of Hillaryland. Where once they called me Mrs. Clinton or Senator Clinton or Madam Secretary, today they refer to me as “Big Girl.” As in, “Has anyone heard from Big Girl whether she’s in town to meet us for dinner?” I like that it’s not “Boss” or (God forbid) “Top Banana.” Big Girl suits me—and the leveling of any hierarchy to these relationships—just fine. Most of the Hillaryland women are a good fifteen to twenty years younger than I. They have been my blanket, my sword, and my shield. They stepped up every day in their demanding jobs. And then they stepped up in 2008 and again in 2016, volunteering for the hard nuts and bolts of campaigning—block-walking in key precincts, knocking on doors, and winning voters one at a time. After a long day of that, they would show up at my nighttime rallies so that their familiar faces in the crowd and their hugs along the rope line would energize me for the next day.
For no more reward than my gratitude and friendship, the women of Hillaryland have remained at my side and had my back through… well… everything. The highest highs, the lowest lows, the mundane middle, and hilarious high jinks in between. (Here’s one great example: In a vain attempt to protect me from fashion critics as First Lady, Capricia took it upon herself to secretly cart away the most “egregious” of the clothes I brought to the White House from Arkansas, something I discovered only when we moved out eight years later and Huma finally reunited me with all my giant shoulder pads and big, fuzzy sweaters that Capricia had stashed in a third-floor closet.)
These extraordinary women were there for the wounds and suffered the wounds themselves—from battles political, legal, and personal. They never judged me or questioned my heart. Nor I, theirs.
When the White House started to feel like one big hall of fun-house mirrors, in which the image reflected back at me through the press and our political adversaries was so distorted and grotesque that I didn’t recognize myself, it was in Hillaryland that I could count on support, constructive criticism, and love.
I loved them right back, these women of Hillaryland. I still do. Through bad dates, difficult pregnancies, divorces, deaths in the family—all the trials of a full life—I tried to be there for them, with advice or just a sympathetic ear. And because I loved them, I tried to protect them. I trusted them with my life, but I had to avoid confiding in them about many of the trials I faced. Because the warped thing about friendship in Washington, D.C., is that once you vent to a friend about your troubles, you increase the chances your friend will need to hire a lawyer.
And so, when I was tearing my hair out over the contrived twists and turns of the bogus Whitewater investigation and Bill’s impeachment ordeal, or losing hold of my dream in the 2008 primaries and then burying it in 2016, my Hillaryland stalwarts knew that all they had to do was be there, keeping me busy, keeping me company, keeping me from feeling alone. Our bond is so unusual that Lissa, a former reporter and one of my longtime speechwriters, is finishing a book called Hillaryland explaining our time in the White House.
It was Betsy’s shoulder I cried on. I will always be grateful that, at the end of the 1990s, when both my marriage and Bill’s presidency were imperiled, Betsy just showed up at the White House. She knew that I needed her—her comfort, support, and guidance—without me having to say a word.
And then there was Diane.
Diane, a political scientist, was one of the two close friends I made in Arkansas when I followed Bill there in 1974 and started teaching law at the University of Arkansas, Fayetteville, where Diane was a political science professor and Ann H. taught at the business school. Ann H., a native Arkansan, became my guide to my new home, advised me on matters big and small, and hosted my wedding reception at her home in 1975. She still keeps me updated about the goings-on of her family and our friends. Diane and I bonded as transplants to Bill’s home state (Diane had moved there from Washington, D.C., eleven years earlier), had a standing lunch date in the student union, strategized over the Equal Rights Amendment in our free time, played tennis, and traded favorite books. Bill and I loved Diane and her husband, Jim. They had a weekend home on Beaver Lake where we would relax and recharge. We trusted their counsel. Diane served as senior researcher to Bill’s 1992 campaign and senior advisor in 1996. In between, she took a position at the Brookings Institution, a Washington think tank, so that she could be close by—with a life raft—as we learned to navigate D.C. waters.
Diane, like Betsy, was wickedly smart and irreverent, with a special knack for leavening the absurdities of public life and making me laugh. Also like Betsy, Diane treated me not like the First Lady and not like a porcelain doll. They treated me like plain old Hillary, the Hillary each had known before all the trappings, perks, and perils of my new position. Here’s a fun example: During Bill’s second term, I was speaking at a formal dinner. Diane came along, as did Huma, who had already worked her way up from East Wing intern to my personal aide. That job on that night included holding my evening bag while I greeted people and shook hands. At one point, I asked Huma for my lipstick. Next thing I knew, both Huma and Diane were wrestling with the tiny purse’s fancy rhinestone-cheetah clasp. Huma pushed and pulled at that precious cheetah. “What in the holy heck are you doing carrying a ridiculous bag like this?” Diane finally chided in exasperation. “You don’t deserve your lipstick!” The whole scene still makes me laugh.
Diane saw how the fun-house mirrors twisted everything I did and said. Ever the academic, she resolved to do all she could to make sure that history, at least, produced an accurate portrait of my tenure in the White House. She kept records of my work and notes on how I was experiencing the swirl of politics that sometimes felt like it would swallow me whole. Her attention to my truth was a comfort, giving me hope that someday, long after Diane and I were gone, historians would have access to Diane’s papers and maybe see me in the unvarnished way that she did: flawed and human, but genuine in my thirst to improve people’s lives, especially those of women and children.
Painfully, that someday came far too soon. Diane was diagnosed with lung cancer in May 2000 and dead weeks later. Losing her crushed me. In 2011, I lost my mother. Then, in April 2019, I lost Ellen, a dear friend and former California congresswoman who came to work with me at the State Department as undersecretary for arms control. After the 2016 election, Ellen was one of my trusted confidantes as I worked through the consequences and pain of that political loss. Little more than one month after Ellen’s death, my younger brother Tony died at the beginning of June 2019, leaving us way too soon. My surviving brother, Hugh, and I talk about him all the time. And I delight in the time I get to spend with Tony’s children, Zach, Fiona, and Simon, and my sister-in-law Megan. Then, at the end of that July, I had to say goodbye to Betsy. A cascade of grief followed.
Intellectually, I obviously accept that death is a part of life—a steadily bigger part as so many of my friends grow old alongside me. But it was so much loss in such a short time. You adjust your sails and carry on, but I don’t think you ever get used to those goodbyes. Maya Angelou, who was eighty-three when she spoke to Essence magazine about friendship, described losing two of her closest sister friends this way: “I can see the perimeters are coming in closer and closer, but I’m still loving, living and giving it my best shot. I fill my days with gratitude, laughter and work and keep on stepping.” She kept her heart open to new relationships. As she wrote in her 2008 Letter to My Daughter, “A friend may be waiting behind a stranger’s face.”
I have tried to follow Maya Angelou’s lead. And I have found that there is real joy in full days, gratitude, laughter, and new friends. Especially women friends who instinctually just know. They know the juggling act of being a woman, a wife, a mother. They know menstrual periods, pregnancy brain, hormones, and menopause. They know what it is to be worried about an unhappy child, troubled by your marriage, or caring for a dying parent. They just know. They see you and they know. And we meet each other where we are now.
For example, Maria is someone I knew for years because of her longtime work providing microloans for poor women. I asked her to join my State Department team in 2009 as undersecretary for civilian security, democracy, and human rights. Maria and I are similarly situated on the staircase of life, and I relish her years of experience and earned wisdom. We traveled together to Spain twice, staying with our friend Julissa, the U.S. ambassador, who whipped up fabulous itineraries in Madrid, Barcelona, and Seville. At one point, Maria and I confessed to each other that we were now living in bodies we didn’t recognize. Together we commiserated and shared strategies for confronting the postmenopausal disappearance of our waistlines. Maria’s tip was to burn hundreds of calories just by jogging in place for five minutes at a time while watching TV or even on a flight, in the airplane bathroom. Of course I tried it! Until Capricia found out what I was doing, did some fact-checking, and told me I had misheard Maria: I need to jog in place for forty-five minutes at a time. There went that plan!
My idea, borrowed from Wanda Sykes, was to give our newly thick midsections names, owning them. When Chelsea and I were filming our 2022 Gutsy docuseries for Apple TV+, Wanda told us she calls her postmenopausal belly Esther Roll. I now call mine Beulah; Maria’s is Bertha. They are stubborn old gals, so Maria and I decided that if the two of them won’t go away, we might as well get on speaking terms with them.
For all the laughter and positive outlooks, I still felt a twinge of panic over the October 2023 calendar invite to that conference call with Capricia, Cheryl, and Minyon. The three of us, with Kiki, had been making fairly regular road trips to Rhode Island over the past few years to see Maggie. She hadn’t been well, and we worried about her. When Capricia, Cheryl, Minyon, and I finally connected on the call that Friday in October, I heard only mischief in their tones before Cheryl took the lead and announced:
“Your birthday is coming up. And, wow, you’re going to be really old!”
“Thanks,” I said. “I really don’t need to hear that.”
“Yes, you do,” Cheryl went on, “because to help you forget, we’re taking you to Vegas this weekend to see Adele!”
Apparently I had offhandedly mentioned during our last Rhode Island trip that I would love to see Adele before her Las Vegas residency ended. And, voilà! I was turning seventy-six and getting a girls’ weekend in Las Vegas. We ate, we laughed, we danced like no one was watching. Friendship, Adele, and an all-you-can-eat breakfast buffet? Life doesn’t get any better.
Summer 2021. Louise and I had a special project about to debut. Back before the pandemic, a publisher who knew that we’re friends convinced the two of us to co-author a novel combining her mastery of mystery with my inside knowledge of politics and national security. Louise and I thought it would be fun, and we had visions of writing together at some luxe spa or exotic resort. But COVID-19 had other plans, and we ended up collaborating over Zoom—still doing a fair share of work in robes and slippers, but without the massages and room service. We were pleased with the result, a political thriller titled State of Terror that was set to be released that fall. We had named the main characters Ellen and Betsy after my two friends who died in those terrible months of 2019.
Now, my co-author and I were back at Lake Massawippi, this time with a bigger group that included many of my Park Ridge friends. There was fun in the sun, but we were all feeling Betsy’s absence. One evening, in the rose garden of the Manoir Hovey where we were staying, Louise and I had to take some casual author photos for publicity for our book. On a whim, I asked Bonnie, the girl from class council who once helped me decorate for high school dances, to braid my hair right there in the garden like we were fourteen years old again. I sat, and Bonnie braided, surrounded by the group of girlfriends that Betsy held together all those years like glue. I was reminded of one time when this Park Ridge gang happened to be visiting the White House while my mother was staying there. Mom just listened as we all chattered about the latest happenings in our lives, at one point telling Kathleen, “It’s amazing, you girls—it’s like you’ve never been apart.” By our 2021 reunion in Quebec, my mother had been gone almost ten years. How precious it is to have so many women in my life who knew Mom and are still generous with memories of her that I never tire of hearing.
Just before Betsy died, Louise gave Betsy and me identical watercolor paintings of the two of us that Louise had commissioned some months earlier. The artist rendered Betsy and me arm in arm—not in our youth, but in the fullness of age, perfectly capturing our lifelong friendship. Bill hung the painting in our bedroom, where I can look at it every day.
At our next reunion in Quebec, in the summer of 2023, we were mourning Hardye, who had passed that February. “I can see the perimeters are coming in closer and closer…” Again I stood in the lakeside rose garden with my friends, including Hardye’s husband, Don. He had made T-shirts featuring the name Agent Hardye Moel, the character in Louise’s latest mystery that she had named for our friend. Misty-eyed, we all wore the T-shirts and shared memories of Betsy and Hardye as the sun set and we prepared to go inside for dinner.
Recently, a journalist shared with me a never-published interview with Betsy from late 2016 that was meant to be published if I won the White House. The interview was about our relationship and the thirty or so friends who were headed to New York City to be with me on election night. “It’s wonderful at this age to realize that the choices you made when you were ten or eleven years old, as far as friends are concerned, can bear fruit as sweet as this,” Betsy had told the reporter.
Betsy’s last gift to me. And how sweet it is.
Make new friends, but keep the old.
One is silver, and the other’s gold.
A circle’s round; it has no end.
