If nothing else, Hillary Rodham Clinton should leave us the “Grand Canyon.”
When asked about presidents I have covered (now that I am a bent and wizened old graybeard who dates back to the 1960 Kennedy-Nixon campaign) I like to say that they tend to come in like conquering generals and go out like ex-cons.
Richard Nixon, you may recall, went out as a near-con. The possibility now exists that William Jefferson Clinton (a k a “defendant”) may go out an actual con.
Or would have, if prosecutor Ken Starr hadn’t made Gen. George B. McClellan seem a specialist in blitzkrieg.
But first ladies should not have to go out like ex-cons. Going back to Jackie Kennedy, I’ve found them a decent and well-intended lot–none of them deserving the scorn and disapprobation attendant to so many of their mates.
Each first lady has left something behind: Jackie, a certain grace, elegance, taste, style and cachet for the White House. Lady Bird Johnson gave us all those flowers and beautification. Pat Nixon (unnoticed and unheralded) blessed the White House with a very thorough refurbishing and restoration effort. Betty Ford set a national example for common sense and found working solutions for substance abusers. Rosalynn Carter embraced the causes of the poor and imbued the White House with rural values. Nancy Reagan cleaned up after the rural values, restored respectability to the fashion industry and launched a worthy anti-drug campaign.
Barbara Bush left a legacy of literacy, straight talk, good manners and strange upper-middle-class New England tribal customs, such as dog worship, wearing natural fibers and always summering in the same place.
But poor Hillary Rodham. Clearly her husband’s superior at everything save public glad-handing, she came in as a sort of governmental Xena the Warrior Princess, bent on reforming every aspect of American health care and filling administration ranks with representatives of every conceivable combination of minority grouping.
Now, thanks to her husband’s politically death-tempting indiscretions and his willingness to become a Republican in everything but name, Hillary Rodham is reduced to the role and legacy she once so sarcastically scorned: Standing by her man like Tammy Wynette.
True, she did go off a few weeks ago on a tour of musty old historic sites to help the National Trust for Historic Preservation with a program she called the “White House Millennium Program to Save America’s Treasures.”
Among these treasures are Thomas Edison’s New Jersey lab, pioneer feminist Elizabeth Cady Stanton’s uninteresting upstate New York house and that peculiar nude statue with wings and stuff honoring German writer Johann Wolfgang von Goethe in Chicago’s Lincoln Park.
This won’t do. The name Edison these days only reminds people of their utility bills. Nobody is very interested in Elizabeth Cady Stanton’s uninteresting house. And most Chicagoans think that Goethe statue honors a street.
Besides, the National Trust lost its federal funding–once a fifth of its budget–in a deal cut by Hillary Rodham’s closet Republican husband and those demonstrably uncloseted congressional ones.
I have a better legacy in mind for her and it has nothing to do with baking chocolate chip cookies.
Saving the “Grand Canyon.”
I don’t mean the real Grand Canyon out in Arizona. That is so besieged by tourists they might as well put a roof over the place and sell it to Disney.
My reference is to a marvelous, huge new painting of the Grand Canyon by Hillary Rodham’s favorite painter–Englishman-turned-Californian David Hockney.
Called “A Bigger Grand Canyon,” measuring 24 by 7 feet and made up of 60 separate sections, this magnificently-hued work may be Hockney’s masterpiece. Even an ersatz, one-time westerner like me can see the genius of it–how Hockney managed to evoke what he described as “the biggest space you could look at that had an edge.”
Under Hillary Rodham’s “official patronage,” this painting is hanging temporarily in one of Washington’s most venerable spaces: the Smithsonian Institution’s National Museum of American Art–but only until Sept. 7.
What I’m suggesting is that Hillary Rodham reach into her husband’s legal fund, which by now must have a cash flow comparable to Microsoft’s, and shell out the requisite $2 million, $3 million or $5 million it might cost and buy the thing for America to hang there in the Smithsonian forever–next to a little bronze plaque that says, “Donated by Mrs. Hillary Rodham Clinton, First Lady of the United States.”
Believe me, people would be looking at that long after Monica Lewinsky is forgotten.
Or, anyway, Linda Tripp.
