Michael Kelly, Editor of The New Republic and former Washington Editor of The New Yorker
FL: How did Virginia Kelly influence Bill?
KELLY:
Virginia was an extraordinary woman in a number of ways, some of them good,
some of them, I think, less admirable. The best testimony to her character,
and to her nature, is in her own words in a book of memoirs she wrote -- and it
was published posthumously -- I think called Leading With My Heart . And
in that she described her view of the world, and, Bill Clinton's mother's view
of the world, in her own description, was a singular one. It consisted of two
very important ideas. One was that there was no tommorrow, and no yesterday;
that you lived in the present. She never worried about what was going to
happen, she wrote, in tommorrow, and she never dwelt upon the past: what had
happened, had happened. And in her description of her life, and the way she
regarded other people who were close to her and so on, she makes it clear
that this was a profoundly felt philosophy with her. She attaches no great
judgement or weight, for instance, to something that most people would consider
bad -- that one of her husbands has done in the past -- that happened in the past.
And she doesn't seem to have any great concern about what is going to happen in
the future -- she lives very much in the moment to moment. This runs through the
pattern of her life.
Her marriage to William Blythe is a case in point. She describes their
meeting, when she was a young nurse and he was a travelling salesman. He came
to the hospital where she was working, bringing in his fiancee, who had become
ill and needed emergency treatment. And ... he flirted with Virginia over the
table as it were. I mean, over the bed, not the operating table. And she made
a date with him. She was immediately attracted to him and made a date with him
and they never looked back. I mean he never looked back at his fiancee, she
never looked back at the moment- they just sailed on.
The other thing that she describes in her world view, her view of herself and
her friends and her family, is that the people that she loves, the people in
her family that she's closest to can do no wrong. They are a hermetically
sealed universe, self-supporting, self-contained, and self, self-judging
only. Their judgements of other people are not of concern to them, and she's
quite explicit about this. She writes "as far as I'm concerned, the people
that I loved could do no wrong, and I wasn't going to listen to what others
said."
Now, you can argue, and it has been argued that this way of looking at
the world, gave Virginia Kelly an extraordinary resiliancy and strength that
allowed her to survive a brutal marriage to an alcoholic, and allowed her to
fashion a career for herself as a nurse anaesthesiologist at a time when
independent careers in that part of the country for a woman were not that easy
to come by and to raise her children by herself pretty much. And that's all
true I think, but it's also, I think, true that this world view gave a message
to her sons, Roger and Bill, that can some degree explain the way Bill
Clinton is, the way he is today.
The idea that you live only in the moment,
that what matters is what is happening in the existential now. And the idea
that the people you love, which includes of course yourself, can do no wrong.
Or that if they do any wrong it's instantly forgiven: for one thing it happened
in the past as soon as it's done, and we've moved beyond that. And for the
other of course that -- the premise is that the people we love can do no wrong -- that this philosophy does explain a good deal of not only what is strong in
Bill Clinton, but what is weak. That what is strong is his astonishing
resiliancy. This is a man who ran for president and was hit with two charges-
either one of which would have proven fatal to most politicians: one that he
had evaded the draft and lied about it -- most controversial war since the
Civil War in this country, and the other that he was a womanizer of
spectacular proportions and had had a tawdry affair and so on.
And in both cases Bill Clinton simply didn't blink. He got up out of bed and
went on and campaigned at a time when the average politician could be excused
for lying whimpering in the closet, I mean he simply does not stop in his
tracks, he just goes on. And that I think he probably owes to his mother and
to this view. But the part of it that is less admirable, perhaps may also be
traced to this way of looking at the world; and that is the president who
seems increasingly, as his term has worn on, to live in the moment with a sort
of disconnection between what has happened in the past and what is going to
happen in the future. And it is this trait that allows him to do the things
that he is most widely criticized for: to promise something which a reasonable
man must be able to say as, as he utters the promise that he is not going to be
able to deliver. And to not worry about not delivering on the promise, just to
keep moving on. To believe utterly in everything he says at the moment that he
says it, but to not seem to have any coherence between what he has said in the
past, and what the consequences of what he is saying now are going to be in the
future.
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