Havel understood political symbolism.

  I spoke at Radio Free Europe headquarters on July 4―an Independence Day message broadcast to twentyfive million listeners in Central and Eastern Europe and the New Independent States. I applauded the role Radio Free Europe had played before the revolution, when many Czechs held their radios toward the window so they could pick up the RFE signal and tune in to Western broadcasts. Inspired by Havel’s warnings about the downsides of globalization and cultural homogenization, I called for “an alliance of democratic values” that would help people confront “the unavoidable questions of the twentyfirst century,” like balancing individual and community rights, raising families amidst the pressures of the mass media and consumer culture, and retaining our ethnic pride and national identity while cooperating regionally and globally.

  I said that democracy is a work-in-progress, one that our own nation, after more than two centuries, was still trying to perfect. Building and sustaining a free society is like a three-legged stool: one leg is a democratic government, the second is a free market economy and the third is a civil society―the civic associations, religious institutions, voluntary efforts, NGOs and individual acts of citizenship that together weave the fabric of democratic life. In the newly free countries, civil society is as important as free elections and free markets to internalize democratic values in citizens’ hearts, minds and everyday lives.

  I closed with a story Madeleine had told me about a tour she had made through western Czech Republic in 1995 to celebrate the fiftieth anniversary of the end of World War II. In every town she visited, the Czech people waved American flags with forty-eight stars. American troops had passed out the flags a half century earlier, and the Czechs had preserved them through years of Soviet domination, just as they had kept faith that freedom would eventually come.

  I was delighted to spend time with Madeleine after our trip in 1995 to the U.N.

  women’s conference in China. She and I were determined to build on Beijing and continue to advocate for the importance of women’s issues and social development in U.S.

  foreign policy. After she became Secretary of State, we had regular lunches in her private dining room on the seventh floor of the State Department, joined by her Chief of Staff, Elaine Shocas, and Melanne. Over time, we changed some minds and helped shift the foreign policy agenda so that it more aptly reflected our nation’s democratic values of equality and inclusion.

  Madeleine and I became allies because of our shared vision and experience, which included Wellesley College. We also became friends, and in the three days we spent in Prague, we talked nonstop during a splendid boat trip on the Vltava River past Prague Castle while July Fourth fireworks were set off in our honor. We walked around Prague, and she pointed out local sights and greeted well-wishers in her native Czech.

  One moment from the trip epitomized Madeleine’s resourcefulness and pragmatism.

  Before a meeting with Prime Minister Vaclav Klaus, she and I had to review some confidential diplomatic information, but there was no private place to meet. Suddenly Madeleine grabbed my arm and tugged me toward a door.

  “Follow me,” she said. The next thing I knew, we were huddled in the ladies’ rest room―the perfect, and only, spot available for two women to have a private conversation.

  Madeleine and I left Prague for Bratislava, the capital of Slovakia and the seat of a government then headed by Prime Minister Vladimir Meciar, a throwback to the era of authoritarian regimes. He wanted to outlaw nongovernmental organizations, seeing them as threats to his rule. Before our trip, NGO representatives asked if I would attend a gathering of NGOs scheduled during my visit to draw greater attention to Meciar’s repressive treatment of these organizations and to highlight his unwillingness to embrace democracy.

  My presence at the meeting, held in the Concert Hall, home of the Slovak Philharmonic Orchestra, emboldened the participants to speak frankly about issues such as minority rights, environmental damage and flawed election procedures and to criticize the government’s attempts to terminate and criminalize their work.

  Of all the world leaders with whom I have met privately, only two have acted in ways that I found personally disturbing: Robert Mugabe in Zimbabwe, who giggled incessantly and inappropriately while his young wife carried on the conversation, and Meciar, whom I met later that afternoon at the Government Offices. A former boxer, he sat on one end of a small couch; I sat on the other. I told Meciar that I had been impressed with the NGOs at the Concert Hall, and the important work the groups were doing. He leaned toward me and, in a menacing tone, constantly clenching and unclenching his fists, ranted on about their duplicity and traitorous challenges to the state. By the end of our meeting, I was wedged tightly into the corner of the couch, appalled at his bullying attitude and barely controlled rage. The Slovak people voted him out of office in September 1998, with considerable help from the NGOs, which mobilized the electorate to vote in favor of change.

  All of the countries I visited wanted to discuss their potential membership in NATO, and in Hungary I discussed its prospects in a private meeting with Prime Minister Gyula Horn. I favored NATO expansion so I tried to be encouraging. I also met with Hungary’s President Arpid Goncz, a heroic figure with the distinction of having been on the wrong side of both the Nazis and the Communists. A playwright like Havel, he was the first President elected by Hungarians as they made the transition to democracy. As Goncz welcomed me to the large house that served as a presidential residence, he confessed that he didn’t know what to do with all the rooms. “It is just my wife and me,” he said. “We only use one bedroom. Maybe we should invite lots of people to live here!” Goncz, white haired and humorous, looked like a fit St. Nicholas. His demeanor became serious when we discussed the Balkans, and he voiced the fear that Europe, and indeed the West, was in for a long struggle with ethnic conflict. In what turned out to be a prophetic comment, he warned about Islamic extremists and argued that the same expansionist impulses that had led the Ottoman Empire to the gates of Budapest in the sixteenth century were again thriving among Muslim fundamentalists, who rejected the secular pluralism of modern democracies and the freedom of others for religious belief and women’s choices.

  People often wonder how much freedom I had to tour the cities I visited and whether I could go anywhere without my Secret Service escort. For the most part, I traveled in motorcades and was surrounded by agents. But in Budapest I had the rare treat of going to the famous Gundel’s Restaurant where I ate in the garden, lit by hanging lanterns, serenaded by a violinist. And then, on a gorgeous afternoon, I had a couple of hours free to see the old city on foot. Melanne, Lissa, Kelly and Roshann Parris, a top-notch advance woman from Kansas City, did their best to disguise themselves as tourists. My lead agent, Bob McDonough, the only agent to accompany me, did the same. I wore a straw hat, sunglasses and a casual shirt and slacks, and we took off down the city’s narrow streets, past shops, public baths and into the neo-Gothic cathedral. The only giveaway was that the host government insisted on “protecting” me while I was in their country, so two Hungarian security agents―wearing dark suits and thick-soled shoes and carrying weapons―

  walked several steps ahead. We had been out for more than an hour before an American tourist yelled from across the street, “Hillary! Hi!” My cover blown, people started gawking, waving and yelling greetings. I shook hands and said hello and resumed walking for several more hours.

  Later, we were greeted by a young American couple who asked if they could be photographed with me. The man was in the Army and stationed in Bosnia. He knew I had visited months before and was eager to tell me his experiences. “So far, so good,” he said in a classic American understatement. Meeting this earnest young man and his wife brought to mind President Goncz’s fears about a future filled with conflicts, and I wondered what lay ahead for them and all of us.

  KITCHEN TABLE

  I’m a pushover for big, stirring ceremonies, and the opening moments of the 1996 Summer Olympics in Atlanta on July 19 were as good as it gets. Bill declared the games open to a fanfare of horns and cymbals, followed by a soaring operatic chorale that enveloped the tens of thousands of athletes and spectators packed into Olympic Stadium. Muhammad Ali, shaking from Parkinson’s disease, steadied his right arm and held up a blazing torch to light the Olympic flame. It was an unforgettable moment for the world and for the ailing champ.

  The celebrations turned to horror a week later when a pipe bomb detonated in Centennial Olympic Park, near the games, killing one woman and injuring 111 people. Bill condemned the bombing as “an evil act of terror.” I laid flowers in the park, near the site of the attack.

  Within days of the bombing, the FBI named a part-time security guard, Richard Jewell, as the likely suspect. Jewell, who had first been called a hero for discovering the pipe bomb, struggled to defend him self against the full weight of the accusation. For months the media staked out his home and broadcast twentyfour-hour coverage. Finally, in late October, Jewell was exonerated, and the bombing was ultimately linked to Eric Rudolph, a fanatic anti-abortion activist believed to have escaped into the Appalachian wilderness, and never caught.

  The Olympic bombing brought an unsettling end to a summer marked by tragic events, including the crash of Flight 800, a passenger jet that went down in the Atlantic after taking off from New York’s Kennedy Airport, and the terrorist bombing of Khobar Towers, a U.S. military installation in Saudi Arabia, that killed nineteen Americans.

  Since his first State of the Union, Bill had sounded the alarm on global terrorism. In the 1980s, terrorism was not regarded as a pressing national security threat, though more than five hundred Americans were killed by terrorists in that decade. The 1993 World Trade Center and 1995 Oklahoma City bombings escalated Bill’s concern. He frequently talked publicly and privately about how easy travel, open borders and technology gave terrorists new opportunities and means to wreak violence and fear. He immersed himself in the literature on the subject and he met regularly with experts on chemical and biological warfare. He would often return to the residence anxious to tell me about these meetings.

  What he learned dismayed him. In 1995, he sent comprehensive anti-terrorism legislation to Congress to toughen laws for prosecuting terrorists, to ban fundraising that channeled money to terrorist causes or organizations and to increase controls over biological and chemical weapon materials. The legislation that finally passed in 1996 omitted key elements that he had requested, so he went back to Congress for increased funding and authority, including provisions for wiretapping and chemical identification. It was difficult, however, to focus public attention or muster congressional support for the actions he thought necessary.

  Domestic issues dominated both the Democratic and Republican agendas in the months before the summer’s political conventions. The Republicans were hammering on their usual issues: bashing big spending liberals and “social engineering” programs: welfare, abortion rights, gun control and environmental protection. Bill’s reelection campaign centered on government policies that he argued would build community, expand opportunity, demand responsibility and reward enterprise.

  I thought about how to present the issues I championed and better relate them to the public’s concerns. Countless families, including my own, tend to congregate after school or work to discuss the issues of the day, often sitting around the kitchen table. I began describing Democratic Party issues as “kitchen table issues,” which became a catchphrase in the campaign. The discussion of kitchen table issues led some Washington pundits to talk derisively about “the feminization of politics,” an attempt to marginalize, even trivialize, policies such as family leave or extended mammogram coverage for older women or adequate hospital stays for mothers after delivering their babies. With that in mind, I coined my own term―“the humanization of politics”―to publicly advance the idea that kitchen table issues mattered to everybody, not just to women.

  By 1996, as he had promised in the 1992 campaign, Bill had reduced the nation’s deficit by more than half, presided over a booming economy that had created 10 million jobs, cut taxes through the Earned Income Tax Credit for 15 million low-wage workers, protected workers from forfeiting their health care coverage when they lost their jobs and raised the minimum wage. And we were successful in passing initial reform in our nation’s adoption laws: a nonrefundable tax credit of up to $5,000 per child for all parents who adopt and $6,000 for parents who adopt children with special needs; and a prohibition on denying or delaying adoptions on the basis of race, color or national origin. Ever since I had worked on behalf of foster children as a law student, I had hoped to improve the chances that foster children would find permanent, loving families. These new provisions helped, but I knew that more needed to be done. I convened adoption experts in a series of White House meetings in 1996 and outlined a blueprint that led to the passage of the Adoption and Safe Families Act of 1997, which for the first time provided financial incentives for states to move children from foster care to permanent adoptive homes.

  Time was also running out for the sixty-year-old welfare system, which had helped to create generations of welfare-dependent Americans. Bill had promised it would be reformed, and the White House had been engaged in months of difficult negotiations and bare-knuckled political conflict. The Republicans knew the public strongly favored welfare reform, and they hoped either to railroad Bill into passing a bill that was far too hard on women and children, denying essential services to millions of needy recipients, or to use his vetoes of their punitive proposals against him in the upcoming election. Instead, welfare reform became a success for Bill. I strongly argued that we had to change the system, although my endorsement of welfare reform came at some personal cost.

  America’s first welfare program was introduced in the 1930s to help widows with children at a time when there were few opportunities for women to enter the workplace.

  By the mid-1970s, the percentage of births to unwed mothers was rising, and by the mid-1980s unmarried mothers were the overwhelming majority of welfare recipients. By and large, they were women with little education and few job skills. Even if they could find work, they could not earn enough to escape poverty or get jobs with health insurance for their children; therefore there was little incentive for them to leave welfare for work.

  Staying home became a rational choice for some in the short run, but it led to the development of a permanent welfare class, and it fed taxpayer resentment, especially among low-income working parents. I didn’t think it was fair that one single mother improvised to find child care and got up early every day to get to work while another stayed home and relied on welfare. I shared Bill’s belief that we should provide incentives and support like child care and health insurance to help people work instead of rely on welfare.

  During Bill’s first term as Governor, Arkansas participated in a Carter Administration “demonstration” project designed to provide more support and encouragement to move people from welfare to work. Seven years later in 1987 and again in 1988, Bill was the lead Democratic governor working with Congress and the Reagan White House on welfare reform. He chaired the National Governors Association hearings, where he presented testimonials from women who had moved off welfare under his plan in Arkansas, and they described how much better they felt about themselves and about their children’s futures.

  Bill was invited to the ceremony in October 1988 when President Reagan signed into law a welfare reform bill that included many provisions he and the Governors had sought.

  By 1991, when Bill launched his campaign for President, it was clear that the reforms weren’t producing much change because the Bush Administration didn’t fund the new programs or aggressively implement them in the states. Bill promised to “end welfare as we know it” and to make the program pro-work and pro-family.

  At the time Bill took office, America’s welfare program, Aid to Families with Dependent Children, or AFDC, received more than half of its funds from the federal government but was administered by the states, which contributed between 17 and 50 percent of the payments. Federal law required coverage of poor mothers and children, but the states set the monthly benefits. As a result, there were fifty different systems that provided benefits ranging from a high of $821 for a family with two children in Alaska to a low of $137 in Alabama. AFDC recipients were also eligible for food stamps and Medicaid.

  On the legislative agenda of 1993 and 1994, the economic plan, NAFTA, the crime bill and health care took precedence over welfare reform. And when the Republicans gained control of Congress, they had their own ideas about how to reform the system.

  They advocated strict limits on how long people could be on welfare; block grants of welfare funds to the states, including Medicaid, school lunches and food stamps; the cessation of all benefits to legal immigrants, even those who were working and paying taxes; and, as introduced by Newt Gingrich, a system of orphanages to house and raise children born out of wedlock to teen mothers. The Republican plan provided minimal support to help people make the transition to work.

  Bill and I, along with members of Congress who wanted productive reform, believed that people able to work should work. But we recognized that assistance and incentives were necessary to help people move permanently from welfare to employment and that successful reform would require large investments in education and training, subsidies for child care and transportation, transitional health care, tax incentives to encourage employers to hire welfare recipients, and tougher child support collection efforts. We also opposed cutting off benefits to legal immigrants and shipping children of poor parents to orphanages.