First Lady Diagnoses Nation's Family and Health-Care Ills

When she takes the podium tomorrow at Harvard Medical School's Class Day, First Lady Hillary Rodham Clinton will have an important task at hand. She has the rare opportunity to convince members of the next generation of premier doctors that health care reform is inherently linked to children's welfare.

"I think she'll have a lot to say about the shake-up of the medical system we're in right now," says Dr. T. Berry Brazelton, professor emeritus of pediatrics at the Medical School (HMS).

"She can talk about the importance of the early years of children and their families. She's very well-schooled in what children need, especially poor children," says Brazelton, whose expertise in early-childhood rearing has helped the Clinton formulate family policy.

If the First Lady has her way, her audience of 161 Medical School and 59 Dental School graduates will walk away convinced that they too are an integral part of the village that Clinton has said it takes to raise a child.

Despite the much-publicized failure of her health-care reform proposal in 1994, Clinton has held firm to her original policy conceptions. And it seems, many of these ideas are working their way back into legislative action.

Clinton's success may stem from her persistence. Her persistence may stem from the values she learned growing up in a close-knit community of parents, teachers and neighbors who worked together to raise the community's children.

And in a world where Clinton's childhood experience has become more the exception than the rule, to build such a village, it takes a First Lady.

Hillary's Village

Born in Chicago, Ill. in the fall of 1947, Clinton grew up in the white-collar suburb of Park Ridge. Clinton's memoirs tell the story of a neighborhood where fathers took their children and their children's friends ice skating at the local pond and where the district school stayed open during the summer, sponsoring arts-and-crafts programs for the area children.

For years, Clinton and her two younger brothers, Hugh and Tony, faithfully attended Sunday school at the local Methodist church. Family dinners were a daily occurrence; time spent watching television after the Rodhams purchased their first set in 1951 was kept to a minimum.

By the time Clinton graduated from Maine Township South High School and headed for Wellesley College in 1965, the combination of parents, relatives, teachers and neighbors who oversaw her childhood had instilled in Clinton a sense of family values that she has often cited as a source of influence for years to come.

The Art of Making Possible

Clinton is certainly not a newcomer to the commencement limelight.

She gave her first speech for such an occasion at her own graduation from Wellesley College in 1969. It was the first time in the school's history that the graduating class requested a student speaker at its commencement.

"There was no debate so far as I could ascertain as to who their spokesman was to be--Miss Hillary Rodham," said Ruth M. Adams, then-president of Wellesley College, in a prelude to Clinton's speech.

The political science major used the occasion to urge the audience to ignore the "trust bust" her classmates felt permeating their generation and instead to "keep trying again and again and again."

"You and I must be free, not to save the world in a glorious crusade, not to kill ourselves with a nameless gnawing pain, but to practice with all the skill of our being, the art of making possible," Clinton said, quoting from a favorite poem.

Clinton took her own words to her heart during the next few years as she developed what would prove a lasting interest in children's welfare and a commitment to making the once-marginalized topic a pressing public policy issue.

"Her value system at that time and now has always been that children are extremely important and valuable," says Dr. Albert J. Solnit, former director of the Yale Child Study Center. "That was a social value she expressed in her words and actions. It was the highest priority for her."

Clinton took a year off from law school in order to study at the center where, according to Solnit who supervised much of her work there, she participated extensively in conferences, discussions and research.

"It was an outstanding experience for her and everyone at the center," says Solnit, who is Yale University's Sterling professor emeritus of pediatrics and psychiatry and a senior research scientist.

"I found her to be warm, thoughtful, straightforward, less than candid but always tactful, with a fine analytical mind with terrific retention of knowledge," Solnit says. "She was always gracious."

While a lack of training in the field prohibited her from doing clinical work for the center, Solnit says Clinton was always interested in formulating policy based on the latest research.

Clinton's career has since taken her far from New Haven, but and colleagues of the First Lady say her interest in children and health-care reform remains strong.

"She's very personable and warm--she's wonderful with her daughter," says Theda Skocpol, professor of government and of sociology at Harvard, who has met with Clinton to discuss children's welfare.

"That bond is a very strong one in her life and probably motivates her continuing interest in the nation's children."

The First Lady

When Clinton campaigned for her husband in 1992, she promised American voters a co-presidency, saying, "If you vote for Bill, you get me too." The future president agreed, boasting that by electing him Americans were getting a terrific two-for-one deal.

Before Clinton became known as the First Lady who produced a 1,364-page legislative proposal on universal health insurance that ultimately failed, she was a board member of the Children's Defense Fund, the head of an Arkansas commission for education reform and a devoted mother to daughter Chelsea.

So while some conservatives blasted Clinton for occupying an untraditional role as a politician's wife, the First Lady had the credentials behind her to justify her public forays into policy-making.

Clinton launched her career one year out of law school when she helped Congress investigate Watergate charges against then-President Richard M. Nixon. She later gained partner status at the Rose Law Firm in Little Rock, Ark., as husband Bill pursued a career in state politics that eventually made Hillary the governor's wife.

But Clinton's failed efforts as head of the President's Health Care Task Force--in addition to growing attacks over the Whitewater land deal and Vincent Foster's suicide--sent her back to the policy making drawing table.

Since then, Clinton has been slowly launching miniature versions of her original campaign. While the buzzwords of "health-care reform" may not dominate the White House agenda anymore, she hopes to use her original work to over-haul portions of the health care system, beginning with a plan to mandate insurance for all children.

"She's a very savvy political actor," Skocpol says. "She's had a lot of experience in figuring out how to move forward even when the political winds are blowing against her."

"She knows that universal health care is at the core of any reforms in the area of children's welfare," Skocpol says. "But her role as the President's wife constrains her from making any policy innovations."

Brazelton says Clinton is the voice behind much of the family welfare legislation of her husband's administration. The author of 26 books and a syndicated columnist, Brazelton criticized President Clinton and other lawmakers in 1997 for adopting welfare reform that adversely affected the nation's children.

Still, Brazelton describes himself as "a consistent admirer" of the First Lady.

"She helped bring in [the Family and Medical Leave Act] in 1995 to show how much [the administration] cared about families," Brazelton says. "It only affected 5 percent of families, but it made every CEO in the country stop and think about what they were doing in terms of family policy."

Brazelton also credits Hillary Clinton with the progress that the Kennedy-Hatch bill and the Kerry-Bond bill have made in Congress. The former legislative proposal seeks to provide health insurance for children in low-income working families; the latter seeks to provide health and education funding for young children.

"After the health care problem, everyone thinks she failed but I'm not so sure," he says. "She gave us a chance to do something about our medical system. If we don't do something now, we're missing a rare opportunity."

Both Skocpol and Brazelton point to Clinton's 1996 best-selling book It Takes a Village as evidence of the mainstream appeal of the First Lady's ideas. And both say Clinton's platform was misportrayed by her conservative opposition.

"She didn't say government raises children. She said communities do. I think people and parents know it's true," Skocpol says. "Her ideas are good, solid, American common sense."

Brazelton says the Republican Party sought to discredit Clinton because it felt threatened by the popularity of her family and community-oriented values.

"I think that when the Republican party rises up about something like that, they hit below the belt," Brazelton says. "They're all scared of her because she's so smart and because she's a woman. They try to muzzle her in Washington, but it doesn't work."

Words of Wisdom

While Clinton's speech was not finalized until a few days before Commencement, many of those who have followed the First Lady's work say it is most likely that she will address those issues with which she is familiar.

"She will elaborate on the concept that we don't only need to strengthen our network of families but that children grow up in communities," says Solnit, who is also the commissioner of mental health and addiction services for the state of Connecticut.

"She has an enormous grasp of the needs of children and the health-care system," he says. "Any medical school class would be interested in not only the content of her speech but also the style of thinking that she provides by way of her perspective."

One official in the White House says Clinton took a keen interest in the address early on.

"She's very interested in the speech," he said, explaining that Clinton had proposed ideas for the Class Day speech more than a week before the scheduled event.

Typically, the official said brainstorming, researching and writing for a speech happens only a few days before the event.

"[Health care is] a topic she's been interested in heavily over the years, and the First Lady knows that there will be many experts of the field sitting in the audience," the source said. "She's taking this speech quite seriously."

Others, like Dean of the Kennedy School of Government Joseph S. Nye Jr., add that Clinton is an especially appropriate speaker for a graduating class of high achievers.

"Hillary Clinton is a very interesting woman with her own strong ideas on policy issues," says Nye, who served as the assistant secretary of defense for international security affairs in the Clinton administration from 1993 until 1995.

Nye says Clinton's speech on families at the Kennedy School in October 1996 attracted "a full house" that appreciated Clinton's policy perspective on the issue.

"Hillary Clinton has been as close to the top of the policy process as you can be. She's a smart women with her own very well-formulated ideas. That's a pretty good combination when it comes to a speaker," Nye says.

Such a combination also has many convinced that the spotlight will not dim over Clinton when her days in the White House are over.

Solnit, for example, says Clinton's days with his child study center taught her that reform can only come after consistent campaigning; it takes years of dedication to build that village.

Skocpol agrees, saying that Clinton will have more freedom to propose "bold ways to meet the needs of children" when she is no longer the First Lady.

"I expect her to continue to play an important part in American life," Skocpol says. "I think she's committed to talking about children and what it takes for American society to successfully raise them."