How Hillary Learned to Trust Herself

In the spring of 1995, I was part of a small press pack that accompanied a wounded Hillary Clinton on her first major international trip as First Lady, to south Asia. She was extremely wary of us at first, but that didn't last very long, as the exotic sights and sounds overwhelmed us all. It was, I suspect, a turning point in Clinton's life. Back home, she had faced dangerous, vitriol-spewing crowds at the end of the health-care battle, but each time she stepped off the big plane with the grand words "United States of America" emblazoned on its side, the crowds were huge and adoring. And as she went from place to place, visiting local programs that helped women overcome the vicious prejudices visited upon them by male-dominated cultures, a metamorphosis took place: gradually, she seemed to put the health-care debacle behind her and realize there was other work to be done, if not as co-President, then as First Lady. There were all these women who needed a public voice. One day in Ahmadabad, India, she visited a remarkable economic program for untouchable women who were ragpickers. They sang We Shall Overcome for her in Gujarati, and tears filled her eyes. All us cynics in the press corps went weepy too.

As the trip went on, a funny thing happened. She started to open up to the press. Off the record, of course. She would come back to the press section of the plane, dressed in a sweatshirt, wearing her Coke-bottle eyeglasses, and schmooze. I have a picture of the two of us, heads thrown back, laughing at some long-forgotten joke as we headed home.

All of which came to mind as Clinton experienced a similar metamorphosis in New Hampshire last week — an unclenching that took place under far more difficult circumstances, with the whole world watching her every move. It was a rocky path with an unexpected ending. She made mistakes, said a few things in the heat of battle that she probably regrets. But she also allowed herself some tentative moments of spontaneity — not just her now famous near-tears in Portsmouth, but moments of humor and anger and grace as well.

My favorite came in a confrontation with the television talk-show host Chris Matthews during a press conference — a press conference! — in Nashua. Matthews was pushing her on Iraq. How was she different from Barack Obama? Back and forth it went, Clinton parrying every thrust easily. Finally, Matthews capitulated. "Please, come on the show," he said. Clinton chuckled and said sarcastically, "Well, right!" Then she joked, "I don't know what to do with men who are obsessed with me." And then she went over, gave him a hug, patted his cheek and said, "Christopher ... baby ..." Matthews seemed to melt. He asked her how she was doing. "I'm good!" she replied brightly.

But she wasn't good. She was shell-shocked, reeling from her loss in Iowa and polls that showed her cratering in New Hampshire. The search for some way to counter Obama's easy brilliance, her search for a true public voice, was proving much harder than her discovery of a new mission back in India in 1995. And then it happened, in the oddest possible way. It happened at a listless rally on Monday afternoon in the town of Dover, where her husband had resurrected his cratering campaign in 1992 by declaring, "I'll be there for you until the last dog dies."

With the last dog on life support, Senator Clinton was introduced by a woman named Francine Torge, who said something startling and dreadful: "Some people compare one of the other candidates to John F. Kennedy. But he was assassinated, and Lyndon Baines Johnson was the one who actually [completed Kennedy's work]." That clearly remained in Clinton's mind, because a few hours later, she was tastelessly comparing Obama to Martin Luther King Jr. in an interview with Fox News. King's dream "became a reality," she said, "because we had a President who said we are going to do it and actually got it accomplished."