During her husband's presidential campaign in 1992, Hillary Clinton He observed that “our lives are a mix of different roles” and said that most people are trying to find the right balance.
“For me, that balance is family, work and service,” he said.
Clinton juggled those roles (and more) for eight years as first lady in the White House. He will return on Tuesday to his first public appearance in the building since the Obama years to satisfy his love for the arts.
In her years in the White House, she was a wife, mother, and hostess to the nation, but also a grieving wife, head of a national health care task force, and the cover of Vogue. In later years, she crossed the threshold of the White House as a visiting senator and Cabinet member, but never in the long-sought role of Madam President.
Early in her career as first lady, she held a rare press conference in which she was questioned about the Clintons' previous real estate dealings and declared that she had been “relocated” outside of their sphere of privacy.
Former first lady and current first lady Jill Biden will appear together to announce the winners of the Praemium Imperiale , an annual global arts achievement award given by the Japan Art Association. Both women will deliver remarks.
Your return visit is likely to be sentimental.
"I imagine she's looking forward to getting back and being with the Bidens, who she's been close to for a long time," said Lisa Caputo, who was Clinton's White House press secretary.
Clinton's ties to the White House mark her time as first lady.
The first visits came when he accompanied Bill Clinton to the executive mansion, when he was governor of Arkansas from the late 1970s to the early 1990s, for the annual receptions for the nation's governors.
She was a White House regular in her post-first lady roles, as U.S. senator and secretary of state, a position that included a permanent seat next to the president at Cabinet meetings.
She twice sought the top job in the White House, campaigning in 2008 and again in 2016 to become the first woman elected president. She fell short every time and stayed away from the White House during the Trump years.
Ellen Fitzpatrick, professor emeritus of history at the University of New Hampshire, said returning to the White House evokes memories for any former first lady.
He recalled Jacqueline Kennedy's return trip with her children years after President John F. Kennedy's assassination. The former first lady later told President Richard Nixon in a thank-you note that a day she had feared turned out to be one of the most precious she spent with her children.
"I think for Hillary herself, I'm sure it will be a great moment to get back in," said Fitzpatrick, author of "The Highest Glass Roof," a book about women running for president.
Clinton had some good and not-so-good memories in the White House.
“My eight years in the White House tested my faith and political beliefs, my marriage, and our nation's Constitution,” he wrote in “Living History,” his memoir. "I became a lightning rod for the political and ideological battles waged over the future of America and a magnet for feelings, good or bad, about elections and women's roles."
In his first year in office, President Clinton joined his wife in the East Room and named her head of a national health care task force to bring health insurance to all Americans. No first lady had ever been responsible for shaping such important public policy. The work, carried out largely in secret, inevitably attracted criticism. The plan ultimately died without a vote in Congress.
In 1994, Clinton donned a pink sweater and answered questions for more than an hour in the East Room about her financial dealings as part of the Whitewater Affair, an Arkansas real estate project on which the couple had lost money and which federal authorities were investigating. doing research.
At one point during the press conference, she said, "I've always believed in a zone of privacy, and I told a friend the other day that after resisting it for a long time, I feel like I've been rezoned."
Another notable image of the Clintons in the White House surfaced in 1998, after the president's sexual relationship with intern Monica Lewinsky was exposed. While the family made plans for a two-week vacation on the island of Martha's Vineyard, Massachusetts, the Clintons crossed the South Lawn to the waiting helicopter with a teenage Chelsea as intermediary between her parents.
Hillary Clinton was also among those in the Roosevelt Room of the White House when the president declared to the nation that “I did not have sexual relations with that woman, Ms. Lewinsky.” She appeared on national television and blamed her political problems on a “vast right-wing conspiracy.”
His public approval ratings rose as his marital problems became public. She also became the first lady to appear on the cover of Vogue magazine, dressed in a long-sleeved black velvet dress and sitting on a red couch in the Red Room of the White House.
After her husband was acquitted during a Senate impeachment trial in January 1999, she ran for and won a U.S. Senate seat from New York in 2000, her final year in the White House. For a brief period, she fulfilled her duties as a freshman legislator while closing her chapter as first lady.
After Clinton lost the Democratic presidential nomination to then-Senator Barack Obama in 2008, he persuaded her to become his secretary of state. She again had a regular presence at the White House, with a seat next to Obama at the Cabinet table. She appears in the famous photograph of officials huddled in the Situation Room when Osama bin Laden was killed in 2011.
Tuesday will be something of a coming full circle moment for Hillary Clinton. She and President Clinton first held the Praemium Imperiale Awards at the White House in 1994. She is the United States international advisor for the awards.
Melanne Verveer, who was Hillary Clinton's chief of staff in the White House, said Clinton's love of the arts is a lesser-known part of her biography as a globe-trotting diplomat and policy expert.
The White House was “a place of enormous artistic welcome” during Hillary Clinton's administration, Verveer said, adding that she was very interested in the National Endowment for the Arts and the National Endowment for the Humanities, federal agencies whose funding conservatives wanted to cut. He also displayed American sculptures in the first lady's garden at the White House.
"It was just a great commitment to the arts, so it doesn't surprise me in some ways that the Praemium Imperiale is being held at the White House with her there," Verveer said.
Whether she visits or not, Clinton will be a lasting presence in the White House: Her portrait as first lady hangs in a downstairs hallway.
