Hillary Rodham Clinton has logged more miles than any other First Lady in history. But behind the traditional images of the president’s wife abroad–the costumed dancers, the well-scrubbed children presenting bouquets on the tarmac–Hillary, like her globetrotting hero Eleanor Roosevelt, has developed into a powerful presidential envoy. Like earlier trips to Africa, India and South America, Hillary’s journey to Central Asia was no First Lady photo op but a diplomatic mission crafted to promote American interests–as well as her own.
Hillary’s taste for the road stems partly from the painful debacle of health-care reform. When Americans rejected her vision of liberal, activist government during Clinton’s first term, she found accepting–even adoring–audiences around the globe. Whether it’s Bishkek or Bangladesh, Hillary preaches universal health care and women’s rights with a boldness she hasn’t shown at home publicly for years. Though she’s been reluctant to spell out a second-term agenda, her travels give the clearest indication yet that she intends to actively promote a traditional liberal vision of America’s responsibility to provide foreign support and aid. She often travels to remote regions where no presidential motorcade would venture and where no secretary of state would have time to go. That means her agenda attracts little attention in America; in fact, Hillary seems happiest when her work and her motives are free from scrutiny.
With the Republican-controlled Congress intent on cutting U.S. foreign aid, the State Department regards Hillary as a useful high-profile asset. Though she steers clear of actually constructing foreign policy (she doesn’t even have a security clearance), she’s willing to express herself more candidly than diplomats can. Her diplomatic coming-out took place at the 1995 U.N. women’s conference in Beijing, where she hammered the Chinese government on human-rights abuses and declared that ““women’s rights are human rights, once and for all.’’ Her China-bashing pleased conservative critics while at the same time sealing her alliance with Madeleine Albright, then American ambassador to the United Nations. After the 1996 election, Hillary lobbied Clinton to name Albright secretary of state, and since then Albright has relied on Hillary as a diplomatic alter ego, promoting women’s rights, foreign aid and ““soft policy’’ while Albright tends mainly to ““hard’’ matters of state (or, as their aides joke, ““the boy stuff’’). ““By bringing women’s issues and American values to the rest of the world she perfectly complements the national-interest calculations that drive the bulk of our foreign policy,’’ says Albright’s spokesman, James Rubin.
Hillary doesn’t hesitate to make her hosts squirm. When she went to Thailand last year, she led a phalanx of American television cameras to a remote northern village where young prostitutes were dying of AIDS. ““It wasn’t exactly the image [the Thais] wanted to project,’’ an aide to the First Lady concedes. In Slovakia, her first stop was to see a freedom-of-the-press group that had been suppressed by the government; only afterward did she make an official courtesy call on the offending authorities. When Hillary called for access to birth control in Buenos Aires last month–an open challenge to the Argentine Roman Catholic church–her female audience erupted in a standing ovation. ““This,’’ boasts an aide, ““was her Evita moment.''
It is precisely the unrestrained image Hillary so gleefully cultivates abroad that has brought her so much grief in Washington. Only in places where references to ““Whitewater,’’ ““health care’’ and ““Ken Starr’’ evoke blank stares from her translators does the personality her aides call ““the real Hillary’’ emerge. On the road, the First Lady is relaxed, approachable, candid, even irreverent–traits rarely seen by reporters at the White House. When her plane takes off from distant capitals, Hillary bounds from her cabin to root through the shopping bags of aides, issuing mock scoldings to those who skipped numbing round-table discussions on microenterprise or female genital mutilation in favor of a shop op.
Even when she attends traditional First Lady gatherings, such as the annual summit of the well-coiffed primas damas of the Western Hemisphere (an event her aides dubbed ““Final Net City’’), Hillary doggedly pursues her own agenda. In Bolivia last year, while the other first ladies primped for their meetings and banquets, Hillary inspected a USAID-funded maternity clinic then marched off for a meeting with Bolivian women about the virtues of microcredit lending–loans as small as $50 that provide starting capital to low-income entrepreneurs. Only then did she take care of the summit’s official event: the signing of a hemispheric pledge to eradicate measles.
By the time she returns to Washington this week, Hillary will have represented the United States on every continent but Antarctica. ““It’s like she’s not my daughter anymore. She’s a world figure,’’ her mother said at her 50th-birthday celebration in Chicago last month. Like her husband, Hillary has discovered it’s easier to craft a legacy on the world stage than at home.
