P
Patriot Games
Guest
http://www.newsmax.com/politics/clinton_profile/2007/12/14/57104.html
Hillary Rodham Clinton: Who Is She?
Friday, December 14, 2007
NEW YORK -- Hillary Rodham Clinton likes to say she was born in the middle
of the country at the middle of the century, in a Chicago suburb that
defined a childhood out of "Father Knows Best" or "Ozzie and Harriet."
Years later, a group of her old teachers and classmates got together with
her to reminisce, with a historian to moderate. During the round of
introductions, Clinton's second-grade teacher turned to her and deadpanned:
"And who are you?"
"Oh yes," said the first lady of the United States. "This is the question
we're all trying to answer."
Clinton has charted a decade and a half now on the national stage. She is by
far the most familiar to us of the nearly 20 people running for president.
And yet she remains somehow paradoxical, impenetrable, unknowable.
Her life has been marked by polar forces: She is the daughter of a
left-leaning mother and an archconservative father. She campaigned for Barry
Goldwater, and then for Eugene McCarthy. She married a force of nature, then
struggled to define her own image.
She has wrestled with a somewhat stilted public speaking voice, a scripted
style, belied by what friends say is a whimsical affinity for costume
jewelry at the holidays and a signature laugh she lets loose occasionally _
boisterous and infectious.
She has an unquestioned intellect but, as former aide Melanne Verveer says,
an "absolute tin ear for foreign languages" rivaled only by her flat singing
voice infamously pilloried on YouTube.
There always has been a holographic quality to Hillary Clinton: Looked at
from one angle, she can be the tough trailblazer, weatherer of a thousand
storms. From another, she can be the personification of icy, calculating
ambition.
But what about that teacher's basic question? Who is she?
There are clues at each stage of her singular American story.
___
On the day Hillary Diane Rodham turned 10 years old, she was in the midst of
a childhood she later called cautious and conformist, growing up in a
two-story brick house in Park Ridge, Ill.
It was 1957, and she won perhaps the first election of her life, co-captain
of the safety patrol for her elementary school. As an adult Clinton
reflected that it was one of many times as a child she had to learn to stand
up to rambunctious boys.
She was a tomboy and a Girl Scout, encouraged by her mother to fight back
when a neighborhood girl pushed her around. Mother and daughter played games
of strategy and calculation: Concentration, Monopoly, Clue.
Young Hillary came early to politics, influenced by opposing pressures. This
was true at home, where her father's outspoken, opinionated conservatism
contrasted with her mother's quiet Democratic leanings, but perhaps more
searingly at school.
She learned about Barry Goldwater through her ninth-grade history teacher at
Maine East High, Paul Carlson, who taught passionately and with an admitted
rightward bent, punctuating lectures with the expression, "Better dead than
red!"
He later recalled Hillary as bright, talkative, enthusiastic.
"She always knew what the affairs of the day were," Carlson, who retired
from Maine East just this spring, remembered years later in an interview
with The Associated Press. "Her parents sat with her and her brothers at
dinner, and they talked politics."
She grew up Methodist, and her social conscience was forged by a youth
minister named Donald Jones. He took her to visit black and Hispanic
churches in Chicago, and to see the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr.
Jones later joked he and Carlson fought for her mind and soul. She exchanged
letters with both men regularly for decades, and 40 years later, desperate
for spiritual guidance during the crisis that threatened her marriage, she
turned to Jones for help.
In high school Hillary Rodham ran for student government and lost. And long
before Hillary Clinton acknowledged presidential ambitions, she would tell a
story about the sting she felt from one of her opponents that senior year.
He told her she was stupid to think a girl could be elected president.
___
On the day Hillary Rodham turned 20, she was halfway through her time at
Wellesley College. It was 1967, and she was nearing a sort of political
fulcrum in her life. She struggled, not for the last time, with her feelings
about a war _ in this case Vietnam _ and continued support for it by both
Republicans and Lyndon Johnson.
She served for a time as president of the campus Young Republicans. As a
senior she was president of the student government and presiding officer of
its Senate. On May 31, 1969, she was selected to give the student
commencement speech.
The act she had to follow was Republican Sen. Edward Brooke, who spoke
against "coercive protest." Rodham later wrote that she waited in vain
during the speech for some mention of the pain and soul-searching of the
time _ Vietnam, JFK, RFK, MLK.
Rodham took to the dais, peering out through Coke-bottle-thick glasses.
"Every protest, every dissent," she said, challenging Brooke by name, "is
unabashedly an attempt to forge an identity in this particular age."
She had just begun forging one of her own. The speech was a sensation. She
was featured in Life magazine.
She also said this: "And then respect. There's that mutuality of respect
between people where you don't see people as percentage points. Where you
don't manipulate people."
Fairly or not, precisely those qualities _ manipulating people, seeing them
as percentage points _ would become the lodestar for those who chose to tilt
the hologram to see Hillary Clinton in a negative light.
___
On the day Hillary Rodham Clinton turned 30, she was a young lawyer at the
Rose Law Firm in Little Rock, Ark. Her husband had been elected state
attorney general, a losing race for Congress behind him, the governor's
office on his mind.
It was 1977, and two years earlier she had finally married Bill Clinton, the
energetic, talkative Arkansan whom she had met in 1970 at the library of the
Yale Law School.
"Bill Clinton and I started a conversation," she would write years later.
"And more than 30 years later we're still talking."
Sheila Bronfman, an Arkansas political consultant who met the couple in
1977, remembers Hillary for her "big glasses and hair" _ and also for the
almost intimidating way she had accomplished so much at such a young age.
"She was always somebody you looked up to," Bronfman recalled recently in an
interview. "I was a young woman back then, and you're just breaking out and
doing stuff _ she'd already done so much. We always said _ he'll kill me for
this _ she was smarter than Bill."
___
A few months after Hillary Clinton turned 30, a businessman named Jim
McDougal came to the young couple with a plan to buy land on the White
River, divide it into lots for vacation homes and resell at a profit.
The Clintons went in with McDougal and his wife and formed a shareholders
company. They named it Whitewater.
It was the piece of frayed string that would later nearly unravel the
Clinton presidency, a $70 million, yearslong investigation by a special
counsel that led to the imprisonment of McDougal and his wife, Susan, but
never resulted in charges against the Clintons.
___
On the day Hillary Rodham Clinton turned 40, her husband was three months
removed from a decision not to run for president in 1988, despite the urging
of prominent Democrats.
Allegations of sexual impropriety had derailed the campaign of Gary Hart,
and at least one panicked adviser suggested to Bill Clinton that rumors of
his own infidelity might derail a White House campaign. He chose not to run.
"We came up with this notion that maybe she could run for governor," Betsey
Wright, Bill Clinton's former chief of staff in Arkansas, said in an
interview. "The feeling in Arkansas at the time was that a spouse was a
for-free, full-time volunteer for the state."
Wright, who calls Hillary Clinton one of the sharpest, shrewdest political
minds she has ever known, said, "Things have changed a lot since then."
Bill Clinton ran for the presidency and won in 1992, of course, and Hillary
struggled to reconcile her own profile _ career-minded, politically astute,
incredibly successful _ with traditional American impressions about first
ladies.
Two slips in particular were memorable. The first was her declaration in a
"60 Minutes" TV interview during the campaign that "I'm not sitting here,
some little woman standing by my man like Tammy Wynette."
The second, in response to a question about her law career, was that "I
supposed I could have stayed home, baked cookies and had teas." Both created
media typhoons.
Clinton herself later wrote that the outcry may have suggested a society
"still adjusting to the changing roles of women" and _ perhaps in an
acknowledgment that some voters are still adjusting _ insisted she had baked
more than a few cookies in her day.
She also wrote that the episodes taught her never to take criticism
personally. But there was another misstep early in the White House years _
her disastrous attempt, at the direction of her husband, to overhaul the
U.S. health care system.
Republicans smelled blood, railed against "Hillarycare," and swept into
control of both houses of Congress in 1994. For Hillary Rodham Clinton, it
was the darkest moment of the first Clinton term, friends say.
"It was a very difficult time," said Melanne Verveer, the first lady's
former chief of staff. "I think she very much felt as though she had truly
failed in what she was trying to do _ with her husband's commitment to
having her do it."
At a meeting of about 10 advisers, all women, Clinton wondered aloud whether
she should completely give up on policy matters.
"She was clearly down," Verveer recalled in an interview. "She was
expressing how deeply discouraged she felt. We all said, you've got a great
deal that you need to be doing."
It was only the beginning of a rocky period. Her poll ratings dropped by
more than 10 points in a single week in January 1996 when news reports were
dominated by speculation about Whitewater and her role in White House
firings. Columnist William Safire famously called her "a congenital liar."
Burned by her very public involvement in the proposed health care overhaul,
she dug in as an aggressive force behind the scenes in her husband's 1996
re-election campaign and in the White House's response to a cavalcade of
scandals.
When a former FBI agent published a book attacking the Clintons, she called
it a "politically inspired fabrication." When President Clinton was unsure
whether personally to respond to the conviction of three Clinton associates
in the first Whitewater trial, she advised him to talk to reporters.
And when a newspaper reported in early 1996 about Vice President Al Gore's
hopes of succeeding Clinton in 2000, Gore personally visited the first lady
to stress his loyalty.
"Gore knew which Clinton to go to," an aide said at the time.
___
On the day Hillary Rodham Clinton turned 50, about 500 of her friends
gathered on the White House South Lawn to celebrate, and the next day she
reminisced in Park Ridge _ the same day her second-grade teacher playfully
asked, "And who are you?"
It was 1997, three months before the nation would first hear of a young
intern named Monica Lewinsky.
Friends of Clinton like to recall the middle years of the White House term
and say the first lady took a personal interest in her staff, relishing the
chance to pop up in the back of the plane in gym clothes and no makeup and
just shoot the breeze.
"She took a great interest in trying to be a matchmaker," Lisa Caputo, her
former press secretary, said in an interview. "She loved to know just within
the White House who was dating whom. She loved to be in on the social mix."
Then came Monica.
Hillary Clinton became the deceived wife in one of the greatest sex scandals
ever to rock the government. She insisted on the existence of a "vast
right-wing conspiracy." Americans who once identified her in polls as
domineering now saw her as strong.
As she tells it in her 2003 autobiography, "Living History," she faced the
two toughest decisions of her life in her 50s. One was to stay married to
Bill. The other was to run for U.S. Senate.
She wrestled once again with her identity. Criticized as a carpetbagger for
running for Senate from New York, a state with which she had virtually no
personal connection, she embarked on a statewide "listening tour," and
easily defeated a Long Island congressman to win in 2000.
Her first Senate term would be remembered for two things: her insistence on
federal aid for New York after Sept. 11, an effort for which even
Republicans praised her, and her 2002 vote to authorize military force
against Iraq _ a vote for which she has refused, in the face of criticism
from the left, to apologize.
In 2006 she captured two-thirds of the vote and won all but four of New
York's 62 counties. Two and a half months later, exactly two years before
Inauguration Day 2009, she appeared in an online video.
She was seated on a couch, her right arm casually draped over a pillow, soft
light in the background. She spoke of energy independence, an end to the war
in Iraq and, yes, health care for all Americans. And she announced her
candidacy for president.
"Let the conversation begin," she said. "I have a feeling it's going to be
very interesting."
___
On the day Hillary Clinton turns 60, the last Friday of this October, she
and the rest of the Democratic presidential field expect to be preparing for
one of their final debates the following week in Philadelphia.
The Iowa caucuses, no longer some far-off abstraction, loom just around the
corner.
Hillary Clinton's campaign has deployed husband Bill on the campaign trail,
though political pundits note his speeches are limited to a fraction of the
length of hers and sometimes he's kept entirely off stage.
To people who know her, there is little doubt whose campaign it is.
"I believe Hillary makes the decisions," former New York Gov. Mario Cuomo,
whom she calls a friend, said in an interview. "I don't think Bill Clinton,
the former president does. I don't think (Clinton strategist Mark) Penn
does."
"I'm sure she will listen," he went on. "But if she disagrees, I guarantee
you, it's going to be Hillary's way."
Former aide Verveer tells a story about a December 1996 visit to La Paz,
Bolivia _ a South American city whose altitude, more than two miles above
sea level, gives it notoriously thin air.
Two reporters had fainted by the end of the first event, and that was just
the beginning. Security officers and aides wound up on gurneys. Someone was
reaching for a tank of oxygen the staff had brought along for the trip when
Clinton burst in.
"She runs in and says, `I'm sorry, you're going to have to give me that _ we
just lost the Secret Service agent,'" Verveer recalls. "She was playing
nurse. She was having to minister to the less of us who were just passed
out."
Verveer says, "She had a constitution different from all of ours."
Perhaps _ but who is she?
It's the question, she herself said, "we're all trying to answer."
Hillary Rodham Clinton: Who Is She?
Friday, December 14, 2007
NEW YORK -- Hillary Rodham Clinton likes to say she was born in the middle
of the country at the middle of the century, in a Chicago suburb that
defined a childhood out of "Father Knows Best" or "Ozzie and Harriet."
Years later, a group of her old teachers and classmates got together with
her to reminisce, with a historian to moderate. During the round of
introductions, Clinton's second-grade teacher turned to her and deadpanned:
"And who are you?"
"Oh yes," said the first lady of the United States. "This is the question
we're all trying to answer."
Clinton has charted a decade and a half now on the national stage. She is by
far the most familiar to us of the nearly 20 people running for president.
And yet she remains somehow paradoxical, impenetrable, unknowable.
Her life has been marked by polar forces: She is the daughter of a
left-leaning mother and an archconservative father. She campaigned for Barry
Goldwater, and then for Eugene McCarthy. She married a force of nature, then
struggled to define her own image.
She has wrestled with a somewhat stilted public speaking voice, a scripted
style, belied by what friends say is a whimsical affinity for costume
jewelry at the holidays and a signature laugh she lets loose occasionally _
boisterous and infectious.
She has an unquestioned intellect but, as former aide Melanne Verveer says,
an "absolute tin ear for foreign languages" rivaled only by her flat singing
voice infamously pilloried on YouTube.
There always has been a holographic quality to Hillary Clinton: Looked at
from one angle, she can be the tough trailblazer, weatherer of a thousand
storms. From another, she can be the personification of icy, calculating
ambition.
But what about that teacher's basic question? Who is she?
There are clues at each stage of her singular American story.
___
On the day Hillary Diane Rodham turned 10 years old, she was in the midst of
a childhood she later called cautious and conformist, growing up in a
two-story brick house in Park Ridge, Ill.
It was 1957, and she won perhaps the first election of her life, co-captain
of the safety patrol for her elementary school. As an adult Clinton
reflected that it was one of many times as a child she had to learn to stand
up to rambunctious boys.
She was a tomboy and a Girl Scout, encouraged by her mother to fight back
when a neighborhood girl pushed her around. Mother and daughter played games
of strategy and calculation: Concentration, Monopoly, Clue.
Young Hillary came early to politics, influenced by opposing pressures. This
was true at home, where her father's outspoken, opinionated conservatism
contrasted with her mother's quiet Democratic leanings, but perhaps more
searingly at school.
She learned about Barry Goldwater through her ninth-grade history teacher at
Maine East High, Paul Carlson, who taught passionately and with an admitted
rightward bent, punctuating lectures with the expression, "Better dead than
red!"
He later recalled Hillary as bright, talkative, enthusiastic.
"She always knew what the affairs of the day were," Carlson, who retired
from Maine East just this spring, remembered years later in an interview
with The Associated Press. "Her parents sat with her and her brothers at
dinner, and they talked politics."
She grew up Methodist, and her social conscience was forged by a youth
minister named Donald Jones. He took her to visit black and Hispanic
churches in Chicago, and to see the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr.
Jones later joked he and Carlson fought for her mind and soul. She exchanged
letters with both men regularly for decades, and 40 years later, desperate
for spiritual guidance during the crisis that threatened her marriage, she
turned to Jones for help.
In high school Hillary Rodham ran for student government and lost. And long
before Hillary Clinton acknowledged presidential ambitions, she would tell a
story about the sting she felt from one of her opponents that senior year.
He told her she was stupid to think a girl could be elected president.
___
On the day Hillary Rodham turned 20, she was halfway through her time at
Wellesley College. It was 1967, and she was nearing a sort of political
fulcrum in her life. She struggled, not for the last time, with her feelings
about a war _ in this case Vietnam _ and continued support for it by both
Republicans and Lyndon Johnson.
She served for a time as president of the campus Young Republicans. As a
senior she was president of the student government and presiding officer of
its Senate. On May 31, 1969, she was selected to give the student
commencement speech.
The act she had to follow was Republican Sen. Edward Brooke, who spoke
against "coercive protest." Rodham later wrote that she waited in vain
during the speech for some mention of the pain and soul-searching of the
time _ Vietnam, JFK, RFK, MLK.
Rodham took to the dais, peering out through Coke-bottle-thick glasses.
"Every protest, every dissent," she said, challenging Brooke by name, "is
unabashedly an attempt to forge an identity in this particular age."
She had just begun forging one of her own. The speech was a sensation. She
was featured in Life magazine.
She also said this: "And then respect. There's that mutuality of respect
between people where you don't see people as percentage points. Where you
don't manipulate people."
Fairly or not, precisely those qualities _ manipulating people, seeing them
as percentage points _ would become the lodestar for those who chose to tilt
the hologram to see Hillary Clinton in a negative light.
___
On the day Hillary Rodham Clinton turned 30, she was a young lawyer at the
Rose Law Firm in Little Rock, Ark. Her husband had been elected state
attorney general, a losing race for Congress behind him, the governor's
office on his mind.
It was 1977, and two years earlier she had finally married Bill Clinton, the
energetic, talkative Arkansan whom she had met in 1970 at the library of the
Yale Law School.
"Bill Clinton and I started a conversation," she would write years later.
"And more than 30 years later we're still talking."
Sheila Bronfman, an Arkansas political consultant who met the couple in
1977, remembers Hillary for her "big glasses and hair" _ and also for the
almost intimidating way she had accomplished so much at such a young age.
"She was always somebody you looked up to," Bronfman recalled recently in an
interview. "I was a young woman back then, and you're just breaking out and
doing stuff _ she'd already done so much. We always said _ he'll kill me for
this _ she was smarter than Bill."
___
A few months after Hillary Clinton turned 30, a businessman named Jim
McDougal came to the young couple with a plan to buy land on the White
River, divide it into lots for vacation homes and resell at a profit.
The Clintons went in with McDougal and his wife and formed a shareholders
company. They named it Whitewater.
It was the piece of frayed string that would later nearly unravel the
Clinton presidency, a $70 million, yearslong investigation by a special
counsel that led to the imprisonment of McDougal and his wife, Susan, but
never resulted in charges against the Clintons.
___
On the day Hillary Rodham Clinton turned 40, her husband was three months
removed from a decision not to run for president in 1988, despite the urging
of prominent Democrats.
Allegations of sexual impropriety had derailed the campaign of Gary Hart,
and at least one panicked adviser suggested to Bill Clinton that rumors of
his own infidelity might derail a White House campaign. He chose not to run.
"We came up with this notion that maybe she could run for governor," Betsey
Wright, Bill Clinton's former chief of staff in Arkansas, said in an
interview. "The feeling in Arkansas at the time was that a spouse was a
for-free, full-time volunteer for the state."
Wright, who calls Hillary Clinton one of the sharpest, shrewdest political
minds she has ever known, said, "Things have changed a lot since then."
Bill Clinton ran for the presidency and won in 1992, of course, and Hillary
struggled to reconcile her own profile _ career-minded, politically astute,
incredibly successful _ with traditional American impressions about first
ladies.
Two slips in particular were memorable. The first was her declaration in a
"60 Minutes" TV interview during the campaign that "I'm not sitting here,
some little woman standing by my man like Tammy Wynette."
The second, in response to a question about her law career, was that "I
supposed I could have stayed home, baked cookies and had teas." Both created
media typhoons.
Clinton herself later wrote that the outcry may have suggested a society
"still adjusting to the changing roles of women" and _ perhaps in an
acknowledgment that some voters are still adjusting _ insisted she had baked
more than a few cookies in her day.
She also wrote that the episodes taught her never to take criticism
personally. But there was another misstep early in the White House years _
her disastrous attempt, at the direction of her husband, to overhaul the
U.S. health care system.
Republicans smelled blood, railed against "Hillarycare," and swept into
control of both houses of Congress in 1994. For Hillary Rodham Clinton, it
was the darkest moment of the first Clinton term, friends say.
"It was a very difficult time," said Melanne Verveer, the first lady's
former chief of staff. "I think she very much felt as though she had truly
failed in what she was trying to do _ with her husband's commitment to
having her do it."
At a meeting of about 10 advisers, all women, Clinton wondered aloud whether
she should completely give up on policy matters.
"She was clearly down," Verveer recalled in an interview. "She was
expressing how deeply discouraged she felt. We all said, you've got a great
deal that you need to be doing."
It was only the beginning of a rocky period. Her poll ratings dropped by
more than 10 points in a single week in January 1996 when news reports were
dominated by speculation about Whitewater and her role in White House
firings. Columnist William Safire famously called her "a congenital liar."
Burned by her very public involvement in the proposed health care overhaul,
she dug in as an aggressive force behind the scenes in her husband's 1996
re-election campaign and in the White House's response to a cavalcade of
scandals.
When a former FBI agent published a book attacking the Clintons, she called
it a "politically inspired fabrication." When President Clinton was unsure
whether personally to respond to the conviction of three Clinton associates
in the first Whitewater trial, she advised him to talk to reporters.
And when a newspaper reported in early 1996 about Vice President Al Gore's
hopes of succeeding Clinton in 2000, Gore personally visited the first lady
to stress his loyalty.
"Gore knew which Clinton to go to," an aide said at the time.
___
On the day Hillary Rodham Clinton turned 50, about 500 of her friends
gathered on the White House South Lawn to celebrate, and the next day she
reminisced in Park Ridge _ the same day her second-grade teacher playfully
asked, "And who are you?"
It was 1997, three months before the nation would first hear of a young
intern named Monica Lewinsky.
Friends of Clinton like to recall the middle years of the White House term
and say the first lady took a personal interest in her staff, relishing the
chance to pop up in the back of the plane in gym clothes and no makeup and
just shoot the breeze.
"She took a great interest in trying to be a matchmaker," Lisa Caputo, her
former press secretary, said in an interview. "She loved to know just within
the White House who was dating whom. She loved to be in on the social mix."
Then came Monica.
Hillary Clinton became the deceived wife in one of the greatest sex scandals
ever to rock the government. She insisted on the existence of a "vast
right-wing conspiracy." Americans who once identified her in polls as
domineering now saw her as strong.
As she tells it in her 2003 autobiography, "Living History," she faced the
two toughest decisions of her life in her 50s. One was to stay married to
Bill. The other was to run for U.S. Senate.
She wrestled once again with her identity. Criticized as a carpetbagger for
running for Senate from New York, a state with which she had virtually no
personal connection, she embarked on a statewide "listening tour," and
easily defeated a Long Island congressman to win in 2000.
Her first Senate term would be remembered for two things: her insistence on
federal aid for New York after Sept. 11, an effort for which even
Republicans praised her, and her 2002 vote to authorize military force
against Iraq _ a vote for which she has refused, in the face of criticism
from the left, to apologize.
In 2006 she captured two-thirds of the vote and won all but four of New
York's 62 counties. Two and a half months later, exactly two years before
Inauguration Day 2009, she appeared in an online video.
She was seated on a couch, her right arm casually draped over a pillow, soft
light in the background. She spoke of energy independence, an end to the war
in Iraq and, yes, health care for all Americans. And she announced her
candidacy for president.
"Let the conversation begin," she said. "I have a feeling it's going to be
very interesting."
___
On the day Hillary Clinton turns 60, the last Friday of this October, she
and the rest of the Democratic presidential field expect to be preparing for
one of their final debates the following week in Philadelphia.
The Iowa caucuses, no longer some far-off abstraction, loom just around the
corner.
Hillary Clinton's campaign has deployed husband Bill on the campaign trail,
though political pundits note his speeches are limited to a fraction of the
length of hers and sometimes he's kept entirely off stage.
To people who know her, there is little doubt whose campaign it is.
"I believe Hillary makes the decisions," former New York Gov. Mario Cuomo,
whom she calls a friend, said in an interview. "I don't think Bill Clinton,
the former president does. I don't think (Clinton strategist Mark) Penn
does."
"I'm sure she will listen," he went on. "But if she disagrees, I guarantee
you, it's going to be Hillary's way."
Former aide Verveer tells a story about a December 1996 visit to La Paz,
Bolivia _ a South American city whose altitude, more than two miles above
sea level, gives it notoriously thin air.
Two reporters had fainted by the end of the first event, and that was just
the beginning. Security officers and aides wound up on gurneys. Someone was
reaching for a tank of oxygen the staff had brought along for the trip when
Clinton burst in.
"She runs in and says, `I'm sorry, you're going to have to give me that _ we
just lost the Secret Service agent,'" Verveer recalls. "She was playing
nurse. She was having to minister to the less of us who were just passed
out."
Verveer says, "She had a constitution different from all of ours."
Perhaps _ but who is she?
It's the question, she herself said, "we're all trying to answer."