On My Mind: Long Live Hillary

Jan. 7 -- Hillary Rodham Clinton has been on my mind a lot the past year. I finally decided to write about her after watching her being sworn in last week as the junior senator from New York.

It was a striking portrait on the television set. Her peacock blue outfit stole attention away from her fellow dark-suited senators as they strode to the podium in the Senate chambers to take the oath of office. That bright pantsuit seemed symbolic that with her presence now there, the august body would never be quite the same.

I thought back to March of 1999, a month after the Senate impeachment trial, I was among a small group of reporters who accompanied Mrs. Clinton and Chelsea on a 12-day trip of North Africa with visits to Egypt, Tunisia and Morocco. It was her first foreign trip after the impeachment scandal.

She was very leery of us reporters, and in the early days kept her distance from us. But before we had left the States, there had been rumors and we were dying for her to answer the major question on all our minds: Will you run for retiring Sen. Daniel Patrick Moynihan’s seat? All we got was, variations on this theme: “Some people want me to think about it, and I am.”

Popular Worldwide

During the trip I was amazed to see firsthand what I had heard about, her worldwide popularity. Whether in Cairo or some remote village in Tunisia, people turned out in large numbers to see the “American first lady.” You would have thought she was Madonna. People shouted “Hee-lary, Hee-lary!” They wanted to touch her and her to touch them.

She embraced the poor, the dirty, the homeless, the sick. She delivered unpopular messages to the leaders of Muslim countries, against female circumcision, and equal rights for women. She promoted child and maternal health, education for girls, and marital and inheritance rights for wives and mothers.

As she became more comfortable with her traveling press corps, she invited us one night to have dinner with her in an elegant restaurant in Marrakesh. It was to be off the record. The perfect time we thought — since we couldn’t report it — to feel her out on the Senate run.