“It’s hard to separate the personal stuff from business,” said Peter Edelman, sitting in a coffee shop on a gray winter’s day and alluding to a deeper freeze, his relationship with two old friends, Bill and Hillary Rodham Clinton.
His own wife, the renowned children’s rights advocate Marian Wright Edelman, and Mrs. Clinton have had minimal contact in the past year. That’s it. The socializing of the past is, well, past too.
In a town where the personal and professional tend to be segregated, especially for the politicians, lobbyists and media who scratch one another’s backs, the wrath of the Edelmans is refreshingly rare. Not even a charmer of a president can smooth over their sense of betrayal.
It involves the nation’s new welfare law. In the March issue of the Atlantic Monthly, due later this week, Edelman will excoriate it as “The Worst Thing Bill Clinton Has Done.” Even if you’re convinced of the need for welfare change (as he is), this surprisingly even-tempered, comprehensive dissection may raise doubts, while reminding one that at least a few folks here have core principles that become their line in the sand.
“The law is about two things,” Edelman said Friday.
“It’s about families with children, not just about adults who should be working. The worst single thing is, I am all too certain that a large number of children will end up down the road without any support because there’s an arbitrary limit on the amount of time their families can get help (welfare). Some families will play by all the rules and still not find a job.
“Second, this is about whether the law really promotes work. People are being told to push people into jobs without the resources to do it. We’re talking about long-term welfare recipients, admittedly not a sympathetic group. Even now, there aren’t enough jobs. There certainly won’t be in a recession.”
Edelman’s comments to me, as well as those in the magazine, represent a certain coming-out. When he last September quit a top job as head of planning at the Health and Human Services Department over the welfare bill, it was front page news in The New York Times and The Washington Post.
He issued merely a two-sentence resignation letter and said nothing else.
“Most people in HHS agree with me, but they made their own decisions,” he said Friday. “Some weren’t in a position to leave.”
Having no interest in a Bob Dole presidential victory, he kept a low profile and is teaching law at Georgetown University Law Center.
Edelman, 59, and his wife are a remarkable couple who met during the height of the civil rights era. They maintain an iron commitment to a set of values, including the need for a social safety net. Their definition of “entitlement” does not square with many Republicans’.
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“They turned it into a dirty word,” he said. “It was, in fact, a national definition of eligibility for families with children and guarantee of a share of federal funding, regardless of the depth of a recession.”
Edelman was raised in Minneapolis and attended Harvard University and Harvard Law School. He served as a U.S. Supreme Court clerk for Justice Arthur Goldberg, the Chicago-bred labor expert, and became a top aide to Robert Kennedy at the Justice Department and in Kennedy’s subsequent Senate office.
Jewish and white, he fell in love with Marian Wright, a black Baptist and preacher’s daughter from South Carolina, after Kennedy visited the Mississippi delta region. She not only testified at a Kennedy hearing on poverty but showed Kennedy, Edelman and others shacks without plumbing and electricity and woefully undernourished children with swollen stomachs.
The couple married in 1968. Marian Wright Edelman became famous as founder of the Children’s Defense Fund. They’ve raised three impressive sons, all of whom graduated from either Harvard or Yale, and now teach high school in California, run a sister organization to the CDF and work for CBS Sports.
Edelman first met Mrs. Clinton in 1969 after he read about a tough-minded speech she delivered at her Wellesley College graduation. He invited her to a conference of the League of Women Voters, for whom he was a consultant, and they became good friends.
While at Yale Law School with Bill Clinton, Hillary Rodham worked with Marian Wright Edelman, and the CDF provided Hillary with her first job after law school. Hillary became a member of the fund’s board of directors, rising to chairman of the board, while Peter placed her on the board of a favorite organization of his, the New World Foundation.
“She stayed at our house on occasion,” recalled Peter, a sort of pragmatic New Deal liberal who shares his wife’s conviction that government must take care of poor children.
No more. “After much soul-searching,” Peter said, Marian wrote an op-ed piece for The Washington Post in late 1995.
It was in the form of an open letter to Clinton in which she called the pending welfare bills “morally and practically indefensible,” predicted they would “push millions of already poor children and families deeper into poverty” and concluded that they violated the urgings of the “Old Testament prophets and the New Testament Messiah (who) made plain God’s mandate to protect the poor and the weak and the young.”
Meanwhile, Edelman had his sights set on a federal judgeship. Clinton wanted to appoint him to the appeals court vacancy created when Chicago’s Abner Mikva became White House counsel.
But Clinton caved to political pressure from the Right–George Will wrote a screechy column bashing Edelman as believing “all of life is permeated by government action”–and dropped plans to nominate him for that position or a lower court job.
Ultimately, one can wonder if Edelman, a conduit to a certain liberal elite for the Clintons of Arkansas, was a tad naive all along.
Clinton’s track record is clear: He won’t let friendships get in the way of political decisions. His past is littered with close acquaintances whom he’s abandoned.
When it came to welfare reform, he saw a Congress controlled by Republicans out for big change. While there is dispute as to how a veto of the GOP measure might have played among Americans, Clinton bought into a view that he’d gain by signing it.
If he took the Edelmans for granted, it was nothing new. As a White House adviser who has known Clinton for a decade says, “First and foremost, he seeks to please his enemies.”
As for Edelman, he’s left worrying about kids and, perhaps, a perniciously gradual effect of the welfare law. Homelessness may just creep up gradually. Meanwhile, things are so bad already in poor inner city neighborhoods, the impact of a radical change in government policy may seem, on the surface, rather incremental.
“That’s kind of cold comfort,” he said.
Humdrum–or humbug–syndrome
For weeks, no months, I have been feeling glum and fatigued, simply not myself. The same has been true for many in my office and, come to think of it, many around town.
It was perplexing, at least until Tuesday evening. It was then that The New York Times moved an analysis of the president’s State of the Union address, which had not yet been delivered, by its esteemed R. W. Apple Jr., renowned for seeking the Big Picture.
The analysis ran on Page 1 of The Times the next morning and opened with Applean understatement.
“WASHINGTON–President Clinton sought on Tuesday night to shake this capital and the nation beyond from the inevitable letdown they experienced following the victory of the West, led by the United States, in the 40-year struggle against militant communism, led by the old Soviet Union.”
Now it’s clear. I am suffering from Post Cold War syndrome. Not even those hot new lozenges with zinc will help.