There’s a powerful scene in episode three of the new four-part docuseries, Hillary, in which we see a smiley 18-year-old Chelsea Clinton walking hand-in-hand with her parents across the manicured lawns of the White House. It’s the summer of 1998 and the first family of the United States is about to board the presidential helicopter, Marine One, for a vacation. Taken out of context, this sunny spectacle, captured by lots of photographers - and complete with a chocolate labrador retriever named Buddy - appears picture-perfect.
In reality, first lady Hillary Rodham Clinton isn’t speaking to her husband.
It was the morning after president Bill Clinton had sat at the foot of his marital bed and admitted to his wife - and then to America via a televised address - that he’d had a relationship with 22-year-old White House intern Monica Lewinsky that was “not appropriate”.
“Chelsea put herself between us and held both our hands,” a slightly emotional Hillary recalls to director Nanette Burstein in a piece to camera in Hillary. “That was not anything other than her trying to keep us together, and when she did that, I thought, ‘Oh my gosh, that’s just so incredible, so strong and so wise’.”
Burstein spent an astonishing 35 hours asking Clinton all about her spectacular five-decade career. Whitewater. Benghazi. Lewinsky. Sanders. The emails. Her famous “women’s rights are human rights” speech to the UN. Her time as New York senator in the wake of September 11. The wild and often perplexing run to the 2016 presidential election. Trump. The emails. The emails again.
But perhaps the most gripping aspect of the series is Burstein’s gentle coaxing of her subject as she extracts details of Hillary’s personal experiences that lay adjacent to these events. A woman’s heart running parallel to the scandals. Who is Hillary Clinton in her most private moments?
Below are a few standout scenes to watch out for in this exceptionally intimate portrait.
“Even though I was a girl, my dad was going to expect me to do well.”
The series tracks Hillary’s childhood: growing up in a conservative Republican household in Chicago in the 1940s, she had a “classic, post-World War II, Leave it to Beaver upbringing”, she says, followed by a feminist awakening. Her father was a chief petty officer in the Navy and “didn’t know anything other than to set high expectations”.
“Even though I was a girl, he was going to expect me to do well,” Hillary says.
Hillary was one of just 27 women accepted into Yale Law School in Connecticut in 1969. As she was sitting the test, she recounts to Burstein how a young boy said to her: “If you get into law school and take my place and I go to Vietnam and die, it’s your fault.”
“In those days, you got no points for being emotional … You just put your head down, you worked hard and you got to where you were going despite obstacles,” Hillary says. “When you train yourself like that and then you fast-forward into an age where everybody wants to see what your emotions are, and how you respond, it’s really a different environment in which we find ourselves now.”
“I found her magnetic.”
“She certainly had an aura about her,” a bleary, blue-eyed Bill Clinton tells Burstein in the first episode, as he recalls the moment he saw Hillary in the library at Yale. “I just thought there was something about her. I found her magnetic.”
Hillary, who says by this stage she had cottoned on to the boy staring at her from across the room, says she walked straight up to him. “If you’re going to keep looking at me, we ought to know each other’s names,” she said. “I’m Hillary Rodham. Who are you?”
“Do you think anybody talks to Bernie Sanders about his goddamn shoes?”
A recurring theme in the series is how Hillary encountered opposition at every turn. From the moment she stepped foot into public life as the first lady of Arkansas, she was criticised for not initially taking her husband’s surname, then for not exclusively playing up to the ceremonial spousal role, then for her wide-rimmed glasses, her fashion sense, her hair and her posture.
The taunts never ceased.
Jennifer Palmieri, communications director for Clinton’s presidential campaign, says: “We would get all sorts of advice about how Hillary should be presenting herself. What she should wear, what her voice should sound like, the kind of words she should use, how she stands at a podium, how she modulates her voice.
“We sat through presentations, we brought people in to meet with her and I’d say, ‘If you could tell [Hillary about] a woman on the world stage who does it perfectly, she could emulate her.’ And no one ever had an answer for who that woman was.”
In previously unseen footage from a green room before a debate in the 2016 Democratic primaries, one of Hillary’s aides asks her if she’s going to “wear those shoes on stage”. She is quick to respond.
“Do you think anybody talks to Bernie Sanders about his goddamn shoes?”
“I believed Lewinsky. I think we all did.”
When Hillary moved into the White House in the 1990s, she hired all female staff. Forever a champion of women, she empowered them every day by encouraging them to share their opinions. She also stayed close to a lot of her college girlfriends - and a good few of these women, such as Nancy Gertner, Clinton’s classmate at Yale, add some candid soundbites to the series.
“I believed Lewinsky from the beginning; I think all of us did,” Gertner says. “Not that we had inside information, but it just didn’t seem far from the person [Bill] that we knew. I hugged Hillary and wanted very much to comfort her [in the wake of the allegations] but it would be like a mask would come over her in those days.”
“I just collapsed.”
In previously unseen footage, Burstein takes us into the green rooms, the hotel rooms and the first-class offices in the sky as Hillary and her team work gruelling 19-hour days, seven days a week in the lead-up to the 2016 presidential election. Their reactions to curveballs are captured, fly-on-the-wall conversations are recorded, and Hillary’s ultimate defeat is recounted.
In one scene, Hillary recalls how, right after giving her empowering and graceful concession speech to thousands of supporters - an address she says was the “hardest public moment that I’d ever had” - she broke down.
“Immediately after I’d got off the stage, after I’d hugged people, held people who were crying and all of that pent-up emotion [began] spilling out, finally Bill and I left. I just collapsed in the back of the van. I was like, ‘What just happened?’”
“The most admired and the most vilified woman in American history”
Hillary’s aides were forever trying to make her appear more genuine, and less polarising. People felt extraordinarily passionate about her or they absolutely did not trust her and rejected her.
“The goal was to get Hillary Clinton to be elected as the 45th president of the United States,” Jake Sullivan, senior policy advisor for the presidential campaign, tells Burstein. “The problem was she is one of the most admired and one of the most vilified women in American history.”
But of all the moments in the series, Hillary recounting her daughter’s actions on the lawn that day in 1998 is the only time we see her close to tears. It’s a painful picture and a real one.
Mandy Grunwald, media advisor for the Democratic Party, tells Burstein: “I think people don’t really understand how hurt [Hillary] has been personally by [Bill]. Because she’s so smart, people always believe that there’s some deviousness, that she must have known about Monica Lewinsky all along and been out there lying to protect him.”
As both the former president and former first lady admit in Hillary, the Clinton picture didn’t always tell a thousand (truthful) words.
Stream the four-part series on SBS On Demand from Wednesday 16 September or watch it weekly on SBS at 8.30pm. SBS On Demand is one of Australia’s largest free streaming platforms with more than 11,000 hours of drama, documentaries, movies, news and more.
