You Didn T Reveal Your Pain

When people are criticizing me, they get to the old “Slick Willie” business. Part of it is that I’m always smiling and try to make it look easy and all that. And part of it is the way I was raised. I had such difficulties in my childhood. And I didn’t have anybody I could talk to about it. I didn’t know I was supposed to talk about it. I was raised in that sort of culture where you put on a happy face, and you didn’t reveal your pain and agony. Those were not things you shared with people. In some ways, while I’m gregarious, I may be more solitary than I appear.

It was the same thing with [anguish over] the [Vietnam] War. I was raised in a time and with a culture where I was never supposed to talk about myself or my own problems-my own pain or my own ambivalence. I was also raised to believe that no matter how tough it gets for you, there are always a whole lot of people worse off. I struggle now for ways to reveal my true feelings that don’t seem self-indulgent. It’s a real hard thing for me to do, I confess.

He genuinely did love me, and I genuinely did love him. It was himself that he didn’t love. Like a lot of men of his age and time, he didn’t have a lot of open and candid conversations until he began to die. If you asked me to make a list of the 10 most vivid times of my life when I was really alive, I would say those six weeks when he was being treated for cancer at the Duke Medical Center-it was 266 miles from Georgetown [where Clinton was studying] to his hospital room-and I went there every weekend. And we had the kind of conversations that I wish my brother had had. [His half brother is a recovering drug addict.] I just have to say-and a lot of people like me who grew up in alcoholic families would say the same thing-the times were not all bad. People don’t stay in hell-it’s intermittent hell that we all put up with…I never regret changing my name.

In an interview, my brother told a story about another incidence of domestic violence that I had interrupted. I didn’t even remember it until I read the story, and then I remembered it. I guess I suppressed a lot of that stuff. But the truth is that there were also a lot of very good times. Like a lot of addicts, [my stepfather] could never appreciate the good things in his life for being consumed by the gnawing fears and failures and insecurities, even though he was attractive and intelligent.

The only thing they ought to do is look at the whole record of my public life. Again, I was a peacemaker, and I hated overt conflicts. It was a source of great pain in my childhood. One of the biggest problems I had in fully maturing was learning how to deal with conflict, and express conflict and express disagreement without being disagreeable, without thinking the world would come to an end, without feeling I would kind of lose my footing in life. Because I grew up in an environment in which either nothing happened or all hell broke loose, so that the ordinary expression of disagreement and the ordinary confrontation and conflict of daily life was not contained. It was either repressed or it exploded, but it was not contained-it wasn’t part of the day-today workings of life.

I do think it was one of my weaknesses. As a young man in polities I was trying to figure out how to reconcile my natural desire to have people be civilized and be on good terms with one another and really respect each other and the need to stake out your ground and be in opposition to people who disagree with you.

On the other hand, I think entirely too much has been made of it. I went back and began a political career with a history in two issues that weren’t exactly the basis for successful white politicians in the South-race and Vietnam. In my first campaign, my opponent had a 70 percent approval rating and I almost beat him. So I think my critics can overplay this desire to please. I’ve never run from a tough fight and I still think I’ve been more of a change agent than most governors have. I don’t believe you have to make permanent enemies to stake out a position. When we had the opportunity to be bold, we were very, very bold. I fought with the AFL-CIO because they didn’t want me to raise any money for education. I fought with the chamber of commerce. I had this big confrontation with the NRA, where [they] said if I ran for president they would cream me because I vetoed their bill. I do not mind taking on vested interests and fighting them.

title: " You Didn T Reveal Your Pain " ShowToc: true date: “2022-12-25” author: “Janet Brown”

When people are criticizing me, they get to the old “Slick Willie” business. Part of it is that I’m always smiling and try to make it look easy and all that. And part of it is the way I was raised. I had such difficulties in my childhood. And I didn’t have anybody I could talk to about it. I didn’t know I was supposed to talk about it. I was raised in that sort of culture where you put on a happy face, and you didn’t reveal your pain and agony. Those were not things you shared with people. In some ways, while I’m gregarious, I may be more solitary than I appear.

It was the same thing with [anguish over] the [Vietnam] War. I was raised in a time and with a culture where I was never supposed to talk about myself or my own problems-my own pain or my own ambivalence. I was also raised to believe that no matter how tough it gets for you, there are always a whole lot of people worse off. I struggle now for ways to reveal my true feelings that don’t seem self-indulgent. It’s a real hard thing for me to do, I confess.

He genuinely did love me, and I genuinely did love him. It was himself that he didn’t love. Like a lot of men of his age and time, he didn’t have a lot of open and candid conversations until he began to die. If you asked me to make a list of the 10 most vivid times of my life when I was really alive, I would say those six weeks when he was being treated for cancer at the Duke Medical Center-it was 266 miles from Georgetown [where Clinton was studying] to his hospital room-and I went there every weekend. And we had the kind of conversations that I wish my brother had had. [His half brother is a recovering drug addict.] I just have to say-and a lot of people like me who grew up in alcoholic families would say the same thing-the times were not all bad. People don’t stay in hell-it’s intermittent hell that we all put up with…I never regret changing my name.

In an interview, my brother told a story about another incidence of domestic violence that I had interrupted. I didn’t even remember it until I read the story, and then I remembered it. I guess I suppressed a lot of that stuff. But the truth is that there were also a lot of very good times. Like a lot of addicts, [my stepfather] could never appreciate the good things in his life for being consumed by the gnawing fears and failures and insecurities, even though he was attractive and intelligent.

The only thing they ought to do is look at the whole record of my public life. Again, I was a peacemaker, and I hated overt conflicts. It was a source of great pain in my childhood. One of the biggest problems I had in fully maturing was learning how to deal with conflict, and express conflict and express disagreement without being disagreeable, without thinking the world would come to an end, without feeling I would kind of lose my footing in life. Because I grew up in an environment in which either nothing happened or all hell broke loose, so that the ordinary expression of disagreement and the ordinary confrontation and conflict of daily life was not contained. It was either repressed or it exploded, but it was not contained-it wasn’t part of the day-today workings of life.

I do think it was one of my weaknesses. As a young man in polities I was trying to figure out how to reconcile my natural desire to have people be civilized and be on good terms with one another and really respect each other and the need to stake out your ground and be in opposition to people who disagree with you.

On the other hand, I think entirely too much has been made of it. I went back and began a political career with a history in two issues that weren’t exactly the basis for successful white politicians in the South-race and Vietnam. In my first campaign, my opponent had a 70 percent approval rating and I almost beat him. So I think my critics can overplay this desire to please. I’ve never run from a tough fight and I still think I’ve been more of a change agent than most governors have. I don’t believe you have to make permanent enemies to stake out a position. When we had the opportunity to be bold, we were very, very bold. I fought with the AFL-CIO because they didn’t want me to raise any money for education. I fought with the chamber of commerce. I had this big confrontation with the NRA, where [they] said if I ran for president they would cream me because I vetoed their bill. I do not mind taking on vested interests and fighting them.