Since I’d already vetted all the judges up for retention during slower moments of the baseball playoffs, I brought my copy of All the King’s Men to the polls this morning to entertain me in case there was a long wait. There wasn’t, but I dipped into it during lunch anyway, because it’s been echoing in my head all election season, especially when I hear someone describing Hillary Clinton as corrupt or a liar.
In the fall she’ll be going to Wellesley College because women aren’t yet admitted to Harvard, Yale, Princeton, et al. She’ll get a good education there, equal to that of her male counterparts. She’ll be in an environment where women are expected and encouraged to lead, where even the college president has always been a woman. Does she feel any regret, though, about missing out on the famous professors, the patina of famous alumni, the knowledge that she and her classmates will be the future leaders of America, not just the wives and helpmates? Has anyone told her yet to lower her voice when she gets angry, or told her that she should be less intense or less brilliant so the boys in her class don’t feel threatened? So they might even ask her to homecoming? Does it bother her that the school paper has predicted that she’ll grow up to be a nun named “Sister Frigidaire”?
What does all this do to a woman’s soul? All that Willie Stark had to do, by contrast, was withstand the mockery of some city slicker types who underestimated him because of his country clothes and manners (and also, in the best chapter in the book, a tongue-lashing from his female secretary and an epic hangover). He had the luxury of drowning his doubts and his anger in women and booze. “It might have all been different, Jack,” he tells our narrator as he lays dying from an assassin’s bullet. “You got to believe that.”
