Lissa Muscatine
California & Wadham 1977
Born in 1954 in Berkeley, California, Lissa Muscatine studied at Harvard before going to Oxford as part of the first class of women Rhodes Scholars. There, she read for a second undergraduate degree, later switching to an MLitt/BLitt in French politics. After Oxford, Muscatine worked as a reporter at the Washington Star and Washington Post. She went on to become a speechwriter for both President Clinton and First Lady Hillary Clinton. In 2011, she and her husband, Bradley Graham, became co-owners of Washington, DC’s Politics and Prose bookshop. Muscatine is now working on HILLARYLAND, her book about her experiences at the heart of Hillary Clinton’s circle of advisers. This narrative is excerpted from an interview with the Rhodes Trust on 14 October 2024.
‘A sense of responsibility about being engaged in civic life’
I grew up in Berkeley in the 1960s and early 1970s, at the height of social and political tumult in the US over the Vietnam War, the civil rights movement, the women’s movement. Berkeley was one of the hotbeds of political activism, and my parents were very politically active, and all of that just instilled in me a sense of responsibility about being engaged in civic life and political life.
I went to the public schools in Berkeley, and they were some of the first to voluntarily desegregate. My high school was extremely diverse. It didn’t give me a great education academically, but what I did get was incredible social awareness. When I went away to college at Harvard, it was just a totally different world than any I had ever encountered. I was in the first class of women who lived in Harvard Yard, and I was also in the forefront of the fight for Title IX, because I played varsity sports.
On applying for the Rhodes Scholarship
When I graduated in 1976, women were not allowed to apply for the Rhodes. A few women a bit older than me deserve a huge shout-out, because they put pressure on different institutions to make that change happen. So, I wasn’t some pioneer. I was just the beneficiary of women before me who totally deserved it but who, by the time it was open to women, were too old to apply.
After college, I was working as a reporter at a small newspaper in the Mississippi Delta when my thesis adviser from Harvard suggested I should apply for the Rhodes. I was lucky in the sense that, because I was out of college and working, there was no pressure or tension. I wasn’t around anyone else who was applying. So, when I was called for interview, I just remember that I was pretty relaxed, and I think that actually allowed me to be a little more natural.
When I won the Scholarship, all of us women in that first class were inundated by press attention. Photographers wanted to take pictures and people wanted to do stories, and I joked that we were like exotic creatures in a zoo: you know, like, ‘Who could these women be?’ It was as if people didn’t understand that women could inhabit multiple roles and spaces.
‘It was odd, and there was awkwardness’
I have to say that Oxford was not entirely welcoming to women at that time. I didn’t feel hostility from Rhodes House, but there wasn’t a lot of support, and the colleges that had recently admitted women were still adjusting. I started my studies in PPE, and I remember a tutorial where our tutor drew a parabola on the chalkboard and said, ‘This is the most perfect symmetrical figure in mathematics, just like a perfect woman’s body.’ That was the kind of thing you dealt with. So, it was odd, and there was awkwardness.
I have to be very honest and say that I didn’t exactly enjoy Oxford. In part, I don’t think I was ready to go back to school at that point. I was also working in London as a stringer, first for TIME magazine and then for the New York Times, and so, I was busy with that. Studying PPE as an undergraduate degree didn’t give me the breadth and flexibility that I wanted as someone who had already been through college and I switched to a programme in French politics, but then I realised I would need to stay an extra year to finish. I didn’t stay, and there is a big part of me that feels like I should have done.
I felt very little affiliation with Oxford when I left, but I did start to become much more engaged again with my college, Wadham, about 15 years ago, and that has been incredibly exciting and wonderful. I’ve rekindled my Oxford self in a new context.
‘I felt so supported, and so challenged in the best ways’
When I left Oxford, I wanted to be a journalist, and I went to Washington, DC to take a job as a reporter. I’d always enjoyed writing, but it was only partway through college, working on a junior paper, that writing became a centrepiece for me. It had also always been in the back of my mind that I wanted to do something more politically active, and when Bill Clinton (Arkansas & University 1968) was elected, I thought this was my chance. I was completely naïve, and I wrote to Clinton’s chief speechwriter and offered my services – this having never written a speech. He said they weren’t hiring, but a little while later, he got in touch about a new position that would be half-time for the president and half-time for the first lady. Of course, I said I was interested, but shortly afterwards, I discovered I was pregnant. The field of applicants kept getting smaller as I kept getting bigger, and then I found out I was having twins. I thought, ‘There’s no way they’re going to hire me now.’ Years later, I found out that Hillary Clinton had overheard a debate about whether to hire me and had said, ‘Time out. We’re going to hire the best person for this job, and if that person has ten kids or one kid, I don’t care. Make it work.’
I cannot tell you what an amazing feeling it was to work in the environment that Hillary Clinton created within the White House. It was a locus of female power, a think-tank, a sisterhood nicknamed ‘Hillaryland.’ I felt so supported, and so challenged in the best ways, and so valued and respected. The role was not without its challenges, but one high point was working with Hillary Clinton on her speech for the UN Fourth World Conference on Women. We worked in a very small group to make it the strongest possible version of her message, and that is the speech in which she famously said, ‘Women’s rights are human rights.’ After Donald Trump was elected in 2016, I remember the women’s march in Washington, DC, where people were holding signs that read, ‘Women’s rights are human rights.’ We had no idea it was going to catch on like that, but it captured that moment.
I was still working as a speechwriter when my husband decided that he would apply to run Politics and Prose, the famous bookshop in Washington, DC, and he asked me to come to the interview with him. It’s a community organisation and it serves a real purpose, with incredibly loyal patrons. I can’t think of another retail business where you feel so appreciated. It was while I was doing that, and just after Trump was elected, that I made the decision to write a book, Hillaryland, about my time working with Hillary Clinton. For me, it’s deeply personal. It has compelled me every minute that I’ve been working on it. It’s a slice of history that, when it has been told so far, has been told superficially and incorrectly, and I feel like it’s a foundational story for women today about a woman who was trying to do something radically different.
‘You have agency’
When I think about my career, I have taken a very unconventional path. I did not plan any of the things that I have done. I didn’t think I was going to be a journalist. I certainly didn’t know I was going to be a speechwriter. I didn’t know I was going to own a bookstore. These were all opportunities that made their way to me and that I was able to grab, thank God. I feel like I’ve been really blessed.
I think taking risk is really important, especially for people like Rhodes Scholars. If you’re a Rhodes Scholar, nobody is ever going to say you’re dumb and nobody is ever going to say you’re not accomplished and you can’t do something. You’ve got that indelible mark on you of achievement and success. And that means that, as a Rhodes Scholar, you can afford to do something different and take a chance. If you have to do work to make enough money to pay bills, then I would never criticise that, but if a Rhodes Scholar chooses a career that’s about money and does that just to have another emblem of success, that really drives me nuts. My message, for young women in particular, is that you have agency, and that agency includes being able to make a choice that other people aren’t expecting, if you need or want to. That is real freedom.