ASHLAND, ORE. — Recently, as New York Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton campaigned in Eugene, her onetime friend and mentor Jean Houston was at home in her double geodesic dome, a style that is not out of place here in this town of theater lovers and spiritual seekers.
"I could have probably gone down to see her, and she would have hugged me and it would have been nice," said Houston, as she sat on a sofa surrounded by art from Bali and Greece in her circular living room. "I could have been very useful to her. But there would have been cameras, and they would have said, 'Oh, now, Hillary's so desperate, she's gone to the spiritualist.' "
Houston was not Clinton's spiritualist, but when Clinton was at her lowest -- after the 1994 defeat of her healthcare initiative, the Republican takeover of Congress, seemingly interminable investigations and intense vilification -- Houston, a pioneer of the human potential movement, was something of a secret emotional life raft for the first lady.
The friendship ended after Bob Woodward revealed in a 1996 book that Houston had helped guide a devastated Hillary Clinton in imaginary conversations with her hero Eleanor Roosevelt.
Houston rarely speaks about her relationship with Clinton. As Clinton's nomination seemed on the verge of hitting the skids, Houston reflected on Clinton's style of politics and where the country's first viable female presidential candidate may have gone wrong.
Houston is a scholar and philosopher who travels the world giving seminars on human potential and what she calls "social artistry," applying myth, history and spirituality to help effect social, political or personal change.
During President Bill Clinton's first term, Houston and cultural anthropologist Mary Catherine Bateson, a friend of Houston, helped Hillary Clinton arrive at a new understanding of the symbolic power of her office and tutored her in what would become her most successful ventures as first lady -- a trip to South Asia, her first book, and a speech in Beijing about human rights that many would consider her finest moment.
Houston is a prolific author whose associates have included Margaret Mead (Bateson's mother) and mythology professor Joseph Campbell. She got to know Eleanor Roosevelt as a high school student in New York.
Houston sees the presidential race through a mythic lens.
