On Tuesday, former first lady Hillary Clinton and current first lady Jill Biden will appear together to announce the recipients of the Praemium Imperiale, an annual global arts prize for lifetime achievement by the Japan Art Association. Both women will deliver remarks.
Clinton’s return visit is likely to be a sentimental one.
“I have to imagine she’s really looking forward to being back and being back with the Bidens, who she’s been close to for a long time,” said Lisa Caputo, who was Clinton’s White House press secretary.
Clinton’s ties to the White House bracket her time as first lady.
Early visits came when she accompanied Bill Clinton to the executive mansion, when he was Arkansas governor from the late 1970s to the early 1990s, for annual receptions for the nation’s governors.
She was a regular at the White House in her post-first lady roles as a U.S. senator and as secretary of state, a position that came with a permanent seat next to the president at Cabinet meetings.
Twice she sought the ultimate White House perch, campaigning for president in 2008 and again in 2016. She failed each time, and kept her distance from the White House during the Trump years.
Ellen Fitzpatrick, emeritus professor of history at the University of New Hampshire, said going back to the White House evokes memories for any former first lady.
She recalled Jacqueline Kennedy’s trip back with her children years after President John F. Kennedy was assassinated. The former first lady later told President Richard Nixon in a thank you note that a day she had dreaded turned out to be one of the most precious she spent with her kids.
“I think for Hillary herself, I’m sure it will be quite a moment going back in,” said Fitzpatrick.
“My eight years in the White House tested my faith and political beliefs, my marriage and our nation’s Constitution,” she wrote in “Living History,” her memoir. “I became a lightning rod for political and ideological battles waged over America’s future and a magnet for feelings, good or bad, about women’s choices and roles.”
The former first lady has amassed some less-than-fond memories of the White House.
In his first year in office, President Clinton stood with his wife in the East Room and made her head of a national health care task force to bring health insurance to every American. No first lady had ever been responsible for shaping such major public policy. The work, largely done in secret, inevitably attracted criticism. The plan ultimately died without a vote in Congress.
In 1994, Clinton donned a pink sweater and fielded questions for more than an hour in the East Room about her financial dealings as part of the Whitewater affair, an Arkansas real estate project the couple had lost money in and that federal authorities were investigating.
At one point during the news conference, she said, “I’ve always believed in a zone of privacy, and I told a friend the other day that I feel after resisting for a long time that I’ve been rezoned.”
Another notable White House image of the Clintons came in 1998 after the president’s sexual relationship with intern Monica Lewinsky was exposed. As the family kept plans for a two-week vacation on the Massachusetts island of Martha’s Vineyard, the Clintons walked across the South Lawn to the waiting helicopter with a teenaged Chelsea as a buffer between her parents.
Hillary Clinton also was among those in the Roosevelt Room at the White House when the president declared to the nation that “I did not have sexual relations with that woman, Miss Lewinsky.” She went on national television and blamed their political problems on a “vast, right-wing conspiracy.”
Her public approval ratings ticked upward as her marital woes played out in public. She also became the first first lady to grace the cover of Vogue magazine, clad in a long-sleeved black velvet gown and seated on a red couch in the White House Red Room.
Whether she visits or not, Clinton will have an enduring presence at the White House: her portrait as first lady hangs in a hallway on the ground floor.
The Associated press contribtued to this article.