First Lady Defended on Ties to New Age Author

White House officials defended Hillary Rodham Clinton on Sunday after a new book revealed that she met with a New Age self-help author and psychic researcher.

“All I can tell you is that the first lady’s a human being. She reaches out, talks to her friends, talks to others, gathers information,” White House Chief of Staff Leon E. Panetta told CBS-TV’s “Face the Nation.”

Washington was titillated when Sunday’s Washington Post ran the first of four excerpts from “The Choice,” a book by its assistant managing editor, Bob Woodward, that says the president’s wife found encouragement by talking with Jean Houston, co-director of the Foundation for Mind Research, which studies psychic experience and altered and expanded consciousness.

The book says that Houston got Hillary Clinton to hold an imaginary talk with First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt, who died in 1962, during an April 1995 session in the White House solarium and that she also advised Mrs. Clinton on her child-rearing book, “It Takes a Village.” Houston told CNN the imaginary talk with Roosevelt took up “maybe four minutes out of hours and hours of conversation.”

Mrs. Clinton was also led into a conversation with Indian leader Mahatma Gandhi, who died in 1948, but drew the line when asked to talk to Jesus Christ, the book says.

The revelations take up only a few pages of the book, which is about the Clintons, Bob Dole and his wife, Elizabeth Hanford Dole. But they immediately prompted comparisons of Hillary Clinton and First Lady Nancy Reagan, who consulted an astrologer and used the information to schedule presidential trips and key events.

“This is not a mystic. This is not channeling. This is just her talking, especially at a time when she was working on her book, trying to get her head in shape and helping her get through some tough times,” said Mrs. Clinton’s spokesman, Neel Lattimore.

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Even one leading critic of the first lady, Sen. Alfonse M. D’Amato (R-N.Y.), dismissed the book excerpts as “a lot of to-do about nothing,” adding, “She has every right to consult somebody who may make her feel good.”

Woodward’s book says that in October and November 1995, Houston virtually moved into the White House residence for several days at a time to help Mrs. Clinton with her book, which was a bestseller earlier this year.

Houston and an associate, Mary Catherine Bateson, followed up their initial weekend at Camp David, Md., with a series of letters and subsequent sessions at the White House.

The most recent session cited was March 21, 1996, when, Woodward reports, Houston told some jokes and stories in an effort to lift what seemed to be the first lady’s sagging spirits.