Rodham

by Curtis Sittenfeld

  “No offense, but I don’t see you doing some grand celebration at Navy Pier because at this point, you’d struggle to generate bodies. I envision a media rollout, starting with an interview with WBEZ or the Trib.”

  “Would you be willing to be my communications director?”

  “I’d sabotage you if you didn’t offer it to me. You know who’d be a great campaign director is Stephanie Crouppen.” Stephanie had worked on the successful campaigns of a few Illinoisans in Congress. Greg said, “We can brainstorm other names, but Stephanie is my top pick.”

  “I’d also need a finance director, a political director, a field director, deputies for all that, a TV consultant—who am I forgetting?”

  “Those are the biggies, but you need to budget for a pollster. And a body man. Body woman?”

  “I’m going with body woman,” I said. “Hypothetically, of course.”

  “Keep me posted,” Greg said. “Hypothetically.”

  * * *

  —

  Clarence Thomas’s confirmation hearings started on Tuesday, September 10, and I watched them when I could in James’s office. Just after Thomas’s opening statement, in which he described his upbringing in rural, impoverished Pin Point, Georgia, and conveyed his respect for Thurgood Marshall, I had to go teach Conflict of Laws. After class, I returned to my own office for long enough to set my briefcase inside the door then entered James’s office and said, “What’d I miss?”

  As always, James rose when he saw me. “They’re on recess now, but Thomas has been very evasive. He wouldn’t even weigh in on natural law.” James gestured toward the left-hand chair facing the TV. “This is now yours. You have a standing invitation to watch whether I’m here or not.”

  “I need to meet with a student, then I’ll pop back in. Let me know if it gets good.” I winced. “So to speak.”

  When I went back to his office an hour later, he stood again, and before I could even ask, he said, “More of the same. Pontificating senators, evasive nominee.”

  “Have they asked him any more about Roe?”

  James shook his head. “The Democrats are subdued, especially Kennedy. The idea that Ted Kennedy is a champion of women is just—” James grimaced. “It’s a travesty. He really ought to retire.”

  “You won’t get any argument from me,” I said.

  Onscreen, there was a call to order, and as the senators reemerged into the chamber, I sat. In his answers, Clarence Thomas did indeed seem wooden and rehearsed—improbably, he said that he’d never debated Roe during law school because he was already married and had a child—and the Democratic senators tiptoed around him.

  I thought of telling James about Thomas carrying pornographic magazines in his overalls, but I feared that mentioning it would re-create awkwardness. Instead, I said, “My friend Gwen told me Thomas was known at Yale for talking wild. Do you know what that means?”

  James shook his head.

  “Neither did I, but I guess it means talking about sex.” As soon as I heard myself, I wondered how what I’d just said was any less awkward.

  “I don’t mean to sound prejudiced,” James said, “but Thomas just doesn’t seem that intelligent.”

  “Or maybe he was overcoached.”

  At the next break, I said, “How are you liking Northwestern?” James laughed, and I said, “Is that an odd question?” I’d been on the search committee that had hired him; he’d come from Wake Forest’s law school in North Carolina, and, in addition to teaching, he was running Northwestern’s Center for Law and Finance.

  “It’s going well,” he said. “It’s certainly more competitive here.”

  “The students or the faculty?”

  “I suppose both. But my main concern in moving was Susie and David, and they’ve adjusted faster than I have. We bought a house in Naperville, and they’ve both made friends in our neighborhood. I’m afraid I’m one of those stereotypical men who isn’t great at socializing. I was in a squash league in Winston-Salem, and that’s what I miss the most, which might sound silly.”

  “Why would that sound silly?” I asked.

  But onscreen, Senator Biden was pounding his gavel against the table. “To be continued,” James said.

  * * *

  —

  The hearings—what we didn’t realize at the time were the first round of hearings—were often boring, with long, convoluted questions from the senators. They went on for more than a week, and it crossed my mind to show them to my students one day, as an example of democracy in action, but the hearings weren’t directly related to either family law or conflict of laws.

  In Family Law, during a discussion of abortion-funding cases vis-à-vis fundamental rights, Rob Newcomb said, “Fine if some welfare queen wants to get thirteen abortions, but it’s not the state’s responsibility to pay for them.”

  As so often happened in the classroom, I didn’t need to rebut a student because another student did it for me. A young woman named Cathy Fernandez said, “Welfare queens are a racist Republican myth perpetuated by Reagan to erode public support for social services.”

  On September 27, the Judiciary Committee voted seven to seven—a deadlock—on whether to endorse Clarence Thomas’s nomination to the rest of the Senate, then voted thirteen to one to send Thomas’s nomination to the full Senate with no recommendation. This was an odd and surprising development on whose meaning James and I speculated.

  * * *

  —

  And then I learned as any stranger might have that Bill Clinton was officially running for president—by listening to All Things Considered on the afternoon of October 3, 1991. By this time, in addition to Paul Tsongas, six other Democrats had entered the race, including Tom Harkin and Bob Kerrey. That evening, I made a point of watching NBC Nightly News, which was hosted by Tom Brokaw.

  In the clip, Bill stood outside the Old State House Museum in Little Rock, a row of flags behind him, facing supporters who waved signs that read CLINTON FOR PRESIDENT and CLINTON ’92. As he spoke about the forgotten middle class, social responsibility, and Republican race-baiting, his family stood a few feet to his left: Sarah Grace, to whom he’d been married for fifteen years; their fifteen-year-old son, Ricky; and their twelve-year-old daughter, Alexis. Sarah Grace had pale skin and strawberry blond hair that appeared to be permed, and she wore a floral dress with short, puffy sleeves and a lace collar, as did Alexis. Ricky wore a short-sleeved white button-down shirt and a tie. Bill looked handsome—a little injuriously so—in a dark suit, light-blue shirt, and blue-striped tie.

  While I watched, I was eating dinner in my kitchen: peanut butter on toast, a sliced apple, and a glass of white wine. It was undeniably surreal to sit alone in downtown Chicago and see Bill in Little Rock, setting in motion his lifelong dream and a plan in which I’d once believed I’d play an integral part. Had it been nothing more than a youthful illusion that our meeting was fated, that we’d found in each other something unique? I tried to imagine myself outside the Old State House instead of Sarah Grace. I owned no dresses like the one she was wearing, preferring suits, but was there a version of me that existed in a parallel universe who would by this point have absorbed the customs of Arkansas, including its fashions? If I’d married Bill, would I now be Hillary Clinton? Hillary Rodham-Clinton? Would I be the mother of a fifteen-year-old boy and a twelve-year-old girl?

  Had the announcement been available online, I’m sure I’d have watched it in its entirety, and perhaps have rewatched it, but I was spared such impulses toward thoroughness or masochism by the media and technology of the time. Within a minute, Tom Brokaw had moved on to describing a disagreement between the White House and the Department of Energy.

  * * *

  —

  Presumably, Bill had timed his announcement to the Senate vote on Clarence Thomas’s confirmation, which was scheduled for October 8; Bi
ll had been inviting Americans to imagine how the Supreme Court might change under him in contrast to how it might continue to change under President Bush. But surely Bill wouldn’t have announced his candidacy when he did if he’d known what would happen next. Just three days later, on Sunday, the country learned that a thirty-five-year-old black law professor was prepared to testify that Clarence Thomas had sexually harassed her when he’d been her boss at, of all places, the EEOC.

  I first heard Anita Hill’s name while listening to Weekend Edition on NPR; apparently, she too had gone to Yale Law, graduating in 1980.

  As soon as the segment ended, I called Gwen and asked, “Do you know her?”

  “The odd thing is that I heard someone might accuse him of impropriety, but it wasn’t her,” Gwen said. “I hope that means she won’t be the only one to testify. But I don’t know her. We left New Haven around the time she got there.”

  “This has to derail Thomas’s confirmation,” I said.

  “I’m cautiously optimistic,” Gwen said. “With the emphasis on cautious, not optimistic. If Thomas withdraws his nomination, does that mean you’ll wait to see who else Bush nominates before you decide on a Senate run?”

  I had been wondering the same. “I think yes,” I said. “And how Dixon votes.”

  “How do you feel about Bill’s announcement?”

  “I know he’ll never get your vote,” I said. “I’m trying to decide if he’ll get mine.”

  “You know what I thought when I heard he’d entered the race?” Gwen said. “I thought, There but for the grace of God goes Hillary.”

  * * *

  —

  On Monday morning, I was unlocking my office door when James appeared and said, “My God, the talking-wild rumors.”

  “I know!” I had been planning to go see him as soon as I’d set down my briefcase.

  “You predicted this! Can you imagine that her legal team has, what, four days to prepare?”

  We looked at each other, and the giddiness between us—it was partly the giddiness of two Democrats hoping a Republican nominee’s confirmation would implode. But I did not think it was only that.

  * * *

  —

  For as long as I live, I’ll never forget watching Anita Hill deliver her opening statement: her aquamarine suit, her composure and seriousness, her essential isolation as she faced the row of fourteen white male senators and the many, many cameras. After she’d held up her right hand and sworn to tell the truth, she sat again and began reading her statement: “Mr. Chairman, Senator Thurmond, members of the committee: My name is Anita F. Hill and I am a professor of law at the University of Oklahoma. I was born on a farm in Okmulgee County, Oklahoma, in 1956. I am the youngest of thirteen children….”

  After a summary of her education, church affiliation, and professional experience, she described meeting Clarence Thomas and going to work for him at the Department of Education and then the EEOC. Three months after they began working together, she said, he asked her out, an invitation she declined. “What happened next and telling the world about it are the two most difficult experiences of my life. It is only after a great deal of agonizing consideration and a number of sleepless nights that I am able to talk of these unpleasant matters to anyone but my close friends.”

  In addition to continuing to ask her on dates, she said, he brought up sex frequently: pornographic films showing women with large breasts and men with big penises, bestiality, group sex, rape. He boasted of his sexual prowess and his fondness for performing oral sex. In the office, he once held up a soda can and asked, “Who has put pubic hair on my Coke?”

  It was jaw-dropping—weirder and more vulgar and more specific than I would ever have imagined, and its weird, vulgar specificity had the texture of truth.

  I was, of course, watching in James’s office, and I could feel him shifting, though in astonishment or discomfort, I couldn’t tell. Intermittently, either he or I said, “What?” or “Oh my God,” or we simply gasped. But mostly, we just listened.

  Eventually, Hill said, she had been hospitalized with acute stomach pains, which she believed were caused by job-induced stress. A year later, she left the EEOC to become a law professor in Oklahoma. Before her departure, Thomas told her that if she ever told anyone of his behavior, it would ruin his career. She said, “This was not an apology, nor was it an explanation.”

  After acknowledging her occasional contact with him in the years since, her voice was both impassioned and contained as she said, “I have no personal vendetta against Clarence Thomas. I seek only to provide the committee with information which it may regard as relevant. It would have been more comfortable to remain silent. I took no initiative to inform anyone. But when asked by a representative of this committee to report my experience, I felt that I had to tell the truth. I could not keep silent.”

  She stopped speaking and tidied the stack of papers on the table in front of her. After a few seconds, it became apparent that she was finished.

  * * *

  —

  Unlike during the earlier hearings for Thomas, James and I were joined that day by several colleagues; a larger television had also been set up in a classroom that wasn’t being used. It was a Friday, which meant that few classes were occurring. Hill’s testimony went on and on, with questions from the senators that ranged from skeptical to flat-out disrespectful. The door of James’s office was open, and a colleague named Eli Disterhoft stuck his head in and said, “Can you believe what they’re putting her through?” He kept watching with us for the next hour.

  Around noon, an older colleague, a man named Edmund Lynham, also paused as he was walking by and said, “I don’t believe a word of it. She voluntarily stayed in touch with him for years.”

  “She needed him as a professional reference,” Eli said.

  During a break, James and I went to the student union to get sandwiches, and he said, “She seems to me like she’s telling the truth.”

  “What incentive would she have not to?” I said. “She’s opened herself up to vicious criticism from the Right and from some people in the black community.”

  “But how could Thomas be that careless?” James said. “How could he imagine he’d get away with it?”

  I thought of Bill, the tension between his private behavior and public ambition. “I wish I knew.”

  By the time Anita Hill’s testimony ended, it was almost 7:00 P.M.—almost 8:00 on the East Coast—and James and I were the only ones left on the fourth floor. It seemed an idiotic concession on the part of the Democratic senators, but Thomas was being allowed to respond immediately. With vehement outrage, he denied everything; he called Hill’s claims “a high-tech lynching.”

  At 9:30, the hearing finally ended, though it would resume the next morning. James said, “I assumed that to reconvene, it had to be something big, but God almighty.”

  We both were sitting in our usual uncomfortable chairs, and I felt as simultaneously wired and drained as if I myself had spent the day testifying. Onscreen, pundits were discussing the proceedings. I said, “A friend of mine who’s very active in the Democratic party here told me he’s heard Alan Dixon is planning to vote to confirm Thomas. I’m considering running against Dixon if he does.”

  “For Senate?” James looked aghast.

  I said, “I’ve done election monitoring in Illinois for years, and before that I worked on several campaigns. It’s not as far-fetched as it sounds.”

  “You’d run in the ’92 election?”

  “There’s a rumor the Republicans are really courting Dixon, but I can’t imagine he’d let himself be convinced after today.”

  Truly, as I spoke, it looked like James had tasted something terrible. At last, he said, “You can’t run for Senate because you’d win and I’d never see you again.”

  Our collegiality—had it just broken open, la
ying bare the true emotions that ran under it? I tried to smile at him, though I suspected my smile was more panicked than sultry.

  “I like you so much, Hillary,” he said.

  I was looking straight ahead, at the TV screen, as I said, “I like you so much, too.” The strenuous innocence between us—I had not imagined it after all, at least not the strenuous part.

  After a silence, he said, “If I didn’t have a family, I would definitely—” He paused. “I would love to ask you out on a date. Would you want that?”

  “Yes,” I said. “But given that you do have a family—” I was violating one of my own rules, which was not to have a significant conversation without knowing what I wanted the outcome to be.

  “Given that I do,” he repeated, but, for a minute, he didn’t say anything else. Then he said, “You’re so bright and interesting and attractive. After we have a conversation, I always think about how lucky I am to know you.”

  At earlier points in my life, when men had said slight variations of You’re so bright and interesting and attractive, they’d meant it as an explanation for why they didn’t want to date me; how odd it was that the passage of time could invert a sentiment.

  “The last few months,” I said, “talking to you for five minutes here or there, it’s made my days feel so much more fun. But I guess I’ve tried to avoid thinking too deeply about why.”

  “I got married when I was twenty-two,” James said. “That seems ludicrous now, like it shouldn’t be allowed. Susie is a devoted mother. She’s a good person. But I wish— I’ve heard that some couples grow together, but that seems much rarer than growing in different directions.”

  Thinking of Maureen and Steve, I said, “I agree, although I’ll refrain from pretending to have any expertise.”

  “If I could do it again, I’d pick someone like you. Someone I could have conversations with.”