But, like Barbara Bush many years before her, Hillary Rodham took all her buoyant rocket fuel and headed to New Haven. She went to Yale Law School, and she believed passionately in things and she learned that justice could be another word for salvation and she wanted to make right all that was wrong in the world and she thought she could fly spaceships to the moon (indeed, quite literally: at age fourteen, astronaut aspirations drove Miss Rodham to write a letter to NASA to find out the requirements for entering its burgeoning space program; of course, they told her there were no girls allowed in their very tall tree house).
Instead she went to Arkansas and became the little woman behind a big man.
Instead she ended up no different from Barbara Bush: Hillary is just her husband’s wife. Her decision for—or descent into—complete devotion to the man with the Memphis-thick sideburns and the thwack of black pompadoured hair (his mod styling made the young Bill look like the bass player from a second-tier British invasion band) and a serious, seductive drawl began with her resolve to graduate from Yale Law a year late so that she could be in the same class with her beloved Bill. How he affected her so is anyone’s guess, but love and lust have made people weak since time immemorial, so why not Hillary? And, of course, one can only imagine that such an intense and purposeful sort as the young Hillary was said to be must have been particularly susceptible to the rare man who saw her sensual possibilities. The courtship of Hillary Rodham is the horror story of every woman who has lived right, who has balanced her own checkbook, who can change her own flat tire, who lives for files and piles and index cards and in-boxes and out-trays and all the order these things imply, only to find it all wrecked by some man who lives to make bonfires out of other people’s to-do lists, who makes her forget to do the laundry until he asks her to do his. Hillary’s Wellesley speech reveals a young woman who is clearly about to burst if somebody does not find access to the corruptible, disheveled part of her that has had it with doing homework for the boys she has crushes on, that wishes they’d at least feel her up now and again. As Michael Medved, a Yale Law classmate who is now a conservative/family values film critic, recalled to David Brock in his book The Seduction of Hillary Rodham, “[Hillary] was somebody who was not considered date bait, because of her weight and her presentation. She was not a glamorous figure by any stretch of the imagination. She was everybody’s best friend.”
Even old boyfriends, whose feelings were presumably romantic, are rather bloodless when talking about Hillary. “The thing that I remember most were the conversations,” Jeff Shields, Hillary’s Harvard boyfriend during her Wellesley years, told Gail Sheehy in Vanity Fair. Not that it isn’t lovely to have men remember how great it was to talk to you, but he isn’t even saying, We spoke all through the night and then we went skinny-dipping in Walden Pond or We had crazy dreams and we told each other everything and we were young and I never felt closer to anyone on earth. It sounds more like lengthy debates on farm subsidies and the Great Society and should they come clean with Gene or just stick with Bobby. I suppose one has to think of Hillary as Minnie Driver in Circle of Friends or Janeane Garofalo in The Truth About Cats and Dogs or Emma Thompson silently longing for Hugh Grant and living this muted, muffled emotional existence in Sense and Sensibility, all the while reminding us that even plain and practical girls are entitled to their dreams. Even Hillary Clinton once read Cinderella.
And if most of the boys saw Hillary as comfort and conversation, Bill Clinton uses words like “dumbstruck” to describe his earliest response to Hillary, claiming he was so awed by her goddess-like presence that he could not speak (I’m sure most of his staffers must think: imagine that!). One can only assume that their first encounter was like the scene in The Big Sleep where Bogey wanders into a bookstore and the librarian-like schoolmarmish salesclerk takes off her glasses, lets down her hair, shuts the shades, gets some paper cups and pours them a pair of drinks, and suddenly this sweet, severe young woman is not so sweet—and not at all severe—anymore. It’s the Bogey magic. Or, at Yale Law in 1970, the Bill magic. And for someone like Hillary, who is wound as tight as coils of copper wire, the feeling must have been like the life force, like electricity.
To be suddenly noticed as a sexual object is supposed to be the downfall of every smart, self-assured young woman who once had goals and plans of her own. Known as “Sister Frigidaire” by her Wellesley sisters, Hillary was bound to melt—but not like the Wicked Witch of the West; no, more like the Siamese cat of a girl in the Rolling Stones’ “Under My Thumb” or the hardened hellion down on her knees in the Velvet Underground’s “There She Goes Again”—both songs that reflect the misogyny implicit and explicit at a time when women’s liberation was just getting underway, both songs suggesting the appeal of surrender, of just giving in, of abandoning the fight. Which is the closest I can come to an explanation for Hillary’s decision, after lingering in New Haven an extra year, to follow her heart and follow Bill to Fayetteville, Arkansas.
Somehow, after serving on the precedent-setting prosecution team for the Watergate hearings, which was her first job out of Yale Law, with a promise for more and better, Hillary put aside her goals—not just her career, but the causes that mattered to her, among them some kind of fundamental belief that a woman should be her own person—for Bill, who would not compromise at all on his plan. “If you want to run for public office, you could be elected,” Bill told her. “But I’ve got to go home. That’s just who I am.”
The wisdom or stupidity in the choices Hillary made so early in her career are for her and history to judge. But the one thing all who are watching are in a position to know is that she truly did choose marriage über alles. That she has come to stand for hardheaded, hard-hat feminism is just ridiculous. In fact, when I see that people have that impression of her but deem, for instance, Elizabeth Dole as more traditional and more of a soft touch, I am reminded of the way people used to misread Betty Friedan in opposition to Gloria Steinem. You see, Friedan has always been pro-marriage and pro-family within the context of her feminism—it’s just that she also wanted equal rights and opportunity; Steinem has never married or had kids and has always taken a harder line on most feminist issues (she’s against pornography, for instance). And yet, years ago, when both of them were out there, actively campaigning for the ERA, people preferred Steinem to Friedan always, thinking of her as less acerbic and less radical because she had her hair streaked at Kenneth’s, she had beautiful long legs, she dated and dumped bald-but-otherwise-eligible bachelors like director Mike Nichols (now married to Diane Sawyer)—basically because it was nice to think that a woman who didn’t “have” to be a feminist would choose to be one. People liked Steinem because she was pretty and disliked Friedan because she was so damn froglike, which is just fine by me: given the choice between someone aesthetically pleasing and someone else whose appearance is somewhere short of offensive, I will always take the former. But we should not get Steinem and Friedan’s positions—which were essentially similar—confused on important matters. In the seventies, the president of one university actually said, when asked his position on feminism, “I don’t subscribe to the radical anti-male views of Betty Friedan, but I think I can be comfortable with Gloria Steinem’s ideas.” If he’d just said, “I like Gloria Steinem, she’s got great legs,” he would have proved that at least he can see, even though he obviously cannot hear.
And today, Elizabeth Dole has never been seen as anything but an asset to her husband, even though her feminist bona fides are lined up just right: a graduate of Harvard Law School, she has never had children, she gives the impression that everything she knows about mothering she learned from Grimm’s fairy tales, she married rather late in life and she has had a very high-profile career of her own. In fact, Hillary’s life choices have been the opposite of the ones Liddy Dole made. Liddy never lived in Russell, Kansas. But with her high-end, high-class degrees and all her high-minded notions of a better world, it’s hard to see that when viewed as a b
lueprint, as the human essentials, the vital organs shown in the transparencies of Gray’s Anatomy, Hillary Clinton is something much more basic: an all-American rugged Midwesterner with wide childbearing hips, muscular stocky legs, and, most likely, a strong back and utilitarian body inherited from the middle-American gene pool that is designed to deliver a baby one day and carry sacks of corn and grain from silo to pickup truck the next. Whatever attaching words like “the sixties” and “Wellesley” and “Yale” and “civil rights” might do to this equation, it is still a picture descended from Grant Wood’s American Gothic, it is a painting that is a bit creepy and defensive, but the farmer with his pitchfork and his wife with her tight, taut bun are synecdoche for this country, and Hillary too, a native of Illinois, is part of agrarian America, descendant of a long line of indigenous personae: she is a political wife.
And Hillary makes no effort to hide this from anybody. “I’m proud of my marriage,” Mrs. Clinton writes in It Takes a Village. “I have women friends who choose not to marry, or who married and chose not to have children, or who married and then divorced, or who had children on their own. That’s okay, that’s their choice. This is my choice. This is how I define my personhood—it’s Bill and Chelsea.”
And yet, so much expectation has been thrown upon Hillary: On the one hand, farthest to the right on the spectrum of insanity, there is the Rush Limbaugh crowd who call Hillary a Feminazi, claim she wants children to disown their parents, parents to disown their children, all this nonsense to be avoided with abortion for all, while her pal Joycelyn Elder advocates masturbation talk in school and buddy Lani Guinier explains that it isn’t really about quotas, it’s about taking turns, the way children play, so everybody wins. Blah, blah, blah. These are the selfsame people who bumper-sticker their cars with slogans like “IMPEACH THE PRESIDENT—AND HER HUSBAND TOO.” Point is, the various political fiascoes and confirmation screwups, the sudden onset of women with names like Zoë and Kimba (the truly qualified made way for the truly available) being offered and then denied cabinet positions in the first term, were hung on Hillary, which, well—who can say? There are a lot of very loud advisers operating in the White House.
But frankly, the blustery blame from the Limbaugh/American Spectator nexus is not nearly so disturbing as the hopes pinned on Hillary by those close to her, those who work in Democratic politics or for Bill Clinton. “I was less interested in Bill’s political future than Hillary’s,” admitted Betsey Wright, Clinton’s notoriously loyal, nutty and tenacious gubernatorial chief of staff—and “bimbo eruption” bomb squad—to Clinton biographer David Maraniss. “I was obsessed with how far Hillary might go, with her mixture of brilliance, ambition and self-assuredness. There was an assumption about all the incredible things she could do in the world.” The precise content of this “assumption” was fleshed out later, when Wright said to Vanity Fair, “She has been absolutely critical to Bill’s success, but then I had images in my mind that she could be the first woman President.” Dorothy Stuck, another Hillary pal, has not given up hope: “Regardless of what happens to Bill, the nation will be exposed to Hillary Clinton, and Hillary could—and should—be our first woman President.” Her mother had intended her to be the first female Supreme Court Justice, but Sandra Day O’Connor put the kibosh on that, and there was talk of her taking the Attorney General position if her husband was elected, though her brother Hugh Rodham seemed to think it was beneath her. “Attorney General is only local lawmaking,” he said, with derision, to Gail Sheehy. “There’s treaty negotiations she could do. There’s labor stuff. There’s Secretary of State.”
Of course, what is interesting about all this speculation on Hillary’s possibilities is that they are precisely the assumptions and ambitions you project onto a gifted youngster, a very bright child, or an adult—no older than twenty-five or thirty—who is thought to be so full of promise. These are not really the kinds of things you say about someone who is full-grown—unless, of course, that person has somehow failed to live up to expectations, or just plain failed and disappointed by any measure. Because all these notions—serving on the Supreme Court, heading up the State Department, getting an elected office, maybe becoming the first woman to chair the Arms Services Committee in the Senate, or perhaps withdrawing to the academy and achieving tenure at some law school or having a chair endowed in her honor for the study of family law or children’s rights—all of these grand ideas are pie-in-the-sky dreams. As far as Hillary is concerned, it ought to be clear to everyone that these dreams are gone—not deferred; they are gone completely. But it doesn’t matter, because she has surrendered it all to wifedom. Looking after Bill Clinton has been her job.
Though Hillary was a partner at the Rose Law Firm—a corporate concern of some genteel southern prestige (and some really icky scandals and skeletons to go with its Confederate roots), she never earned more than $100,000 a year until after 1990, and lived with an income that was only about a third of what the other Rose litigators with equal seniority took in because her outside commitments were so extensive. “Her partners estimated that on average she spent less than three quarters of her time on firm business,” writes David Brock in The Seduction of Hillary Rodham, explaining that she spent the remainder of her working hours conducting state policy, serving in an unpaid position as chair of a committee on educational standards, which sent her on reconnaissance missions to all seventy-five counties in Arkansas. She also put in a lot of time on corporate boards like Wal-Mart and TCBY, both Arkansas-based companies. Though these board directorships were remunerative positions which could not be filled by the completely brain dead, they were political appointments, the kinds of quasi-community service, quasi-corporate sinecures where having a friend at the statehouse—i.e., marriage to the governor—is always useful.
Meanwhile, charity aside, Hillary brought home $160,000 in combined salary and board directorship fees that she earned in 1990, a sum that bankrolled the Clintons’ lifestyle and Bill’s political ambitions while he took in his $30,000 a year in state pay. (Thanks to the relatively paltry sum of both spouses’ take-home income, the Clintons will be the first couple in recent memory to leave the White House with no family home to retire to.) Many have seen the Clintons as the first two-career couple to occupy the White House, but anyone who examines the record knows that both were working for his career, that her breadwinner status in the family is practically akin to a woman working in a steno pool to put her husband through medical school.
Ever since the Labor Party’s watershed victory in 1997, people have been comparing the baby-boom Clintons with the age-analogous British Prime Minister Tony Blair and his successful London attorney wife Cherie Booth, since both couples would appear to be the creature quintessence of postwar Anglo-American hopes and dreams. But this was rather demeaning to Ms. Booth, who has run for office (unsuccessfully) on her own, who still uses her maiden name professionally and who still has a profession to use it in, donning the barrister’s black robe and white wig as she does each day in court. (Of course, it is easier to pull this off in Britain, where you have the royal family to take care of the ceremonial tasks, and the Prime Minister can stick to the role of governing.) For Hillary Rodham, who was, as she said in her Commencement address, “searching for more immediate, ecstatic and penetrating modes of living,” corporate law was the equivalent of a job in the mailroom—menial and meaningless.
And when you compromise yourself that much—you change your hair, your name, your personal style, and you finally invest all your hopes for an idealism that you hold dear into another person—you become thwarted, frustrated and neurotic, like a parent living through his child or, more to the point, like a nagging wife. In fact, feminism got its start precisely because the expansion of the leisure class in postwar America left more and more women with nothing to do except be wives, and the limited stimulation that scrubbing away mildew in the bathroom or wiping runny noses in the car pool provided over time drove a lot of them quite crazy. (Th
is is why, though there was a women’s movement in the nineteenth century, it filled less of a void in the predominantly agronomic society where everyone, including wives, had to work in the fields; this does not mean that women were not frustrated by circumscribed roles or a desire for suffrage back then, but it does mean they weren’t bored or idle: people who are bone tired rarely foment revolution—except in France, where everything is weird. Which is precisely why many liberal social movements—feminism, communism—tend to remain products of the chattering class, and fail to reach the overworked and underpaid who could benefit from them the most.) The main symptom of “wife sickness”—by which I mean the malaise of just being the supporting player in someone else’s star vehicle, only this one doesn’t end in two hours—is the way these women become self-involved with someone else’s life: this is actually an impossibility, to see yourself so completely in another person’s life that you forget about your own, but this is exactly what happens to corporate wives who spend all their time planning dinner parties for their husbands’ clients and to political wives who spend all their time on someone else’s campaign trail.
The insanity of being nothing but a wife can be maddening enough to move a Westchester homemaker, fed up with the daily struggle to achieve a Mop & Glo kitchen, to write a book called The Feminine Mystique. It also happened to be irksome enough to have sent millions of women in 1963 out to buy Betty Friedan’s kitchen-table manifesto—in one of the later episodes of Happy Days, Marion Cunningham even starts quoting the book to Howard while Joanie eggs her on and Fonzie stands by, sort of looking distressed and sort of savoring the idea that whatever girl trouble is yet to come, it won’t affect him. But the particular madness of political wives is, well, special, perhaps because its necessarily hush-hush nature means that, like most wild things bred in captivity, it develops twisted intractable strains while hiding out, and emerges as particularly sordid and bloated. In other, nonpolitical public walks of life, people may not advertise their plans to check into Payne Whitney, but at this late date it needn’t be cause for embarrassment, and it certainly shouldn’t ruin anyone’s career or future plans.
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