Hillary

by Sara Marshall

  And, of course, she met Bill Clinton. He was a force of nature, an Arkansas boy only slightly polished by four undergraduate years at Georgetown University. He joined her law-school class after two years on a Rhodes fellowship at Oxford, sporting a wild mane of hair and a reddish-brown beard. For him, school was mostly a social affair. Classes were secondary to friendships. He was happiest when he was the center of attention. She was more intellectual and disciplined. He was a talker; she was a doer.

  Bill and Hillary had noticed each other from a distance. One day she walked up and said, “If you’re going to keep looking at me, and I’m going to keep looking back, we might as well be introduced. I’m Hillary Rodham.” In the spring of 1971, Bill took Hillary on a long walk that turned into a date. Soon after that they were a couple.

  Bill was excited about his summer job: He had been recruited to organize in the South for the presidential campaign of Senator George McGovern. But he told Hillary he was passing on that prospect to go with her to California, where she had signed up to clerk at a small Oakland law firm. Why would he do that? she asked. “For someone I love, that’s why,” he said. And he did. They spent the summer in a small apartment in Berkeley while she worked and he read. They explored nearby museums. He played his saxophone. And they experimented with tennis and cooking. Back at Yale, they rented a dilapidated apartment and furnished it from Goodwill and Salvation Army stores. Bill opened a “McGovern for President” office in a storefront he rented with his own money. Finally, he talked the local Democratic boss into endorsing McGovern.

  That Christmas, Bill spent a few days in Chicago visiting Hillary’s family. He soon won over her mother and slowly ingratiated himself with Hugh Rodham playing card games and watching football. After meeting Bill, Betsy Johnson’s mother took Hillary aside and told her, “Don’t let this one go. He’s the only one I’ve ever seen make you laugh.”

  Hillary started the summer of 1972 working for Marian Wright Edelman in Washington, while Bill labored full-time for the McGovern campaign. After the Democratic convention in Miami in July, she joined him in Texas. While Bill helped run the McGovern campaign in the state, Hillary headed up a Texas registration drive among young, black and Hispanic voters. They rode out the Nixon landslide there and took a short holiday before returning to New Haven for their final year of law school. Graduating in the spring of 1973, they went to England for a vacation. There, in the Lake District, Bill asked Hillary to marry him.

  “Not now,” she said.

  It was a prescient answer to a premature question. But like any force of nature, Clinton didn’t give up. He kept asking.

  Hillary visited him in Little Rock, where she met his mother Virginia and heard the details of her life. Virginia had married Bill’s father, William Jefferson Blythe, during World War II. After the war, they lived in Chicago, not far from Hillary’s parents’ apartment. Pregnant, Virginia went home to Hope, Arkansas, to wait for the baby. Driving down to visit her, Blythe was killed in an accident. He was thrown from his car after a blowout and drowned in three feet of water in a drainage ditch. Three months later, on August 19, 1946, Bill was born. The fact that he never met his father shaped his ambitions. “My father left me with the feeling that I had to live for two people,” Bill later wrote. “If I did well enough, somehow I could make up for the life he should have had.”

  Virginia became a nurse anesthetist. When Bill was four years old, she married car dealer Roger Clinton. But he was a drinker whose addiction got worse, with rages that he took out on Virginia, Bill, and his own son Roger. The turmoil behind the family’s closed doors on Park Avenue was well hidden. In public, Virginia appeared happy. Bill remembers a life “full of uncertainty and anger and a dread of ever-looming violence.” But to his friends, he was happy-go-lucky. Following his mother’s example, he tucked away his pain and tackled the outside world with enthusiasm. At Hot Springs High School, he was a National Merit Scholar semi-finalist, first chair in the Arkansas State Band, and led the student government. Bill looked up to President John F. Kennedy, who sparked his interest in public service.

  “[Clinton] always found himself trying to redeem and rescue his family,” historian William Chafe said. “Part of doing that is to sort of put yourself in the position of rescuing not just your family, but everybody, including yourself, by doing good.”

  When he was fifteen years old, Bill was strong enough to stop the beatings. Roger Clinton died of cancer in 1967.

  Virginia married again, this time to Jeff Dwire, a kind man who owned a beauty parlor and lavished affection on her. Dwire often served as a buffer between Virginia and Hillary, polar opposites in style and substance. Hillary’s do-it-yourself haircuts, work shirts, and jeans grated on Virginia, who never appeared in public without heels, false eyelashes, and red lipstick. But the women bonded over time. “We figured out that what we shared was more important than what we didn’t,” Hillary wrote. “We both loved the same man.”

  Bill had decided to make a political career in Arkansas, starting with a teaching job at the University of Arkansas School of Law in Fayetteville. Hillary moved to Cambridge, Massachusetts, to work for Marian Wright Edelman’s CDF. The post took her around the country, studying the fate of children locked up in adult jails and leading a drive to improve their lot. She also investigated why many children didn’t go to school, finding heartbreaking cases of blind, deaf, or disabled children who had no way to attend. Finally, the CDF persuaded Congress to pass a law mandating that public schools help such children.

  By late 1973, the details of the Watergate scandal that would eventually drive Nixon from the White House were coming to light. Bill decided that the scandal would make Republicans vulnerable. Since he couldn’t find another Democrat willing to take on the popular four-term Republican Congressman John Hammerschmidt, he did it himself. Then Bill got a recruiting call from John Doar, a veteran of the civil rights movement who had been chosen by the House Judiciary Committee to look into impeaching Nixon. Doar needed a lawyer for his staff. When Bill declined, Doar told him Hillary was at the top of his list. She took the job.

  Doar promised painstaking, monotonous work, with long hours and low pay, and he hadn’t exaggerated. However, the company was stellar, and Hillary, at twenty-six, knew that her work was important. The only previous presidential impeachment, of Andrew Johnson in 1868, came on slipshod charges with obvious partisan motives. Doar was committed to conducting a meticulous and fair investigation. His staff of forty-four lawyers was sworn to secrecy about their work. They had to avoid socializing, refrain from writing diaries, and put trash only in designated containers.

  Hillary helped frame the staff procedures, then researched the legal grounds for impeachment. She spent hours in a windowless room listening intently to the tapes Nixon had made of Oval Office conversations, trying to decipher the content and meaning of the scratchy, garbled recordings.

  From the tapes, testimony of witnesses, and a paper trail of evidence, it became clear that the president had paid witnesses to lie or keep quiet. Nixon had also used the Internal Revenue Service to get people’s tax records, ordered the Federal Bureau of Investigation to spy on Americans, and hired his own secret investigators, dubbed the White House “plumbers.” The Judiciary Committee approved three charges of impeachment: abuse of power, obstruction of justice, and contempt of Congress. The full House seemed set to impeach, setting up Nixon’s trial on the charges in the Senate. Just before the vote was to be taken, the White House released the “smoking gun” tape in which Nixon ordered the cover-up of illegally used funds. Four days later, he resigned.

  In a rare break, Hillary anticipated a visit from Bill. The night before he was to arrive, she spoke with White House Counsel Bernard Nussbaum about him. She told him her friend Bill Clinton was from Arkansas and had graduated from Yale Law School. Nussbaum asked, “What law firm is he going to?”

  Hillary replied, “On no, no, he’s going to run for Congress. And he thinks he’s going t
o win, and I think he’s going to win. In fact, Bernie, he’s going to go past Congress. He’s going to be a senator or a governor. He’s going to be President of the United States.”

  Bill was twenty-eight and full of political ambition. Some of the voters in Arkansas felt he was not in tune with their values. Bill overcame those doubts with charm and political deftness. He entertained the crowds on the campaign trail, winning them over. He slept on couches and was up by dawn each day. “We might stop at a service station or a restaurant or whatever,” campaign aide Bobby Roberts remembered. “He would want to meet the cooks. He would go back in the kitchen and meet everybody there. He would not leave a place, I think, where he had not met everybody.”

  Hillary decided to make a life with Bill in Arkansas. Her friends thought she was throwing away her chance at a successful career in Washington or New York for a “country lawyer.” But she called the dean of Bill’s law school in Fayetteville, who had earlier offered her a teaching job, and he told her the post was still hers for the asking. Ten days later, she reported for work.

  Life in a southern college town was a novel experience for Hillary. She taught criminal law, which also involved supervising students who provided legal assistance to the poor. Hillary was introduced to the local chancery court judge, Tom Butt, as “the new lady law professor. She’s going to run the legal aid programs.”

  “Well,” said the judge, “we’re glad to have you, but you should know I have no use for legal aid, and I’m a pretty tough S.O.B.”

  Smiling, Hillary replied, “Well, it’s nice meeting you, too, Judge.”

  The judge was true to his tart words. When Hillary tried to send law students to represent poor clients in his court, he required them to qualify for free legal help under an old statute: a nineteenth-century relic that said people could get help only if their total assets came to $10 or less, plus the clothes on their backs. That standard would rule out legal help even for most homeless people, whose meager possessions would be deemed worth more than ten dollars. To repeal the law, Hillary needed the backing of the Arkansas Bar Association. Months later, she and Judge Butt appeared before the association’s executive committee to argue the case. The committee sided with Hillary, and the law was repealed.

  In deference to local mores, Hillary lived at the home of an older law professor and his wife. But she spent as much time as possible campaigning with Bill for a seat in Congress. She wasn’t welcome on the campaign trail. Hillary was Chicago-born, out of place in the Deep South of Arkansas. She had curly hair, wore big glasses, and spoke with a Midwestern accent. Bill’s staff saw her as a problem. Campaign manager Paul Fray didn’t mind so much when she worked on the inside “‘cause she’s sharp as a tack.” But on the road, he feared she would be a distraction. Bill had enough of those as it was: “I mean you got to understand at one time there were at least twenty-five women per day coming through there trying to find him. And I’d tell them he’s out on the road, you know, and they’d get out the door. But, lord, it was bad. Bad, bad, bad, bad, bad.”

  Campaign aide Marla Crider said the way Clinton drew in women was like “flies to honey.” And Hillary couldn’t help but notice. “I don’t think there’s any question Hillary was hurt,” Crider said. But, though Bill was unfaithful, Hillary remained dedicated to their mutual goals.

  Polls showed Clinton was gaining momentum, and his opponents threw up a barrage of personal attacks. Even though he had been a student in Oxford at the time, the canard persisted for years that he had been the young war protester who had climbed a tree to make a statement against Richard Nixon’s visit to Fayetteville in 1969. He lost narrowly. The next morning, he was back at it. He walked the town square, shaking hands. He wouldn’t be bowed by defeat.

  Shortly after the election, on their way to the airport where Hillary was about to embark on a long vacation to ponder her future, Clinton drove past a red brick house for sale. Casually, Hillary said it was a sweet-looking house. Several weeks later, after she had decided to stay in Arkansas with him and returned to Fayetteville, he drove past the house again and announced that he had bought it, “so now you’d better marry me because I can’t live in it by myself.” She said yes, and their wedding was celebrated there on October 11, 1975.

  In was a simple ceremony in their living room, Bill and Hillary committed to sharing their hearts and futures, if not their last names. They were bound by a common love, not just for each other but also for politics.

  Clinton’s first victorious race in 1976, Hillary wrote, was a bit anticlimactic. He won the Democratic primary for attorney general that May, and there was no Republican opponent in the general election. Coasting to an inevitable win gave him and Hillary plenty of time to take part in Jimmy Carter’s presidential campaign that year. The self-assured Carter calculated that President Gerald Ford’s pardon of Richard Nixon would be a prime issue. He also believed the post-Watergate mood of the nation was an opportunity for a Washington outsider – especially a governor of Georgia who could appeal to former Southern Democrats, who had been voting Republican in increasing numbers.

  Carter’s advisers asked Bill to head up the governor’s campaign in Arkansas. Hillary was given the job of field coordinator in Indiana, a reliably Republican state. She thought, accurately, it would be tough to turn voters toward the Democrats, but she set up a campaign organization in every county. She had already developed a no-nonsense management style, and some of the local party faithful weren’t always happy to take her direction. Once, in a get-out-the-vote meeting where she was the only woman at the table, she pushed for specifics on the plans. One of the men, half-drunk, reached across the table and put both hands around the collar of her turtleneck. “Just shut up, will you,” he told her. “We said we’d do it, we will, and we don’t have to tell you how!”

  She looked him in the eye, pulled his hands down, and said, “First, don’t ever touch me again. Second, if you were as fast with the answers to my questions as you are with your hands, I’d have the information I need to do my job. Then I could leave you alone – which is what I’m going to do now.” She stood up – on shaky knees, she wrote – and left the room.

  Carter lost Indiana, but he carried Arkansas by nearly two to one on his way to the White House. After Bill’s election as attorney general, the Clintons moved to Little Rock, the capital, from their first home in Fayetteville. Since the trip to Hillary’s teaching job at the law school would be too long for daily commuting, she had to find something else to do. What’s more, since Bill’s position as attorney general paid only $26,500 a year – a respectable salary, in that time and place, but not enough to set aside any savings – she needed a job.

  One of the lawyers who had supported her legal aid work (and helped repeal Judge Butt’s favorite statute) was Vince Foster, a partner at the Rose Law Firm. Small but respected, Rose was said to be the oldest law firm west of the Mississippi. Soon after the election, Foster and another Rose partner offered Hillary a job as an associate. This move brought an opinion from the American Bar Association approving a law firm’s hiring of the spouse of a state attorney general, together with the rules for avoiding conflicts of interest. It wasn’t a given the more curmudgeonly Rose partners would approve a female associate. But she was voted in and soon became one of the office’s fifteen lawyers.

  Vince Foster and Bill Clinton had been boyhood playmates and back-fence neighbors, and now they renewed their friendship. At the Rose office, Hillary worked closely with Foster and shared an assistant with him. She also befriended Webster Hubbell, a shrewd litigator with a vast command of obscure case citations. Hubbell went on to become mayor of Little Rock and chief justice of the Arkansas Supreme Court. The three often lunched together at a small, unfashionable Italian restaurant, which caused some censorious sniffs in staid Little Rock, where women did not have meals with men who were not their husbands. Working mainly in court as a litigator, Hillary handled a wide variety of cases for Rose clients. On the side, she did
pro bono work and advocated for children’s causes. She remained on the board of Marian Wright Edelman’s Children’s Defense Fund and flew to Washington for its meetings. Hillary also founded a statewide counterpart of the CDF, the Arkansas Advocates for Children and Families. She had help from Dr. Bettye Caldwell, a professor of child development at the University of Arkansas.

  Bill Clinton was elected governor of Arkansas in 1978. He won the support of more than 60 percent of voters, with his record of even-handed administration of justice and tough enforcement of the rules of conduct for elected officials. He set out to fulfill his dozens of campaign promises, including setting up a new economic-development office, reforming rural healthcare, fixing the state’s battered highways, and improving Arkansas’ failing school system. It was an ambitious agenda for a first-term governor. Arkansas was poor and largely undeveloped. Clinton was determined to better his home state. He later remembered it as “an urgent sense to do everything.” He was young, confident, and ready to change the world. Since all of his goals required added revenues, especially road improvements, he began by decreeing an increase in car-registration fees. The cost to renew a license plate rose from $19 to $36. The hike proved unpopular.

  Hillary was now the hostess for official events at the Governor’s Mansion. Bill had also appointed her chair of the Rural Health Advisory Committee, which was making progress in improving access to medical facilities in remote areas of the state. In addition to her CDF duties in Washington, President Carter had put Hillary on the board of the Legal Services Corporation, providing legal aid for the poor on a national level.

  More than ever, Hillary understood that Clinton’s dedication to public life ruled him out as primary breadwinner, leaving her responsible for their family’s financial future. Commodities were generally booming in the late seventies. Jim Blair, the husband of her good friend Diane, was making substantial money with a trading system he had developed. Blair offered to be Hillary’s guide in the tricky, high-stakes game of commodities trading. She started with a stake of $1,000. Over the next few years, she chalked up some losses but more gains until her account had climbed to $100,000.