First In His Class

by David Maraniss

  Rodham viewed the college years as a time when she could “try out different personalities and lifestyles,” she explained in a letter to Don Jones. But it is an important aspect of her personality that even then there was a self-aware, moderate aspect to her experimentation. In another letter to Jones she talked about intentionally playing different roles at different times: now the social activist, now “sticking to the books,” and occasionally “adopting a kind of party mode.” She claimed that she even got outrageous at times, but immediately modified that assessment—“as outrageous as a moral Methodist can get.” In her search for identity, she thought of herself now as “a progressive, an ethical Christian and a political activist.” For those who are currently watching and judging her behavior later in life, when she seems to play contrasting roles at different times—here asserting her maiden name, there relinquishing it; here deferring to her husband, there instructing him on what to do; here posing like a model for the cover of traditional women’s magazines, there emphasizing substance over style; here searching for the moral meaning of life, there playing the commodities markets to make a quick buck; here disparaging cookie-baking housewives, there peddling her chocolate chip recipe—it is instructive to know that she was, self-consciously, ever thus.

  For a young person in the turbulent late sixties, Rodham was “personally pretty conservative,” according to Shields. He said that she did not smoke marijuana during the years they were together, and that while she drank beer and liquor he never saw her drunk. She was disciplined about apportioning her time, though not obsessive. She preferred diving into political arguments or attending Harvard football games to studying in the Wellesley library, and while she had a sharp mind, she was not brilliant in every subject. Shields, an economics major, had to help her in that course because “she struggled some with numbers.” After dates on weekends, they often ended up with a crowd at Winthrop House, where Shields lived, dancing or talking late into the night. Many of Shields’s friends at Harvard also dated Wellesley women, who were considered more outgoing than Radcliffe women and more intellectual than those from the other women’s schools in the Boston area.

  As Rodham evolved into a liberal, she rarely seemed overtaken by dogma. She was a pragmatist above all. In the middle of intense political debates she would often say, “You can’t accomplish anything in government unless you win!” Her focus was always on winning, according to Shields. “She was more interested in the process of achieving victory than in taking a philosophical position that could not lead anywhere.” For her senior political science thesis, she analyzed community action programs and the effort to give poor people greater control of their own lives, including organizer Saul Alinsky’s efforts in Chicago. According to Alan Schechter, her professor, Hillary “started out thinking community action programs would make a big difference,” but eventually concluded that that view was “too idealistic and simplistic; that they might make a marginal but not a lasting difference” without outside money and help. She was also troubled by certain aspects of radical thought. Don Jones, her youth group mentor, wrote her a letter at Wellesley in which he questioned whether “someone can be a Burkean realist about history and human nature and at the same time have liberal sentiments and visions.” She wrote back, “It is an interesting question you posed—can one be a mind conservative and a heart liberal?” She thought it was possible, but offered an example of the difficulty. She supported Martin Luther King, Jr., she wrote, but questioned some of the tactics of SNCC, the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, which was taking a radical black power position. “Some people think you can’t be critical of the black power movement and still be for civil rights,” she wrote. She did not think that her unwillingness to accept every radical idea meant that she was an enemy of the movement.

  As their Wellesley days neared an end, Rodham and several classmates decided that a student should speak at commencement along with the traditional distinguished guest. There was an urgency to the generational pulse in the spring of 1969; students were either boycotting or refashioning commencements at schools across the country. Wellesley’s president, Ruth M. Adams, disliked the idea of a senior speaker but reluctantly acquiesced on the condition that the address should reflect the sentiment of the entire graduating class. Rodham, as student government president, was chosen to give the speech. Her classmates were not shy about offering ideas and helping her draft what they took to be an important statement of purpose.

  President Adams introduced Rodham after the commencement speech by Senator Edward Brooke, the liberal black Republican from Massachusetts, noting that among the four hundred graduating seniors, “there was no debate so far as I could ascertain as to who their spokesman was to be—Miss Hillary Rodham.” Adams described her by saying, “She is cheerful, good humored, good company and a good friend to all of us.”

  But goodness was not what Hillary Rodham exuded on her graduation day. Before delivering her prepared remarks, she launched into an extemporaneous critique of Brooke’s oration, which she found too full of compromises and statistics and empathy over action. Her words have a peculiar resonance when considered in the light of how her future husband, a man renowned for his empathy and tendency to compromise, would be criticized decades later. “I find myself in a familiar position,” Rodham began, “that of reacting, something that our generation has been doing for quite a while now. We’re not in the positions yet of leadership and power, but we do have that indispensable task of criticizing and constructive protest and I find myself reacting just briefly to some of the things that Senator Brooke said…. Part of the problem with empathy with professed goals is that empathy doesn’t do us anything. We’ve had lots of empathy; we’ve had lots of sympathy, but we feel that for too long our leaders have used politics as the art of the possible. And the challenge now is to practice politics as the art of making what appears to be impossible, possible.”

  That Rodham would take on a United States senator, and not only a senator but the highest-ranking black politician in the nation, sent murmurs of shock through the commencement audience. From that point on, her listeners either loved or hated her message. Most of it was sixties jargon, at times a cluttered mix of love-in piety and anticapitalist philosophy. “We are, all of us, exploring a world that none of us understands and attempting to create within that uncertainty,” she declared. “But there are some things we feel—feelings that our prevailing acquisitive and competitive corporate life, including, tragically, universities, is not the way of life for us. We’re searching for more immediate, ecstatic and penetrating modes of living.”

  Rodham the child of Park Ridge spoke of “a very strange conservative strain that goes through a lot of New Left collegiate protests” which she found “intriguing because it barkens back to a lot of the old virtues, to the fulfillment of the original ideas.” Rodham the activist of the sixties said her generation was haunted by a disintegration of trust. “This is the one word that when I asked the class at our rehearsal what it was they wanted me to say for them, everyone came up to me and said, ‘Talk about trust.’ ” But what, Rodham asked rhetorically, was there to say about it? “What can you say about a feeling that permeates a generation and that perhaps is not even understood by those who are distrusted?” Rodham the moral Methodist spoke of respect—“that mutuality of respect where you don’t see people as percentage points, where you don’t manipulate people, where you’re not interested in social engineering for people.” And Rodham the spokes-woman for the Wellesley seniors closed by reading a poem from one of her classmates, Nancy Scheibner, which began:

  My entrance into the world of so-called social problems

  Must be with quiet laughter, or not at all.

  The Hollow Men of anger and bitterness

  The bountiful ladies of righteous degradation

  All must be left to a bygone age.

  The speech, especially the challenge to Brooke, created a media stir, landing Rodham’s portrait, with h
er long brown hair and striped bellbottoms and oversized glasses, in Life magazine. Geoffrey Shields, who by then was living in Vermont, got a call from her shortly after the commencement. “She said it had been hard for her to come around and make what was both a political statement and a personal attack. There was some exhilaration but also nervous questioning about whether it had really been the right thing to do. She realized what she had done was important. But when it was over she wondered about what she had said. She asked, ‘Did I go too far?’ ”

  IN the fall of 1971, Rodham and Clinton arranged to live in a small apartment at 21 Edgewood Avenue at the corner with Lynwood, within walking distance of the law school. It had been passed down from one class to the next. The previous tenant had been Rodham’s friend Greg Craig. It was “a sweet little student apartment,” according to Carolyn Ellis, with one bed-room, a built-in bed in the living room, and a small kitchen. The rent was seventy-five dollars a month. Neither tenant was there much. Rodham was spending most of her time in clinical work involving children’s rights and legal aid for the indigent—the two principal interests of her career. Clinton held several part-time jobs, teaching law enforcement personnel at the community college, assisting an attorney in New Haven. He was attending class more regularly than at any other time in his Yale career. (“I am trying to at least learn the stuff this year,” he wrote to a friend.) Classmates remember coming over for spaghetti dinners and marveling at how Clinton and Rodham could talk nonstop with great intensity about the issues of the day. But their first year together, while intellectually stimulating, could not be called an altogether joyous one.

  On the morning of September 14, they were eating breakfast at the Blue Bell Café near the law school when a friend came in and said there was an emergency phone call. Clinton would later say that he was overwhelmed at that moment with a premonition of tragedy. He had a feeling that one of his friends was dead. The call was from Brooke Shearer, the girlfriend of Strobe Talbott. Shearer and Talbott were in Cleveland visiting Talbott’s family. Talbott had dialed New Haven, but was so choked up he could not speak. He had given the phone to Shearer. She, like Clinton, had had a premonition. Hers came days earlier in Los Angeles as she boarded the plane for Cleveland and took one last look back at Frank Aller, who had driven them to the airport. Finally, it seemed, everything in Aller’s life was together again. Not only had he flunked his military physical and had his indictment for resisting the draft dropped, but he had arranged, with help from Shearer’s father, Lloyd Shearer, to get an interview with the Los Angeles Times foreign desk. That interview had led to an offer of work in the paper’s Saigon bureau. He would write about the war in which he felt a moral obligation not to fight.

  Aller seemed “hopeful and cheerful” at the airport when he said goodbye to “Strobovich” and “Brookechen”—his affectionate monickers for his friends. Yet as Shearer turned away and walked with Talbott toward the waiting jet, she had “a very distinct” reaction. “I remember thinking we should not get on that airplane. I could not say why. But it was a very strong feeling. But common sense or protocol tells you not to make a scene. It would have appeared ridiculous. I had these vague instincts. Something said to me, ‘Something is not right here.’ ”

  Now she was on the telephone saying what Talbott, silenced by grief, could not say. “Frank’s dead,” she told Clinton.

  Aller had gone back to Spokane and put a bullet through his head. There was a suicide note, but it is long gone and no one claims to remember what it said. Some of his friends think Aller was a victim of Vietnam as surely as he would have been had he been killed on the battlefield. But most of them think that the notion that Vietnam killed him is simplistic. His torment was deep and personal. Talbott, who knew him as well as anyone, considered the suicide a “double shock”—a friend dead, and dead by his own hand. “Did I see anything in retrospect that was a progression to suicide? The answer is emphatically no.” Yet in those final months, as the cloud of draft resistance and its consequences—exile or prison—finally lifted, it seemed that another darker cloud settled over Aller, Talbott thought, making him “seriously upset and depressed.”

  “Frank’s dead.” Clinton got the word from Brooke Shearer and passed it on. Clinton was the one who had the addresses and telephone numbers. He had a card file full of them, constantly revised and updated for letters and late night calls and future political solicitations. He notified friends in London and Oxford and Washington and Boston, who called friends, and soon everyone in the Rhodes crowd knew that Aller was gone. They all had their own perspectives along with the grief.

  Aller’s problems, thought Rick Stearns, “ran deeper than angst over how many bombs dropped on Hanoi that day.” What did it mean, wondered John lsaacson, that Aller killed himself just at the moment when the major crisis in his life seemed to have lifted? To lsaacson it implied that Aller “needed the war to stay alive. He needed the external crisis to avoid the internal crisis.” Brooke Shearer, too, concluded that the war might have kept Frank alive. His own “personal demons” finally killed him, she thought. Mike Shea thought perhaps Aller was the victim of an unanticipated sense of nothingness, He did something—resist—which he took very seriously, with the view that it was an important statement, “and in the end it had no effect on anything, it didn’t even have an adverse effect on him, which depressed him.” Willy Fletcher, the Rhodes Scholar who came out of Washington State with Aller, thought about the east-west tension that his home-state friend felt—not the tension between the United States and Vietnam but between the two sides of Washington. Aller was a boy from the east side of the mountains, the conservative side, but he crossed over and became a liberal and then a leftist when he went west to school in Seattle, and that tug between east and west was something that Fletcher saw Aller struggle with from the moment he met him.

  But Fletcher, too, was stunned by word of Aller’s suicide. He found out through a circuitous route, from a note sent to him by Sir Edgar Williams, the warden of Rhodes House in Oxford. He remembers sitting at his desk in the Office of Emergency Preparedness in Washington, D.C., where he was serving out his stint as a naval officer, and opening the letter and immediately calling Clinton in New Haven. “Hey, Bill, what happened?” he asked. They talked for an hour, a wandering conversation in which they tried to bring Aller back in their memories at least. “I didn’t know Frank as well as I thought I did,” Fletcher said at one point, to which Clinton responded, “Well, maybe none of us did.”

  But for Bill Clinton and Strobe Talbott and Willy Fletcher and the Rhodes Scholars of the class of 1968. the sixties ended that day in September 1971 when Frank Aller shot himself in the head.

  THERE is some evidence that Clinton fell into another dark period after Aller’s death, a time when he questioned the path he had chosen in life and the worthiness of the government and society he hoped to serve. The humor dropped out of his letters again, as it had during the days of his torment over the draft, replaced by weariness and doubt. A letter that he sent to Cliff Jackson, his competitor from Arkansas who was seeking a job in the Nixon White House, revealed a cynicism and tone of resignation. Of Senator Fulbright, his first political role model, Clinton told the conservative Jackson, “His politics are probably closer to yours than to mine.” He was giving advice to Jackson, but he was also clearly writing to himself, wondering whether he still had the desire to reach his life’s ambition as a world leader. “One final thing: It is a long way from Antioch to the White House, and it may not be a bad thing to make the leap,” he wrote to Jackson, who had grown up in Antioch, Arkansas, not far from Hot Springs. “Just always remember it’s far more important what you’re doing now than how far you’ve come. The White House is a long way from Whittier and the Pedernales too; and Khrushchev couldn’t read until he was 24, but those facts leave a lot unsaid. If you can still aspire go on; I am having a lot of trouble getting my hunger back up, and someday I may be spent and bitter that I let the world pass me by. So d
o what you have to do, but be careful.”

  Jackson, in law school at the University of Michigan, was confounded by Clinton’s advice. He had never before seen the disillusioned side of Clinton; he had always thought Clinton was too much the gladhander and conniver. Jackson wrote back asking Clinton to explain himself. Clinton sent him a short note that again sounded as though it was meant more for the writer than the receiver: “As to the ‘disturbing undercurrents’ in my letter, they were not meant to sway you from your course, or to express disapproval at the kind of things you seem destined to do—only to say—these things too must be considered. You cannot turn from what you must do—it would for you be a kind of suicide. But you must try not to kill a part of yourself doing them either.”

  Clinton took a seminar that year taught by Jan Deutsch which focused on corporations and society. The ideas at issue included whether corporations could be compelled to treat workers fairly, deal honestly with consumers, and refrain from polluting the environment. Corporate responsibility was a vital topic in intellectual circles in the early 1970s, with academics churning out monographs on concepts ranging from worker ownership to placing executives under psychoanalysis. Each student was required to write a paper and read it to the class. Clinton went first. The question his paper addressed was whether the pluralist model of society, with its mix of corporations, regulatory agencies, labor unions, consumer groups, environmentalists, citizen advocates, chambers of commerce, could place enough pressure on corporations to make them responsible. Leftist intellectuals led by Herbert Marcuse believed that the answer was no. The pluralist model was a fraud in the final analysis, Marcuse argued, and freedom and democracy were illusions in the corporate capitalist system.