First In His Class

by David Maraniss

  Greg Craig, who was Rodham’s friend and another student in the seminar, remembers Clinton’s presentation and how surprised he was by it. Everyone at Yale Law knew that Clinton wanted to be a politician and that he still believed strongly in the system. But “the whole thrust of his paper,” Craig thought, was that “the pluralist model just didn’t work. He said it didn’t work because the money was out of whack. The corporations had all the money and they used it to defend themselves. Bill argued that the system was corrupted.” Clinton seemed in “the depths of despair” then about the system to which he wanted to devote his life. “But if you had dreams, that was a terrible time,” Craig said later. “If it was a tough time for him, an angry, hostile period of his life, it was consistent with what a lot of us felt.”

  What was the partnership of Clinton and Rodham like in those early days? The first public display came that spring, near the end of his second and her third year in law school. Rodham had decided to extend her studies at Yale Law to a four-year program. To look back on how they interacted then is to appreciate a dynamic that would change little through the years. Yale Law students were required to perform as lawyers either presenting appellate arguments in moot court or trying cases at mock trials. The trials, run by the Barristers Union, a student organization, were both major entertainment and serious competition. Cases were scripted like Broadway dramas. New Haven residents and Yale students were recruited to serve on the jury and enact the parts of witnesses. Student teams took the defense and prosecution cases and competed on two levels: the jury verdict was interesting but secondary. What counted was how each lawyer’s performance was evaluated. At the end of the year there was a Prize Trial in which the top-ranked lawyers competed against each other, two to a side plus two alternates. A judge was brought in, usually one of national renown. The Prize Trial was an event in New Haven, drawing a packed house to a law school classroom transformed into a courtroom.

  The Prize Trial for 1972 began at ten in the morning of April 29. Rodham and Clinton were the prosecution team. They had spent evenings and weekends for most of that month preparing their case, often working at the house of their alternate, Robert Alsdorf. Rodham ran the prep sessions. Alsdorf remembered at least one night when Clinton fell asleep—“he just nodded off’—while they were discussing the case. Michael Conway and Armistead Rood formed the defense team. Abe Portas came to New Haven to preside as judge, a rather controversial choice in that he had only recently resigned from the U.S. Supreme Court in some disrepute. Elliot Brown, a first-year student, wrote the case, basing it on a recent trial in the South. Posters tacked up around campus before the trial summarized the case: “Herb Porter is a tough cop who doesn’t like long-haired kids. But is that enough motivation to beat and kill someone? What did happen at the infamous road block on Rte. 34 last October? The newspapers called this the worst case of police brutality in Kentucky history. ‘Maybe so,’ says the defendant, ‘But don’t blame me.’”

  Early in the trial, Clinton made the key prosecution argument on the admission of evidence. He argued vehemently, several people in the audience that day remember, and openly displayed his chagrin when the evidentiary ruling went against him. “Hillary was much calmer,” according to Elliot Brown. “You could see her say, ‘Okay, we lost it, let’s move on.’ ” Brown, as the scriptwriter, knew better than anyone that Rodham and Clinton had a difficult case. He had to give both sides an argument, which made it hard to write a scenario without a reasonable doubt, in essence stacking the deck against the prosecution. And along with the tough case, Rodham and Clinton were up against Michael Conway, perhaps the sharpest student in their class. Conway, who went on to become a top litigator in Chicago, had arrived at Yale Law after serving as editor of the student newspaper at Northwestern University. He had honed his skills like an ace reporter and could deliver an oral argument as though he were dictating a perfect story to the rewrite desk. The defense won the verdict and Fortas gave Conway the top prize.

  But what lingers in the minds of most of those who watched the trial is the way the partnership of Clinton and Rodham operated. Clinton was soft and engaging, eager to charm the judge and jury and make the witnesses feel comfortable, pouting when a ruling went the other way. Rodham was clear and all business. Alsdorf was struck by the contrasting styles, noting that Rodham was never concerned about stepping on toes whereas Clinton “would massage your toes.” Nancy Bekavac, watching from the back of the room, later said of the pair, “It was like Miss Inside and Mr. Outside. I thought, ‘What is this—Laurel and Hardy?’ Hillary was very sharp and Chicago and Bill was very To Kill a Mockingbird.”

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  TEXAS DAYS

  AFTER MEETING THE two state coordinators that the 1972 presidential campaign of South Dakota Senator George McGovern had dispatched to Texas for the general election, Houston political organizer Billie Carr lodged a sarcastic complaint with campaign manager Gary Hart. “You said you were sending some young men down to help us, but I didn’t know they’d be this young!” Carr huffed. “One of them looks ten and the other twelve!”

  The one who looked ten was the bushy-haired law student from Yale, Bill Clinton. Passing for twelve was a mustachioed political writer from Washington, D.C., named Taylor Branch. They were not only young but utterly unknown in Texas, which was how Hart wanted it. He realized that it was problematic to send out-of-state political operatives to a contentious place like Texas, where mortal enemies might conspire against an outsider who dared to tell them what to do. Yet he found it necessary. The historically sharp disputes between liberal, moderate, and conservative Democrats in Texas, to say nothing of the personality clashes within each of the factions, had intensified with the nomination of McGovern, a certified liberal. It would be virtually impossible to find native Texans who were not linked to one of the warring factions and thus unacceptable to others. Beyond that, Hart had established a policy of placing organizers in states other than their home states “so they would not be tempted to look after their own careers instead of McGovern’s best interests.”

  Although unknown in Texas, Branch, who came from Georgia, and Clinton at least were southerners who knew the language and could adapt to the culture. Despite the admonition about their youthfulness, they apparently passed the test in a brief screening session with Carr, known as the Godmother of Texas liberals; Robert Hauge, an antiwar activist at Rice University; and Sissy Farenthold, a veteran Texas firebrand who was recovering from a disheartening loss in the Democratic primary for governor. Farenthold and Hauge, seeking to measure their ideological credentials, pressed Clinton and Branch about their positions on the Vietnam War and domestic issues, while Carr wanted to know about “the organizational stuff”—whether they had a feel for politics.

  Clinton could cite his experience in the Duffey campaign in Connecticut, as well as his role as an antiwar organizer in England and his earlier work in Arkansas for Fulbright and Frank Holt. And unlike other veterans of the Duffey campaign, he qualified as someone who had supported McGovern from the beginning. At a reunion of Duffey workers at Anne Wexler’s home in Westport during the summer of 1971, Wexler and other Duffey organizers had said that they were signing up to work for Maine Senator Edmund Muskie, then the frontrunner for the Democratic nomination. Clinton broke from the pack and said that he was for McGovern. His decision can be attributed to two factors. First, the intensity of his feelings about the Vietnam War: McGovern was the clearest antiwar candidate. And second, his friendship with Rick Stearns, his former Oxford classmate from California, who served as McGovern’s deputy campaign manager and had been talking to Clinton about the South Dakota senator for several years, going back to his work on the McGovern Rules Commission. During the spring and early summer, Stearns had sent Clinton to Arkansas to work on his home-state delegation, which was committed to favorite son Wilbur Mills. Clinton also had operated close to Stearns at the Democratic Convention in Miami Beach. From a post in the main trailer, he had p
assed along instructions to a floor whip for several states. In the week before the disastrous withdrawal of Missouri Senator Thomas Eagleton as McGovern’s runningmate because of his past use of electric shock therapy to treat depression, Clinton had polled southern delegates on the Eagleton affair. Along the way, he impressed Gary Hart, who thought he “combined a lot of southern charm with eastern sophistication.” Hart also noted Clinton’s hair. “He was one person in that period who had as much or more hair than I did.”

  Taylor Branch brought his own share of organizing experience to the Texas job. As an undergraduate at the University of North Carolina, he had been influenced by Allard Lowenstein, the charismatic antiwar leader and UNC alumnus who frequently visited the campus in search of disciples. During the summer of 1966, Branch trained under Lowenstein at a leadership camp at the University of Maryland, picketing the White House and listening in amazement as Lowenstein engaged Stokely Carmichael in a debate about black nationalism. Branch was engrossed in the issue of race relations. He had grown up in segregated Atlanta, where his father owned a dry-cleaning shop in the Buckhead section. All the workers were black. The lead cleaner, a man named Peter Mitchell, was also Taylor’s father’s workday pal. They would wager on Atlanta Crackers minor league baseball games and head off to Ponce de Leon park in an old white laundry truck. Sometimes Taylor would tag along. When they entered the park, the trio would split up: Mitchell was required to sit in the blacks-only section of the bleachers.

  By the end of his senior year in college, the volcanic 1968, which was also Clinton’s senior year, Branch was dividing his time between civil rights and the war. That spring he traveled to Indiana to canvass for Eugene McCarthy’s antiwar presidential campaign in the black wards of Indianapolis. On the night after the primary, which McCarthy lost to Robert Kennedy, Branch was at the Indianapolis airport. He was engaged to be married and had just received his draft notice and was flying home to take his physical. His mind was spinning with the possibilities awaiting him, one of which was jail. He had already decided that if he passed the physical, he would sooner go to prison than fight in Vietnam. Broke, dejected, and without a place to stay, he spent the night at the airport, sitting on his suitcase, waiting for a morning plane. In the middle of the night, someone tapped his shoulder. There stood Bobby Kennedy. He asked Branch and another bedraggled McCarthy volunteer if they would join him for breakfast at the cafeteria. Branch and his colleague squeezed into a booth across from Kennedy and talked politics. It struck Branch that while Kennedy should have been happy—he had just won a crucial primary, after all—he seemed as despondent as Branch, whose candidate had lost and who was facing an unwanted draft physical. It did not take Branch long to discover what was troubling Kennedy.

  “I’m getting all the C students and McCarthy’s getting all the A students,” Kennedy lamented. “I don’t like it.” He asked the students why they were for McCarthy. They said that McCarthy was there first, challenging Johnson on the war, while Kennedy was holding back. But he wanted to end the war as much as McCarthy, Kennedy told them. “McCarthy can’t end this war because he can’t win,” he said. “I can win.” As the conversation went on, Branch thought to himself, “Here’s a guy who might be president of the United States arguing with two college students in the middle of the night.” After Kennedy left, Branch felt somewhat guilty. He wrote Kennedy a note explaining that he was still for McCarthy and hoped Kennedy didn’t think he was a jerk. Then he flew home and flunked his draft physical. He was married on the day that Robert Kennedy was buried.

  Branch’s reputation within the movement was established that summer when he helped black activists Julian Bond and John Lewis organize the integrated Loyal National Democrats, who challenged the delegation that had been handpicked by Lester G. Maddox, Georgia’s segregationist governor, for the Democratic Convention in Chicago. Over the next four years, he supplemented his graduate studies and journalism career with political forays. He helped organize the massive antiwar protests in Washington in the fall of 1969. While working at The Washington Monthly, an iconoclastic political journal, in early 1972, he polished a few speeches for Senator McGovern and helped the campaign recruit delegates for the caucuses in Georgia and Kentucky. When Rick Stearns broached the subject of running the Texas campaign for the fall. Branch’s marriage was falling apart and he was eager for a change of scenery. The fact that he would be working with Clinton made it easier for him to accept the job. He had felt a rapport with his fellow southerner, and admired his political instincts, since their first meeting three summers earlier at the summit of young antiwar leaders on Martha’s Vineyard. If Clinton and Branch were not a subcommittee of Branch’s satirical Executive Committee of the Future, they were at least a compatible, energetic team.

  THE McGovern headquarters that awaited them in Austin was located in a one-story stucco shell on West Sixth Street noted for its creaky wooden floors and peeled walls. Dust, which had settled on the floor and window-sills for months when the building stood unoccupied, filled the air when McGovern volunteers stampeded into the headquarters during that dry summer of 1972, forcing staff members to drink water or coffee constantly to wash out their throats. There is a measure of well-intentioned naivete in every grass-roots campaign, and McGovern’s Texas effort had its share. Such embarrassing questions as “You are Commissioner who?” and “You are Senator what?” echoed through the headquarters. After a few conversations with the local pols of Duval and Jim Wells County—a notorious South Texas region where LBJ supporters provided the critical votes for his first Senate election by stuffing ballot box 13—the McGovern campaign’s boiler-room operators were told by a courthouse pol: “Look, we’ll carry it for you down here if you leave us alone. We don’t need you and we don’t want you. Don’t ever call us back again!”

  Across from the boiler room was the radio room, run by Mark Blumenthal, who arrived in Austin not from Yale Law School but from a hippie commune in New Mexico called Tree Frog, where he had lived for three years. Blumenthal made only minimal lifestyle changes to accommodate his new line of work. He now lived on a three-acre farm on the eastern rim of Austin with his wife, an infant daughter, dairy goats, fig trees, a beehive, and an ample supply of marijuana. He did not want to cut his hair, but neither did he wish to embarrass the campaign, so he tucked his ponytail atop his head and wore a wig on days when he might encounter the public. He was also, like the rest of them, intensely devoted to the cause. Between midnight and four in the morning, he would turn on the reel-to-reel tape machine at his house and take feeds of McGovern’s speeches from the night before sent to him over the telephone by national staff technicians. He would head into the office before dawn and start sending out McGovern actualities, or sound bites, to hundreds of radio stations around the Southwest.

  Clinton and Branch entered this colorful scene in the midsummer heat just as the national campaign was struggling to recover from the Eagleton disaster. They shared a garden apartment in a complex across the Colorado River about two miles from headquarters and split their campaign duties along comfortable lines: Branch took finances, Clinton took politics. Everything seemed fresh and possible. In his first week in Austin, Branch was quoted in a San Antonio newspaper boasting, “We are going to win this thing.” The Texans viewed the newcomers with curiosity. Blumenthal, whose office was across the hall from Clinton’s, noticed that the big Arkansan was a curious mix of cultures. He kept his hair long and curly and sometimes wore cutoffs to work. Yet when he was alone in his room, leaning back in his chair with his feet up on the desk, jabbering on the telephone, occasionally chomping on an unlit cigar, Clinton looked to Blumenthal “like a real politician, a junior politician.” Lisa Rogers, then a twenty-one-year-old college dropout who worked in the boiler room, was struck by “how big he was, and how calm, and how left-handed.” Something about Clinton “belied the hippie image,” according to Carrin Patman, the daughter-in-law of the venerable East Texas congressman Wright Patman, and the most
establishment-type figure at McGovern headquarters. Not everyone was impressed. Anne McAfee, an early Mc-Govern supporter whose husband ran Austin’s union-label print shop, thought Clinton was “wet behind the ears and not likely to make much of a contribution.”

  Branch seemed more ideological than Clinton and was less extrovert. He occasionally flashed a temper, yet had a wonderful, high cackling laugh and was gracious in his dealings with the staff. He had “less patience treating assholes like nice people” than Clinton had, according to one former campaign worker, and because of his position as the keeper of the checkbook was more often placed in situations where he had to make tough decisions. “It was sort of a good cop—bad cop routine,” recalled Billie Carr, who dealt with Clinton and Branch regularly. “Clinton was the good cop. He always thought your idea was good. He was always sweet. Taylor would have to say, ‘No, you can’t do it, we don’t have the money for that project.ߣ” There were parts of the pop culture that apparently had eluded Branch during the years in Washington when he was writing about bureaucrats and congressmen. When Lisa Rogers excitedly announced that Linda Ronstadt might hold a concert for McGovern, Branch asked, “Who’s Linda Ronstadt?”

  · · ·

  LESS than four years had passed since Lyndon Baines Johnson sat in the White House. In five more months he would be dead. But in the late summer of 1972, slowed by heart attacks, his rugged visage blurred by extra pounds and stringy long hair, LBJ played out his final days along the Pedernales as a phantasmagoric presence, not all there but not yet gone. At the Democratic Convention at Miami Beach, dominated by antiwar liberals to whom Johnson was anathema, it had seemed almost as though he had never existed. His portrait was absent from the floor gallery and his name unmentioned from the podium until the final night. But he remained an important symbol in Democratic politics, especially in Texas and especially during a general election. McGovern did not want to run for president without Johnson’s blessing and endorsement. One of his first acts as the Democratic nominee was to telegraph the former president inquiring about his health and asking whether a visit to the ranch would be in order. Johnson was furious about the way he had been ignored at the convention and did not want to see McGovern, but wired back that he would be delighted to receive him.