Long before he revealed his intentions publicly, Clinton began taking steps helpful to the waging of a statewide campaign. The Democratic State Committee, now chaired by Mack McLarty, appointed him to head its affirmative action committee, whose mission was to study the state’s new presidential primary law and set guidelines for the selection of delegates for the next national convention. This convenient assignment allowed Clinton to travel the state at party expense to meet with Democratic activists. He also obtained a part-time teaching post at the University of Arkansas-Little Rock, traveling down to Little Rock each week to teach a class on criminal justice and law enforcement in addition to his courses in Fayetteville. Many of his students in Little Rock were law enforcement personnel, a group he had also taught during his Yale Law School years when he was a part-time instructor of criminal justice at the University of New Haven. Teaching police officers strengthened the resume of a prospective attorney general, and furthered his efforts to toughen his image following his graduate school days as a long-haired war protester who had avoided military service.
HILLARY Rodham was deeply immersed in the university community by 1975. She taught trial advocacy and criminal procedure at Waterman Hall, directed the legal aid clinic, and helped run a prison project in which law students assisted inmates with post-conviction problems. At the legal clinic, she was meticulous about maintaining casework files on every person who walked in the door. Van Gearhart, one of her student assistants, worried that the recordkeeping would be too burdensome, but Rodham persuaded him that “a strong statistical base could help cement the future of the clinic,” which it did. In the first year, the clinic handled three hundred clients and took fifty cases to court. For years afterward, Rodham would recall her experiences in the courthouses of northwest Arkansas with a touch of wistfulness, often retelling her favorite stories, including the time when a small-town jailer called her and said that a traveling preacher-lady was about to be committed by a judge who thought she was insane. Rodham drove to the town and in the course of interviewing the babbling preacher discovered that she had relatives in California. “People need the Lord in California, too,” Rodham told the woman, who left for the West Coast after the judge was sold on the argument that a one-way plane ticket was the easiest and cheapest resolution of the case.
The prison project took Rodham and her Fayetteville associates into an unfamiliar world. Once she and another supervisor drove down to the Tucker Unit for youthful offenders near Pine Bluff. As they entered the prison farm, they noticed a building near the main unit that was identified as the dog kennel. Robert Newcomb, a lawyer stationed at the prison farm on a federal grant, recalled that when the two women lawyers got out of the car, one remarked to the other that she “didn’t realize that the Arkansas prison system was so progressive that it would allow inmates to have their own dogs.” It was left to Newcomb to break the news that the dogs were there not to serve as the inmates’ best friends, but to track them down if they tried to escape.
In Fayetteville, Rodham often met Diane Kincaid for lunch: they would buy yogurt and walk around campus, talking about the university, their careers, feminism, and the joys and frustrations of life in their adopted small town. Kincaid, who had grown up in Washington, moved to Fayetteville a decade before Rodham and had gone through various stages—“resistance, resentment, anger, disbelief, resignation, and finally smugness about how good things were.” They played tennis on weekends, scrappy singles matches, Rodham and Kincaid both diving and scraping their knees, good athletes but lacking in classic form, each with a burning desire to win, their hair a mess by the end in the summer humidity. One day, moved by what Kincaid termed “a burst of patriotism,” Rodham decided to visit the local U.S. Marine Corps office to see if she could enlist. She told Kincaid that the Marines informed her she was not one of the few and the proud they were looking for: she was a woman, she was too old, and she had bad eyesight, the recruiter said, suggesting that she “oughta go try with the dogs”—the Army. If there was a political component to this odd episode, an attempt to balance Clinton’s lack of service with Rodham’s bold enlistment, or a test of the equal rights policies of the military, it never went any further, and the incident remained a closely held joke among friends.
Rodham’s Arkansas circle widened when her two fun-loving brothers, Hughie and Tony, enrolled at the university at their sister’s urging. They shared an apartment south of campus with Neil McDonald, the former campaign volunteer. Tony “liked to keep his stuff put up, semi-neat,” but Hughie, who had long hair and talked earnestly about Che Guevera, was another story, according to McDonald. “As far as housekeeping, forget Hughie. He was the biggest slob in the world. He made ‘The Odd Couple’ seem tame.” Their father, Hugh Rodham, paid for most of their expenses and came down from Park Ridge to visit during fly-fishing season.
Although they still lived apart, Rodham and Clinton spent most of their free time together, playing Volleyball and charades with friends, attending Razorback basketball games, and going for steaks and chicken afterward with Coach Eddie Sutton and Don Tyson and his pals. Pressure was building on the pair to marry or separate. Should Clinton marry Rodham? He told friends that he wanted to get married and that it was Hillary or nobody: but he also realized that while their partnership was intellectually invigorating and politically complementary, their personal relationship was stormy. “All we ever do is argue,” he confided to Carolyn Yeldell Staley, his high school friend. Betsey Wright, who had befriended the pair during the McGovern campaign and now worked in Washington recruiting women to run for public office, was also “aware of lots of tension between them.” She had heard Clinton complain after a round of arguing with Rodham that he had tried to “run Hillary off, but she just wouldn’t go.”
Should Rodham marry Clinton? She studied the question from every angle, asking several women friends how they balanced their own political objectives with family responsibilities. Her questions came at a time when feminism was an urgent subject for her and the professional women with whom she associated. The equal rights amendment (ERA), which had narrowly failed in the previous session of the Arkansas legislature, was up for another vote, and a central event of the House deliberations was a Valentine’s Day debate between ERA opponent Phyllis Schlafly and Diane Kincaid, who was chairwoman of the governor’s commission on women and had been asked at the last minute to fill in for Sarah Weddington, the feminist lawyer from Texas. Rodham and Clinton came over to Kincaid’s house and prepped her for the confrontation. They sat in the living room and rehearsed different arguments and counterarguments, when suddenly Kincaid’s six-year-old daughter Kathryn called out “Mommy!” from the floor behind them. They turned around and saw the little girl holding the plastic symbol of the prefeminist era. “Here we were fighting for feminist rights and Kathryn was there with a Barbie doll!” Kincaid later recalled. The scene, she said, provoked a long, loud, infectious belly laugh from Hillary Rodham.
Among the feminists, there were differences of opinion over how best to resolve the conflicting demands of wife and sisterhood. Ann Henry, who was married to a state senator and toiled as a Democratic party activist while rearing three young children, argued with Rodham about the role that a political wife could play. Rodham thought that Henry should be more independent. “Hillary was very curious to see how women integrate family and politics. She knew politics is where she wanted to be. She had a sense of what she wanted to do. She would say, why don’t you do certain things?” Henry later recalled. “And I would say that I felt certain limits as a wife. She thought she could do as much. I didn’t agree with that. There’s a gap between what you think you can do and what the reality is. I was not willing to push my own [career] at the risk of jeopardizing what my husband wanted to do. She didn’t agree with me. I said, ‘Well, that’s my opinion.’” It was clear to Henry that Rodham was on her way to marriage and looking for the role she could play in a partnership where her husband would be the candidate.
Before the start of her second year in Fayetteville, Rodham returned to the East Coast and talked with several friends about her future. Should she make Bill Clinton and Arkansas the center of her life? Many of her friends worried that she was selling short her own ambitions. They saw that it was hard for her. It was obvious to them that she was not fooling herself about what she would be getting into with Clinton. She understood his talents and his flaws. He might not be faithful, but together they could be faithful to their larger mission in life and achieve things beyond their individual reach. And there was, at the same time, an old-fashioned infatuation that went beyond shared goals. When Rodham visited Carolyn Ellis, her Yale Law School classmate, who was now living in New York, Ellis encouraged her not to let Arkansas be a factor in the decision. Ellis had grown up in Mississippi and felt a southern kinship with Clinton and Arkansas. “I was one of the big believers,” she said. “I told her to go back. I said that Arkansas wasn’t Mars. I told her that to love somebody and not marry them because of where they were living was the height of foolishness.”
When Rodham arrived back in Fayetteville, Clinton was waiting for her with a present and a proposal. The present was a house he had bought, a little red-brown brick cottage at 930 California Street on the southwest side of town. The proposal was that she live there with him as his wife. Rodham accepted. In the days before the ceremony, she showed little interest in the details, according to Ann Henry, and “was looking more at life to come than at the wedding itself. What happened that day she didn’t want to worry about.” In fact, she and her mother, who had come down from Illinois, spent most of their time painting the cottage and putting in bookshelves. They were quite willing to leave most of the wedding plans to Henry, who was giving the reception at her house. The one concession Rodham made was to go downtown and register a Danish modern pottery style that guests could buy as wedding presents.
The wedding took place on October 11, 1975, in the living room of the little cottage on California Street. Victor Nixon, the Methodist minister Clinton had met during his first foray into the Ozarks with Carl Whillock, performed the ceremony. It was a traditional Methodist service, using the King James Version—“I, Hillary Rodham, take thee, Bill….” Rodham wore a Victorian dress with a high collar and long sleeves that she had selected off the rack. The couple exchanged heirloom rings in the company of a few family members and friends. Betsy Johnson Ebeling, Hillary’s close friend from Park Ridge, got to the wedding midway through the service after relying on Hughie Rodham’s vast underestimation of how long it would take her and her husband to drive from Chicago to Fayetteville. Roger Clinton, now a nineteen-year-old college student, stood as his big brother’s best man. Even though Bill and Roger were growing apart in those days, not as close as the Rodham brothers, the choice of Roger as best man signaled Clinton’s yearning for a family bond. It also reflected a characteristic of his adult life: he was a man with hundreds of close friends but no best friend. Virginia Dwire, widowed for a third time the year before and between husbands, listened to the wedding vows with a mixture of pride and dismay. That morning at the Fayetteville Holiday Inn, as Virginia was having breakfast in the coffee shop with her friend Marge Mitchell, Bill had dropped by to say hello and give her an early warning. “Hillary’s keeping her own name,” he had said, a pronouncement that brought tears to Virginia’s eyes. It would take time for her to accept this assertive Yankee daughter-in-law.
After the private ceremony, the wedding party adjourned to the Henry house for a reception that more obviously represented “the gregariousness of Bill,” as Ann Henry later described it. Hundreds of friends from all eras of Rodham and Clinton’s lives mingled on the spacious back lawn on that gentle autumn Saturday night, drinking champagne and talking about Clinton’s political future. “Everybody, even at the wedding, was talking about the next campaign,” Henry recalled. “Everybody knew that he was going to run.”
If Rodham and Clinton felt an urge to get out of town, they had made no honeymoon preparations. It was only because Dorothy Rodham noticed a special vacation package to Acapulco that they made a getaway later that year. For a politician whose idol was John F. Kennedy, there was a poetic touch to the trip. A generation earlier. Kennedy and his bride Jacqueline Bouvier had also gone to Acapulco after their marriage. It is safe to assume that he did not have anything resembling Clinton’s peculiar entourage: at the hotel it was Bill and Hillary and Hugh and Dorothy and Hughie and Tony. Clinton took along a copy of the cultural anthropologist Ernest Becker’s The Denial of Death, a book that regards the idea of death as “the mainspring of human activity—activity designed largely to avoid the fatality of death, to overcome it by denying in some way that it is the final destiny for man.” Clinton also wrote thank-you notes to wedding guests.
THE old boys were not what they used to be, according to that year’s progress report by Bob Reich, secretary of the Rhodes class of 1968. Approaching their thirtieth birthdays, they seemed anxious and compromised, looking inward for fulfillment, viewing the outside world with disillusionment or confusion.
Mike Shea was now a lawyer in Honolulu, “fighting the losing battle against middle age” by running marathons, but discouraged that he “could not find a political candidate to support at any level of government.” Tom Reinecke, a scientist at the Naval Research Laboratory near Washington, D.C., lamented “the dullness and blandness of the Washington scene— especially the great Washington suburbia.” Bob McCallum, a lawyer in Atlanta, had learned to ski and was “trying to figure out more ways to avoid getting older.” According to Reich, who occasionally interjected his own sensibilities into the reports of others, McCallum was “concerned about losing sight of the forest for the trees as his career progresses.” Rick Stearns was dabbling in presidential politics again, “doing some consulting” for Arizona congressman Morris Udall. Strobe Talbott was married to Brooke Shearer and working in the Washington bureau of Time, where on occasion “he chases around after President Ford, in pursuit of further proof that the Peter Principle applies even—yea especially—at the highest levels of leadership in the Free World.” Reich, married to Claire Dalton, the girl he had met at a Univ College audition, was also in Washington, working for the Justice Department, where he was “still filing indefensible briefs before the Supreme Court on behalf of our government.”
And of his friend from Arkansas, Reich wrote: “From the political heartland of America comes news of Bill Clinton, who is now married to Hillary Rodham and living in a comfortable suburban bungalow…. He is at this moment spending most of his time running for Attorney General of the state, and he expects to be spending most of his time a year from now being Attorney General of his state.” Although Clinton’s ambitions seemed clearer than most, he, too, expressed a sense of uncertainty. “He says he is concerned that, in spite of his intense political involvements of late, he does not really have a good grasp of what is happening in this country, where we are going and what we can do to make it better. So like most other people he lives and works as best he can.”
CLINTON took an unpaid leave of absence from the law school for the 1976 spring semester to begin his campaign for attorney general. In fundraising letters to out-of-state supporters, he revealed the practical politics dictating his choice: “My opponent in the last election—with an eye over his shoulder—has changed his vote on a number of critical issues, including public jobs and the oil price rollback, and, therefore, is less vulnerable than he was.” He made his formal campaign announcement on March 17 in the rotunda of the state Capitol, with Hillary Rodham at his side, calling the attorney general “the principal protector of the people” and promising to expand the consu
mer protection office and push for stronger antitrust laws.
Although Clinton thrived on the electoral process, he wanted an easier ride this time. He had lost an election, and it was always possible that he could lose again, which would greatly damage both his ego and his nascent career. He was relieved when one potentially difficult opponent, Beryl Anthony, decided not to enter the Democratic primary, but no sooner had Anthony declined than George Jernigan, the secretary of state, entered the race. Clinton turned to Governor Pryor, who was Jernigan’s political benefactor, and pleaded with him to change Jernigan’s mind, but Pryor was unwilling to play that slate-making role. On filing day there were three candidates: Clinton, Jernigan, and Deputy Attorney General Clarence Cash. That might have been two more candidates than Clinton wanted, but on the positive side, all he had to do was to win the primary and he had the job—the Republican ticket lacked a candidate for attorney general.
The primary turned out to be a mismatch. Jernigan and Cash could claim experience in state government that Clinton lacked, but they had none of his abilities as a political networker. Clinton had found a way to reach virtually every courthouse in the state, and in those areas where he was less well known, the word was spread by former law students—another advantage of teaching at a public university that took scholars from every corner of the state who tended to return home to practice law. Newspaper ads listed the scores of former law students who declared that they could ease any doubts voters had about Clinton. Jernigan later acknowledged that when he was on the road, he would retire to his motel room at an early hour, turn on the television, and order room service. It is hard to imagine Clinton following a similar routine. He was too overloaded with energy and ambition to keep to himself for long. He was alert to danger and opportunity, plotting the next move, studying the landscape, looking for allies. Political campaigns tend to imitate the rhetoric of military campaigns, with battles and skirmishes and armies and war rooms, but in Clinton’s case the war metaphor runs on a deeper psychological level. The campaign became the equivalent of the war that he never fought. It was a means of pardoning his past and making himself feel worthy. His speech at the party’s kickoff rally in Russellville was like something out of the Civil War era: one can hear the strains of first Whitman and then Lincoln as Clinton strove to create the aura of a veteran in a noble cause.
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