A Woman in Charge (14 page)

For their friends, and virtually all of the law school's students, that carefully balanced equation would become evident six months later when Hillary and Bill were selected as one of the two debating teams in the renowned Barristers' Union Prize Trial.

In
Living History,
Hillary wrote: “He can astonish me with the connections he weaves between ideas and words and how he makes it all sound like music. I still love the way he thinks and the way he looks. One of the first things I noticed about Bill was the shape of his hands. His wrists are narrow and his fingers tapered and deft, like those of a pianist or surgeon.” In an “autobiography” written in large part by ghostwriters, this is one of the few passages in which ecstasy comes through.

Early in their relationship, at the beach house on Long Island Sound, Hillary and Bill talked one night about what each would do after graduation. Bill said he intended to go back home to Arkansas and seek public office. Hillary's plans were still up in the air, except for her certainty that she wanted to pursue her interests in child advocacy and civil rights.

In Oakland, she would be working for the most important radical law practice on the West Coast, celebrated for its defense of constitutional rights, civil liberties, and leftist causes. “The reason she came to us,” said Robert Treuhaft, the firm's senior principal, “the only reason I could think of because none of us knew her, was because we were a so-called Movement law firm at the time.” In all probability, Hillary found her way to the firm through her professor, Tom Emerson, an old friend of Treuhaft and some of his partners. “There was no reason except politics for a girl from Yale” to intern at the firm, said Treuhaft. “She certainly…was in sympathy with all the left causes, and there was a sharp dividing line at that time. We still weren't very far out of the McCarthy era.”

Treuhaft et al. had represented leaders of the labor movement on the West Coast who had been prosecuted for allegedly being members of the Communist Party. It also represented some of the Black Panther leadership. Of the firm's four partners, “two were communists, and others tolerated communists,” Treuhaft said, but none acknowledged membership in the party until many years later.

Hillary's attraction to the firm was not ideology but rather its defense of constitutional causes and liberties. “All I can say is some people may have been bothered by being associated with my law firm, but she wasn't,” said Treuhaft, who was married to the writer Jessica Mitford. Hillary stayed in touch with the Treuhafts, and when Mitford came to Arkansas for research on an article she was writing, she visited the Clintons in the governor's mansion. Characteristically, the note Hillary wrote to Treuhaft upon the death of his wife in 1996 was filled with personal touches. Equally characteristic, Hillary's description of her association with the Treuhafts and her summer interning in Oakland—“at Treuhaft, Walker and Burnstein, a small law firm in Oakland, California”—glosses over the suggestion of anything that could be construed as resembling a radical or leftist past.

She and Bill found an apartment near the University of California, Berkeley, campus, still the nexus of American student radicalism. She worked on a child custody case. Bill got to know the area and introduced Hillary to it. Bill read a lot and discussed
To the Finland Station
by Edmund Wilson and other books with Hillary. And they took long walks.

 

B
ILL
C
LINTON,
as he was falling in love with Hillary, perceived that she possessed the one necessary quality that was not native to his soul: a kind of toughness, the significance and nature of which would be endlessly debated by the Clintons' friends, advocates, and adversaries. Without it, he could never have gotten to the presidency. There is truth in the observation that, after all, Bill Clinton would rather accommodate than fight and that it often took Hillary to push him into the ring. The Clintons' former pollster, Stan Greenberg, described this quality as a “fierceness,” a “tough-mindedness,” summoned by Hillary in pursuit of their shared goals because Clinton, unlike his wife, was preternaturally “conflict-averse…and by nature uncomfortable attacking…. He didn't get there instinctively. He'd rather persuade people. He'd like to persuade everybody in the room.”

Their most important political counselor and consultant for two decades, Dick Morris, remarked—before he turned enemy—that “she has a quality of ruthlessness, a quality of aggressiveness and strength about her that he doesn't have. A killer instinct. Her genre of advocacy is always straight ahead—fight, battle, take the fight to the other side. There's no subtlety, there's none of the nuance that he has.”

But Hillary's is not the caricatured, bitchy, ball-breaking toughness that their enemies like to attribute to her. She has almost always been much more thoughtful than they accorded. It is more like a kind of military rigor: reading the landscape, seeing the obstacles, recognizing which ones are malevolent or malign, and taking expedient action accordingly. Bill's process is different. He is slow to recognize the malevolence in others, he wants to assume the best about them, and he is willing to spend months trying to win their hearts and minds. Hillary means to cut off the enemy at the pass.

The first public glimpse of their political partnership, and indications of what Morris, Greenberg, and others later discerned, came during the 1972 Prize Trial at Yale. Hillary and Bill were assigned the role of prosecution team. They spent more than a month preparing their arguments, citations, and tactics. They had a tough case to prosecute, based on the murder trial of a Kentucky cop whose antipathy was on record toward young people who looked like hippies. “But is that enough motivation to beat and kill someone?” read posters advertising the trial and laying out the case.

Bill and Hillary failed to win the prize. But their preparation and performance were prototypical of a methodology they would perfect over the next quarter-century, carving out complementary roles that played to the strength and character of each. Their full partnership was apparent to their peers, who watched, fascinated, as they laid out their unusual division of labor. Nancy Bekavac described the dynamic perfectly: “Hillary was very sharp and Chicago, and Bill was very
To Kill a Mockingbird.
”

 

S
ENATOR
G
EORGE
M
C
G
OVERN'S
presidential campaign, which had grown out of the antiwar movement, was at the grassroots level a youth crusade. The candidate's campaign manager, Gary Hart, thirty-five, one of the movement's most talented organizers, chose Clinton to be McGovern's state co-coordinator in Texas with Taylor Branch, a fellow Southerner who had organized antiwar protests and worked as a political journalist for
The Washington Monthly.
(Later, Branch would write a classic three-volume biography of Martin Luther King and win a Pulitzer for one of its volumes.) In their Texas environment, Clinton and Branch looked a bit like Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, Bill with his bushy hair and cowboy boots, and Taylor with a full mustache.

Bill had asked Hillary to come to Texas for the campaign, and she signed on to register voters in San Antonio. Clinton was physically and organizationally a dominating presence in the state campaign, but Hillary created an equally memorable impression. Many of the women in the campaign regarded her as the real luminary, with a more impressive résumé than Bill's. Given the likelihood of Richard Nixon overwhelming McGovern in the election, they looked to her as someone who could help pick up the pieces of the Democratic Party and, in the next few years, run for office herself.

In San Antonio she lived and worked with Sara Ehrman, who was fifteen years older. “We were two oddballs in San Antonio,” Ehrman said of the two of them—a middle-aged Jewish housewife with the assertive edge of her native Brooklyn, and a hippie-looking Ivy Leaguer possessed with an intensity every bit the equal of her own. Hillary, recalled Ehrman, “came into campaign headquarters a kid—in brown corduroy pants, brown shirt, brown hair, brown glasses, no makeup, brown shoes. Her Coke-bottle glasses. Long hair. She looked like the campus intellectual that she was. She totally disregarded her appearance.” Hillary's politics at the time were “liberal, ideological, the same as my own,” Sara said. She described the Hillary she knew that Texas summer as a “progressive Christian in that she believed in litigation to do good, and to correct injustices and to live by a kind of spiritual high-mindedness.” Sara said Hillary was a compulsive reader: contemporary fiction, religious tomes, the Bible, academic materials about child psychology. Hillary seemed to have everything in balance—the gift of seriousness leavened by the ability to have a good time. She was witty, genuinely funny; there was nothing stuffy about her, Sara thought.

Hillary was vivid and pragmatic in approaching her task in San Antonio: trying to establish a strong connection between the local Mexican-American community and the McGovern campaign. Ehrman found her to be firm and indomitable, knocking on doors in tough neighborhoods to register Hispanic voters. Hillary was so un-intimidated that Sara took to calling her by the nickname “Fearless,” the same quality that others had recognized in Hillary in her early teens, jumping on a skateboard to get a prom date or going into Chicago's ghettos on behalf of Goldwater's campaign.

Ehrman also noted another, less apparent aspect of Hillary's character—“I'd call it a kind of fervor, and self-justification that God is on her side.” That summer Sara sensed Hillary was trying to reconcile her rigorous liberal political theology with her middle-class Methodist upbringing. She carried her Bible almost everywhere, marking in it and underlining as she read.

Ehrman had also met twenty-five-year-old Bill Clinton that summer, before Hillary had arrived. Sara judged him to be one of the most handsome young men she had ever seen, a conclusion many other women in the McGovern campaign seemed to share.

“Bill Clinton tapped into part of Hillary that no one ever had. Everybody else saw her as a terribly serious woman, very intense,” Ehrman said. “He saw the side of her that liked spontaneity and laughter. He found her guttural laugh: it's fabulous—there's nothing held back. The public never sees that side of her. When she's laughing, that's when she's free.”

Most of the McGovern volunteers in Texas were under thirty, dispatched there by Hart, and there was an easy camaraderie among the bunch, including a carefree sexual atmosphere that was reflective of the era. Evenings they would have a beer or go bowling. On weekends, Hillary was often with Bill in Austin, but they occasionally dated others, and were frequently seen arguing heatedly. More than a few women thought Bill was captivating and sexy. With his reputation as a political wunderkind, there were even groupies, and Hillary took note. After a fight, they decided to stop seeing each other. Franklin Garcia, a San Antonio labor organizer who was tutoring Hillary about the Hispanic community, smoothed things over. Bill thanked him. “You really saved our relationship,” he said.

She had a knack for making male friends, some of whom found her easier to talk to than Bill. Taylor Branch, who had recently separated from his wife, remembered that Hillary was “more focused on the grand cosmic questions” that troubled people of their generation. “Bill and I talked business,” he recalled. “We laughed. We talked personalities, but we never sat down and philosophized. I was feeling rootless, unhinged, and it was easier to talk to Hillary about those things than to Bill.”

To the women working in McGovern's Texas campaign, Hillary seemed to be on her way to an exceptional career in politics. Betsey Wright, a particularly industrious and ideological organizer from the West Texas hamlet of Alpine, became a true acolyte. Wright thought “women were the ethical and pure force” that could change American politics, and she and Hillary spent many of their spare hours discussing how to get more women into politics in a serious way. “It was a nascent feminist movement then. We had both read Simone de Beauvoir and Germaine Greer. And I'd just come off the heady experience of Sissy Farenthold's campaign [for governor] in Texas,” Wright said. Betsey was “less interested in Bill's political future than Hillary's. 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.”

Hillary thought Wright's experience ought to benefit women outside Texas, and at Hillary's behest she moved to Washington after McGovern's crushing defeat (33 percent to Nixon's 67 percent in Texas, and similarly disastrous nationwide) to organize for the National Women's Political Caucus. From such a position, Betsey believed she could help Hillary eventually become America's first female president.

Though Ehrman and Wright formed easy friendships with Hillary, others remembered her intelligence or reserve more than any sort of effusive social interaction. Some found her aloof. There would be others, though not as many, who found her warm, gregarious, accessible, and sociable. This dichotomy always seemed to be the case with Hillary—in an organization, campaign, or even the Senate of the United States.

4

Making Arkansas Home

After all that has happened since, I'm often asked why Bill and I have stayed together…. What can I say to explain a love that has persisted for decades?

—Living History

W
HEN
H
ILLARY
C
LINTON
met Bill Clinton she was no fatalist. She fervently believed that a person could control her own destiny and that she, Hillary, could never give herself over to vague forces, or to somebody else's dominating personality, as she knew her mother had disastrously done. She did not believe that an individual—particularly herself—was powerless to change either events or the nature of other people, and she went about both tasks tenaciously.

But time after time, in Hillary's courtship and marriage with Bill Clinton, she was confronted with the obvious: He was beyond her control when it came to other women. It wasn't his pursuit of extramarital sex per se that so riled her, she once said. She had come to view her husband almost as an adolescent when it came to his sexual sensibilities and compulsions, and attributed them to the pathology of his unusual childhood. “There are worse things than infidelity,” she told a confidante in 1989, at a time when Bill believed himself to be in love with an Arkansas divorcée, Marilyn Jo Jenkins. The source of Hillary's frustration and anger, dating back to their courtship, was her knowledge that she was powerless to change him, as she was reminded repeatedly during their marriage. Hillary trusted in the power of rational thought and logic above almost all else, yet he seemed immune to logical reasoning on the subject, rather than defiant.

It took Hillary more than two years to make up her mind to marry Bill. She had serious doubts not only about his womanizing but about living in Arkansas, about the intensity with which he pursued his passions (including even his passion for her, which sometimes could be overwhelming). She wanted children, but she didn't want them to grow up in a strained marriage. The experience of her mother—both as an abandoned child and an abused wife (a term Hillary avoided)—weighed on her. Hillary's hesitant decision was reached only after dipping her toes in the Arkansas waters and calculating that she could learn to live there. She carefully positioned herself during those years to have a fallback plan in case their marriage or political journey ran aground. She knew that Bill's history of compulsive infidelity during their courtship meant the chances for a stable marriage, especially a marriage without adultery, were at best a crapshoot.

In the end, she married for love, and the shared dream of a grand political future someday in Washington. But that future would be focused on him, not her, she reluctantly conceded to friends who were urging her to pursue a more independent course and separate identity. Going to Arkansas meant forgoing a prestigious job in the capital or New York, and all but extinguishing her own flash in the season of her greatest promise. Since her graduation from Wellesley, she had been speeding toward national prominence.

In Arkansas, she would not be a woman in charge—something she knew was not necessarily antithetical to being married, but was antithetical to being married to Bill Clinton, on his turf. She would, by choice, inhabit the more traditional universe in which she would invest her talent, dedication, and energy to brighten her man's star—as her mother's generation had done. She would be the partner, the manager, the adviser. She would follow her heart.

 

H
ILLARY HAD ALREADY
deferred her independent ambitions and made her first great sacrifice by remaining at Yale an extra year to be with Bill rather than graduate with her own class. She worked in the McGovern campaign until election day and studied children's development at the Yale Child Study Center. After their graduation from law school in the spring of 1973, she went with Bill on her first trip abroad, to England, and he showed her London, Oxford, and some of the places he had visited during his year as a Rhodes Scholar. At twilight one evening “on the shores of Ennerdale,” in the English Lake District celebrated by the Romantic poets, he asked her to be his wife.

She said no. She didn't want to rush into a decision, she later explained. At that time she was afraid “of commitment in general and Bill's intensity in particular.”

Many years afterward, Hillary said the marriage almost didn't happen. Bill proposed many times. “I never doubted my love for him, but I knew he was going to build his life in Arkansas. I couldn't envision what my life would be like in a place where I had no family or friends.”

Not long after their return from Europe, Hillary made her first visit to Arkansas, in June 1973, almost as a consolation for saying no to his marriage proposal. Bill had asked her to come with him “to see how she liked it.” He urged her to take the Arkansas bar exam. He picked her up at the Little Rock airport, choosing a picturesque (and symbol-heavy) route home to Hot Springs, first passing the state capitol and governor's mansion, then following the Arkansas River to Russellville, seventy miles from the capital, then south through the Ouachita Mountains where they stopped periodically to take in the view. Since they had first met, Bill had talked almost incessantly about his state, trying to make his enthusiasm infectious—a tough sell, the scenery notwithstanding. It was made tougher by Hillary's brief stay in Hot Springs, where Bill's mother and brother lived.

Hillary had first met Virginia Cassidy Blythe Clinton Dwire (later, Kelley) when she visited New Haven in 1972. Virginia and Hillary loved the same man, but from the beginning that didn't seem to sit well with either woman. Virginia thought Hillary was a fright—her hair badly cut (she had chopped it herself that semester, to save money), no makeup, and jeans, her preferred posture tending toward a hippie slouch. As someone with a pedigree from Park Ridge, Wellesley, and Yale—though that was hardly how she projected herself—Hillary might have concluded that Virginia, with her distinctive white-striped hair and fondness for fast men, fast horses, red lipstick, and false eyelashes had followed Route 1 straight north from Tobacco Road to New Haven. Virginia certainly didn't expect Bill to bring someone like Hillary home—a “Yankee,” for good measure, albeit from Illinois.

Roger Clinton, Bill's younger brother, whom Hillary had not met prior to her arrival in Hot Springs, was quick to share his mother's parochial assessment: Hillary wasn't good-looking enough, for starters. And they thought she was bossy with Bill.

Hillary got along much more easily with Virginia's third husband, Jeff Dwire. From the time Jeff met her in New Haven, he treated her kindly and encouraged her efforts, unreciprocated for a long stretch, to reach out to Virginia. Hillary took note that he regarded Virginia with deep reverence. Dwire was a charming character, an ex-con beauty parlor proprietor who had served nine months in prison for stock swindling in the early 1960s. He was the person who had fashioned Virginia's distinctive hairstyle, taking the white stripe she'd already had and dyeing the area around it. Dwire told Hillary that Virginia would eventually come around, and embrace her as family. She did, but the turning was glacially slow.

In the two years Bill and Hillary had been together, he had recapitulated for her the vague history of his family origins as best he knew or understood them. But in Hot Springs, in Virginia's house, she would come for the first time to clearly comprehend the milieu Bill came from and, she once inferred, his sexual proclivities.

Virginia's family, the Cassidys, and the Clintons had always been religious, churchgoing people, but their faith didn't put much store in sexual restraint as an essential element of godliness. Virginia's mother, Edith, a nurse, regularly denounced her husband, Eldridge, for affairs with other women, and she was rumored to be involved sexually with some of the physicians in Hope, Arkansas. Bill's likely father, William Jefferson Blythe, had four or five wives before his death at twenty-eight. Roger Clinton, Bill's stepfather, whose last name was conferred on Bill, did not cease his philandering after marrying Virginia, and his drunken rages were sometimes fueled by jealousy—because of gossip about his wife, her flirting, or discovering her out on the town. In this environment, it might not be surprising that part of Bill's intensity was focused on women, flirting, and sexual conquests, Hillary believed.

Her confusion and ambivalence were evident the day she and Bill took the Arkansas bar exam, in Little Rock, when she ran into Ellen Brantley, who had been a year behind her at Wellesley and was also taking the exam. Brantley, who was born and raised in Little Rock, was surprised to see Hillary in a setting so jarringly out of context. “What are you doing here?” she asked.

“Oh, you know, I'm trying to get a job in Arkansas,” Hillary said. Brantley could see that “she was kind of enigmatic about it, [and] didn't mention there was a romantic interest that had brought her here.”

But Bill was already making calculations for both of them based on his political future, even evaluating whether there might be negative political consequences to him if they listed the same New Haven address on their individual bar applications. It had been nine years since he'd really lived in Arkansas, since he'd graduated high school and gone off to Georgetown. His plans were to teach law at the University of Arkansas while he adjusted to the political climate back home, and then to run for office.

If Hillary eventually moved to Arkansas, she would either join a law firm there or teach at the law school in Fayetteville—hardly roles commensurate with the scale of her ambition. Meanwhile, she had accepted an exciting job opportunity in Cambridge, Massachusetts, at the organization Marian Wright Edelman had recently founded, the Children's Defense Fund. When Bill and Hillary parted after her brief stay in Arkansas, their situation seemed totally unsettled.

Not long thereafter, on July 23 and 24, Hillary took the D.C. bar exam, according to records of the District of Columbia Bar Association. In Cambridge, she rented rooms not far from the Harvard campus. It was the first time in her life she had lived alone. She didn't like it.

Hillary found herself invigorated by her work for Edelman. There was a pioneering feeling about what she was doing. There had never before been a national organization devoted solely to defending the legal rights and interests of children. Hillary traveled to South Carolina to interview juvenile offenders, some as young as fourteen, who were housed in adult state prisons. The situation was all too common, she was learning, especially in the South. In Massachusetts, she went door-to-door in New Bedford to find out why there was such a discrepancy between the number of school-age children counted in the census and those enrolled in school. She studied the history of family law and the inherent and practical difficulties of asserting the rights of abused or neglected children. She was intellectually stimulated, and she enjoyed Cambridge, where many friends from her Wellesley and Yale years had gravitated, either to Harvard's campus or jobs in nearby Boston. But she missed Bill and confessed she was lonely.

On November 3, the District of Columbia Bar Association notified Hillary that she had failed the bar exam. For the first time in her life she had flamed out—spectacularly, given the expectations of others for her, and even more so her own. Of 817 applicants, 551 of her peers had passed, most from law schools less prestigious than Yale. She kept this news hidden for the next thirty years. She never took the exam again, despite many opportunities. Her closest friends and associates—Webb Hubbell, Jim Blair (Diane's husband), Nancy Bekavac, Betsey Wright, Sara Ehrman—were flabbergasted when she made the revelation in a single throwaway line in
Living History.
“When I learned that I passed in Arkansas but failed in D.C., I thought maybe my test scores were telling me something.”

Those who knew her best speculated that she must have felt deep shame at her failure, and that her self-confidence—always so visible a part of her exterior—was shattered by the experience (though many first-rate lawyers, even Yale Law graduates, had flunked the bar on their first try). There can only be conjecture about what turn her life—and the nation's—might have taken had she
not
failed the exam.

There was a striking aspect to her failure. Her almost uninterrupted success to that point—including her academic career—had been based in large measure on interaction with the people who were evaluating her performance: teachers, employers, colleagues, interviewers, mentors, friends. Propelled by her character, personality, and drive, she was almost invariably very impressive. The D.C. bar examination, hardly one of the toughest in the nation but far more difficult than the Arkansas exam, was an impersonal test—no people skills were on display, no opportunity to influence the outcome with demonstrations of character or force of personality, or a winning way with strangers. This failure, a blow to her ambition, played a role in the decisions she now faced.

Bill flew to New England over the Thanksgiving holiday in 1973, and while they explored Boston together, they talked about their future. By then he had rented “the perfect place to live,” as he called it, a singularly beautiful, small wood-and-glass house eight miles outside Fayetteville in the countryside, on eighty secluded acres bordered on one side by the White River. Clinton had always had an aesthetic gift, more developed than Hillary's in art, design, and music, their friends thought, and he'd rented a house created by one of the country's more remarkable mid-century architects, the Arkansan Fay Jones, whose Thorncrown Chapel outside Fayetteville, in Eureka Springs, is a tiny jewel justly celebrated for its simple, pared beauty. Fayetteville, on the edge of the Ozarks in northwest Arkansas, was only a few miles from the summer band camp Bill had attended as a boy, a forested annual respite from the tar-baked asphalt of Hot Springs. Sitting in a rocking chair on the porch of this little house, Clinton could gaze at cattle grazing on the property near the river, and the familiar forests beyond. Field mice regularly scurried into the kitchen, and when he gave up trying to keep them out, he put out breadcrumbs for them.