A Woman in Charge (18 page)

“If you were unprepared, she would rip you pretty good, but not in an unfair way,” recalled Woody Bassett, who became a good friend of both, and worked in many Clinton political campaigns. “She made you think, she challenged you. If she asked you a question about a case and you gave an answer, well then—here comes another question. Whereas in Bill Clinton's classes, it was much more laid-back.” In class Hillary never mentioned her work on the impeachment inquiry. Bill was far more open about discussing political issues with his students, whether Nixon's impeachment or
Roe v. Wade,
on which he spent several weeks. The subject of his constitutional law course more naturally lent itself to political questions than Hillary's. He was regarded as the easiest grader in the law school. Hillary's exams were tough, and her grading commensurate with what she expected serious law students to know. There was little doubt that she was the better teacher, possessed with “unusual ability to absorb a huge amount of facts and boil them down to the bottom line,” Bassett thought. Clinton was more likely to go at a subject in a circular way, looking at it from every angle and sometimes never coming to a conclusion. But usually his was the more interesting class, because of the passion and knowledge with which he addressed legal questions that related to everyday events.

 

H
ILLARY MADE GOOD
women friends in Fayetteville, which helped put her at ease. One, Diane Kincaid (later Diane Blair), became what Hillary described as the closest friend of her life, a source of great joy, camaraderie, understanding, and mutual purpose. Two years before Hillary's arrival, not long after they had started dating, Bill had sought out Diane with the idea that she could help get Hillary to Arkansas.

We walked over to the student union to have lunch [Diane recalled], and I was in the middle of a sentence, and he just stopped me and said, “You remind me so much of the woman that I'm in love with.” And I said, “Tell me about her.” And he went on to describe this paragon and the smartest person he had ever met, the most wonderful, innovative, luminating mind on any subject whatsoever and just on and on and on. He was just smitten. It was clear to me by that time that he was planning his political future in the state, and wanted to marry this woman, and bring her here. And he said, “I
hope
I can, that's what I want to do. But, if I bring her here it will be
my
state and
my
political life. And she could very easily have an amazing political career of her own. She could easily be a governor, a United States senator.” I had never met at that point a man who was in politics, and who wanted to do politics, who could so easily envision a woman with a brilliant political future. So, it impressed me.

Diane, nine years older than Hillary, had also left Washington for Fayetteville to join an Arkansas man, her first husband, in 1965. She shared with Hillary a common political outlook and views about their generation of women, particularly women like themselves who wanted both careers and families. The daughter of a devout Irish Catholic father and a Polish, Orthodox Jewish mother, she was pleased to enlist another kindred spirit in the causes and movements of women who saw themselves as Southern progressives. Neither Hillary nor Diane was truly radical in her politics, but both were committed to concepts that situated them on the outer edges of Arkansas liberalism. They shared a belief in an activist government that asserted and protected the equal rights and opportunities of all Americans, including women and their reproductive rights.

With two children from a prior marriage, Diane was the partner of one of the most powerful (and richest) political figures in the state, Jim Blair, who would become a counselor to Bill and loom large in Hillary's life as well. Because Hillary had “somebody like me, what might have festered if you felt totally isolated would become an endearing eccentricity,” Diane said. She connected emotionally with Hillary “because I had been through a very similar experience.”

The smallest town I had ever lived in before was Washington, D.C. Fayetteville then had 25,000 people. The only place to eat downtown was Ferguson's Cafeteria, and if you really wanted to get fancy you drove up to Tontitown for spaghetti. Women still put on white gloves and had bridge parties and tea parties. People dressed up for football games. I just knew the kind of culture shock that she was going to go through because I'd had an Ivy League education and all that kind of stuff. I just knew what was coming. But, I also had been here long enough by the time she came to be able to see the positives and the sweetness to life here. So, I felt like I could be her guide, and more to the point, I think before she even came, Bill thought that I could. He wanted her to love it here.

Racial segregation, poverty, the psychological and physical barrier of the Ozarks themselves, had mired Arkansas in relative isolation, but the state also had a vigorous tradition of populism and progressivism. The legacy of the state's competing forces were reflected in the student body of the university where Diane taught political science to undergraduates, and its law school, where Hillary thought too many of her pupils were constrained by convention. “We both took teaching very seriously,” Diane said. “We wanted to lift people's expectations. Arkansas kids, we thought, just didn't think big enough about the world and their place in it. And we were concerned about women students who were still thinking of themselves as having very limited existence.” Both were amused but frustrated with their students' evaluations of their teaching. “Hillary and I got a lot of comments about the way we dressed, which we thought was hilarious,” Blair said. Hillary was told that turtleneck sweaters made her look fat. “It was just so absurd to us that students who had this opportunity to critique ways in which you could improve your teaching instead [were focused on] dress code.”

Hillary and Diane traded books, played tennis, and met regularly at the student union for lunch. There weren't many women on the university faculty. They took long walks and discussed their disappointment at the failure of ratification of the Equal Rights Amendment in the Arkansas legislature.

Hillary had the natural coordination of her father. Neither she nor Diane had anything approaching good tennis form, but they thrived on competing. “We'd go out and just whack balls at each other until we drove each other into the ground,” said Diane.

When Hillary would call Diane to tell her about some aspect of Arkansas life she was experiencing for the first time, Diane would share a similar anecdote from her first days in town and they would laugh together. “There would be frustrations, but I never, ever heard her say, Oh, I ruined my life. I could have done this, I could have done that,” said Diane.

Yet there were concessions Hillary had to make to Arkansas's conservative political and social milieu. The first was to continue to live separately from Bill, an arrangement that left their friends from Yale flabbergasted.

 

V
ENOMOUS RUMORS
and allegations would follow Bill Clinton throughout his political career—some of them true (his carefree sexual ways, his elusive Selective Service status), some of them wildly exaggerated, many of them outright false—and they were a major factor in his first campaign, a source of animated discussion in the Third Congressional District and political circles around the state, even on the University of Arkansas campus. Though he had never sought election before, he already had enemies. Max Brantley, one of the ablest journalistic observers of his state's politics and traditions (his wife was Ellen Brantley), believed part of Bill's problem—and Hillary's eventually—was the nature of the electorate itself. “There is a strong feeling in Arkansas, that was taught in school a while ago, that you could build a wall around Arkansas and we could survive without the rest of the world just fine, thanks. And even though Clinton was a local boy, he'd gone away. He had put on airs, going off to Eastern schools and even going abroad for education. A lot of people read into that that somehow what we have here isn't good enough. It's an implicit insult.” Ideology was also a factor. Clinton was running for a seat in a strongly Republican congressional district, and he generated antipathy, on the far right especially, because he allowed himself to be identified as a liberal in ways that he more successfully shrugged off in later campaigns, by which time his identity as a centrist had solidified.

Some voters held it against Clinton that he had “imported” a Miss Fancy Pants from New England and Washington. (Hillary's Midwest credentials were often ignored.) Even Bill's band boy history became freighted with sexual overtones: not only were there rumors that Clinton was gay, but he was simultaneously said to be living in sin with a woman to whom he wasn't married (though he and Hillary lived apart). Conservative preachers around the state took to the pulpit to denounce the Clinton campaign as an iniquitous den of drug use and perfidious women.

Though Hillary became a dominating presence at headquarters upon her arrival, Bill fitfully continued his relationship with the student volunteer. He told his staff to watch for Hillary's car in the driveway and often sent the young woman out the back door to avoid confrontations. In fairly short order, Hillary succeeded in having the student banned from headquarters. Hillary made it known that she thought women from Bill's past, and by implication any others still in his orbit, were intellectually from another world than her and Bill's, and thus represented no serious competition. This would be her condescending assertion through many an election season, the degree of venom and how publicly she expressed it often dependent on the commensurate political danger to him and embarrassment to her.

Hillary's relationship with Bill during the period was often explosive. She was fiercely determined to keep her man—and make sure the political dream was kept on track, as much on her terms as possible. It was not unusual for the campaign's managers to stand by silently while Hillary and Bill shouted at each other, often about a matter of strategy, but there were obviously other underlying tensions. She was not exempt from the famous Bill Clinton temper that hundreds of campaign workers and even, occasionally, cabinet members were to be subjected to over the next quarter-century. Unlike them, she gave as good as she got, both in tone and language. On one such occasion, while being driven to a campaign stop, she angrily announced at a stoplight, “I'm getting out.” After she did, she slammed the car door and began walking down the road.

“They would constantly argue, and the next thing you know, they'd be falling all over each other with ‘Oh my darling…come here baby…you're adorable…' then throwing things at each other, and then they'd be slobbering all over each other,” a disaffected Clinton aide said with exaggerated disdain. Yet this dynamic would persist.

As would happen when Bill ran for president in 1992, rumors about his sexual involvements intensified as election day drew near, most of them (in this instance) elaborated by his opponent's workers. Whatever her private discomfort at the situation—or perhaps because of it—Hillary overruled the Clinton campaign's managers when it was proposed that fire be fought with fire. They wanted to counterattack with a slogan used by Democrats in a previous campaign: “Send John Paul Hammerschmidt to Washington, the wife you save may be your own.” But Hillary was adamantly opposed. Bill, as he did several times in the closing weeks of the campaign, sided with her against his campaign manager. In all of Bill Clinton's subsequent campaigns, including for the presidency, her influence with the candidate was that of first among unequals, partly because of her often superior instincts and knowledge (especially about him), and partly because Bill did not like contravening her. On this occasion, for reasons she did not articulate, Hillary was insistent on taking the high road.

From the time of her arrival, the campaign's top managers clashed with her substantively and stylistically. Both sides seemed bewildered by the other. The three male principals—Clinton, Fray, and Addington—talked to each other in their own kind of mock-redneck patois that eluded her at first (“the Boy” was their name for Clinton).

“Our organization went to shit” after Hillary's arrival, said Addington. He felt her presence led to a general atmosphere of infighting and bickering. Hillary, however honorable her intentions, “managed to antagonize the entire staff,” Clinton's press secretary complained in a memo to the candidate.

As election day approached, Bill was again caught between Hillary's high-minded ethical insistence and his managers' ground-level strategic realism. Desperate for last-minute funds, the campaign had been offered $15,000 from a lawyer who represented state dairy interests, earmarked for use in Sebastian County, where it was known voting results could be bought and certified. The contribution was also intended to help secure Clinton's agreement to serve the interests of the dairy industry once he was in office. But Hillary fought the deal during a heated election eve meeting. Clinton remained quiet, but, according to Fray, Hillary was unyielding, telling Bill: “No! You don't want to be a party to this!”

Did they want to win or did they want to lose? Fray asked.

“Well, I don't want to win this way. If we can't earn it, we can't go [to Washington],” Hillary answered, according to Fray.

In September, Bill had been behind 59 percent to 23 percent, according to the polls. By election day, he and Hammerschmidt were locked in a tight race, partly because Hammerschmidt hadn't felt it necessary to campaign until three weeks before the election, so confident had he been of coasting to victory. Bill had been doing door-to-door campaigning for eight months in every hamlet and hollow in the district. The Clinton camp was optimistic on election night. By midnight, Bill had pulled ahead in a close race, with only the votes from Sebastian County outstanding—long past the hour when they should have been reported. Hillary was seated at a desk, calmly working a calculator and trying to analyze the vote. Clinton volunteers at the county courthouse were hearing tales of chicanery with the ballot boxes. When Fort Smith, the county seat, fell to Hammerschmidt by a big—and unlikely—margin, Fray went on a tear, throwing things and swearing. “It was the goddamn money!” he shouted. Clinton had lost the election by six thousand votes. Fray claimed that Hillary's ethics kept Clinton out of Congress.