A Woman in Charge (19 page)

She processed the campaign's lessons. Subsequently, she would be far less committed to the high road and much more concerned with results. The question of Bill's other women would become a prominent feature of the Clinton electoral landscape and, when raised by opponents or when the women themselves surfaced, Hillary would set the strategy of response: to attack the women as gold diggers and lying opportunists trying to capitalize on her husband's prominence. By the time of her husband's reelection as president (and a decade after that, her own preparations for running for president), she would preside over a vast fund-raising apparatus and bowed to no one in her willingness to stretch the rules of campaign finance.

 

B
ILL'S CONGRESSIONAL
race was a turning point in Arkansas politics. Though he had lost by 2 percentage points and agonized for days afterward about what might have been (seventy-five Democratic freshmen were elected to Congress on November 5, part of a generational transformation on Capitol Hill, in which he would have been a standout), he became the inevitable leading young man of the state Democratic Party for his challenge of Hammerschmidt, a four-term incumbent, who had previously been reelected with ease. The major question about his political future was now what office he would run for in 1976, two years hence, and how fast and far he could go.

Hillary, however, now had to deal with the practical consequences of his loss. She seemed more on the fence than ever about whether to marry Bill. They were not going to Washington together anytime soon. Their grand vision seemed to be derailed, and she was left with choices she had not wanted to face: remain with the man she loved or strike out on her own, either in New York practicing law (which meant yet another bar exam to study for) or moving back to Washington, which, compared with Manhattan or even Cambridge, was still tea-pouring country when it came to welcoming strong, able professional women.

She wondered if she could build a meaningful professional and politically influential life in Arkansas while her husband climbed the state electoral ladder, which she judged the likely course he would pursue, rather than trying to get elected to Congress again. She did not relish becoming a local politician's wife in a poor Southern state. Less talented women were getting plum jobs in New York and Washington, where the action was.

Two weeks after Bill's defeat, Nancy Bekavac, their law school classmate, arrived in Fayetteville to visit. Bekavac thought Bill seemed “oddly elated” as he launched into an analysis and explanation of his loss. “We know how to whip them next time,” he said. Hillary was less upbeat, expressing particular disappointment that she and Bill wouldn't be going to Washington together to advance the causes—local and national—they believed were important. Bill sounded a lot like he intended to stay in Arkansas and run for statewide office. Hillary, sounding desultory, enumerated some reasons for her to stay, too. She really cared about her students. There were plenty of local issues to get involved in, education especially. The Arkansas education system was one of the weakest in the country. Many of her students lacked the requisite writing skills and vocabulary for a legal career. Arkansans desperately needed help on urban issues, women's rights, the stubborn rural poverty that afflicted the state, which ranked forty-ninth in per capita income and forty-ninth in educational achievement. There were many ways for her to contribute. But she was frank with Bekavac about her fear that Arkansas would smother her ambitions and chances for personal achievement such as she had once envisioned for herself.

Bekavac, given a guided tour of the local scene on her first night in town, was certain suffocation would come sooner rather than later. At a payback chicken dinner for campaign supporters, Bill arrived late and went to sit with the politicos. After the speeches, Bekavac started to move to the back of the room where the serious political discussions were going on. Hillary stopped her.

“Sit down. We sit here,” she instructed. They had to remain seated with the women through dessert and coffee, until the event was over and the men had concluded their backslapping.

Bekavac was shocked. Later, the three could go to Bill's house for drinks, said Hillary, who was still living in town with her brother Tony.

Bekavac told Hillary she couldn't believe she was in modern America. “This is Australia in 1956,” she said. “This is like mind Jell-O. You can't do this. It's like Antigone, you know, it's like, ‘Jump in the tomb.' You can't do this.”

Hillary responded: “Well, I know, but I love him.”

“Hillary, you've got to love him a whole lot to do this,” Bekavac said.

“I do,” Hillary said. Her clear, measured way of discussing the matter convinced Bekavac that Hillary was carefully weighing her options, however unpalatable. She seemed inclined toward staying, but still undecided.

“When will you know if you can do this?” Bekavac asked.

“When I know,” said Hillary.

It was a choice unlike any faced by Bekavac or Hillary's other friends. “Because you're buying this guy, and you're buying this life, which is not New Haven. It's not anything,” Bekavac recalled thinking. She was stunned. “Because I identified with her. She was smart. She was funny. She was warm. She was ambitious. She had done all these accomplished things.”

As Bekavac drove out of Fayetteville in her Pinto a few days later, she thought to herself: “This is a nightmare!…Thank God, it's not me.”

 

B
EKAVAC WAS IGNORING
how good Hillary and Bill could be together, how much fun they had, how they reveled in each other's company, how they connected, the deep commitment they shared to an old-fashioned concept of public service, the belief of each, naive as it sounded, that together there was a way to make things better for people whose lives were not as blessed as their own. Bekavac knew they were, in their respective ways, the two most ambitious people she had probably ever met. Yet she felt the sharper edge of their ambitions seemed to become blunted, less threatening when they were together. Others found the joint ambitions of Hillary and Bill terrifying.

Their friends observed a remarkable chemistry. “She's the one that gets up in the morning with a dark cloud over her head, and he gets up with the bright sun,” said a photojournalist who followed the Clintons in Arkansas and in Washington. “As the day goes on, he's the one who falls into a funk and she's the one who will refocus him. It's one of those things that if they had never met neither of them would have reached the heights that they did.”

Bill supplied the passion and Hillary the focus, though obviously there was far more to the bond. “They're not whole without each other,” said their friend Deborah Sale. “He is enormously dependent on her, and I think she on him as well. He loves getting up in the morning and seeing what the day's going to bring, seeing what he can do. Living with someone who has that kind of passion for life is wonderful. And she's someone who wakes up thinking about what she's going to accomplish that day, what she has to do, who she should be seeing, what she should be doing.”

For a few days after his defeat Bill traveled through the Third Congressional District thanking voters for their support or if they hadn't voted for him, for merely considering the merits of his candidacy. Then, for the next six weeks, “I went into a funk,” he said. He spent most of his time at Hillary's house lying on the floor and feeling sorry for himself. Then, as became the rhythm of their life, with her encouragement, he grasped her stronger, extended hand, picked himself up, and turned to action: in December Hillary coerced him to take her dancing and that seemed to lift his spirits. He also knew that only two sitting senators (and no House members) had been elected president in the twentieth century, Kennedy and Harding. Most of the others had been governors. He convinced himself that if he'd won and they'd gone to Washington, he might never have been elected president.

With renewed vigor, he set out to win over Arkansas voters, whatever office he decided to seek, and to win over Hillary as well. She wrote later that he asked her so many times to marry him that he finally said she should let him know if and when she was ready.

She sought counsel from Jim Blair, who was familiar with almost all of Bill's complexities and proclivities. “Well, Bill has asked me to marry him several times, and I've turned him down several times,” Hillary said. “And he's asked me again and this is something I want to do someday—but just not right now.” Abruptly, she switched gears: “On the other hand…I'm afraid that if I turn him down he will never ask me again.” Innately, Hillary recognized that she was “happier with Bill than without him” and that her heart was still telling her “that I was going in the right direction.”

“Oh hell, Hillary, go ahead and marry him 'cause if it doesn't work out you can always get divorced,” said Blair.

She also sought advice from Ann Henry, who had married a state senator, was the mother of three young children, and was herself a prominent figure in the state Democratic Party. She was among the women Hillary felt closest to in Fayetteville. She had spent hours sitting by the Henrys' backyard swimming pool with Ann, Diane, and others, talking about their lives, the problems of their state, and issues of particular concern to women—and organizing to try to change things.

Ann elaborated for Hillary the constant compromises demanded of a politician's wife, especially in Arkansas. There was no way to fully pursue your own professional and political ambitions, or even express yourself adequately, without jeopardizing your husband's agenda and career, she said.

Hillary disagreed, and aggressively questioned some of the choices Henry had made as a political wife. “Whether I
wanted
to run for office myself or take a big public job was beside the point,” Henry tried to explain to Hillary, “because I was married to somebody who was in politics. And I was not willing to take on a real public profile in some areas. It might get Morriss [her husband] defeated, and I would take the blame. And I didn't want that.”

Hillary suggested that Ann's decisions had been far too accepting. “She wouldn't call me a coward, but she just thought I was wrong,” Ann remembered. “But she was young and not married. And I was married with three children, and had already gone through campaigns where your lives are disrupted.”

Hillary cited Eleanor Roosevelt in order to contradict Ann.

“That's right,” said Ann, who had just finished reading Joseph Lash's recently published biography of Eleanor, documenting for the first time that FDR had had an affair with Lucy Mercer. Eleanor “never found her voice until after that marriage was over—until she didn't care about the marriage!”

Ann concluded that Hillary had already made up her mind to marry Bill. But the question of Arkansas, the character of the place (more than the character of Bill), its provincial outlook, its Southernness, continued to propel her doubt, especially when she listened to stories like Ann's and looked beyond the congeniality of a university town like Fayetteville and its bucolic setting. Little Rock beckoned, but it did not call to her.

Hillary took a long, soul-searching trip in the fall of 1975 to Boston, New York, Washington, and Chicago to assess what she was missing, including in the job market. Her trip may have been at least partially instigated by Bill's decision to seek election as Arkansas's attorney general, rather than run again for Congress. “I had lost my desire to go to Washington. I wanted to stay in Arkansas,” he said. In New York, Carolyn Ellis, her law school friend who was raised in Mississippi, told her that Arkansas “wasn't Mars,” and that “to love somebody and not marry them because of where they were living was the height of foolishness.” Other friends thought she was on the verge of jumping off a marital cliff with Bill Clinton.

He sometimes gave the impression that he, too, had doubts. “All we ever do is argue,” he told Carolyn Yeldell Staley, a friend since high school. However, he didn't tell her that underlying much of the fighting was Hillary's perception that he still wanted to see other women, which he did. Later, he claimed to Betsey Wright that he had actually tried to “run Hillary off, but she just wouldn't go,” not because he worried about Hillary being hurt by his promiscuous ways, but because marrying him and living in Arkansas would restrict Hillary's career and political independence.

“He was surprised she really wanted to marry him because he felt that she could have so much more,” Betsey said. Wright attributed part of this to “Bill Clinton's ongoing inferiority complex…. Bill Clinton has spent his whole life scared that he's white trash, and doing whatever he could to try to prove to himself that he isn't.”

He had told his mother to “pray that it's Hillary. Because I tell you this: It's Hillary or it's nobody. I don't need to be married to a beauty queen or a sex goddess. I am going to be involved all my life in hard work in politics and public service, and I need somebody who is really ready to roll up her sleeves and work for me.” He did not mention a corollary of the equation: that he had no money and, if he stayed in politics, would have little opportunity to amass any on his own. Hillary's earning potential as a lawyer was considerable, though the whole question of money was something he rarely considered.

Hillary's trip to Chicago and the East Coast rattled whatever complacency he might have been feeling. He told his friend Jim McDougal and McDougal's then girlfriend (and eventual wife), Susan, over a meal at Frankie's Cafeteria in Little Rock, that Hillary had totally won him over.

Bill and McDougal had worked together one summer in Washington, in the office of Senator J. William Fulbright, while Bill was at Georgetown. Jim encouraged Bill to do it. “Don't worry about marrying someone different,” he said. “You'll need someone stronger to support you.”