A Woman in Charge (20 page)

It seems likely that Bill's expressions of doubt were as much preparation for the possibility of being rejected than a genuine desire to send Hillary off to another life.

Bill sent a letter to a friend that contained a more plausible description of what was in his mind and his heart. The friend said that in the letter Bill talked about his shared values with Hillary, about how different she was from the other women he had dated. “That's not to say he hadn't known smart women,” said the friend. “But, you know, he liked boobs and big hair and—I mean he liked lookers. He's from a state where beauty pageants are a big deal. There was a kind of Southern look that Bill was attracted to. But Hillary fit none of those, and had no cultural connection. She was as far and removed as if he had gone to a foreign country and found her.”

When Bill picked Hillary up from the airport upon her return from the East Coast, he reminded her about a small brick house with a “For Sale” sign on it that they had passed on their way to the airport when she left for her trip. “Well, I bought it,” he told her, “so now you'd better marry me because I can't live in it by myself.”

Hillary said that was the moment she agreed to marry him.

Not long after she accepted, he told Betsey Wright that he and Hillary were going to be married. Wright was not pleased. “I really started in on how he couldn't do that. He shouldn't do that. That he could find anybody he wanted to be a political wife, but we'd [the women's movement] never find anybody like her” to run for political office. Wright promptly called Hillary and told her she hoped Hillary wouldn't marry Bill. Hillary laughed and said she was going to marry Bill and live in Arkansas. Elective office was not the only way to lead. She was going to make a difference wherever she was living.

Deborah Sale considered Hillary's decision the natural one. “I think she was happy to make it. I think she could have done something else, but she could not have done something else with him that would have been as satisfying. And she could not have done something else that would have so united her goals and her heart.”

The wedding was set for October 11, 1975, in the front room of the house he had just bought at 930 California Street in southwest Fayetteville. Their new home, all of one thousand square feet, had a beamed A-frame ceiling, a fireplace, and a bay window. An attic fan and a screened porch compensated for the lack of air-conditioning. Bill took the first steps toward making the house a home by buying some old wooden furniture, an antique cast iron bed, and Wal-Mart sheets with green and yellow flowers. He had made a $3,000 down payment on the $20,000 house. The monthly mortgage was $174.

Hillary did not want an engagement ring, but she and Bill did have an engagement party in Hot Springs in early October. Guests remembered Bill sitting in a chair and Hillary sitting on the arm, and the two “holding hands and looking very much in love,” as one described it.

Hillary seemed supremely uninterested in planning her own wedding. She happily accepted Ann Henry's offer to throw a reception in her backyard and left the details up to her. Hillary was “looking more at life to come than at the wedding itself,” Henry concluded. No printed invitations were sent to the guests for either the ceremony or the reception. Hillary's conformity with wedding protocol was pretty much limited to registering at Dillard's department store for Danish modern dishware. It wasn't until the day before the ceremony, when Dorothy asked what her daughter's dress looked like, that Dorothy discovered Hillary hadn't bought one and didn't intend to. Dorothy insisted that they head to Dillard's, on the town square, the only place in town that sold bridal gowns. Hillary chose the first dress she took off the rack, in Victorian lace style, designed by Jessica McClintock. “This will be fine,” she said.

The details Hillary seemed most concerned with were putting the finishing touches on her new home, which was to be the site of the ceremony. She and Dorothy were painting and putting in bookshelves and light fixtures until the day before the wedding—much to the horror of Hillary's mother-in-law-to-be, who arrived with her guests and was appalled that the house was still such a mess.

When the minister said “Who will give away this woman?” at the beginning of the brief Methodist ceremony, everyone looked at Hugh Rodham, but he seemed frozen in place and continued to hold his daughter's arm. The minister finally said, “You can step back now, Mr. Rodham.” Bill and Hillary exchanged old family rings in front of about twenty guests in their living room. Roger Clinton was the best man and Betsy Ebeling, who arrived late from Chicago, was Hillary's maid of honor. Both choices reflected an important fact in the lives of Bill and Hillary. They each had a large and devoted circle of friends but even the closest of their friendships were in some way restrained or compartmentalized. Neither had a real confidant, an intimate with whom deepest confidences were comfortably exchanged and to whom even dark secrets could be disclosed. The real intimacy in their lives was reserved for each other and perhaps always would be. But there would always be secrets.

More than two hundred relatives and friends—many from Yale, Oxford, Wellesley, Georgetown, Park Ridge, and Hot Springs—crowded into Ann and Morriss Henry's backyard, several blocks away, for the reception. There was a champagne fountain, a wedding cake decorated with yellow roses, and a piano player. The party was also something of a political rally. Many of Bill's students, but few of hers, attended. “It was like a big reunion,” said Ann. “People like Don Tyson [of Tyson Foods, the state's biggest business enterprise], who were interested in Bill's future. A lot of business people who saw he was going somewhere. People who had money…. And a lot of the local Democratic Party people from all over the whole district.”

Some thought Hillary was having a difficult time seeing her guests clearly since she wasn't wearing her glasses. She stunned the crowd—especially those from Arkansas—when she announced that she would not be taking her husband's name and would remain Hillary Rodham. Bill had told Virginia that morning, as she and a friend ate breakfast at the Holiday Inn coffee shop. Virginia had cried at the news. Paul Fray, already planning the next campaign, was upset about the political implications of Hillary's decision. When the
Arkansas Democrat-Gazette
printed their wedding announcement, and underscored the fact that Hillary was keeping her maiden name, Fray told Bill, “Hillary Rodham will be your Waterloo.”

The whole saga of Hillary's name-changing was, for her, for Bill, and for the Clintons' friends, a dispiriting index of attitudes in Arkansas and (later, when he sought the presidency) much of the nation toward women in public life and independent women generally. Hillary had resolved to keep her maiden name as a young girl, even before the practice was encouraged by a nascent women's movement. To Hillary, her name was her identity—something, she told Ann Henry and others, that would always ensure she remained “a person in my own right,” and not a “sacrificial” political wife.

 

H
ILLARY AND
B
ILL
spent their wedding night in their new house. At 4
A.M.
they got a call from the Washington County Jail, where Tony Rodham had been incarcerated after departing the wedding festivities. His car had been pulled over by a state trooper who noticed that a passenger was dangling her feet through the back window and that Tony had been drinking. Bill bailed him out—not for the last time.

The Clintons' honeymoon was postponed for two months, until the end of the school term, when they took a penthouse suite at a hotel in Acapulco and, with the whole Rodham family (Dorothy had noticed a vacation package ad and booked the trip) and a girlfriend of one of Hillary's brothers, spent a week by the sea.

They saw far less of each other in the next year than most newlyweds. In January, Bill set up headquarters in Little Rock for his campaign for the Democratic nomination as attorney general of Arkansas. His old childhood friends Mack McLarty and Vince Foster helped him reach into the state capital's business establishment for support. Hillary continued her teaching. During the first six months of 1976, Bill crisscrossed the state, sometimes aided and attended by the Rodham brothers, both of whom had moved to Arkansas (Hugh Jr. had finished serving two years in the Peace Corps in Colombia) and enrolled at the university.

Some of the issues and political positions embraced by her husband's campaign were antithetical to, or harder-edged, than Hillary's own beliefs, and were touted by Bill as intended to “significantly improve the quality of life in Arkansas.” This included capital punishment, which, for the first time, he publicly said he favored when he was asked about it in a television interview, and seemed to be caught off-guard. His platform for attorney general included mandatory “minimum prison sentences, victim compensation programs, improved work release, and rapid assistance to law enforcement agencies in interpreting the new criminal code, issues related to criminal justice and the office.” More to Hillary's liking, Bill also ran on issues that would appeal to working-and middle-class voters: “fair utility rates, citizens' rights to consumer protection in small claims courts, effective antitrust laws, and a right to privacy.” His campaign slogan was “Character, Competence, and Concern.”

Clinton won the Democratic primary in May with 55.6 percent of the vote, a triumph against two opponents. His victory virtually ensured his election to the job that November. With the most difficult part of the race behind him, his political fortunes rising, Bill and Hillary attended the Democratic convention in New York that July, which nominated Jimmy Carter for president. They were a conspicuous presence at social and political events there, almost glamorous in their somewhat disheveled, youthful way, proud exemplars of the next generation of the New South of which Carter, the governor of Georgia, was the current embodiment. Already there was an assumption in Arkansas that Bill was in line to become governor of his state in the next few years. Part of Hillary and Bill's plan in going to New York was to talk to Carter and his deputies about working seriously in the campaign: Bill signed on as Arkansas state chairman and Hillary was named field coordinator for Indiana. Betsey Wright, working out of Washington, had urged campaign officials to give Hillary the top position in Indiana, but “she was to be the number two, which is what they always did to women,” Betsey said.

Hillary was feeling far more hopeful about the future than when she'd embarked on her last trip north. From New York, they flew to Europe for a two-week vacation, the highlight of which was intended as “a pilgrimage” to the Basque town of Guernica, which inspired Picasso's emblematic masterpiece that Don Jones had cited in talking about both art and fascism. Generalissimo Francisco Franco had succeeded in persuading Hitler to send the Luftwaffe to level the town in 1937. The newlyweds explored its rebuilt streets and took coffee in the central plaza. Like many of their generation, they were still idealistic young thinkers and doers who wanted to influence their own time for the better. But there was something different (though not necessarily unique) about them from most people their age making their way through the ranks of either American political party: a powerful connection to the threads of the history of the century and their country, a deep feel for what had gone before, intimate knowledge of the conflicting currents that had defined the generation of their parents and the places of their own past. Their uniqueness, however, was in the intertwining of their dreams—as a political mission to be achieved together, conceptually premeditated, breathtakingly ambitious, a true partnership, and yet flexible enough to adapt to all manner of personal, political, and cultural upheaval and possibility.

 

T
HE
C
ARTER CAMPAIGN
was an opportunity for Hillary to increase her own considerable political knowledge, to help raise her husband's stature in the Democratic Party (and perhaps in the next presidency), and to get herself placed on the list of the most promising prospects for appointment to presidential boards and commissions. If Bill was going to stay in Arkansas, she wanted a foot in Washington. Upon returning from Europe, she went immediately to Indianapolis. As director of Indiana field operations, she would be in charge of executing the campaign's strategy in ninety-two counties, dispatching hundreds of volunteers to storefront offices throughout the state, and managing some very tight finances. She brought to the challenge a combination of useful political experience and received wisdom: from Texas during the McGovern campaign, from Bill's campaign and his tutelage, from Marian Edelman, and from John Doar and her time in Washington. She was in her element—though the odds of Carter winning Indiana were daunting. From her father's politics and her own Midwestern roots in neighboring Illinois, she understood Indiana's voters, their interests, and their prejudices with almost intimate familiarity. Her manner with subordinates and the state's top Democrats, from Senator Birch Bayh down, was direct and to the point, with little of the gift of her husband's gab. Yet she seemed comfortable whether dealing with Bayh or a ward-heeler, a company president or a union shop steward. And she was decisive, partaking in almost none of the agonizing temperature-taking and enervating debate with aides that Bill indulged in on his circumlocutious way to action. She imaginatively embraced the underdog mentality of Carter's situation in Indiana, luring phone-bank workers by offering the legal minimum wage and then hiring senior citizens or accused criminals, whose bond had been posted by the bail-bonding firm that had previously occupied the office space of Carter headquarters in Indianapolis.

Election day produced a double victory for Hillary. As expected, Carter did not carry traditionally Republican Indiana but he had captured a very respectable 46 percent of the vote, compared with Gerald Ford's 53 percent. He won the presidency with a popular vote majority of 50 percent to 48 percent, and 297 electoral votes to Ford's 240. In Arkansas, Bill Clinton overwhelmingly won the attorney general's race, carrying sixty-nine of seventy-five counties. Hillary chose to celebrate in Indianapolis—Bill agreed—with her comrades from the Carter campaign.