A Woman in Charge (22 page)

Despite the sometimes tense atmosphere, Hillary came to enjoy her workdays, largely because of her relationship with Foster and Hubbell. They poked fun at her intensity, tutored her in the traditions of the capital (and how she might take advantage of them), and looked out for her like a little sister. The three often went to lunch together at the Lafayette Hotel. Sometimes they watched lingerie shows there, a popular form of lunchtime entertainment of the era, in which models from upscale lingerie stores showed off nightgowns and their bodies. Hillary simply laughed at her two partners and told them what Neanderthals they were. Physically Hubbell and Foster were polar opposites. Vince was rail-thin, elegant in perfectly tailored suits, and soft-spoken to the point of taciturnity. Hubbell was a whale of a man, a former college quarterback who (unlike Hillary's father) actually had been drafted to play pro ball, but was injured before his career could take off. Hubbell carried close to three hundred pounds, and his back suffered the load, requiring sometimes that he lie on the floor while working. Once, as the three prepared for a case, Webb was sprawled on the carpet airing hundred-year-old case law, while Hillary was dispatched to the library to produce the documentation.

The first case she handled solo involved a canning company Rose represented—against a man who claimed he'd found a rat's hindquarters in a can of pork and beans. Though he didn't eat the rat, he said, looking at it made him so sick he couldn't kiss his fiancée. For the jury's obvious benefit, he regularly spit into his handkerchief. The plaintiff was awarded only a small amount in damages. Aside from the obvious “rat's ass” jokes, the experience shook Hillary. Though her defense was reasonably able and well crafted, she was “amazingly nervous” in front of the jury, according to Hubbell. In fact, she was not a particularly good litigator, hardly light on her feet before judge and jury. There had been signs of it during the Barrister's Trial with Bill, and the Rose firm began steering her practice toward nonjury work, and she appeared in court only infrequently.

 

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a month before Bill was sworn in, he and Hillary found a house in the Hillcrest neighborhood of Little Rock, an upper-middle-class enclave not far from downtown. It was even smaller than the house in Fayetteville, a mere 980 square feet, and cost $34,000.

Though Bill's campaign had stressed the punitive side of the job, as attorney general he maintained a careful balance in which the interests of consumers and working people were accorded rhetorical, legislative, and enforcement priority. This reflected Hillary's counsel on both policy and staffing matters. On occasion, she made speeches in the state booked by his office and stressed his consumer-friendly policies. Much of the new attorney general's agenda was pure populist politics. He developed regulations to improve the quality of nursing home care, tried to maintain the price of a pay phone call at a dime, sued dairy companies for fixing milk prices, and took tentative, but ultimately ineffectual, steps to regulate lobbyists. He also took care not to alienate companies that he recognized were the most important part of Arkansas's tax base. And, from the beginning, he had fun. There was a juke-joint down the street from the statehouse, and on Fridays, when the legislature didn't meet, he encouraged casual dress in the office and invited the whole staff to join him for lunch there and play the pinball machine at the back of the restaurant.

Hillary was particularly pleased by the profile she and Bill were projecting inside the national Democratic Party and in Washington under a Democratic president. In Arkansas and at the national level, it was common knowledge that Bill was en route to the governor's mansion, unless he chose to run for the U.S. Senate in 1978. During his campaign, prospective contributors had been advised to “get on board early.”

Bill and Hillary became somewhat regular dinner guests in Jimmy Carter's White House, and Bill traveled frequently to Washington for briefings and meetings with the president's staff and the Democratic National Committee. Carter gave him the authority—with Dale Bumpers, the state's Democratic senator, and Jackson Stephens, a Carter contributor—to vet presidential appointments and judgeships of Arkansans. However, Bill and Hillary were rebuffed in their attempt to get Jim Blair appointed as chairman of the Federal Home Loan Bank Board. Hillary did succeed in winning a seat for herself on the presidentially appointed board of the Legal Services Corporation. It was based on merit, as well as her political service to Carter in Indiana and Bill's in Arkansas.

She had continued her work in children's advocacy while at the Rose firm, taking a few pro bono cases, including that of a couple seeking to adopt the foster child for whom they'd cared for more than two years. She won it, and the case later served as a precedent used in the state for foster care adoptions.

The Legal Services Corporation, as any local journalist who had covered municipal court in an urban area knew, was genuinely important to keeping the American legal system functioning. Established in 1974, it was an extension of Lyndon Johnson's War on Poverty programs of the 1960s. The corporation's board decided how to distribute funding to the 335 local Legal Services offices around the country, which offered counsel to people who couldn't afford an attorney. In most big cities, this meant a majority of individuals charged with crimes and many others preyed upon by unscrupulous merchants. Hillary knew how important the program—originally called Neighborhood Legal Services—was to protecting the constitutional right to a fair trial of the most vulnerable defendants who passed through America's turnstile system of justice. The program's local lawyers tended to be young, diligent, and dedicated, and won a surprisingly high proportion of their cases, including many in which local prosecutors and police played fast and loose with the facts.

Many Republicans loathed the idea of using federal money to provide free legal services to the poor and lawsuits undertaken on their behalf, and when Richard Nixon became president he attempted to discontinue the program even before it was fully up and running. By the time Hillary was appointed to the board, the program had five thousand lawyers handling one million cases a year. A few months later, Carter named her to chair the board. After confirmation by Congress, she became the first woman ever to hold the position. Carter's choice was deft.

In 1980, while trying to become the Republican presidential nominee, Governor Ronald Reagan sought to drastically reduce funding for legal services for the poor in California. Hillary successfully persuaded the LSC board to reject Reagan's proposal. But when he became president, succeeding Carter, Reagan again tried to undercut the Legal Services program, this time attempting to get Congress to reduce its funding on a national basis and approve new members of the board who opposed the basic concept of free legal services for the poor. As chairperson, Hillary hired Vince Foster to seek a restraining order, prohibiting Reagan's nominees from meeting before they were confirmed by the Senate. Meanwhile, she enlisted Senate Democrats in a campaign against the nominees. Ultimately, the Senate refused to confirm them and instead forced the president to name more moderate members to the board. By the time Hillary's term as chairperson expired in 1982, funding for the Legal Services Corporation had grown from $90 million to $300 million. She had not only saved the concept of federal funding for legal aid to the poor, but she had done it with crucial assistance from Foster working under her direction and going to court to defend the prerogatives she enunciated. More than a decade later in the White House, she would attempt the same with disastrous effect, this time instructing Vince to find a way to defend the secrecy of her health care task force against those who wanted its deliberations to be public.

 

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couldn't care less about money, Hillary once said, confirming Betsey Wright's opinion. But because politics is hardly a sure thing, she knew they had to make some money and put it aside. She had come a long way from her rejection of “our prevailing acquisitive corporate life” that she condemned in her Wellesley commencement address. Though Arkansas ranked forty-ninth in per capita income, there were also huge fortunes in the state, not just in Little Rock, but in Hot Springs, Bentonville, Fayetteville, and towns barely known outside the state. Little Rock and northwest Arkansas were home as well to a new generation of concentrated wealth, some of it from fast money in the financial markets and some of it from servicing the industries and companies that were basic to the state's tax base. Brokers in the state were often averaging $50,000 a month and a few were making twice that. It was not uncommon in Springdale or the wealthiest parts of Little Rock to see Porsches, Cadillac convertibles, and Mercedes coupes in driveway after driveway. In Fayetteville, long before there were “Microsoft Millionaires,” there were supermarket cashiers and filling station attendants who had become wealthy from stock in Wal-Mart and Tyson, where their relatives worked.

Until their arrival in Little Rock, Hillary had seemed almost as uninterested in money, not to mention wealth, as her husband. She had worked for Marian Edelman's nonprofit Children's Defense Fund at a nominal salary, earned a clerk's wages in the Watergate impeachment investigation, and received an assistant professor's salary at one of the lowest-paying law schools in the nation. Her most adamant action in Bill Clinton's congressional campaign had been to insist that he turn down dirty money from lobbyists.

What seems to have changed is that, with the need to support a family (and, later, perhaps be on her own if her marriage failed), she could justify in her moral construct financial opportunities that increasingly made her uncomfortable (judging from her subsequent, almost frenzied efforts to hide them) or perhaps led her into some state of denial in which she rationalized that “everyone” did it. She also operated in an easy atmosphere of conflicts of interest that, in a larger state, might not have been regarded as business as usual. Moreover, the Clintons certainly had the friends and the opportunities to skirt rules and procedures required of less-well-connected individuals.

Even before Hillary had decided to follow Jim Blair into the tricky cattle futures market in which he was making millions in 1978, she had engaged a well-connected financial adviser, William Smith, a broker in Little Rock at Stephens Inc., the largest investment firm in the United States off Wall Street. It was controlled by the Stephens family of Arkansas, and though the Clintons had little money to invest, Smith took them on as serious clients not least because Bill was Arkansas's attorney general. Hillary told Smith she knew little about the markets but that she wanted to earn a much greater return than Treasury Bonds would yield. She set up two accounts, a joint investment account with Bill, and a separate one for herself, and gave Smith discretionary authority to trade and invest in both. In occasional meetings with Smith to review the accounts, Hillary explored various investment strategies and asked Smith detailed questions, while Bill—if he appeared at all—seemed uninterested and talked politics.

Hugh Rodham had taught his daughter how to read the stock tables. Occasionally, Hillary and Blair, who was then engaged to Diane Kincaid, would talk about the market. Blair's law office was outside Fayetteville in Springdale, and though he was retained by Tyson Foods as its outside counsel, he made even more money in the financial markets—a considerable fortune by the time Diane, Hillary, Bill, and Jim had become close friends in the mid-1970s. The two couples met for frequent dinners, spent time at Jim and Diane's cottage on Beaver Lake, and would take numerous vacations together over the next fifteen years. Hillary served as “best person” at the Kincaid-Blair wedding (and wore a tuxedo). They discussed and argued any and all aspects of life: politics, life in Arkansas, where the country was headed, books, movies, rock and roll, Razorbacks football.

Jim had become something of an older brother to Bill Clinton. He had managed J. William Fulbright's last senatorial campaign, introduced Bill to the Tysons, helped raise funds for his first political campaigns, and contributed mightily to Bill's talents as a storyteller. Both Blair and Clinton had grown up in unusual circumstances. If a visitor to Fayetteville was given a tour of northwest Arkansas with Blair at the wheel of his white Cadillac, the first stop was likely to be a little brick building in which he was raised above a grocery store in the apartment of his paternal grandparents, after being abandoned by his mother. Blair was a match for Bill in his catholic interests and ability to do several things at once—including, in his case, lawyering and playing the financial markets. He graduated high school at age eighteen and law school at twenty-one. He had been ordained a Southern Baptist minister but left the church because it had supported segregation. After Bill had been elected governor, Jim would fly Hillary and Bill in his private plane from Little Rock to Fayetteville for football games and political events. Hillary and Jim had won first place in the Fayetteville Country Club's mixed doubles tennis tournament. If any couple could be considered closest to the Clintons in Arkansas, it was the Blairs.

By the end of summer in 1978, Blair was urging close friends and colleagues to follow him into the cattle futures bonanza. Hillary was looking for bigger returns than she was seeing on her Stephens accounts. Blair had had a knack for the stock market since he began trading at the age of twenty-one. “I made my first $1,000 in 1958, and in 1959, I made $30,000 trading American Motors stock when I was making $5,000 a year practicing law, so I think I'm a good trader,” he said. In the next two decades, he earned far more from his trading than his law practice. His broker was Robert L. (Red) Bone, at Ray E. Friedman & Company (Refco), who specialized in futures and took Blair into the cattle business. Bone was another Tyson executive who'd started with the company young—driving a chicken truck—and eventually became a vice president. He then left to become a broker. He also was an inveterate gambler who had made it to the semifinals of the World Series of Poker in Las Vegas. At first, Red Bone made the cattle call decisions for Blair, no matter how large the trade. And though Blair still lacked the expertise to make trades himself, he was learning. “I was watching the [cattle] market by then. I would come down to Red's office sometimes and watch the board, and I got a pretty good sense of what was going on.” He began sitting in on Bone's conference calls at the end of the day in which the broker would talk to pit-traders in Chicago, cattle buyers in Texas and Colorado, operators of feed lots in Nebraska, and the head of Refco, Thomas Dittmer, at the home office in Vegas.