First In His Class (49 page)

By her sophomore year Rodham was writing to a friend that they could meet in New York, which she called a “saved city” because John Lindsay was elected mayor (“
See how
liberal I'm becoming!”). That summer she worked as a researcher, and baby-sitter, for a Wellesley professor who was writing a book on the Vietnam War from a beach house on Lake Michigan. Shields, who drove up to visit her at the Michigan resort several times, noted that by the end of the summer Rodham was a strong opponent of the war and no longer considered herself a Republican. By her junior year she was working with poor black children in Roxbury, taking part in protest marches in Boston and supporting Eugene McCarthy's antiwar presidential campaign. She had “grown up and out of the conservative materialistic mind-set which is typical of affluent suburbs,” according to Shields. “She was not interested in making money or being affluent.” During the summer after her junior year, she and her high school friend Betsy Johnson, who had just returned from a year studying in Madrid, ventured
down to Chicago to see the tumult on the streets outside the Democratic National Convention. Both of their mothers had ordered them not to go, but the young women said that they were planning to see a movie, hopped in Johnson's car, and headed to the city. “
We saw
everything we wanted to look for,” Johnson later recalled. “We saw police and large crowds of kids, chanting and yelling, and things being thrown out the windows at the Palmer House.”

Rodham viewed the college years as a time when she could “
try out
different personalities and lifestyles,” she explained in a letter to Don Jones. But it is an important aspect of her personality that even then there was a self-aware, moderate aspect to her experimentation. In another letter to Jones she talked about intentionally playing different roles at different times: now the social activist, now “sticking to the books,” and occasionally “adopting a kind of party mode.” She claimed that she even got outrageous at times, but immediately modified that assessment—“as outrageous as a moral Methodist can get.” In her search for identity, she thought of herself now as “a progressive, an ethical Christian and a political activist.” For those who are currently watching and judging her behavior later in life, when she seems to play contrasting roles at different times—here asserting her maiden name, there relinquishing it; here deferring to her husband, there instructing him on what to do; here posing like a model for the cover of traditional women's magazines, there emphasizing substance over style; here searching for the moral meaning of life, there playing the commodities markets to make a quick buck; here disparaging cookie-baking housewives, there peddling her chocolate chip recipe—it is instructive to know that she was, self-consciously, ever thus.

For a young person in the turbulent late sixties, Rodham was “
personally pretty
conservative,” according to Shields. He said that she did not smoke marijuana during the years they were together, and that while she drank beer and liquor he never saw her drunk. She was disciplined about apportioning her time, though not obsessive. She preferred diving into political arguments or attending Harvard football games to studying in the Wellesley library, and while she had a sharp mind, she was not brilliant in every subject. Shields, an economics major, had to help her in that course because “she struggled some with numbers.” After dates on weekends, they often ended up with a crowd at Winthrop House, where Shields lived, dancing or talking late into the night. Many of Shields's friends at Harvard also dated Wellesley women, who were considered more outgoing than Radcliffe women and more intellectual than those from the other women's schools in the Boston area.

As Rodham evolved into a liberal, she rarely seemed overtaken by dogma. She was a pragmatist above all. In the middle of intense political
debates she would often say, “
You can't
accomplish anything in government unless you win!” Her focus was always on winning, according to Shields. “She was more interested in the process of achieving victory than in taking a philosophical position that could not lead anywhere.” For her senior political science thesis, she analyzed community action programs and the effort to give poor people greater control of their own lives, including organizer Saul Alinsky's efforts in Chicago. According to Alan Schechter, her professor, Hillary “
started out
thinking community action programs would make a big difference,” but eventually concluded that that view was “too idealistic and simplistic; that they might make a marginal but not a lasting difference” without outside money and help. She was also troubled by certain aspects of radical thought. Don Jones, her youth group mentor, wrote her a letter at Wellesley in which he questioned whether “
someone can
be a Burkean realist about history and human nature and at the same time have liberal sentiments and visions.” She wrote back, “It is an interesting question you posed—can one be a mind conservative and a heart liberal?” She thought it was possible, but offered an example of the difficulty. She supported Martin Luther King, Jr., she wrote, but questioned some of the tactics of SNCC, the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, which was taking a radical black power position. “Some people think you can't be critical of the black power movement and still be for civil rights,” she wrote. She did not think that her unwillingness to accept every radical idea meant that she was an enemy of the movement.

As their Wellesley days neared an end, Rodham and several classmates decided that a student should speak at commencement along with the traditional distinguished guest. There was an urgency to the generational pulse in the spring of 1969; students were either boycotting or refashioning commencements at schools across the country. Wellesley's president, Ruth M. Adams, disliked the idea of a senior speaker but
reluctantly acquiesced
on the condition that the address should reflect the sentiment of the entire graduating class. Rodham, as student government president, was chosen to give the speech. Her classmates were not shy about offering ideas and helping her draft what they took to be an important statement of purpose.

President Adams introduced Rodham after the commencement speech by Senator Edward Brooke, the liberal black Republican from Massachusetts, noting that among the four hundred graduating seniors, “there was no debate so far as I could ascertain as to who their spokesman was to be—Miss Hillary Rodham.”
Adams described
her by saying, “She is cheerful, good humored, good company and a good friend to all of us.”

But goodness was not what Hillary Rodham exuded on her graduation day. Before delivering her prepared remarks, she launched into an extemporaneous
critique of Brooke's oration, which she found too full of compromises and statistics and empathy over action. Her words have a peculiar resonance when considered in the light of how her future husband, a man renowned for his empathy and tendency to compromise, would be criticized decades later. “
I find
myself in a familiar position,” Rodham began, “that of reacting, something that our generation has been doing for quite a while now. We're not in the positions yet of leadership and power, but we do have that indispensable task of criticizing and constructive protest and I find myself reacting just briefly to some of the things that Senator Brooke said…. Part of the problem with empathy with professed goals is that empathy doesn't do us anything. We've had lots of empathy; we've had lots of sympathy, but we feel that for too long our leaders have used politics as the art of the possible. And the challenge now is to practice politics as the art of making what appears to be impossible, possible.”

That Rodham would take on a United States senator, and not only a senator but the highest-ranking black politician in the nation, sent murmurs of shock through the commencement audience. From that point on, her listeners either loved or hated her message. Most of it was sixties jargon, at times a cluttered mix of love-in piety and anticapitalist philosophy. “We are, all of us, exploring a world that none of us understands and attempting to create within that uncertainty,” she declared. “But there are some things we feel—feelings that our prevailing acquisitive and competitive corporate life, including, tragically, universities, is not the way of life for us. We're searching for more immediate, ecstatic and penetrating modes of living.”

Rodham the child of Park Ridge spoke of “a very strange conservative strain that goes through a lot of New Left collegiate protests” which she found “intriguing because it barkens back to a lot of the old virtues, to the fulfillment of the original ideas.” Rodham the activist of the sixties said her generation was haunted by a disintegration of trust. “This is the one word that when I asked the class at our rehearsal what it was they wanted me to say for them, everyone came up to me and said, ‘Talk about trust.' ” But what, Rodham asked rhetorically, was there to say about it? “What can you say about a feeling that permeates a generation and that perhaps is not even understood by those who are distrusted?” Rodham the moral Methodist spoke of respect—“that mutuality of respect where you don't see people as percentage points, where you don't manipulate people, where you're not interested in social engineering for people.” And Rodham the spokes-woman for the Wellesley seniors closed by reading a poem from one of her classmates, Nancy Scheibner, which began:

My entrance into the world of so-called social problems
Must be with quiet laughter, or not at all.
The Hollow Men of anger and bitterness
The bountiful ladies of righteous degradation
All must be left to a bygone age.

The speech, especially the challenge to Brooke, created a media stir, landing Rodham's portrait, with her long brown hair and striped bellbottoms and oversized glasses, in
Life
magazine. Geoffrey Shields, who by then was living in Vermont, got a call from her shortly after the commencement. “
She said
it had been hard for her to come around and make what was both a political statement and a personal attack. There was some exhilaration but also nervous questioning about whether it had really been the right thing to do. She realized what she had done was important. But when it was over she wondered about what she had said. She asked, ‘Did I go too far?' ”

I
N
the fall of 1971, Rodham and Clinton arranged to live in a small apartment at 21
Edgewood Avenue
at the corner with Lynwood, within walking distance of the law school. It had been passed down from one class to the next. The previous tenant had been Rodham's friend Greg Craig. It was “a sweet little student apartment,” according to Carolyn Ellis, with one bed-room, a built-in bed in the living room, and a small kitchen. The rent was seventy-five dollars a month. Neither tenant was there much. Rodham was spending most of her time in clinical work involving children's rights and legal aid for the indigent—the two principal interests of her career. Clinton held several part-time jobs, teaching law enforcement personnel at the community college, assisting an attorney in New Haven. He was attending class more regularly than at any other time in his Yale career. (“
I am
trying to at least learn the stuff this year,” he wrote to a friend.) Classmates remember coming over for spaghetti dinners and marveling at how Clinton and Rodham could talk nonstop with great intensity about the issues of the day. But their first year together, while intellectually stimulating, could not be called an altogether joyous one.

On the morning of September 14, they were
eating breakfast
at the Blue Bell Café near the law school when a friend came in and said there was an emergency phone call. Clinton would later say that he was overwhelmed at that moment with a premonition of tragedy. He had a feeling that one of his friends was dead.
The call
was from Brooke Shearer, the girlfriend of Strobe Talbott. Shearer and Talbott were in Cleveland visiting Talbott's family. Talbott had dialed New Haven, but was so choked up he could not speak. He had given the phone to Shearer. She, like Clinton, had had a premonition. Hers came days earlier in Los Angeles as she boarded the plane for Cleveland and took one last look back at Frank Aller, who had
driven them to the airport. Finally, it seemed, everything in Aller's life was together again. Not only had he flunked his military physical and had his indictment for resisting the draft dropped, but he had arranged, with help from Shearer's father, Lloyd Shearer, to get an interview with the
Los Angeles Times
foreign desk. That interview had led to an offer of work in the paper's Saigon bureau. He would write about the war in which he felt a moral obligation not to fight.

Aller seemed “hopeful and cheerful” at the airport when he said goodbye to “Strobovich” and “Brookechen”—his affectionate monickers for his friends. Yet as Shearer turned away and walked with Talbott toward the waiting jet, she had “a very distinct” reaction. “I remember thinking we should not get on that airplane. I could not say why. But it was a very strong feeling. But common sense or protocol tells you not to make a scene. It would have appeared ridiculous. I had these vague instincts. Something said to me, ‘Something is not right here.' ”

Now she was on the telephone saying what Talbott, silenced by grief, could not say. “Frank's dead,” she told Clinton.

Aller had gone back to Spokane and put a bullet through his head. There was a suicide note, but it is long gone and no one claims to remember what it said. Some of his friends think Aller was a victim of Vietnam as surely as he would have been had he been killed on the battlefield. But most of them think that the notion that Vietnam killed him is simplistic. His torment was deep and personal. Talbott, who knew him as well as anyone, considered the suicide a “double shock”—a friend dead, and dead by his own hand. “Did I see anything in retrospect that was a progression to suicide? The answer is emphatically no.” Yet in those final months, as the cloud of draft resistance and its consequences—exile or prison—finally lifted, it seemed that another darker cloud settled over Aller, Talbott thought, making him “seriously upset and depressed.”