A Woman in Charge

by Carl Bernstein

  Some fellow students thought Clinton’s attraction to Hillary was calculated, that he was trading on her renown to advance his own stature on campus and beyond. Hillary, meanwhile, conveyed an attitude that Bill’s women had never confronted him with: I don’t need you. It seemed to unnerve him.

  Within weeks, Hillary told him that she planned to spend the summer in Oakland, California, as an intern at the law firm of Treuhaft, Walker and Burnstein. Clinton’s plan had been to work in the South in George McGovern’s presidential campaign, still in its infancy, for the Democratic presidential nomination. Now he told her he wanted to go with her to California instead.

  When she pressed as to his reasons, he said it was because he loved her, according to Hillary’s account in Living History. Hillary said later she was over the moon.

  From the start, he was looking at the big picture. “I just liked…being around her, because I thought I’d never be bored with her. In the beginning, I used to tell her that I would like being old with her. That I thought that was an important thing.”

  Even then it was possible to glimpse aspects in their relationship that would become much more evident during their years in the governor’s mansion and the White House. David Gergen, who worked with each during the first years of the Clinton presidency, observed: “The Bill Clinton I saw needed the emotional approval of his wife on a daily basis. He depended on her, spoke of her, and acted as if she were his Rock of Gibraltar…. When they were in balance, they complemented each other well. Their partnership energized his leadership. She was the anchor, he the sail. He was the dreamer, she the realist. She was the strategist, he the tactician.”

  For their friends, and virtually all of the law school’s students, that carefully balanced equation would become evident six months later when Hillary and Bill were selected as one of the two debating teams in the renowned Barristers’ Union Prize Trial.

  In Living History, Hillary wrote: “He can astonish me with the connections he weaves between ideas and words and how he makes it all sound like music. I still love the way he thinks and the way he looks. One of the first things I noticed about Bill was the shape of his hands. His wrists are narrow and his fingers tapered and deft, like those of a pianist or surgeon.” In an “autobiography” written in large part by ghostwriters, this is one of the few passages in which ecstasy comes through.

  Early in their relationship, at the beach house on Long Island Sound, Hillary and Bill talked one night about what each would do after graduation. Bill said he intended to go back home to Arkansas and seek public office. Hillary’s plans were still up in the air, except for her certainty that she wanted to pursue her interests in child advocacy and civil rights.

  In Oakland, she would be working for the most important radical law practice on the West Coast, celebrated for its defense of constitutional rights, civil liberties, and leftist causes. “The reason she came to us,” said Robert Treuhaft, the firm’s senior principal, “the only reason I could think of because none of us knew her, was because we were a so-called Movement law firm at the time.” In all probability, Hillary found her way to the firm through her professor, Tom Emerson, an old friend of Treuhaft and some of his partners. “There was no reason except politics for a girl from Yale” to intern at the firm, said Treuhaft. “She certainly…was in sympathy with all the left causes, and there was a sharp dividing line at that time. We still weren’t very far out of the McCarthy era.”

  Treuhaft et al. had represented leaders of the labor movement on the West Coast who had been prosecuted for allegedly being members of the Communist Party. It also represented some of the Black Panther leadership. Of the firm’s four partners, “two were communists, and others tolerated communists,” Treuhaft said, but none acknowledged membership in the party until many years later.

  Hillary’s attraction to the firm was not ideology but rather its defense of constitutional causes and liberties. “All I can say is some people may have been bothered by being associated with my law firm, but she wasn’t,” said Treuhaft, who was married to the writer Jessica Mitford. Hillary stayed in touch with the Treuhafts, and when Mitford came to Arkansas for research on an article she was writing, she visited the Clintons in the governor’s mansion. Characteristically, the note Hillary wrote to Treuhaft upon the death of his wife in 1996 was filled with personal touches. Equally characteristic, Hillary’s description of her association with the Treuhafts and her summer interning in Oakland—“at Treuhaft, Walker and Burnstein, a small law firm in Oakland, California”—glosses over the suggestion of anything that could be construed as resembling a radical or leftist past.

  She and Bill found an apartment near the University of California, Berkeley, campus, still the nexus of American student radicalism. She worked on a child custody case. Bill got to know the area and introduced Hillary to it. Bill read a lot and discussed To the Finland Station by Edmund Wilson and other books with Hillary. And they took long walks.

  BILL CLINTON, as he was falling in love with Hillary, perceived that she possessed the one necessary quality that was not native to his soul: a kind of toughness, the significance and nature of which would be endlessly debated by the Clintons’ friends, advocates, and adversaries. Without it, he could never have gotten to the presidency. There is truth in the observation that, after all, Bill Clinton would rather accommodate than fight and that it often took Hillary to push him into the ring. The Clintons’ former pollster, Stan Greenberg, described this quality as a “fierceness,” a “tough-mindedness,” summoned by Hillary in pursuit of their shared goals because Clinton, unlike his wife, was preternaturally “conflict-averse…and by nature uncomfortable attacking…. He didn’t get there instinctively. He’d rather persuade people. He’d like to persuade everybody in the room.”

  Their most important political counselor and consultant for two decades, Dick Morris, remarked—before he turned enemy—that “she has a quality of ruthlessness, a quality of aggressiveness and strength about her that he doesn’t have. A killer instinct. Her genre of advocacy is always straight ahead—fight, battle, take the fight to the other side. There’s no subtlety, there’s none of the nuance that he has.”

  But Hillary’s is not the caricatured, bitchy, ball-breaking toughness that their enemies like to attribute to her. She has almost always been much more thoughtful than they accorded. It is more like a kind of military rigor: reading the landscape, seeing the obstacles, recognizing which ones are malevolent or malign, and taking expedient action accordingly. Bill’s process is different. He is slow to recognize the malevolence in others, he wants to assume the best about them, and he is willing to spend months trying to win their hearts and minds. Hillary means to cut off the enemy at the pass.

  The first public glimpse of their political partnership, and indications of what Morris, Greenberg, and others later discerned, came during the 1972 Prize Trial at Yale. Hillary and Bill were assigned the role of prosecution team. They spent more than a month preparing their arguments, citations, and tactics. They had a tough case to prosecute, based on the murder trial of a Kentucky cop whose antipathy was on record toward young people who looked like hippies. “But is that enough motivation to beat and kill someone?” read posters advertising the trial and laying out the case.

  Bill and Hillary failed to win the prize. But their preparation and performance were prototypical of a methodology they would perfect over the next quarter-century, carving out complementary roles that played to the strength and character of each. Their full partnership was apparent to their peers, who watched, fascinated, as they laid out their unusual division of labor. Nancy Bekavac described the dynamic perfectly: “Hillary was very sharp and Chicago, and Bill was very To Kill a Mockingbird.”

  SENATOR GEORGE MCGOVERN’S presidential campaign, which had grown out of the antiwar movement, was at the grassroots level a youth crusade. The candidate’s campaign manager, Gary Hart, thirty-five, one of the movement’s most talented organizers, chose Clinton to be McGovern�
�s state co-coordinator in Texas with Taylor Branch, a fellow Southerner who had organized antiwar protests and worked as a political journalist for The Washington Monthly. (Later, Branch would write a classic three-volume biography of Martin Luther King and win a Pulitzer for one of its volumes.) In their Texas environment, Clinton and Branch looked a bit like Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, Bill with his bushy hair and cowboy boots, and Taylor with a full mustache.

  Bill had asked Hillary to come to Texas for the campaign, and she signed on to register voters in San Antonio. Clinton was physically and organizationally a dominating presence in the state campaign, but Hillary created an equally memorable impression. Many of the women in the campaign regarded her as the real luminary, with a more impressive résumé than Bill’s. Given the likelihood of Richard Nixon overwhelming McGovern in the election, they looked to her as someone who could help pick up the pieces of the Democratic Party and, in the next few years, run for office herself.

  In San Antonio she lived and worked with Sara Ehrman, who was fifteen years older. “We were two oddballs in San Antonio,” Ehrman said of the two of them—a middle-aged Jewish housewife with the assertive edge of her native Brooklyn, and a hippie-looking Ivy Leaguer possessed with an intensity every bit the equal of her own. Hillary, recalled Ehrman, “came into campaign headquarters a kid—in brown corduroy pants, brown shirt, brown hair, brown glasses, no makeup, brown shoes. Her Coke-bottle glasses. Long hair. She looked like the campus intellectual that she was. She totally disregarded her appearance.” Hillary’s politics at the time were “liberal, ideological, the same as my own,” Sara said. She described the Hillary she knew that Texas summer as a “progressive Christian in that she believed in litigation to do good, and to correct injustices and to live by a kind of spiritual high-mindedness.” Sara said Hillary was a compulsive reader: contemporary fiction, religious tomes, the Bible, academic materials about child psychology. Hillary seemed to have everything in balance—the gift of seriousness leavened by the ability to have a good time. She was witty, genuinely funny; there was nothing stuffy about her, Sara thought.

  Hillary was vivid and pragmatic in approaching her task in San Antonio: trying to establish a strong connection between the local Mexican-American community and the McGovern campaign. Ehrman found her to be firm and indomitable, knocking on doors in tough neighborhoods to register Hispanic voters. Hillary was so un-intimidated that Sara took to calling her by the nickname “Fearless,” the same quality that others had recognized in Hillary in her early teens, jumping on a skateboard to get a prom date or going into Chicago’s ghettos on behalf of Goldwater’s campaign.

  Ehrman also noted another, less apparent aspect of Hillary’s character—“I’d call it a kind of fervor, and self-justification that God is on her side.” That summer Sara sensed Hillary was trying to reconcile her rigorous liberal political theology with her middle-class Methodist upbringing. She carried her Bible almost everywhere, marking in it and underlining as she read.

  Ehrman had also met twenty-five-year-old Bill Clinton that summer, before Hillary had arrived. Sara judged him to be one of the most handsome young men she had ever seen, a conclusion many other women in the McGovern campaign seemed to share.

  “Bill Clinton tapped into part of Hillary that no one ever had. Everybody else saw her as a terribly serious woman, very intense,” Ehrman said. “He saw the side of her that liked spontaneity and laughter. He found her guttural laugh: it’s fabulous—there’s nothing held back. The public never sees that side of her. When she’s laughing, that’s when she’s free.”

  Most of the McGovern volunteers in Texas were under thirty, dispatched there by Hart, and there was an easy camaraderie among the bunch, including a carefree sexual atmosphere that was reflective of the era. Evenings they would have a beer or go bowling. On weekends, Hillary was often with Bill in Austin, but they occasionally dated others, and were frequently seen arguing heatedly. More than a few women thought Bill was captivating and sexy. With his reputation as a political wunderkind, there were even groupies, and Hillary took note. After a fight, they decided to stop seeing each other. Franklin Garcia, a San Antonio labor organizer who was tutoring Hillary about the Hispanic community, smoothed things over. Bill thanked him. “You really saved our relationship,” he said.

  She had a knack for making male friends, some of whom found her easier to talk to than Bill. Taylor Branch, who had recently separated from his wife, remembered that Hillary was “more focused on the grand cosmic questions” that troubled people of their generation. “Bill and I talked business,” he recalled. “We laughed. We talked personalities, but we never sat down and philosophized. I was feeling rootless, unhinged, and it was easier to talk to Hillary about those things than to Bill.”

  To the women working in McGovern’s Texas campaign, Hillary seemed to be on her way to an exceptional career in politics. Betsey Wright, a particularly industrious and ideological organizer from the West Texas hamlet of Alpine, became a true acolyte. Wright thought “women were the ethical and pure force” that could change American politics, and she and Hillary spent many of their spare hours discussing how to get more women into politics in a serious way. “It was a nascent feminist movement then. We had both read Simone de Beauvoir and Germaine Greer. And I’d just come off the heady experience of Sissy Farenthold’s campaign [for governor] in Texas,” Wright said. Betsey was “less interested in Bill’s political future than Hillary’s. I was obsessed with how far Hillary might go, with her mixture of brilliance, ambition, and self-assuredness. There was an assumption about all the incredible things she could do in the world.”

  Hillary thought Wright’s experience ought to benefit women outside Texas, and at Hillary’s behest she moved to Washington after McGovern’s crushing defeat (33 percent to Nixon’s 67 percent in Texas, and similarly disastrous nationwide) to organize for the National Women’s Political Caucus. From such a position, Betsey believed she could help Hillary eventually become America’s first female president.

  Though Ehrman and Wright formed easy friendships with Hillary, others remembered her intelligence or reserve more than any sort of effusive social interaction. Some found her aloof. There would be others, though not as many, who found her warm, gregarious, accessible, and sociable. This dichotomy always seemed to be the case with Hillary—in an organization, campaign, or even the Senate of the United States.

  4

  Making Arkansas Home

  After all that has happened since, I’m often asked why Bill and I have stayed together…. What can I say to explain a love that has persisted for decades?

  —Living History

  WHEN HILLARY CLINTON met Bill Clinton she was no fatalist. She fervently believed that a person could control her own destiny and that she, Hillary, could never give herself over to vague forces, or to somebody else’s dominating personality, as she knew her mother had disastrously done. She did not believe that an individual—particularly herself—was powerless to change either events or the nature of other people, and she went about both tasks tenaciously.

  But time after time, in Hillary’s courtship and marriage with Bill Clinton, she was confronted with the obvious: He was beyond her control when it came to other women. It wasn’t his pursuit of extramarital sex per se that so riled her, she once said. She had come to view her husband almost as an adolescent when it came to his sexual sensibilities and compulsions, and attributed them to the pathology of his unusual childhood. “There are worse things than infidelity,” she told a confidante in 1989, at a time when Bill believed himself to be in love with an Arkansas divorcée, Marilyn Jo Jenkins. The source of Hillary’s frustration and anger, dating back to their courtship, was her knowledge that she was powerless to change him, as she was reminded repeatedly during their marriage. Hillary trusted in the power of rational thought and logic above almost all else, yet he seemed immune to logical reasoning on the subject, rather than defiant.

  It took Hillary more than two years t
o make up her mind to marry Bill. She had serious doubts not only about his womanizing but about living in Arkansas, about the intensity with which he pursued his passions (including even his passion for her, which sometimes could be overwhelming). She wanted children, but she didn’t want them to grow up in a strained marriage. The experience of her mother—both as an abandoned child and an abused wife (a term Hillary avoided)—weighed on her. Hillary’s hesitant decision was reached only after dipping her toes in the Arkansas waters and calculating that she could learn to live there. She carefully positioned herself during those years to have a fallback plan in case their marriage or political journey ran aground. She knew that Bill’s history of compulsive infidelity during their courtship meant the chances for a stable marriage, especially a marriage without adultery, were at best a crapshoot.

  In the end, she married for love, and the shared dream of a grand political future someday in Washington. But that future would be focused on him, not her, she reluctantly conceded to friends who were urging her to pursue a more independent course and separate identity. Going to Arkansas meant forgoing a prestigious job in the capital or New York, and all but extinguishing her own flash in the season of her greatest promise. Since her graduation from Wellesley, she had been speeding toward national prominence.

  In Arkansas, she would not be a woman in charge—something she knew was not necessarily antithetical to being married, but was antithetical to being married to Bill Clinton, on his turf. She would, by choice, inhabit the more traditional universe in which she would invest her talent, dedication, and energy to brighten her man’s star—as her mother’s generation had done. She would be the partner, the manager, the adviser. She would follow her heart.

  HILLARY HAD ALREADY deferred her independent ambitions and made her first great sacrifice by remaining at Yale an extra year to be with Bill rather than graduate with her own class. She worked in the McGovern campaign until election day and studied children’s development at the Yale Child Study Center. After their graduation from law school in the spring of 1973, she went with Bill on her first trip abroad, to England, and he showed her London, Oxford, and some of the places he had visited during his year as a Rhodes Scholar. At twilight one evening “on the shores of Ennerdale,” in the English Lake District celebrated by the Romantic poets, he asked her to be his wife.