She said no. She didn’t want to rush into a decision, she later explained. At that time she was afraid “of commitment in general and Bill’s intensity in particular.”
Many years afterward, Hillary said the marriage almost didn’t happen. Bill proposed many times. “I never doubted my love for him, but I knew he was going to build his life in Arkansas. I couldn’t envision what my life would be like in a place where I had no family or friends.”
Not long after their return from Europe, Hillary made her first visit to Arkansas, in June 1973, almost as a consolation for saying no to his marriage proposal. Bill had asked her to come with him “to see how she liked it.” He urged her to take the Arkansas bar exam. He picked her up at the Little Rock airport, choosing a picturesque (and symbol-heavy) route home to Hot Springs, first passing the state capitol and governor’s mansion, then following the Arkansas River to Russellville, seventy miles from the capital, then south through the Ouachita Mountains where they stopped periodically to take in the view. Since they had first met, Bill had talked almost incessantly about his state, trying to make his enthusiasm infectious—a tough sell, the scenery notwithstanding. It was made tougher by Hillary’s brief stay in Hot Springs, where Bill’s mother and brother lived.
Hillary had first met Virginia Cassidy Blythe Clinton Dwire (later, Kelley) when she visited New Haven in 1972. Virginia and Hillary loved the same man, but from the beginning that didn’t seem to sit well with either woman. Virginia thought Hillary was a fright—her hair badly cut (she had chopped it herself that semester, to save money), no makeup, and jeans, her preferred posture tending toward a hippie slouch. As someone with a pedigree from Park Ridge, Wellesley, and Yale—though that was hardly how she projected herself—Hillary might have concluded that Virginia, with her distinctive white-striped hair and fondness for fast men, fast horses, red lipstick, and false eyelashes had followed Route 1 straight north from Tobacco Road to New Haven. Virginia certainly didn’t expect Bill to bring someone like Hillary home—a “Yankee,” for good measure, albeit from Illinois.
Roger Clinton, Bill’s younger brother, whom Hillary had not met prior to her arrival in Hot Springs, was quick to share his mother’s parochial assessment: Hillary wasn’t good-looking enough, for starters. And they thought she was bossy with Bill.
Hillary got along much more easily with Virginia’s third husband, Jeff Dwire. From the time Jeff met her in New Haven, he treated her kindly and encouraged her efforts, unreciprocated for a long stretch, to reach out to Virginia. Hillary took note that he regarded Virginia with deep reverence. Dwire was a charming character, an ex-con beauty parlor proprietor who had served nine months in prison for stock swindling in the early 1960s. He was the person who had fashioned Virginia’s distinctive hairstyle, taking the white stripe she’d already had and dyeing the area around it. Dwire told Hillary that Virginia would eventually come around, and embrace her as family. She did, but the turning was glacially slow.
In the two years Bill and Hillary had been together, he had recapitulated for her the vague history of his family origins as best he knew or understood them. But in Hot Springs, in Virginia’s house, she would come for the first time to clearly comprehend the milieu Bill came from and, she once inferred, his sexual proclivities.
Virginia’s family, the Cassidys, and the Clintons had always been religious, churchgoing people, but their faith didn’t put much store in sexual restraint as an essential element of godliness. Virginia’s mother, Edith, a nurse, regularly denounced her husband, Eldridge, for affairs with other women, and she was rumored to be involved sexually with some of the physicians in Hope, Arkansas. Bill’s likely father, William Jefferson Blythe, had four or five wives before his death at twenty-eight. Roger Clinton, Bill’s stepfather, whose last name was conferred on Bill, did not cease his philandering after marrying Virginia, and his drunken rages were sometimes fueled by jealousy—because of gossip about his wife, her flirting, or discovering her out on the town. In this environment, it might not be surprising that part of Bill’s intensity was focused on women, flirting, and sexual conquests, Hillary believed.
Her confusion and ambivalence were evident the day she and Bill took the Arkansas bar exam, in Little Rock, when she ran into Ellen Brantley, who had been a year behind her at Wellesley and was also taking the exam. Brantley, who was born and raised in Little Rock, was surprised to see Hillary in a setting so jarringly out of context. “What are you doing here?” she asked.
“Oh, you know, I’m trying to get a job in Arkansas,” Hillary said. Brantley could see that “she was kind of enigmatic about it, [and] didn’t mention there was a romantic interest that had brought her here.”
But Bill was already making calculations for both of them based on his political future, even evaluating whether there might be negative political consequences to him if they listed the same New Haven address on their individual bar applications. It had been nine years since he’d really lived in Arkansas, since he’d graduated high school and gone off to Georgetown. His plans were to teach law at the University of Arkansas while he adjusted to the political climate back home, and then to run for office.
If Hillary eventually moved to Arkansas, she would either join a law firm there or teach at the law school in Fayetteville—hardly roles commensurate with the scale of her ambition. Meanwhile, she had accepted an exciting job opportunity in Cambridge, Massachusetts, at the organization Marian Wright Edelman had recently founded, the Children’s Defense Fund. When Bill and Hillary parted after her brief stay in Arkansas, their situation seemed totally unsettled.
Not long thereafter, on July 23 and 24, Hillary took the D.C. bar exam, according to records of the District of Columbia Bar Association. In Cambridge, she rented rooms not far from the Harvard campus. It was the first time in her life she had lived alone. She didn’t like it.
Hillary found herself invigorated by her work for Edelman. There was a pioneering feeling about what she was doing. There had never before been a national organization devoted solely to defending the legal rights and interests of children. Hillary traveled to South Carolina to interview juvenile offenders, some as young as fourteen, who were housed in adult state prisons. The situation was all too common, she was learning, especially in the South. In Massachusetts, she went door-to-door in New Bedford to find out why there was such a discrepancy between the number of school-age children counted in the census and those enrolled in school. She studied the history of family law and the inherent and practical difficulties of asserting the rights of abused or neglected children. She was intellectually stimulated, and she enjoyed Cambridge, where many friends from her Wellesley and Yale years had gravitated, either to Harvard’s campus or jobs in nearby Boston. But she missed Bill and confessed she was lonely.
On November 3, the District of Columbia Bar Association notified Hillary that she had failed the bar exam. For the first time in her life she had flamed out—spectacularly, given the expectations of others for her, and even more so her own. Of 817 applicants, 551 of her peers had passed, most from law schools less prestigious than Yale. She kept this news hidden for the next thirty years. She never took the exam again, despite many opportunities. Her closest friends and associates—Webb Hubbell, Jim Blair (Diane’s husband), Nancy Bekavac, Betsey Wright, Sara Ehrman—were flabbergasted when she made the revelation in a single throwaway line in Living History. “When I learned that I passed in Arkansas but failed in D.C., I thought maybe my test scores were telling me something.”
Those who knew her best speculated that she must have felt deep shame at her failure, and that her self-confidence—always so visible a part of her exterior—was shattered by the experience (though many first-rate lawyers, even Yale Law graduates, had flunked the bar on their first try). There can only be conjecture about what turn her life—and the nation’s—might have taken had she not failed the exam.
There was a striking aspect to her failure. Her almost uninterrupted success to that point—including h
er academic career—had been based in large measure on interaction with the people who were evaluating her performance: teachers, employers, colleagues, interviewers, mentors, friends. Propelled by her character, personality, and drive, she was almost invariably very impressive. The D.C. bar examination, hardly one of the toughest in the nation but far more difficult than the Arkansas exam, was an impersonal test—no people skills were on display, no opportunity to influence the outcome with demonstrations of character or force of personality, or a winning way with strangers. This failure, a blow to her ambition, played a role in the decisions she now faced.
Bill flew to New England over the Thanksgiving holiday in 1973, and while they explored Boston together, they talked about their future. By then he had rented “the perfect place to live,” as he called it, a singularly beautiful, small wood-and-glass house eight miles outside Fayetteville in the countryside, on eighty secluded acres bordered on one side by the White River. Clinton had always had an aesthetic gift, more developed than Hillary’s in art, design, and music, their friends thought, and he’d rented a house created by one of the country’s more remarkable mid-century architects, the Arkansan Fay Jones, whose Thorncrown Chapel outside Fayetteville, in Eureka Springs, is a tiny jewel justly celebrated for its simple, pared beauty. Fayetteville, on the edge of the Ozarks in northwest Arkansas, was only a few miles from the summer band camp Bill had attended as a boy, a forested annual respite from the tar-baked asphalt of Hot Springs. Sitting in a rocking chair on the porch of this little house, Clinton could gaze at cattle grazing on the property near the river, and the familiar forests beyond. Field mice regularly scurried into the kitchen, and when he gave up trying to keep them out, he put out breadcrumbs for them.
In Cambridge, Bill told Hillary how he loved the house, how he was enjoying teaching at the university—and that he was scouring his corner of the state to find a Democratic candidate who could take on Arkansas’s only Republican member of Congress, John Paul Hammerschmidt. Hammerschmidt might be unusually vulnerable because of the toll Nixon’s Watergate scandal was taking on members of the president’s party as he fought to stay in office. Bill had been unable to persuade anybody to run. Hillary could tell he was thinking of doing it himself. She was relieved to be with him again, even elated. Their time together in Cambridge did little to clarify their situation, however. Her reservations about marriage and Arkansas remained.
Bill recognized that to be married to him “would be a high-wire operation,” and that Arkansas was not her preferred residence. He’d been fortunate to rub elbows with the ablest people of his generation, but he regarded Hillary as “head and shoulders above them all in political potential. She had a big brain, a good heart, better organizational skills than I did, and political skills that were nearly as good as mine; I’d just had more experience.” Her happiness was all-important to him, he said, and perhaps it was better if she proceeded without him. They agreed that during the upcoming Christmas holidays Hillary would visit Arkansas again, so they could work toward a decision, Hillary said.
She arrived in Fayetteville a few days after Christmas. She had hardly settled in when what must have seemed like Providence itself intervened, in the form of a phone call to Bill from John Doar, who had just been hired as chief counsel to the House Judiciary Committee’s impeachment investigation of Nixon. Doar had served the previous year as a judge during the Barristers’ Union Prize Trial at Yale—at the invitation of Hillary and Bill, who had admired him from afar. Now Doar was saying that Bill was at the top of his list of recommendations for young lawyers to join the impeachment committee staff. Would Clinton take off a year from teaching law and come to Washington, and suggest the names of other exceptional attorneys who might be available.
According to Hillary’s version of events, Bill had already made up his mind to run for Congress before Doar’s call, and she, too, was on the short list of Doar’s candidates to join the impeachment staff. Bill, in his version, said that he was still undecided about running for office, but after talking with Hillary he made up his mind. He turned Doar down but recommended Hillary.
Whatever the exact version of events, when Hillary was offered the job, she jumped at the opportunity.
IF THINGS FELL into place, Doar’s offer to Hillary represented a perfect solution to her and Bill’s dilemma as a couple. Hillary did not want to move to Arkansas. But if Nixon were investigated by the Judiciary Committee, then impeached by the House and tried by the Senate (a real possibility, even likely), the process would almost certainly take more than a year. If Bill won election to the House of Representatives in November, he would begin the job in January 1975, about the same time the impeachment process was likely to end. Under such circumstances, Hillary’s stature, at age twenty-seven, among the political cognescenti of the capital would be soaring (as indeed occurred after Nixon’s resignation). They could accede in the capital as the city’s golden young couple.
Hillary excitedly called Marian Edelman from Bill’s house. Marian told her she could always return to the Children’s Defense Fund, but that working on the impeachment inquiry was far more important.
Before leaving for Washington, Hillary accompanied Bill on a courtesy call to the home of former governor Orval Faubus in Huntsville, high on a ridge overlooking the Ozarks, about twenty-five miles from Fayetteville. Seventeen years after his famous (and shaming) refusal to permit the integration of Little Rock’s Central High School and President Dwight Eisenhower’s dispatch of federal troops to enforce the desegregation order of the Supreme Court, Faubus was still a canny operator, and as much as Clinton “disapproved of what he’d done at Little Rock,” he knew a thing or two about Arkansas politics. In fact, Faubus was an amalgam of Arkansas political traditions—the son of a communist/socialist organizer, a populist, a New Dealer, and an unrepentant segregationist. Calling on him was a price that wise Democratic candidates still paid. Hillary remained virtually silent through the visit four or five hour visit, as did Faubus’s second (and much younger) wife, Elizabeth, whose hair was piled in a beehive. Bill sought answers to practical and historical questions: How did Arkansans cope with the Depression? What was life like in World War II Arkansas? Why was Faubus insistent on still defending his segregationist stand of 1954? How did he think the impeachment investigation of Nixon—and the president’s difficulties generally—would figure in the congressional election? (Not much, Faubus replied.)
Meanwhile, Bill called David Pryor, then running for governor, to ask whether his girlfriend’s taking a job on the impeachment inquiry staff might prove a political liability. It might even be an asset, Pryor believed.
In Washington, Hillary moved into a spare room in the townhouse of Sara Ehrman, her friend from the McGovern campaign in Texas. The atmosphere in the capital felt to her electric. She was part of a historic enterprise in which her work and ideas would contribute to monumental events. There was a further, personal dividend: by doing what she did best—research, analysis, absorbing the experience of accomplished colleagues and stimulating them with her own ideas, engaging her keen political sensibility in the most meaningful public service imaginable—Hillary could rebuild her self-confidence after failing the D.C. bar examination.
Her work reflected Doar’s unorthodox and clever methodology. Only three or four of his most trusted aides had a full picture of how the impeachment investigation was being put together, and of the materials that would be used to build the case against Nixon. At the staff attorney level—Hillary’s—Doar assigned scutwork, nuts-and-bolts tasks that required procedural research about the rules and requirements for impeachment, even who would sit where during hearings. The last impeachment by the House had been in 1936, of a federal judge. Hillary’s first responsibility was to collate procedural information about previous impeachment proceedings, both American and English, from which the concept had been borrowed. The proclamation of the sergeant at arms was duly noted in the materials she put together: “All persons are commanded to
keep silent on pain of imprisonment while the House of Representatives is exhibiting to the Senate of the United States articles of impeachment against.”
Hillary was one of three women on the staff of forty-four lawyers. The whole operation—ninety lawyers and secretaries, clerks, researchers, and typists—was directed by Doar on the faded premises of the old Congressional Hotel on Capitol Hill, which had been commandeered for the staff’s exclusive use. Capital police patrolled the perimeter. Many bedrooms had been transformed into two-desk offices. Some of the larger bathrooms had been set aside for single-desk occupancy.
Like her colleagues, Hillary worked twelve-to eighteen-hour days, rising shortly after dawn. Doar’s rules forbade the staff from making personal notes or keeping diaries or (not surprisingly) talking outside the office to any nonstaff members about the inquiry or their work. Given such strictures, colleagues tended to eat lunch and dinner together, then go home for a night’s sleep and report back to the office in the morning.
One of the other women on the legal staff was Terry Kirkpatrick, an Arkansan who had been raised in Fort Smith and attended the University of Arkansas Law School in Fayetteville. As they got to know each other better, Hillary began asking Kirkpatrick about life in Arkansas and how a non-Southern woman like herself might fare there, especially in the state’s tight-knit legal community. There weren’t many female lawyers in the state, noted Kirkpatrick, so “you have to be three hundred percent better than any man to succeed. You have to pick your friends carefully. It’s a very different culture. But the people when they accept you are loving and very supportive and very willing to accept new ideas once they get past the initial shock.” Morover, it would be “easy to make an impact there. You can be a big fish in a small pond.”
A Woman in Charge Page 13