A Woman in Charge

by Carl Bernstein

  By the time Hillary had met Bill at Yale, she was considerably more sophisticated than he. His romantic relationships with women were usually short, sexual, casual, one-dimensional. She’d had real romances before she met him, a few of them in which political, philosophical, and intellectual ideas were meaningfully exchanged. There was a maturity and wholeness that was lacking in Bill’s relationships with women. She had come a long way since Park Ridge.

  When Bill Clinton became president he had experienced life through the glands of a politician and the mind of an intellectual. With the formative exceptions of his empathic boyhood experience among Southern blacks and the European travels of his Oxford days, his most basic ideas and values evolved from reading, conversation, campaigning, and governing—and the experience of his wife.

  Her detractors and enemies have long maintained that her huge ambition was rooted in the raw pursuit of power and bent severely toward a far-left or radically liberal agenda. But by the time she had graduated from Yale Law School in 1973, radicalism and fervent ideology held little appeal to her. She was, though, willing to experiment with radical ideas, borrow from them and seek to understand their impetus, the history behind them, and their relevance. Democracy, she asserted in her senior thesis at Wellesley, was “the most radical of political faiths.”

  As an undergraduate, “she was never truly left,” in the words of a classmate. “Very much a moderate, very much a facilitator.” Her gift for political pragmatism as a means of achieving what she believed was right—a gift she shared with Bill—was already evident.

  Ultimately Hillary’s real-life education and sense of right and wrong (which became more complicated and relativist as she grew older) guided her away from rigid ideology, led her to reject hard political dogma of any sort (including aspects of feminist theology), and to choose a career in mainstream law—to pay the bills—and a pro bono practice (the unconventional impetus) defending the rights of children. These were particularly interesting choices for the daughter of Dorothy Rodham, a woman who had been abandoned by her parents and marginalized financially by her husband, and the wife-to-be of a man whose mother had been beaten by his alcoholic stepfather and widowed by his wandering biological father.

  By high school, the different approaches taken by Hillary and Bill had already emerged—her riskier, experimental, and experiential path was evolving; his more set, conventional track with its emphasis on good government, Boys Nation, and band was likewise identifiable. He loved Elvis, played the saxophone, and worshipped Jack Kennedy. Hillary chaired the Fabian fan club, accumulated batches of Girl Scout badges, was a certified swimming instructor for the recreation department, and cleaned the church altar on weekends—but she also canvassed Chicago’s black housing projects for Barry Goldwater’s candidacy and babysat migrant Mexican children whose mothers and fathers worked the fields in rural Illinois, west of Chicago. Hillary reached decisions through trial and error; participation and involvement was common to both Bill and Hillary. Her political development reflected more curiosity and openness.

  Hillary put enormous faith in her own empirical compass, allowing it to guide her exploration of Wellesley and Yale, and eventually to get through the wilderness of her personal and political struggles in Arkansas. She might have been better served in the White House had she not wandered so far from her usual path of testing and experimenting with different routes before fixing on a destination. With her decision to run for the Senate, and her subsequent tack as a senator, she again turned confidently to the magnetic tug of her own experience.

  Though she looked bookish and enjoyed studying, Hillary was far more inclined than Bill to augment study with firsthand reconnaissance and personal trial as the basis for action and belief. She was not a classic intellectual, one guided by received wisdom and consequent supposition. Characteristically, she had traveled to Chicago to personally examine the programs described in her senior thesis. Her college letters to Geoff Shields and Don Jones are a lode of rich descriptions of her own experiences, from trying out for a Wellesley production of Edward Albee’s play Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? (in the role of foul-mouthed, emasculating Martha) to working in a cannery.

  When she settled in Arkansas, her diverse undertakings were already remarkable. She’d worked at menial jobs (washing dishes at a lodge in Mount McKinley National Park and sliming fish in Alaska, where she wore knee-high boots in bloody water while removing the guts of king salmon with a spoon); studied law as it affected the wealthiest and poorest of clients; spent a summer interning at a California law firm noted for representation of the Black Panthers and the Communist Party; and been a summer intern for the House Republican Conference. Now she had been a lawyer in the congressional impeachment investigation of Richard Nixon.

  And she could throw a football.

  Before becoming president, Bill had held few real jobs outside of electoral politics: as a counselor in his teens at a summer youth camp and a summer clerk for the Senate Foreign Relations Committee as an undergraduate; and, to support himself at Yale, as an instructor at a community college teaching law enforcement personnel and a lawyer’s assistant in New Haven. His later teaching and law practice were basically time-killers between running for office.

  Through the years of their marriage, Hillary’s experiential openness would further delineate her capacity for personal growth and change. As for Bill, only his political skills and judgments, as opposed to personal and emotional attributes, appeared to become more acute as he grew older.

  HILLARY’S MOMENTOUS political journey with Bill began in earnest in Sara Ehrman’s Volkswagen a week after Richard Nixon and his long-suffering wife, Pat, left the White House for exile in San Clemente, California. Hillary would never forget the experience of that first lady, and her wifely passivity at the trauma her husband put her through.

  For the next uneasy twelve months, Hillary, now twenty-six, would vacillate about whether to marry Bill. Ehrman, who had been an important source of wisdom and encouragement in her life since their summer together in Texas, was deeply disappointed by Hillary’s decision to leave the capital for Arkansas. To her, Hillary was the “brilliant and dazzling” embodiment of the women’s movement and all its promise, and she tried mightily to persuade her not to surrender a limitless future in Washington for a man—even Bill Clinton, whom she knew—and become an assistant professor at a “hillbilly” law school. “You are crazy,” Ehrman told her at one point, and asked why she would do something so out of character. Hillary, of course, was deeply ambivalent, “at sea about whether she wanted to move to Arkansas,” according to one of their mutual friends, torn about “how hard to be, how careerist to be,” for this was 1974, and she was hardly unaffected by the feminist movement.

  Ehrman asked incredulously, “Why on earth would you throw away your future?” The Democrats in Washington looked ascendant and principled. The country seemed on the verge of a new age of reform. By virtue of Hillary’s role in the most important investigation in Washington since the Army-McCarthy hearings in the 1950s, she was now at the top of the heap of America’s young, public-service-minded lawyers, with an undimmed opportunity (or so Ehrman thought) to take a seat at any of Washington’s or New York’s top law firms, leading to a partnership. And though Ehrman regarded Hillary almost as a daughter, and as “a poster child of a liberated woman,” she also knew from the incessant phone calls between Hillary and Bill that they were deeply in love.

  Unsuccessful at persuading Hillary to stay in Washington, Sara had finally offered to drive Hillary to Arkansas, with another friend, Alan Stone, who was a native of the state. Hillary packed her books, stereo, and clothes into Ehrman’s Volkswagen and they headed south. Her bicycle, which she had barely had a chance to ride in Washington, was strapped to the roof. When they crossed the Potomac that humid August morning, its banks were ablaze in yellow and red blossoms, Lady Bird Johnson’s lasting floral bequest to the nation before she and her husband had left the capital, disil
lusioned, with the country mired in an unwinnable war. Hillary’s final glance back was of Memorial Bridge and Lincoln’s marbled temple from the Arlington Heights, after which they drove through the Virginia countryside, past Middleburg, Warrenton, Culpeper, and into the Shenandoah Mountains, then down to Charlottesville. Hillary was in a hurry to get to Fayetteville, excited at the prospect of seeing Bill, but Ehrman stopped at Monticello, the home of Thomas Jefferson, and detoured to other historical sites as she renewed her campaign to persuade Hillary to turn around.

  Hillary was unflinching.

  “Are you sure?” Sara kept asking.

  “No, but I’m going anyway.”

  Hillary was sure only that she loved Bill and wanted to take a chance. “My friends and family thought I had lost my mind. I was a little bit concerned about that as well,” she said later.

  Fayetteville seemed even farther away from Washington than the 1,225 miles between. When they finally reached the University of Arkansas campus, a rally was underway for the Razorbacks football team. The whole town had turned out, thousands upon thousands of fans wearing pig hats and yelling Sou-ee, sou-ee, pig, pig, pig. “I was just appalled,” Sara recalled. The following day, however, when she and Hillary went to see Bill speak at a campaign stop, Sara recognized immediately those magnetic attributes that had pulled Hillary across the mountains. Sara could see now, for the first time, something else: that Hillary was not being preposterous when she said that this young man, only twenty-eight years old and seeking his first public office, might someday be president of the United States. And for the first time, Sara sensed that Hillary had given a lot of thought about how she could become something approaching an equal partner in the venture.

  TWO DAYS AFTER her arrival in Fayetteville, Jeff Dwire died unexpectedly of heart failure at forty-eight, probably a consequence of the diabetes from which he suffered. Virginia, widowed for a third time, and Bill’s brother, Roger (who had now lost two fathers, as Bill put it), were devastated by his death. Dwire had made Virginia happier than she’d been in all the years Bill could remember. Bill’s closeness to his mother, his solicitousness and lifelong desire to please her, his caring and love for a troubled younger brother, affected Hillary, though she continued to chafe at Virginia’s antipathy. Bill had conveyed to Hillary, with extraordinary tenderness, his longing to have with her the kind of family life he had lacked. Both of them carried scars from childhood. Each recognized some deep, unresolved hurt in the other.

  Dwire had wanted to be cremated, but there was no crematorium anywhere in the state. This was the sort of thing that reinforced Hillary’s fears about the smallness of the Arkansas world into which she had just arrived. Bill, who had driven to Hot Springs to take care of the funeral arrangements, had to ship Dwire’s body to Texas for cremation; upon the return of Jeff’s ashes, Bill would see that they were scattered over a lake outside town, near Dwire’s favorite fishing dock.

  Hillary had arrived on campus only a day before the term began at the law school and didn’t learn what courses she’d be teaching until then. In addition to her classwork, she was assigned to run the local legal aid clinic and a prisoners assistance project.

  By the end of the first week of classes, almost everyone at the University of Arkansas seemed to know that Hillary was Bill Clinton’s girlfriend, and that she had just come from working on Nixon’s impeachment. Her competence and high expectations of her students registered immediately, but not nearly as much as her personal style, her accent, and her manner of dress, which struck many on campus as Northern hippie. The ethos and impact of the counterculture were much less apparent in the nonurban South than cities like Atlanta and New Orleans and even Dallas; and the University of Arkansas hardly rivaled Duke or the University of Texas in terms of the general sophistication of its student body or faculty. Behind the barrier of the Ozarks there was almost a time warp, reflective of many aspects of the state itself.

  Fayetteville, with its quaint town square lined on each side by small shops (including the Campbell-Bell department store run by Bill Clinton’s cousin Roy) and the municipal post office in the middle, could not have been more removed from Hillary’s experience since she’d left Park Ridge—her life in Washington and New England and even Texas, with their rhythms of drama and conflict. Since she’d left home for Wellesley in 1965, she’d been literally in the thick of things, which she craved. She had always aspired to be a major player. But there was something about Fayetteville that was reminiscent of Park Ridge—not just the little downtown with its soda shop and hangouts for the locals, but also the easy congeniality of the town. People seemed to recognize one another on the streets, to smile, to move more slowly. Not long after her arrival, Hillary dialed Information to obtain the phone number of a student who’d skipped an appointment. “He’s not home,” the operator told her. “He’s gone camping.”

  To Hillary’s surprise and relief, Fayetteville was home to an extraordinary, and worldly, group of women, some of them native Arkansans, others from big Northern and Western cities who had followed their men back home after college. Life in Fayetteville had a certain sweetness, they seemed to agree, and there was no shortage of things to do locally either politically or intellectually. “She was moving into an academic environment,” said Deborah Sale. “She wasn’t moving to a plantation along the Mississippi in a town of twenty.” Hillary learned to enjoy some of the town’s Southern charm: eating barbecue, cheering from the stands at Arkansas Razorback football games—even yelling “Soo-ee!” to call the hogs. She moved into a stone-and-wood house—also designed by Fay Jones—that belonged to a renowned member of the faculty who had taught for many years both in Fayetteville and at New York University Law School.

  Hillary taught criminal law and trial advocacy the first semester and criminal procedures the second semester. When Bill had decided to run for Congress, he had obtained permission from the dean to keep teaching through the campaign. He taught agency and partnership law, as well as trade regulation. Many students had both as professors. Hillary’s style was confident, aggressive, take-charge, and much more structured than Bill’s. “All business,” a colleague said. Her questions to students were tough and demanding. Bill almost never put his students on the spot; rather, he maintained an easy dialogue with them. His conversational approach often gave students the run of the class, and he let them filibuster.

  “If you were unprepared, she would rip you pretty good, but not in an unfair way,” recalled Woody Bassett, who became a good friend of both, and worked in many Clinton political campaigns. “She made you think, she challenged you. If she asked you a question about a case and you gave an answer, well then—here comes another question. Whereas in Bill Clinton’s classes, it was much more laid-back.” In class Hillary never mentioned her work on the impeachment inquiry. Bill was far more open about discussing political issues with his students, whether Nixon’s impeachment or Roe v. Wade, on which he spent several weeks. The subject of his constitutional law course more naturally lent itself to political questions than Hillary’s. He was regarded as the easiest grader in the law school. Hillary’s exams were tough, and her grading commensurate with what she expected serious law students to know. There was little doubt that she was the better teacher, possessed with “unusual ability to absorb a huge amount of facts and boil them down to the bottom line,” Bassett thought. Clinton was more likely to go at a subject in a circular way, looking at it from every angle and sometimes never coming to a conclusion. But usually his was the more interesting class, because of the passion and knowledge with which he addressed legal questions that related to everyday events.

  HILLARY MADE GOOD women friends in Fayetteville, which helped put her at ease. One, Diane Kincaid (later Diane Blair), became what Hillary described as the closest friend of her life, a source of great joy, camaraderie, understanding, and mutual purpose. Two years before Hillary’s arrival, not long after they had started dating, Bill had sought out Diane with the idea that she c
ould help get Hillary to Arkansas.

  We walked over to the student union to have lunch [Diane recalled], and I was in the middle of a sentence, and he just stopped me and said, “You remind me so much of the woman that I’m in love with.” And I said, “Tell me about her.” And he went on to describe this paragon and the smartest person he had ever met, the most wonderful, innovative, luminating mind on any subject whatsoever and just on and on and on. He was just smitten. It was clear to me by that time that he was planning his political future in the state, and wanted to marry this woman, and bring her here. And he said, “I hope I can, that’s what I want to do. But, if I bring her here it will be my state and my political life. And she could very easily have an amazing political career of her own. She could easily be a governor, a United States senator.” I had never met at that point a man who was in politics, and who wanted to do politics, who could so easily envision a woman with a brilliant political future. So, it impressed me.