“It was,” says deputy campaign manager George Stephanopoulos, “inspirational.”
* * *
—
To Hillary Clinton, the stories of her husband’s sexual infidelities seem to register, consciously at least, as having nothing to do with her, or with their marriage, but rather as evidence of the depths of degradation to which the hit men behind George Bush will stoop. Rarely does anyone in her audiences dare to bring up the question of infidelity, and when someone does, Hillary usually knocks it out of the park, leaving people cheering. Her refrain has become something of a mantra, protecting her from ever seeming to take the whole ugly business personally: “This is a much bigger issue than just Bill and me—I just hope for the sake of the country we’ll set some boundaries for others coming along.”
Not only is her altruistic defense politically astute, it also serves to buffer her psychologically from the feelings that would send most women off on an emotional roller coaster. “It doesn’t make any difference what people say about her,” says her friend Stuck, “whatever criticism or belittling, she doesn’t take it personally, because the cause is always more important. It may very well be the way she insulates herself from hurt. And I think in the past ten or twelve years with Bill she may have done that, to protect her sanity.”
In all the time I traveled with Hillary, and in sixty interviews with her friends, family, and associates, there was just one hint of a deep emotional reaction. “She never shows her personal feelings on the surface,” attests Carolyn Huber, but that week, when the governor’s wife phoned her confidante and Huber broke into sobs, a fissure opened in the protective coating of equanimity. “I know, Carolyn, it’s hurting so bad,” Hillary said. “The press doesn’t believe you have any feelings. They sure don’t believe in the Bible.”
But Hillary is also an avowed pragmatist, accustomed to life in the political fishbowl. “She knew this day would come,” says Jan Piercey, her former college dormmate, “and she wasn’t going to put anybody in the position of lying.” Another friend says of the media frenzy over Clinton’s nocturnal peccadilloes, “None of this came as a surprise to her.”
I asked Hillary if she thought her husband had told her everything she needed to know. “Yes. I have absolutely no doubt about that,” she replied, her light-blue eyes unblinking beneath the dark hedgerow of brows. “I don’t think I could be sitting here otherwise. That’s been, over years, part of the development of trust.”
I asked if she thought Gary Hart was qualified to be president, or did she think his problems revealed something disturbing about his character? “He was not yet at a point where he could be honest with himself, that’s my perception,” she said. “People in his campaign said they confronted him and said, ‘Have you ever?’ and he said ‘No.’”
She praised Bill Clinton for being honest with the people he loves, admitting his problems, and declaring he wanted to do better. “I think as he got older, as he became a father, he began to let his breath out a little bit,” observes Hillary. Her husband believes that trauma and mistakes are all tests that help one grow. For him, says Hillary, “it’s a constant coming to grips with who you are and what stage of life you can grow beyond.”
The Clintons’ friends fiercely idealize their marriage, seeing in it a remarkable integration of strong personalities and sheer guts. “Most of us have thrown in the towel,” says one friend, the thoughtful actress Mary Steenburgen. “These people didn’t. It’s exciting to be around them and to see how it can be to be a married couple.” Another member of the “Arkansas diaspora” in L.A., television producer Linda Bloodworth-Thomason, is one of Hillary’s most loyal intimates. “Look, this isn’t Lurleen Wallace,” says Bloodworth-Thomason. “Hillary doesn’t have to stay with Bill Clinton. She could get to the Senate or possibly the White House on her own—and she knows it. . . . But these two people are intertwined on every level, as a man and woman, as friends, as lovers, as parents, as politicians. . . . This is a love story.” Huber agrees, describing how “Bill and Hillary are always smooching.” Their pals call the Clintons “soul mates,” saying they confide fully in nobody, not even family, only in each other.
“She also has an investment in this marriage and his career,” points out the practical Wright, who says Hillary never considered divorce. “It absolutely was not an alternative that she gave him.”
The only area of vulnerability friends spot in Hillary is her daughter, Chelsea. The longest periods of silence she maintains are in hotel rooms, a phone cradled to her ear, often dead tired but listening without interruption to the stream-of-consciousness account of the twelve-year-old’s day. Before the campaign, Hillary was out of town on law or board work two or three nights a week. She does homework with Chelsea by fax.
“Whenever Hillary was there, she always sat with Chelsea while she had dinner,” recalls Melinda Martin, the resident baby-sitter from ’85 to ’87. (Most of the Clintons’ baby-sitters are fresh out of the University of Arkansas, with names like Melinda, Melissa, and Michelle.)
I asked Melinda how often Bill and Hillary went out together. “Just the two of them? Very, very seldom. . . . Hillary took Chelsea on vacations. Bill would promise to catch up, but usually he’d come a couple of days late, or not at all.”
Hillary’s protectiveness of her daughter took precedence one evening, at the peak of the bimbomania, when she was facing a command performance as the “candidate’s wife” before a backbiting Washington audience at a roast of Ron Brown, chairman of the Democratic National Committee. Bill was scheduled to take Chelsea to a father-daughter dance at the Little Rock Y.W.C.A. Their friend Linda Bloodworth-Thomason had an inspiration: “Let’s do a live remote to Little Rock—it will be a nice image for them to see Bill dancing with his daughter.”
Hillary didn’t think twice. “No,” she said. “This is Chelsea’s night.”
It is one of Hillary’s philosophical tenets that children should be spoken to just like adults. This explains how Hillary is able to pass the supermarket checkout counter in the company of her adored daughter without gagging. Indeed, Hillary is the first to point out the lurid tabloid headlines screaming about multiple affairs or a love child, instructing Chelsea that “this is what’s to be expected in a political campaign.” Chelsea follows the political horse race avidly, but “when they talk bad about my daddy” on TV, she leaves the room.
For women who have been betrayed by unfaithful husbands, Hillary Clinton is a Rorschach test. Some grimace at the prospect of having their hearts broken by a man whose story you never know whether to believe: “I don’t want another charmer.” Others admire her stoicism and buy the strength-through-adversity story.
Still, any wife subjected to embarrassing, detailed reports of infidelity must register searing pain at some level. It is quite possible that Hillary is so focused on power agendas that she is disconnected from her feelings, able to compartmentalize her pain: she codes it, labels it, and puts it away in the deep freeze. What does that leave? An unresolved hurt so profound that it may not surface until all the sound and fury of campaigning is over.
* * *
—
The secret behind Hillary’s boldness goes back to the torch passed from a silent generation of mothers to the daughters of the feminist movement. “I was determined that no daughter of mine was going to have to go through the agony of being afraid to say what she had on her mind,” says Dorothy Rodham, Hillary’s mother, who hadn’t finished college before marrying Hugh Rodham, a rough-edged Chicago salesman and later owner of a small textile business. Mrs. Rodham made raising her three children her full-time occupation. They played endless word games and rarely watched television. Thus, Hillary was an especially sheltered four-year-old when the Welsh-English family moved to Park Ridge, a middle-class, white-collar suburb out near O’Hare airport.
The new neighborhood was dominated by a family with a daughter, Suzy, who regularl
y decked the beribboned little Hillary, watching in triumph as she ran home sobbing.
“There’s no room in this house for cowards,” Hillary’s mother announced one day. “You’re going to have to stand up to her. The next time she hits you, I want you to hit her back.”
Out trudged the trembling four-year-old. A circle of scowling boys and the pugilistic girl closed around her. Suddenly, Hillary threw out her fist, knocking Suzy off her pins. The boys’ mouths dropped open. Flushed with victory, Hillary ran home to exclaim to her proud mother, “I can play with the boys now!”
The lesson sank in deep. “Boys responded well to Hillary,” clucks her mother. “She just took charge, and they let her.” Even as a child she thought in terms of mobilizing constituents for her causes, organizing neighborhood carnivals or clothing drives for migrant workers. As a young teen she helped her youth minister, the Reverend Don Jones, in counseling black and Hispanic teens from the South Side. “She would think things through to see what would be appealing to the group,” recalls her brother Hugh. “We would just follow along as little brothers.”
The other formative experience for Hillary was competitive sports. A keen though terminally mediocre athlete, Hillary now appreciates having learned the lesson few girls did in those days: “You win one day, you lose the next day, you don’t take it personally. You get up every day and you go on.” It became the pattern of her life, a pattern that has fortified her in the topsy-turvy days of the current campaign.
To go east in 1965 to Wellesley College—“all very rich and fancy and very intimidating to my way of thinking”—was a big stretch. She started out a Goldwater Girl. Though instant conversions to radicalism were common at the time, Hillary had a slower, more thoughtful evolution in her political views, working her way through the moderate Rockefeller wing of the Republican Party to campaigning for Eugene McCarthy by ’68.
Jeff Shields, her Harvard boyfriend in those days, who is now a Chicago lawyer, fell in love with her earnestness. “The thing that I remember most were the conversations,” he recalls. “She would rather sit around and talk about current events or politics or ideas than to go bicycle riding or to a football game.”
Hillary’s charisma was strong enough to attract a half-dozen girls to move into the Gothic dorm, Stone Davis, to be near her. They all ate together in a cloistered stone-and-glass gazebo. “You were surrounded by role models,” remembers Jan Piercey of the all-female college. “We came away just assuming that everyone had serious aspirations.” Hillary became president of her college government and graduated with high honors.
Coming to political consciousness in the late 1960s, Hillary saw these as “years dominated by men with dreams, men in the civil-rights movement and the Peace Corps, the space program.” As an ambitious fourteen-year-old Hillary had written to NASA asking what it took to be an astronaut. She was told girls need not apply. Still, “growing up in the fifties, a lot of us sensed that we could redefine what women do.” Her mother had hoped Hillary would be the first woman on the Supreme Court, “but Sandra Day O’Connor beat her to it,” she jokes. Friends along the way have told her what Dorothy Stuck says today: “Regardless of what happens to Bill, the nation will be exposed to Hillary Clinton, and Hillary could—and should—be our first woman president.”
* * *
—
Bill Clinton’s childhood, as tumultuous as Hillary’s was stable, helps illuminate his complicated relationship with his wife and the mistakes that have tested their political and personal partnerships.
Three months prior to his birth, his mother, a high-spirited, part–Native American, part-Irish woman by the maiden name of Virginia Cassidy, lost Bill’s father, the first of her four husbands. William Jefferson Blythe III, a traveling salesman, swerved across the highway driving home from Chicago and drowned in a rain-filled ditch at the age of twenty-nine. The tragedy meant that Bill was left with his grandparents in the tiny town of Hope, Arkansas, for his first four years while his mother went off to New Orleans to pursue nurse’s training in anesthesiology. Young Billy adored his grandfather, a six-day-a-week storekeeper who died when the boy was eleven. From then on he was bereft of family male role models.
When I asked Bill Clinton who was the first man who endorsed him as worthwhile, there was a very long pause. He stared out the plane window at the bleak, snow-blistered New England terrain. After mentioning his grandfather, he spoke stiffly of his stepfather Roger Clinton. “He took me to St. Louis in a train once, I remember that.” He dredged up one family vacation, one fishing trip. “Literally, all those years and I can count on one hand—there just weren’t many times. It was sort of sad. . . . I missed it.”
When Bill was seven, the family moved to Hot Springs, a tingly place notorious for its racetrack, illegal gambling clubs, whorehouses, and gangster glamour. Every winter the high rollers would come from New York and Chicago and Miami Beach, looking for action. “The Clintons fit in with all that,” says Carolyn Staley, the local preacher’s daughter, who introduced herself to me at Clinton headquarters as “Bill’s ‘girl next door.’” Staley says Virginia Clinton was at the races every day—still is—she has her own box. “She loves it, it’s in her blood. She wrote her own rules.”
Clinton’s mother also worked at being glamorous. With a silver streak dyed down the middle of her dark hair and three shades of eye shadow, “she’d put on tailored men’s pajamas and mules and hang around with a cigarette in her hand, real Hollywood,” says Staley. “She was a good-lookin’ lady and hilarious. . . . One-liners are her trademark, like a walking female Will Rogers.”
Virginia Clinton remained emotionally stoic through the abuse of Bill’s alcoholic stepfather, who went on rampages that sometimes ended with a bullet hole shot in the wall or a beating of Bill’s mother or younger brother. Finally, at fourteen, Clinton put an end to the violence in a shocking confrontation that marked the turning point of his adolescence. Hearing a fight, he broke down the door of his parents’ bedroom. “[I] told him that I was bigger than him now, and there would never be any more of this while I was there,” Clinton recalled to political writer Joe Klein.
Virginia Clinton temporarily threw Roger out of the house—a brief divorce—and began taking her teenage son along to a nightclub she frequented called the Vapors. During racing season the club ran fast and loose with lusty Vegas entertainers singing over the raucous chi-ching of slot machines and the squeals at the blackjack tables—an experience which seems to have simultaneously intrigued and repelled the boy. “It was fascinating,” Bill told me. But he added, “I didn’t like to be around dark smoky places where people were drinking too much. . . . I had a real negative association with alcoholism. I think subconsciously I was afraid it would happen to me.” Bill later became president of his Baptist Sunday-school class.
“Some of the mistakes I made later in life were rooted in all those things that were unsaid or unexplored when we were growing up,” Bill told me. Virginia Clinton made no attempt to explain or analyze behavior. “My mother was trying to keep peace and survive in an explosive situation.” Bill never rebelled, adds Staley. “He had to be the shining light in his mother’s life.”
The fact that his reality as a child was completely defined by a woman may explain his later dependence on Hillary and other strong women. Young Bill also developed the pleasing style of many children from alcoholic homes, who reason, as Betsey Wright describes it, “‘If I’m really nice, and I make this person feel better, then maybe this [behavior] will stop.’” Wright adds, “I can see that in Bill now. He sees it.”
Another common result in families where parents are weak, narcissistic, or alcoholic is that the growing child either copies the immature habits he sees at home or leaps ahead to become a premature grown-up. The missed childhood can later trigger immature behavior as an adult. “I always wondered if I’d want to be sixteen when I was forty because I never felt like I got to comp
lete my childhood,” Bill Clinton has said.
Carolyn Staley confides that “Virginia and Bill and Hillary have taken what might otherwise have been made out to be a debilitating background and they’ve carefully developed a spin to their lives to make Bill the conquering hero.”
* * *
—
Bill Clinton first laid eyes on Hillary Rodham at Yale Law School in a class they shared in political and civil liberties. He thought she was “the greatest thing on two legs,” but there was more to the attraction. They belonged to a new generation, where everything was supposed to be equitable between the sexes. Hillary had come to Yale already a star, renowned as a multiple winner on the TV quiz show College Bowl, and as the college senior who delivered an extraordinary counter-commencement speech at Wellesley College in 1969. The address, which earned her national publicity, including her picture in Life, had struck a very sixties tone: “We feel that our prevailing, acquisitive and competitive corporate life . . . is not the way of life for us. We’re searching for more immediate, ecstatic . . . modes of living.”
What does Hillary remember as the most ecstatic experience of her twenties? She ponders, then laughs, conjuring up the sunny southerner with Elvis sideburns who entered Yale Law School a year after she did. “Falling in love with Bill Clinton,” she answers.
Vanity Fair's Women on Women Page 9