What attracted her to him? “He wasn’t afraid of me,” says Hillary.
“But I was afraid of us, I tell you that,” admits Bill.
He trailed her out of the class they shared, following her so close he could smell her hair, and then he stopped dead in his tracks. No, this is nothing but trouble, he told himself. “I could just look at her and tell that she was interesting and deep.” He walked away. For the next couple of weeks he stared at her, he stalked her, but he couldn’t bring himself to make the first move.
One night, huddled at the end of the library, he watched the object of his gaze stand up and march the full length of the Yale Law School library until she stood face-to-face with him. “Look, if you’re going to keep staring at me, then I’m going to keep looking back,” Hillary said, “and I think we ought to know each other’s names. I’m Hillary Rodham.”
“I was dumbstruck,” says Bill Clinton. “I couldn’t think of my name.”
They have been looking at each other with mixed feelings of fascination and apprehension ever since.
* * *
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Studious, solemn, dynamic, substantive—these are the adjectives her classmates use to describe Hillary Rodham at Yale Law School. Hillary gave no thought to “getting herself up,” and was in fact mousy-haired, makeupless, and somewhat intimidating behind her oversize, Steinem-like glasses. Big Bill Clinton, by contrast, was “Mr. Aura”—a good time, funny, intense, a very quick study. Bill shared a famous beach house for the first two years with an African-American from a family of Philadelphia Republicans, Bill Coleman. He remembers Clinton partying, reading Camus, dating several women (including an African-American classmate). But he spent most of his time working on political campaigns. “He did not spend lots of time trying to master Marbury v. Madison,” snickers Coleman.
Professor Burke Marshall remembers Hillary vividly. “She was even then forceful, very smart, very articulate. Some very good lawyers ramble, but that’s not Hillary. Her mind is an organized mind.” Of Bill Clinton he says, “He was a very good student, he’s very, very smart. But I’d never have thought Bill Clinton was law-firm material. He was obviously going to be a candidate.”
To Clinton, law school was just a credential. He had a single-track focus. Even when he and Hillary took a house together, a baby Colonial, and “he was totally consumed by somebody else’s being,” as Coleman recalls, Clinton did not take his eye off his soaring political ambitions. As a result, doubts about the match lingered for Bill and Hillary. “I loved being with her, but I had very ambivalent feelings about getting involved with her,” Bill admits. He insists he warned Hillary from their earliest dates, “You know, I’m really worried about falling in love with you, because you’re a great person, you could have a great life. If you wanted to run for public office you could be elected, but I’ve got to go home. It’s just who I am.”
When Hillary and Bill joined the Barristers’ Union, to put on a competitive trial before a real jury, she whipped him into shape as her partner. Alan Bersin, a fellow student, now a partner at Munger, Tolles & Olson in L.A., chuckles as he remembers Bill, “who was superb at presenting. But Hillary was definitely the serious one about getting work done and thinking through the position.” They did not, however, win the prize trial. “I just had a bad day,” Bill told me sheepishly, adding that it didn’t help when “Hillary wore this bright-orange outfit.”
But the dynamic duo made a lasting impression on one of the judges, John Doar, a hero of the civil-rights movement. Six months after they graduated, Doar was shopping for crack young lawyers to staff the House Judiciary Committee inquiry that would prepare the impeachment case against President Richard Nixon. Bill excused himself; he was already geared up for his 1974 congressional race. But what about Hillary? “If he hadn’t suggested her, I would have called her anyway,” says Doar.
The work was thrilling and grueling, twenty hours a day for six months. In August, treed by the committee’s work and public opinion, Nixon resigned. By the end of her first year out of law school, Hillary Rodham had become part of history.
* * *
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Why would she marry him? That was what her Wellesley classmates and the feminists who knew Hillary from the McGovern campaign demanded to know. Most thought Bill was terrific. But move to Arkansas? You gotta be kidding, the subtext clearly being buncha redneck racists.
“I kept struggling between my head and my heart,” Hillary remembers. Head said: gold-plated law firm in New York or Washington, public-interest law, or government. Heart won. Later in the summer of 1974, she “took a leap of faith” and moved to Fayetteville. “I just knew I wanted to be part of changing the world,” she says now. “Bill’s desire to be in public life was much more specific than my desire to do good.”
Hillary and Bill taught at the University of Arkansas Law School, eschewing living together “because of the local mores.” After a year of trying on Arkansas life, Hillary decided to see what all her friends were doing that she might be missing. “I went to Boston, New York, Washington, Chicago,” she recalls. “I didn’t see anything out there that I thought was more exciting or challenging than what I had in front of me.”
When Bill picked her up at the midget airport, he was ebullient. “You know that house you liked?” Hillary looked blank. “What house?”
As Bill tells the story, she’d made a passing comment about a pretty little glazed-brick house. He’d gone out and bought it, feathering the nest with an antique bed and flowered sheets from Wal-Mart. “So you’re going to have to marry me,” he declared, winding up his pitch as he pulled into the driveway of the house. Two months later she did.
“I was disappointed when they married,” admits Betsey Wright, who had met the dating couple when they came to her home state of Texas to work for the McGovern campaign in 1972. “She has been absolutely critical to Bill’s success but, then, I had images in my mind that she could be the first woman president.”
Mack McLarty, a childhood friend of Bill’s who now serves with Hillary on the board of the yogurt giant TCBY Enterprises, adds candidly, “I married above myself in terms of intellect, like Bill did.”
For Hillary, Arkansas was a different world. Even in Little Rock, where they moved in 1976 when Bill became attorney general, women were expected to be content with curling their eyelashes and selecting china patterns—especially political wives.
Instead, Hillary was recruited as one of the first women in the state to join a mainline law practice, the Rose Law Firm, after several partners were impressed by the way she set up the University of Arkansas’s legal-aid clinic. “I think initially there were some [clients] who might put her into a stereotype . . . the pushy, Yankee female,” says her law partner Webb Hubbell, “but I don’t think anybody after fifteen minutes with Hillary would think that. . . . She can tell if the client is very nervous or concerned about something and can put them at ease.”
In 1978 the Clintons swept into the governor’s office with the promise of youth and purity. “Arrogant” was the outcry of the Establishment, and the governor’s spouse became the lightning rod for people’s resentment. To southerners expecting a more decorative First Lady, Hillary Rodham was almost an eyesore. She rejected makeup, glared through thick glasses, drowned herself in big shapeless fisherman’s sweaters, and adamantly stuck to her maiden name.
Two years later, at the age of thirty-two, Hillary produced her “one perfect child” the same month she made law partner. According to Carolyn Huber, Hillary believed the baby came three weeks early because she was under the emotional stress of litigating a tough child-custody case. There were harrowing hours until Hillary underwent a cesarean. Finally, Bill emerged from the delivery room in green scrubs, cradling a seven-pound baby, saying he was “bonding” with his new daughter, and generally acting “like he’d invented fatherhood,” says Diane Blair, a political-science profes
sor in Fayetteville.
But it was also an election year. When the newspapers reported that “Governor Bill Clinton and Hillary Rodham had a daughter,” the voters were outraged at their First Lady’s blatant feminism.
His defeat that November was devastating for the Wunderkind governor, who was written off as having no political future. “There are a couple of periods in my adult life that were pretty tough,” says Bill, and this was the first one. Observant friends think Bill also felt as if he had failed Hillary. “The mutual admiration that creates the closeness in their marriage also produced difficulties,” says Piercey.
At the time of his disorienting loss, Hillary’s own career was soaring. “Subconsciously, that’s hard for all of us,” sympathizes Herb Rule, another of Hillary’s partners. “You always want your friends and spouse to do well. But not at a time when you’re failing.”
* * *
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For the next six months, according to friends, the governor “went a little crazy.” They suggest that the Clintons’ marital problems began around this time, and lasted until a few years ago. Before the couple purchased a small house, Betsey Wright was summoned to move into the mansion and see what was salvageable of Bill’s career and his political records. “He got crazy in the incessant quest for understanding what he did wrong, which was masochistic,” remembers Wright.
The ousted governor stalked around the state apologizing for himself—and seeking solace. “The frustrations I went through in the seven years of being his chief of staff,” moans Wright, “of watching the groupie girls hanging around and the fawning all over him. But I always laughed at them on the inside, because I knew no dumb bimbo was ever going to be able to provide to him all of the dimensions that Hillary does.”
According to Wright, Clinton resisted the aphrodisiac effect of his powerful position more than many men. But, she admits, “Bill was always very careless, out of an unbelievable naïveté. He has a defective shit detector about personal relationships sometimes. He just thinks everyone is wonderful. He is also careless about appearances.”
Bill remembers during this dark period being so haunted by a sense of imminent death, “I would seize everything.” Hillary thinks he “viewed his father’s death as so irrational—so out of the blue—that it really did set a tone for his own sense of mortality. . . . Not just in his political career. It was reading everything he could read, talking to everybody he could talk to, staying up all night, because life was passing him by.” Uncharacteristically, her narrative begins to skip at this juncture: “I mean it was . . . it was an intense sense of . . . what he might miss at any moment.”
Some say Hillary took the political defeat harder than her husband did. When she gets down for brief periods, she withdraws into reading, playing dress-up with Chelsea, or trudging off to the Y to work out. She also prays. “Hillary has an unbelievable ability to control her personality and her moods,” marvels Wright. Sometimes, she pops off, not often, but stingingly. “The person on the receiving end never gets over it,” says Huber.
Hillary determined to do whatever it took to put her husband back in power. So, without a word from Bill, she shed her name for his. She also dyed her hair, traded her thick glasses for contacts, and feigned an interest in fashion.
The Clintons campaigned nonstop those next two years—on top of their jobs at respective law firms. The first of a series of baby-sitters was hired to live on the premises and be on twenty-four-hour call. Once their daughter began speaking, at age two, “Chelsea would say, ‘I want my mama,’” recalls Huber, but she soon learned to answer her own question: “Mommy go make ’peech.”
Commonly, a chief of staff and willful wife are natural enemies, but “Hillary made herself absolutely indispensable,” says Betsey Wright. She sat in on their strategy sessions. “Her own performance in selling and implementing his government programs was extraordinary. There were so many ways he needed her.”
Hillary also acted as his conscience. “I think that there have been many times when he would have liked to go home and turn on the TV and escape or just read a book,” concedes Wright, “and she would be in with a list of things people had called her about that day or that had to be done. He would be ‘Ah, couldn’t you just be a sweet little wife?’ instead of being this person helping me be what I’m supposed to be.
“Between Hillary at home and me at the office, pushing and pushing him, I know there was a point where he felt, These people need to leave me alone. I just want to do what I want to do. It was a rebellion.”
By the time voters returned the Clintons to the governor’s mansion in 1982, Hillary was ready with her beaded inauguration gown, Chantilly lace over charmeuse silk. And for Easter she made sure to pick out the sort of cartwheel-brimmed hat that would stir whispers of “Very nice” and “Just right.” As Jan Piercey puts it, “Hillary made her tradeoffs early on, and I think she steeled herself not to look back.”
The Clintons marched straight into the heat of public censure in ’83 when the governor appointed Hillary to chair the state committee on educational standards. She spearheaded a requirement for a onetime teacher examination. “Lower than a snake’s belly,” one school librarian called her. It was typical of the insults she faced for the next several years.
Hillary pushed on to introduce a consumer-rights approach to education, and the concept of continuing education for educators. She barnstormed around the state for hearings, stopping in all seventy-five counties. Her husband massaged his legislature until Arkansas was eventually tunneling seventy cents out of every tax dollar into education programs. These improvements—plus the governor’s timely hike last year in teachers’ salaries—won over the teachers’ union, which had been their bitterest foe. It was typical of the way their political partnership worked.
Hillary also injected her ideals into her corporate-board work. As a sort of resident sociologist on the board of Wal-Mart, a nonunion company with 380,000 employees, she contributed to the retailing giant’s ranking in The 100 Best Companies to Work for in America. Named head of Wal-Mart’s environmental committee, she reframed the question from waste disposal to education and launched the company on a recycling program. She “saved us from a false start on environmental policy,” says Rob Walton, son of the company’s founder.
The Clintons’ partnership looked perfect, at least from the outside. And then Bill stepped on another land mine from his past.
He was thirty-seven when he went through the worst year of his life. It was 1984, during his second term as governor, when a colonel of the state police phoned Betsey Wright, who dashed out to track down Hillary in a nearby restaurant and tell her, “We need to talk to Bill.” His twenty-seven-year-old half-brother, Roger, had been spotted selling cocaine. The state police wanted to inform Clinton about their undercover surveillance. Though he was pained by it, he told them to proceed. “It was,” says Hillary, “a much greater crisis than anything we’ve had in this presidential campaign.”
Bill’s half-brother did more than a year in prison, then came out only to discover that he was cross-addicted to alcohol. A drug counselor rounded up Bill, Roger, their mother, and even occasionally Hillary for intense family therapy. She led them through discussions on co-dependency. Clinton says the process helped him to learn things he never knew about himself. The counselor told them that the line between wanting to be a rock star—Roger’s dream—and a governor is a very thin one.
During “the next two or three years of discovery . . . they all came to grips with having grown up in the home of an abusive stepfather,” says Wright.
“After my brother got into trouble in 1984, it really had a profound impact on me,” explains Clinton. “I just couldn’t imagine. . . . I kept asking myself, How could I not have known this?”
The unfinished business of his past threw him again into a period of disequilibrium. He feared he might not be able to live up to the gr
eat expectations of his political life and his life partner. The soulsearching, which coincided with Bill’s mid-life passage from the age of thirty-seven to forty, also sparked a revival of the behavior that had earlier put strains on their marriage.
* * *
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In the summer of 1987 forty-year-old Bill Clinton was poised to launch his candidacy for the presidency. Political big shots flew into Little Rock for the announcement luncheon. Everything was ready.
But moments before the scheduled start, Bill backed out. He and Hillary had had a heart-to-heart talk about the longstanding rumors of his zipper problem. Chelsea was only seven. It was too soon. The press that July day caught a rare glimpse of Hillary Rodham Clinton spilling emotion: she stood behind Bill and wept.
The period that followed the climb-down from their joint national aspirations may have been the nadir of their marriage. A clue slipped out during the 60 Minutes confessional. Bill told Steve Kroft humbly, “If we had given up on our marriage . . . three years ago, four years ago, you know . . . If we were divorced, I wouldn’t be half the man I am today, without her and Chelsea.”
* * *
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So it was that Hillary Clinton woke up one morning last August in the Arkansas governor’s mansion, looked over at her husband’s sleepy face, and told him, “You almost have to do it,” meaning run for president.
“Do you have any idea what we’re getting into?” he asked.
“I know, it’ll be tough,” she replied. But she was ready to take her own platform national, as a campaign letter described it. And she was bored with the politics of Arkansas, where her husband has put in a full decade as governor. “She doesn’t like all the duties of First Lady,” confirmed her brother Hugh Rodham. “It’s tiresome and too local.”
Reflecting back on the personal journey he has made over the last four years, Bill says the fear of life running out at any moment has subsided. “It’s all different now. I think—in the aftermath of my brother’s encounter and all the stuff that Hillary and I went through, and where we are together now, and Chelsea—I’m so much more relaxed. I got into this race because I really felt I was strong enough and ready to be president . . . and because the things that Hillary and I have worked on together were more relevant to what has to be done in the country than anybody else.”
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