Part 4 (1/2)

The Clinton-Rodham romance deepened, and they soon moved in together in a student apartment for $75 a month. At this stage in their relations.h.i.+p, friends remember, their arguments were mostly friendly ones, dinnertime conversation over the issues of the day. The moment of truth came in 1972, when Hillary was to have graduated. The choice she made tells of the deepening of their relations.h.i.+p, and her hopes for a union with Bill. For the first time in her meteoric educational career, Hillary chose to slow down, to remain at Yale taking an extra year to graduate until Bill Clinton finished in 1973.

In the years to come, they worked together as co-dependents, as campaigners, as co-governor and co-president. The first project in which they put their minds together was as student lawyers arguing before a mock trial, the coveted Prize Trial. To all appearances, the trial appeared real, with local citizens and students brought in to serve on the jury and play-act the role of witnesses.

Bill and Hillary were brought in to argue for the prosecution in a case in which a policeman had been accused of murdering ”longhairs.”

Bill and Hillary crammed for a month, spending every spare moment prepping and challenging each other to do their best.

One spring day, they began their argument before Abe Fortas, former justice of the U.S. Supreme Court.

”Clinton was soft and engaging, eager to charm the judge and jury and make the witnesses feel comfortable, pouting when a ruling went the other way,” recounts Clinton biographer David Maraniss. ”Rodham was clear and all business.” One observer remembered ”that Rodham was never concerned about stepping on toes whereas Clinton would ma.s.sage your toes.”*16 Despite their best efforts, they lost the trial. But it was here that they hit on a winning formula that would serve them well in all the political trials to come. Bill does a great ”good cop,” the one who speaks more from sadness than from anger, who seeks to co-opt, not to condemn. Hillary, harder to attack behind the s.h.i.+eld of a woman's vulnerability, is the tough prosecutor, the one to level a charge or counter an attack with one of her own.

Their next partners.h.i.+p was in the McGovern campaign, in the summer and fall of 1972. Bill worked as coordinator of the McGovern campaign in Texas, a campaign based in a dusty office on Sixth Street in Austin, but one that perhaps should have been based in the Alamo.

Hillary was sent to San Antonio, where she led a Democratic voter registration drive. Even in a losing campaign, there are new influential friends to be made, new additions to the rolodex. One of them was a woman who would eventually become the master of the Clinton rolodex, future Little Rock chief of staff Betsey Wright.

Wright is known to most Americans as the person who would later coin the term ”bimbo eruption” and was portrayed as the rough queen of opposition research in Primary Colors.

There also were visits to each others' parents. On a trip to Park Ridge, Illinois, Bill Clinton made his customary good first impression. ”I was cutting the gra.s.s,” Tony Rodham says, recalling one day when he was eighteen years old. ”He climbed out of the car, came right over and started helping me cut the gra.s.s. We had a nice little chat, and, of course, I had something else I wanted to do so Bill immediately volunteered to help finish the job with the gra.s.s.

I think Dad came out of the house and put a stop to it.”*17 Hillary's family liked the engaging young man, but Hugh had his doubts. ”My father was more concerned that he was a Democrat than [from Arkansas],” Hillary said. ”Great arguments, great arguments.”*18 THE CHOICE.

About that time Bill, like Hillary, was given an opportunity to work on the House Judiciary Committee impeachment investigation of Richard Nixon. Had he done so, he would have set the groundwork for what would have been the political irony of the century. Instead, Bill decided to accept a job teaching law at the University of Arkansas at Fayetteville as a stepping stone to elected office. It was Hillary who was recruited to serve as counsel on the House Judiciary Committee, working long hours on an investigation that would lead to a committee vote that would result in the resignation of President Nixon. Yet well before the fatal moment came, a full month before, she flew down to Fayetteville to interview for a professors.h.i.+p of her own. The interview went well, and she was accepted.

While still in Was.h.i.+ngton, Hillary spoke often of her Arkansas boyfriend, her mood often turning on whether he had called. There were signs that she worried about whether he was spending time with other women. Hillary often declared to her colleagues that her boyfriend in Arkansas was going to become president someday.

No sooner had Richard Nixon walked down the red carpet, and given his broad wave and victory sign before boarding the plane that would carry him into exile, than Hillary asked her roommate, Sara Ehrman, to drive her to Arkansas in a 1968 Buick. During the trip, Ehrman tried to talk her out of it. Two years shy of thirty, Hillary had had opportunities galore: Offers from law firms, top positions in the Democratic Party, leaders.h.i.+p positions in major a.s.sociations--it was there for the taking.

If she stayed back East.

If she remained in Was.h.i.+ngton or moved to New York.

If she forgot about this guy from Arkansas.

”You have the world at your feet,” Ehrman said. ”Why are you throwing your life away for this guy?” When the two stopped in Charlottesville, Virginia at Monticello, Ehrman reminded her they were still close to the Was.h.i.+ngton Beltway, time enough to go back.

Hillary would hear none of it.*19 Enormous adjustments were necessary when she arrived in Arkansas. ”I grew up in the Land of Lincoln, and spent enormous amounts of time as a child studying Illinois and American history, reading biographies of Lincoln, making field trips to Springfield and other places that had some a.s.sociation with Lincoln,” Hillary reninisced.*20 ”So he [Lincoln] had a very big place in my historical imagination. I mean, it was just an open-and-shut case that Abraham Lincoln was by far the greatest President, because he had saved the Union and came from Illinois. I remember clearly one time traveling with my family on a trip to Florida, when I was nine, I think,” Hillary said. ”We got to Vincennes, Indiana, which is very southern Indiana, and checked into a little motel that had a little tiny TV. For the first time I saw a TV series called The Gray Ghost, which was about a Confederate soldier. And I was just astonished that anybody would have a television series in which the hero was a Confederate soldier. And then as we traveled farther south, I remember being in Alabama and stopping at gas stations where they sold Confederate flags and things like that.”

Bill Clinton was the first person she had ever met from Arkansas.

One time he picked her up at the airport and proceeded to make a hard sell for living in the South. What should have been a one-hour drive to Hot Springs took eight hours as he gave her a tour of state parks, scenic overlooks, favorite barbecue spots, and his favorite fried-pie place.

”My head was reeling because I didn't know what I was going to see or what I was expecting,” Hillary later said.*21 ”I had a lot of apprehension, partly because I didn't know anybody and did not know how I'd be received.

”The people were warm and welcoming to me. I felt very much at home,” she told Newsweek. ”And it was a shock to me because I had never lived in the South or in a small place before. It gave me a perspective on life and helped me understand what it was like for most people .... I think I've had a more interesting time of it than I would have if I had chickened out and not followed my heart.”*22 Yet, her awareness of being a Yankee outsider grew as she looked around her prospective future home, a hybrid state between the Ozarks and the muddy flats of the Mississippi River.

The time had also come for Hillary to be judged by Bill's family.

One can imagine Virginia's inner reactions when she saw Hillary.

”virginia loathed Hillary then,” Clinton friend Mary Fray recalled.

”Anything she could find to pick on about Hillary she would. Hillary did not fit her mold for Bill.”*23 Even Bill knew that Hillary's ”look” could be a public problem, and a.s.signed a friend the task of finding ways to mute the hippie Hillary with a few traditional southern touchups.

But Clinton's mother could never warm to this harsh, Yankee outsider.

Perhaps Virginia was the kind of mother who would always be jealous of any woman who attached herself to her beloved older son. More likely, she may have imagined Bill marrying the kind of woman who would make a great playmate, someone who would be fun to be with, someone who could cut up and carouse, someone, perhaps, like Bill's longtime occasional girlfriend Dolly Kyle Browning, an attractive blonde, who would later urge Clinton to seek treatment for his ”s.e.x addiction.” But if Virginia wanted a good-looking southern girl to show off as a daughter-in-law, Bill could not have disappointed her more.

To Hillary, Virginia must have appeared like a clown, with her penciled-in Joan Crawford eyebrows, and her Tammy Faye Bakker thick powder and heavy, coat of lipstick. There was a long testy period of sounding each other out.

According to friend Carolyn Staley, Bill sat his mother down, and told her in no uncertain terms that he would never ”marry a beauty queen.” It was to be Hillary or n.o.body.*24 And they would live in Fayetteville, the home of the University of Arkansas.

THE NARROW CENTER.

”If Arkansas is an hourgla.s.s, then Fayetteville is the narrow center,” former Razorback offensive tackle Webb Hubbell recalled in his memoirs: All these young people grow up all over the state in towns like Mountain Home and Bald k.n.o.b and De Valls Bluff and El Dorado (here p.r.o.nounced El Do-ray-do), and then at a certain point the kids all leave those hamlets and go off to the University of Arkansas at Fayetteville.

There, the continuity of the statewide bond is forged. For four years these people from all corners eat together, drink (a lot) together, sleep with one another, cheer for the Razorbacks together, and in so doing they form alliances, marital and otherwise, that will affect the future of the state for years. Because, after college, having all pa.s.sed through that unifying filter, they disperse once again back into the wider (but still not very wide) geography, taking with them an expanded field of acquaintances, loyalties, and bonds.

As a result, everything in our state--including its business and politics, which you can't separate from everyday life--is intensely personal. That's why it's like Main Street. Everybody's on a first name basis. And that means that political talk is personal talk, and business deals are personal deals, and personalities are more than issues. Furthermore, they don't want this system to change.*25 Bill Clinton had made a shrewd job choice. As his students graduated, they fanned out across the state with stories about their gregarious, energetic young professor who had been a Rhodes scholar and who was sure to make a name in Arkansas politics.

One thing was clear once Hillary and Bill settled in Fayetteville, they could not continue to live together. Having a liberal firebrand of a girlfriend was a detriment enough. Living in sin with her in Arkansas during the 1970s would have been political suicide.

It was during this time, as a law professor, that Hillary made a lifelong friend in political scientist Diane Blair, whose husband, Jim, became the general counsel for Tyson Foods, the giant poultry producer. Later, as governor, Clinton presided over the wedding of Diane and Jim. Jim Blair was so much older and more distinguished looking, that when they traveled out of state he was mistaken for the governor, and Clinton as a junior member of his entourage.

”Jim and I became friends with Bill and Hillary before Bill held any office, before Jim was at Tysons, indeed, before they were the Clintons and we were the Blairs,” Diane Blair recounts in The Clintons of Arkansas.*26 They had first met Bill at the 1972 Democratic National Convention. For a long time, Bill had sung Hillary's praises to Diane, promising her that they would be fast friends.

”I asked him why he didn't marry this wonderful woman and bring her back to Arkansas with him. He would love to, he said, but Hillary was so uncommonly gifted and had so many attractive options of her own that he felt selfish about bringing her to what would be his state and his political future.”*27 Diane was impressed with Clinton's sensitivity. It piqued her interest in Hillary all the more. She was not disappointed. In Hillary, the new law school professor, she found a soulmate.

”As two of the few female faculty members, we were acutely aware of the suspicion with which many old-timers still regarded women in academe,” she recalled. Hillary was one of the few women practicing law in northwest Arkansas, and was inevitably tagged a ”lady lawyer”

by a local judge.*28 They became regular lunchmates, tennis partners, and sounding boards about life in Fayetteville.

Hillary, always with an excess of energy, devoted much of her time to establis.h.i.+ng a legal clinic to train local law students in the legal needs of indigent people. She also secured funds from the Legal Services Corporation to operate a legal aid bureau in Northwest Arkansas.

Hillary had done her part. The time had come for Bill Clinton to make his intentions clear. Once, while driving around Fayetteville, the young couple had noticed a small brick-and-stonework house for sale. Then Hillary left for a trip to Illinois and the East Coast to explore her options.

When she returned, Bill drove her to the little house, offering a key and a ring.

They were married two months later, in October 1975, in a modest ceremony. It would have been common for an Arkansas woman to have spent a great deal of time preparing for her wedding. Hillary bought her dress at the last minute, an off-the-rack item frown Dillards department store.

They didn't plan a honeymoon. Later, Hillary's mother found a good package deal including Hillary's brothers. So the young couple honeymooned in Acapulco with Hugh, Dorothy, Hughie, and Tony in tow.*29 THE SECRET POLICE.

What explains the eventual evolution of the Clintons' marriage into a dynamic political partners.h.i.+p, the constant undercurrents of anger and recrimination, the shouting and the throwing of lamps and books?

How did they become so angry at each other that they would destroy the memory of Inauguration Day for one another, the day their lifelong dreams were fulfilled, with a public display worthy of James Carville's acid term, ”trailer trash”?

There is another side to their early relations.h.i.+p. Hillary was well acquainted with Arkansas long before she moved to Fayetteville. She had lived in Arkansas for part of 1974, when Bill Clinton had decided to run against inc.u.mbent Republican Congressman John Paul Hammerschmidt. The Clintons and their boosters rarely talk about that race, and for good reason. It was during this time that Hillary learned all too well what kind of husband Bill Clinton would make.

Two legacies were created during this period. First, in the Clinton marriage, the personal fused with the political. The risks that Bill Clinton took with his relations.h.i.+p with Hillary were inseparable from the risks he took with his own career.

The second legacy is the need for what Clinton consultant and friend d.i.c.k Morris called ”the secret police.” Hillary learned about private investigators in her work on behalf of the Black Panthers and the Communist apologists Robert Treuhaft and Jessica Mitford. Now Hillary was constantly checking up on Bill, not just to learn the extent of his betrayals, but to a.s.sess the danger he posed to their joint political career.