A Woman in Charge (10 page)

Suddenly, a jolt of electricity seemed to startle the audience, and many in it wondered how far Hillary Rodham would go.

Some of what followed was a heartfelt, if hackneyed, litany of the era's anti-capitalist cant, combined with a verbally tangled commitment to a kind of blissful searching that would seem utterly foreign to the Hillary Rodham Clinton of today. (“We are, all of us, exploring a world that none of us understands and attempting to create within that uncertainty. But there are feelings that our prevailing acquisitive [culture], and some things we feel [about] corporate life, including, tragically, universities, is not the way of life for us. We're searching for more immediate, ecstatic and penetrating modes of living.”)

Hillary's audacious response to Senator Brooke, and the passionate antiwar tone of her remarks (and perhaps the unintelligible part, too), seemed to the editors of
Life
magazine to exemplify what was happening on campuses that spring, and they chose to feature it, along with a photo of Hillary in her Coke-bottle glasses of the moment, wearing striped bell-bottom trousers, her hair a mangy tangle.

Though Geoff Shields was no longer her boyfriend and had moved to Vermont, they had remained close, and she called him shortly after the speech: “She said it had been hard for her to come around and make what was a political statement and a personal attack. There was some exhilaration but also nervous questioning about whether it had really been the right thing to do. She realized what she had done was important. But when it was over she wondered about what she had said. She asked, ‘Did I go too far?'”

The least noticed parts of her speech were in many ways a vivid reflection of Hillary's values, the values of her family and of the placid, secure, suburban environment of Park Ridge. Hillary noted “a very strange conservative strain that goes through a lot of New Left collegiate protests” which “harken[ed] back to a lot of the old virtues, to the fulfillment of the original ideas.” Her generation, like the country's Founders, had lost trust in government, and in powerful institutions. It extended even to the universities. Trust was “the one word that when I asked the class at our rehearsal what it was they wanted me to say for them, everyone came up to me and said, ‘Talk about trust.' [But] what can you say about a feeling that permeates a generation and that perhaps is not even understood by those who are distrusted?”

Her answer was to return to the old verities, the values of her Methodist upbringing and her parents' teaching, expressed in words that sounded much like the anti-liberal rhetoric of the Goldwater campaign she had supported in 1964. She praised “that mutuality of respect where you don't see people as percentage points, where you don't manipulate people, where you're not interested in social engineering for people.”

Her father, who had flown in for the day and then turned around and gone home, was among those listening in the audience, but not her mother. Hillary said her mother could not attend because a doctor had advised against her traveling due to health problems that required her to take blood-thinning medications. Hillary wrote she was very disappointed because of that. “In many ways, this moment was as much hers as mine.”

She closed her commencement address with a poem from one of her classmates, Nancy Scheibner. It began:

My entrance into the world of so-called social problems must be with quiet laughter, or not at all.

The Hollow Men of anger and bitterness

The bountiful ladies of righteous degradation

All
must be left to a bygone age.

3

Love and War at Yale

I was about to meet the person who would cause my life to spin in directions that I never could have imagined.

—Living History

B
ETSEY
W
RIGHT
once noted that Hillary Rodham and Bill Clinton “both passionately share the sense that they're supposed to make a difference in this world—and they had that before they met each other.” It was extraordinary how these two very different people meshed and enabled each other to better pursue their singularly huge ambitions. Neither likely had ever dreamed of finding such an ideal partner. A loving wife, a devoted husband, yes, a helpmate—but a fitting of gears such as these two exhibited was beyond the imagination (and certainly the experience in their own families) of either, according to those who had known Hillary or Bill before the two met. From the beginning of their relationship, their mutual friend Deborah Sale was aware of a consummate “sharing of values and ambitions that are really important.” But Sale sensed another shared trait, perhaps equally telling: “a little bit of a level of naïveté about both of them.”
Naive
is a word used with surprising frequency by those who know the two of them well.

At Yale, where they met in 1970, Bill and Hillary recognized almost immediately in the other the leavening and ameliorating attributes that would make for a partnership with limitless political possibilities. That Hillary would soon articulate, straight-faced and with total seriousness, what Bill had never been known to say aloud—her certainty that he would be president of the United States someday—underlies the point. But their falling in love—described by friends as real, rapid, and deep—was hardly part of some Faustian bargain. Until she met Bill, “Hillary was interested in her own capacity to help change the world,” Sale knew, and had chosen a career in the law “because she thought that lawyers could change most of the world.” The “female law-school virus,” as some skeptical lawyers had half-mockingly named it, was sweeping through women's colleges in 1969, the year Hillary graduated from Wellesley; instead of working toward teaching credentials, thousands of women graduating from college were going on to study law. Yet law degree in hand, “ultimately Hillary made the decision to join Bill Clinton, and to help him change the world. That was probably a reasonable decision for a woman in the early 1970s,” Sale believed.

Others who knew Hillary, especially those who identified themselves as feminists, disagreed. “The political world was ready for truly independent women,” said a Wellesley alumna of the period. “It seems wildly tragic that we know she could have been president if she had just not even married him.” By the time Hillary had graduated from Wellesley, she was already on her way to becoming a political meteor. She, not he, had been recognized in
Life
magazine, after all, as an emblem of her generation and its values. Betsey Wright, who would move to Washington in 1973 with the specific idea of advancing the electoral career of Hillary Rodham, had no doubt that Hillary could have reached the Senate or perhaps the presidency on her own. The question would be debated by millions of women, especially, during Hillary's White House years and even her first term in the Senate. In a common scenario, it was assumed that, without Bill Clinton's coattails, Hillary could have become head of a children's defense organization or legal aid program after law school and, by her early thirties, been drafted to run for Congress in Illinois or New York. “In fact, it's hard to think of a sadder example of a person who couldn't quite give up the old ideas,” said the same Wellesley alumna. “Her way of moving toward electoral politics was to marry someone who was going to run.”

Certainly upon her graduation from Wellesley that was not her intent. She was out to make her own mark on the world, her way. Until Hillary met and fell in love with Bill, she did not believe that her ambition could be fulfilled through marriage alone.

Hillary's ambition was always to do good on a huge scale, and her nascent instinct, so visible at Wellesley, to mediate principle with pragmatism—without abandoning basic beliefs—seemed a powerful and plausible way of achieving it. Bill Clinton, too, wanted to do good, and on a grand scale, but his gaze had always been fixed at the ground level of practical politics. Hillary's looked heavenward and toward John Wesley's message of service. Part of what Hillary brought to the union was an almost messianic sense of purpose, a high-mindedness and purity of vision that hovered above the conventionally political. Bill's political beliefs were strongly held, but “with Bill, you felt he just wanted to be president, whereas Hillary had this religious zeal,” said a friend from law school days. Hillary had seemed to believe since her adolescence that her life was an unending search to determine what was right and seeking to make it happen.

Toward that end, she had applied to and was accepted at both Harvard and Yale law schools, but delayed a final decision on which to attend. From the start, she leaned toward Yale. Its law school, rather than Harvard's, was in the forefront of a movement in the 1960s that regarded the law as a primary instrument of social change, in the tradition of Thur good Marshall and pioneering civil rights lawyers who recognized that the courts—not Congress, presidents, or state legislatures—had been the impetus for desegregating the nation, and protecting the civil liberties of its citizens. Hillary's choice of Yale was sealed during an exploratory visit to Harvard's law school, when she was introduced to an eminent professor whom she quoted as telling her, “Well, first of all, we don't have any close competitors. Secondly, we don't need any more women.”

Hillary arrived at Yale in the fall of 1969, one of 27 women among 235 law students. She had brought from Wellesley a reputation as both a bold leader and an activist that was perhaps greater than justified by the facts. “We were awed by her courage,” said Carolyn Ellis, one of her new classmates. “She arrived with many of us thinking of her as a leader already. We had seen her picture in the national magazine and here she was, three months later, in our class.” Her fellow law students presumed that a career in electoral politics was inevitable for Hillary, and that she had chosen Yale as the optimal trajectory of her ambition. Her first year on campus seemed designed to give her a rocket-powered liftoff. She had no visible self-doubt. Hillary “knew she wanted to be politically influential and prominent. She wanted recognition,” said a female classmate. As at Wellesley, her peers gravitated toward her, sensing that she was where the action was.

“Action,” in fact, was perhaps the best description of the wild aura that had seized the once staid and stolid precincts behind the ivied-fortress walls of the university and its law school in New Haven. An almost dizzying anti-establishment ethic pervaded the place. In its main quadrangle, declared “a liberated zone” by students who took over the space during Hillary's first weeks on campus, tents were pitched by various factions who announced their countercultural ethos: hippies, Black Power preachers, earnest antiwar advocates, radical leftists. Though the tents were intended for teach-ins and distribution of literature, they also became free motels for homeless students and hangers-on. In the midst of this chaos, marijuana was freely consumed, students propelled themselves above the tents and teepees from an inflatable trampoline, and Frisbees floated through the airspace. Hendrix, hard rock, and sitar strains played incessantly. Later in the semester, members of author Ken Kesey's (
One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest
) Hog Farm commune arrived on their psychedelic bus. Abraham Goldstein, who became dean of the law school the following year, referred to this period of Yale's history as “the Dark Ages.” Students had forced the faculty to institute pass-fail grading, and there was some truth to the statement that, if you could get admitted to Yale Law, it was almost impossible to flunk out. Lawyerly haberdashery had been replaced by tie-dyed shirts and dirty jeans.

For all the appearances of anarchy, however, there was something deadly serious about the atmosphere. The antiwar movement appeared sometimes on the brink of overwhelming the nation's established political process, and student leaders from Yale were among its most skilled strategists. Black Power advocates dominated the discussion of race in America—not proponents of integration or mere desegregation—and in Hillary's freshman year New Haven became the scene of a murder trial that objectified the country's twisted racial dynamic. Unbridled capitalism was also under philosophical and practical attack, spurred by young lawyers from Yale and elsewhere whose weapons were class-action lawsuits and other tactical matériel not favored in traditional law books.

As usual, Hillary carefully threaded her way through the extremes and patterned her own agenda. The notoriety she had achieved from her commencement speech at Wellesley led to an invitation from the League of Women Voters to join its Youth Advisory Committee. In October, she attended a league conference in Fort Collins, Colorado, convened to encourage young leaders to participate in mainstream politics, or at least in politics that respected traditional institutions and methods of discourse. Her participation left a lasting impression on some of her contemporaries. More important than the substance of the conference—on the question of lowering the voting age from twenty-one to eighteen, Hillary repeated the old slogan about young people being old enough to fight being old enough to vote—were the friends she made who would become part of the Rodham-Clinton constellation over the next three decades. They included Vernon Jordan, then heading a campaign to register black voters in the South as director of the Voter Education Project of the Southern Regional Council in Atlanta; David Mixner, a principal organizer of that year's Vietnam moratorium and later a leader of the gay rights movement; and Peter Edelman, then the associate director of the Robert F. Kennedy Memorial and chairman of the league's youth committee. Her meeting with Edelman was especially significant. He told her about the work of his wife-to-be, Marian Wright, a 1963 Yale Law graduate who had become the first black woman admitted to the Mississippi bar; now she was in the process of putting together an advocacy organization in Washington that would focus on the needs of the nation's poor children. Hillary was intrigued, and Peter urged that she and Marian meet soon. “You had an immediate sense you were in the presence of somebody who was just exceptionally impressive,” he said of Hillary.

For millions of college and university students in the spring of 1970, traditional matters of learning and classwork were secondary to the larger issues facing the country generally and, more directly, young people subject to the draft and the war in Vietnam. Rather than move rapidly toward ending the war, as he had promised in the presidential campaign of 1968, Richard Nixon had intensified the conflict as part of his and Henry Kissinger's strategy to achieve “peace with honor”—meaning that the United States would not stand down in Indochina until it had won enough on the battlefield to impose a political settlement foreclosing an outright communist victory. Pursuit of that strategy would cost more than twenty-five thousand American lives and hundreds of thousands of Vietnamese and Cambodian casualties during the four years Hillary was at Yale. That spring of 1970, her second semester, America and its campuses especially were roiled by protest and violence. White, middle-class members of the Weathermen and other supporters of violent action were building bombs and exploding them at military recruiting centers, banks, and other symbolic institutions of the state. The FBI, under its director, J. Edgar Hoover, was engaged in deadly warfare with urban blacks who gravitated to the Black Muslim movement and the Black Panther Party. The bureau's own lawbreaking, and that of the Nixon administration in infiltrating and disrupting the antiwar movement, was manifest. At times it seemed like the government “was at war with its own people,” Hillary said later. Constitutional guarantees of rights of assembly and free speech were being deliberately undermined from the top down.

The traditional route to student recognition in American law schools had always been appointment to the law review, and none was more influential or important than Harvard's and Yale's. But in the spring of 1970, an alternative law journal,
The Yale Review of Law and Social Action,
published its first issue, with Hillary listed on its board of editors. Its title proclaimed its purpose, as did an introductory note written by Hillary and her fellow editors: “This, the first issue of
Law and Social Action,
begins our exploration of areas beyond the limits of traditional legal concerns. For too long, legal issues have been defined and discussed in terms of academic doctrine rather than strategies for social change.
Law and Social Action
is an attempt to go beyond the narrowness of such an approach, to present forms of legal scholarship and journalism which focus on programmatic solutions to social problems.” The language seemed to pick up where her commencement speech (“for too long our leaders have used politics as the art of the possible…”) had left off.

Hillary's interests “were not in the legal academy,” a law school colleague noted. “They were in the legal profession and the use of law in the service of people.” This was especially true of serving the legal needs of the poor—one of the founding principles of the new review. The inaugural issue was dominated by two other concerns: the war and the Black Panther movement, the center of which had moved from Northern California to New Haven, “the grim Connecticut port city that housed the Yale campus, a bastion of white middle-class guilt surrounded by a black ghetto,” as one cynic put it. At the federal courthouse in downtown New Haven, Panther chairman Bobby Seale and seven of his comrades were on trial that spring for murdering a fellow Panther who had, supposedly, become a police informant. Thousands of protesters converged on New Haven for the trial, certain that the Panthers had been persecuted by Hoover's FBI and federal prosecutors under the thumb of Nixon's Justice Department. The trial ended in a hung jury.