A Woman in Charge (12 page)

Marian and Peter married in 1968 and settled in Washington, where she continued her civil rights work. That year, she helped organize the Poor People's Campaign of Martin Luther King and his Southern Christian Leadership Conference. It was intended to be the most massive campaign of civil disobedience undertaken by the civil rights movement. Protest activities in Washington, including many intended to shut down the city, were to be supported by simultaneous demonstrations throughout the country. The campaign was meant to draw unusual attention to family issues and the punishing handicaps suffered by children born into poverty. But it failed to strike a national chord. Many of the fragile pitched tents and ramshackle huts erected by the campaigners, between the Capitol and the Lincoln Memorial on the Mall, were occupied that spring and early summer by poor black parents and their children. But internecine struggles in the civil rights movement, incessant rain and flooding that turned the encampment on the Mall into a village of mud huts, and the pall cast by Kennedy's and King's assassinations in the spring doomed the campaign.

From her experiences as an activist, her disappointment in the failed campaign, and her own intimate familiarity with black poverty in the South, Marian began to conceive the idea of a national organization that would become a voice for and legal defender of poor, minority, abused, and handicapped children. This was what Peter Edelman had talked to Hillary about in Colorado. When Marian came to Yale a few months later to speak about the state of the civil rights movement and her plans for a new organization dedicated to children's advocacy, Hillary introduced herself and raised the possibility of working for her when the school term finished in June. Edelman told her there was no money to pay her. Hillary persisted. What if she could figure out a way of getting paid? “Of course,” Edelman responded.

Marian's speech at Yale seemed to touch on the themes of Hillary's most ardent social, political, and personal concerns—both those she articulated to others and some she sensed perhaps only through the deepest of her own feelings. Since childhood, Hillary had heard teachers, preachers, politicians, and theoreticians talk about the future of the country and the world being in the hands of the next generation—hers. Almost all of it sounded like lip service to her, which was what she had tried to express both in her commencement speech and to the League of Women Voters.

The only public woman Hillary had ever looked to as a plausible role model had been Margaret Chase Smith. But Smith's accomplishments, unlike Edelman's, had derived almost literally from following in her husband's footsteps. Smith had been his secretary while he was a member of Congress, and upon his death was elected to finish his term. When she first ran for the Senate, Smith leaned heavily on her qualifications for governance—as a housewife: she compared management of public affairs with running a household. “Women administer the home. They set the rules, enforce them, mete out justice for violations, thus, like Congress, they legislate. Like the Executive, they administer; like the courts, they interpret the rules. It is an ideal experience for politics.” Increasingly, it seemed to Hillary that Smith was a fine role model—for a previous generation. Marian Wright Edelman was a woman of her own time.

Four weeks after the league convention, Hillary moved to Washington for the summer and went to work for her new mentor. Hillary had persuaded the Law Students Civil Rights Research Council to fund an internship—through a grant—for Edelman's new organization, the Washington Research Project. “I always liked people who could find ways to get things done,” said Edelman.

She put Hillary to work developing information for a Senate investigation into the living and working conditions of migrant farm laborers and their families. The subcommittee conducting the inquiry was headed by Senator Walter Mondale, who had worked closely with Edelman to obtain passage of the Child and Family Services Act, a legislative milestone that required compensatory education and day care for poor infant and school-age children. Hillary knew something of the conditions that migrant workers faced from her days babysitting for some of their children in Illinois. Several had attended her elementary school for a few months each year, and on Saturday mornings during the fall crop season, she babysat at a migrant camp with other members of her Sunday school class.

Hillary's assignment in Washington built on that experience. She was asked to come up with hard information about migrant children's health and education difficulties. Her research focused on the South, where migrant children were confronted by, among other things, a particularly cruel form of discrimination. School districts in Virginia first, and then increasingly in other Southern states, had turned formerly all-white public schools into private, segregated academies to escape court-ordered desegregation. The white children of migrant workers could not afford tuition for the academies; black and Hispanic children of migrant workers were excluded by race. The Nixon administration was inclined to grant tax-exempt status to the academies as part of its strategy for achieving an “emerging Republican majority”—by appealing to Southern segregationists who had traditionally voted Democratic. For Hillary, her summer was an education in how the most powerless citizens were further punished by malevolent government and misuse of the law.

With her introduction to Marian Edelman and work with Mondale's subcommittee, Hillary could sense that her experiential path was finally leading toward a satisfying destination, even a kind of maturity, in which her life's passions and concerns could be used in the spirit that John Wesley had enunciated. She studied the filthy camps for migrant workers who serviced the Florida citrus groves and tended the green fields of adjacent states, where they made possible the South's bountiful harvest. As in the fields outside the Chicago of her childhood, the people who suffered most grievously were the children, whose preordained futures were the product of their parents' misfortune. Her documentation of extreme examples of the cruelties of migrant labor life, especially the plight of migrant children without schooling, sanitation facilities, or decent housing, was the basis for some of the most dramatic testimony compiled that fall in hearings convened by Mondale. Among the migrant camps Hillary scrutinized were ones serving the Coca-Cola Company, which had recently acquired the Minute Maid brand. Her strategy was to have Coca-Cola's president, J. Paul Austin, brought before the committee to testify, and held up as an egregious example of corporate callousness. Here was a recognizable villain for the piece. The effectiveness of Austin's example would become a basic component of her approach to political action over the next quarter-century. Still, no legislation resulted from the committee's work. That in itself reinforced her negative impression of electoral politics.

The hearings, however, had made for good Washington theater, timed to mark the tenth anniversary of Edward R. Murrow's celebrated
Harvest of Shame
broadcast, which had vividly revealed the despicable conditions in which migrant workers and their children subsisted. Hillary took great satisfaction from what she had uncovered for the committee's investigation, but in reality, what she had learned was that the lives of migrants hadn't improved. At the hearings, several fellow students from Yale Law School sat across the witness table from the senators: they were present as summer associates on behalf of corporate clients of the law firms where they were interning. She made her contempt for such lawyering clear, and upbraided them for their choice. “I'm not interested in corporate law. My life is too short to spend it making money for some big anonymous firm,” she had said. Her summer working with Edelman became “a personal turning point.” She would concentrate her studies on how the law affected children.

That fall, she commuted between New Haven and Washington, an ideal vocational and educational arrangement. On Capitol Hill she monitored hearings for Edelman and evaluated legislation that might have impact on the lives of children. In New Haven, she developed a unique curriculum and work program for herself, which combined aspects of law, medicine, and psychology. She audited classes at Yale's medical school and worked at the Yale–New Haven Hospital on problems of children's physical and mental health, including child abuse, which was being seriously studied for the first time as a significant sociological phenomenon. She helped establish the hospital's legal procedures dealing with incoming cases of suspected child abuse. At the Yale Child Study Center, she spent much of the academic year observing clinical sessions with children and attending subsequent case discussions with their doctors. The center's director, Dr. Al Solnit, and one of her law school professors, Joe Goldstein, asked her to become their research assistant on a book they were editing with Anna Freud, Sigmund's daughter. The work,
Beyond the Best Interests of the Child,
became a standard text of the era. As a result of Hillary's work on the book, “I began to think through a lot of the issues that affect children, both visible and invisible, and the role that the law can and cannot play.” Like many law students, she was assigned to the local office of the federally funded National Legal Services Program, where a young legal aid lawyer named Penn Rhodeen instructed her on advocacy for neglected and abused children.

With Rhodeen, she represented a black foster mother in her fifties who had cared for a two-year-old since the child was born. The foster mother sought to adopt the girl, who was of mixed race. The woman had already raised two grown children of her own. However, the Social Services Department of Connecticut enforced its rule forbidding foster parents from adopting, and ordered the little girl placed with “a more suitable family.” Hillary and Rhodeen drafted a lawsuit against the state, but lost.

Despite losing the case, a children's rights movement seemed to be on the horizon, in which the courts would protect the interests of children as an aggrieved class, much as civil rights law had addressed the inequities and cruelties of racial segregation. In the next few years Hillary would write a series of articles in scholarly journals, beginning with “Children Under the Law,” published in 1974 in the
Harvard Educational Review.
It examined the legal problems and civic consequences of children suffering abuse or neglect, including those denied medical care by their parents or the right to continue school. Abused children, she argued, were “child citizens,” entitled to the same procedural rights under the Constitution as adults. She saw a connection between her mother's mistreatment as a child and the horrible things some parents were doing to their children. She wanted to help those children.

Hillary's academic writings and work as a children's advocate would later become a target of attack by the Clintons' enemies. The caricature of her work and its “subversive” implications were seen as part of the makeup of a leftist ideologue. By the 1992 presidential campaign, she was being characterized as “anti-family,” a woman who “believes that twelve-year-olds should have the right to sue their parents, and…compared marriage as an institution to slavery,” in the words of Patrick Buchanan, addressing the 1992 Republican convention. In fact, her scholarly writings were carefully wrought, highly regarded in the field of family law, and not terribly controversial. Historian Garry Wills, reviewing some of her writings in
The New York Review of Books,
found them impressive enough to call Hillary “one of the more important scholar-activists of the last two decades.”

Her decision to pursue children's studies at Yale and her work with Marian Edelman's Washington Research Project had left Hillary unusually settled and at ease with herself. Finally, she seemed to know what she wanted to do with her life. “I want to be a voice for America's children,” she said.

 

I
N HER FORTY-FIFTH YEAR,
not long after deciding against divorcing her husband and soon before moving to the White House, Hillary was asked to recall the most ecstatic experience of her twenties. She answered without hesitancy. “Falling in love with Bill Clinton.” There is no reason to disbelieve the spontaneity or substance of her response. Though
ecstasy
is a word not often associated with this most disciplined, controlled, and controlling of characters, it is perhaps the best explanation of the path she put herself on in the spring of 1971.

Having finally arrived at an exciting, satisfying choice of vocation, having settled into an easy relationship with an interesting, attractive man, and having seen her image burnished as one of her generation's brightest stars after only eighteen months of law school, Hillary suddenly allowed her life to be turned upside down in the most traditional of ways: by falling head-over-heels in love. Bill Clinton “was the wild card in her well-ordered cerebral existence,” said a friend. She had been seduced. But so had Bill Clinton. “He was the first man I'd met who wasn't afraid of me,” she said. His friends doubted his fearlessness. “I was afraid of us,” he said. More likely, his friends believed, he masked his fear of her. She was so out of the realm of his previous girlfriends, and he was so captivated by her attributes, that his self-assurance was severely tested. Meanwhile, she confessed to feeling a degree of comfort she had never known previously.

Their own oft-told story of meeting and falling in love—a version suitably dramatic, unencumbered by awkward mention of mutual ambition, clouded by several degrees of self-generated myth—ignores the fact that they had already been introduced and hardly took notice of each other on the first day of classes at Yale in the fall of 1970.

Bill Clinton arrived at Yale Law School from Oxford two semesters shy of a graduate degree, determined to embellish his credentials among the brightest and best of his generation of Americans. He was looking forward to going back to Arkansas to run for public office and eventually get to Washington as a congressman. If he succeeded, the whole gaudy panorama of political possibility would spread before him. Since high school his friends had been saying that he was destined for the White House. But he understood that, after Oxford, to fulfill his ambitions he needed the American equivalent of High Church, establishment credentials of the kind that could never be found at the University of Arkansas Law School, where he had briefly considered alighting. Yale Law School in 1970 was the perfect perch from which to glide toward his destination.