A Woman in Charge (15 page)

In Cambridge, Bill told Hillary how he loved the house, how he was enjoying teaching at the university—and that he was scouring his corner of the state to find a Democratic candidate who could take on Arkansas's only Republican member of Congress, John Paul Hammerschmidt. Hammerschmidt might be unusually vulnerable because of the toll Nixon's Watergate scandal was taking on members of the president's party as he fought to stay in office. Bill had been unable to persuade anybody to run. Hillary could tell he was thinking of doing it himself. She was relieved to be with him again, even elated. Their time together in Cambridge did little to clarify their situation, however. Her reservations about marriage and Arkansas remained.

Bill recognized that to be married to him “would be a high-wire operation,” and that Arkansas was not her preferred residence. He'd been fortunate to rub elbows with the ablest people of his generation, but he regarded Hillary as “head and shoulders above them all in political potential. She had a big brain, a good heart, better organizational skills than I did, and political skills that were nearly as good as mine; I'd just had more experience.” Her happiness was all-important to him, he said, and perhaps it was better if she proceeded without him. They agreed that during the upcoming Christmas holidays Hillary would visit Arkansas again, so they could work toward a decision, Hillary said.

She arrived in Fayetteville a few days after Christmas. She had hardly settled in when what must have seemed like Providence itself intervened, in the form of a phone call to Bill from John Doar, who had just been hired as chief counsel to the House Judiciary Committee's impeachment investigation of Nixon. Doar had served the previous year as a judge during the Barristers' Union Prize Trial at Yale—at the invitation of Hillary and Bill, who had admired him from afar. Now Doar was saying that Bill was at the top of his list of recommendations for young lawyers to join the impeachment committee staff. Would Clinton take off a year from teaching law and come to Washington, and suggest the names of other exceptional attorneys who might be available.

According to Hillary's version of events, Bill had already made up his mind to run for Congress before Doar's call, and she, too, was on the short list of Doar's candidates to join the impeachment staff. Bill, in his version, said that he was still undecided about running for office, but after talking with Hillary he made up his mind. He turned Doar down but recommended Hillary.

Whatever the exact version of events, when Hillary was offered the job, she jumped at the opportunity.

 

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into place, Doar's offer to Hillary represented a perfect solution to her and Bill's dilemma as a couple. Hillary did not want to move to Arkansas. But if Nixon were investigated by the Judiciary Committee, then impeached by the House and tried by the Senate (a real possibility, even likely), the process would almost certainly take more than a year. If Bill won election to the House of Representatives in November, he would begin the job in January 1975, about the same time the impeachment process was likely to end. Under such circumstances, Hillary's stature, at age twenty-seven, among the political cognescenti of the capital would be soaring (as indeed occurred after Nixon's resignation). They could accede in the capital as the city's golden young couple.

Hillary excitedly called Marian Edelman from Bill's house. Marian told her she could always return to the Children's Defense Fund, but that working on the impeachment inquiry was far more important.

Before leaving for Washington, Hillary accompanied Bill on a courtesy call to the home of former governor Orval Faubus in Huntsville, high on a ridge overlooking the Ozarks, about twenty-five miles from Fayetteville. Seventeen years after his famous (and shaming) refusal to permit the integration of Little Rock's Central High School and President Dwight Eisenhower's dispatch of federal troops to enforce the desegregation order of the Supreme Court, Faubus was still a canny operator, and as much as Clinton “disapproved of what he'd done at Little Rock,” he knew a thing or two about Arkansas politics. In fact, Faubus was an amalgam of Arkansas political traditions—the son of a communist/socialist organizer, a populist, a New Dealer, and an unrepentant segregationist. Calling on him was a price that wise Democratic candidates still paid. Hillary remained virtually silent through the visit four or five hour visit, as did Faubus's second (and much younger) wife, Elizabeth, whose hair was piled in a beehive. Bill sought answers to practical and historical questions: How did Arkansans cope with the Depression? What was life like in World War II Arkansas? Why was Faubus insistent on still defending his segregationist stand of 1954? How did he think the impeachment investigation of Nixon—and the president's difficulties generally—would figure in the congressional election? (Not much, Faubus replied.)

Meanwhile, Bill called David Pryor, then running for governor, to ask whether his girlfriend's taking a job on the impeachment inquiry staff might prove a political liability. It might even be an asset, Pryor believed.

In Washington, Hillary moved into a spare room in the townhouse of Sara Ehrman, her friend from the McGovern campaign in Texas. The atmosphere in the capital felt to her electric. She was part of a historic enterprise in which her work and ideas would contribute to monumental events. There was a further, personal dividend: by doing what she did best—research, analysis, absorbing the experience of accomplished colleagues and stimulating them with her own ideas, engaging her keen political sensibility in the most meaningful public service imaginable—Hillary could rebuild her self-confidence after failing the D.C. bar examination.

Her work reflected Doar's unorthodox and clever methodology. Only three or four of his most trusted aides had a full picture of how the impeachment investigation was being put together, and of the materials that would be used to build the case against Nixon. At the staff attorney level—Hillary's—Doar assigned scutwork, nuts-and-bolts tasks that required procedural research about the rules and requirements for impeachment, even who would sit where during hearings. The last impeachment by the House had been in 1936, of a federal judge. Hillary's first responsibility was to collate procedural information about previous impeachment proceedings, both American and English, from which the concept had been borrowed. The proclamation of the sergeant at arms was duly noted in the materials she put together: “All persons are commanded to keep silent on pain of imprisonment while the House of Representatives is exhibiting to the Senate of the United States articles of impeachment against.”

Hillary was one of three women on the staff of forty-four lawyers. The whole operation—ninety lawyers and secretaries, clerks, researchers, and typists—was directed by Doar on the faded premises of the old Congressional Hotel on Capitol Hill, which had been commandeered for the staff's exclusive use. Capital police patrolled the perimeter. Many bedrooms had been transformed into two-desk offices. Some of the larger bathrooms had been set aside for single-desk occupancy.

Like her colleagues, Hillary worked twelve-to eighteen-hour days, rising shortly after dawn. Doar's rules forbade the staff from making personal notes or keeping diaries or (not surprisingly) talking outside the office to any nonstaff members about the inquiry or their work. Given such strictures, colleagues tended to eat lunch and dinner together, then go home for a night's sleep and report back to the office in the morning.

One of the other women on the legal staff was Terry Kirkpatrick, an Arkansan who had been raised in Fort Smith and attended the University of Arkansas Law School in Fayetteville. As they got to know each other better, Hillary began asking Kirkpatrick about life in Arkansas and how a non-Southern woman like herself might fare there, especially in the state's tight-knit legal community. There weren't many female lawyers in the state, noted Kirkpatrick, so “you have to be three hundred percent better than any man to succeed. You have to pick your friends carefully. It's a very different culture. But the people when they accept you are loving and very supportive and very willing to accept new ideas once they get past the initial shock.” Morover, it would be “easy to make an impact there. You can be a big fish in a small pond.”

It was clear to Kirkpatrick that Hillary was “besotted,” “absolutely, totally crazy about Bill Clinton” the two or three times he was on his way to Washington to visit, Hillary's “face would change. It would light up.”

Others regarded her as near-obsessed with her relationship with Bill to the extent that her moods were dictated by the frequency of her phone conversations with him and the vibes she was picking up over the line from Arkansas. Tom Bell, with whom she shared an office, saw her “come in some mornings mad because he wouldn't have called her. She would be cranky. But she would come in other mornings, hit me in the biceps, and say, ‘You know, Tom Bell, Bill Clinton is going to be president of the United States someday.'”

Bernard Nussbaum, a former assistant U.S. attorney from New York, class of '61 at Harvard Law, was her immediate supervisor. One night when they were the last to leave the office, Nussbaum offered Hillary a ride home and she talked about Bill. Nussbaum, who regarded himself as Hillary's mentor, suggested that perhaps her young man needed some experience beyond law school before seeking a congressional seat.

“You don't understand,” she said. Her umbrage was palpable. “He's going to be president of the United States.” Nussbaum drew a deep breath, as he remembered it, and pronounced the idea absurd. Hillary remained unbowed. “You don't know him—I do. He is going to be president. You may think it's silly. It's not.” He'd never seen her angry before. At Sara Ehrman's house, she got out without saying another word and slammed the car door. Nussbaum did not understand that much more than a seat in Congress was at stake in Bill's candidacy. His victory would mean a life in Washington for Hillary, and she wouldn't be tethered like an Arkansas prisoner on a ball and chain.

 

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was virtually locked up in a building on Capitol Hill, Bill declared his candidacy from the Third Congressional District of Arkansas on February 25, 1974, with press conferences in the state's four principal cities: Hot Springs, where he grew up; Little Rock; Fort Smith, with the biggest concentration of voters in the Third District; and Fayetteville, where he set up his campaign headquarters not far from the University of Arkansas campus.

From the outset, his campaign staff heard Bill speak rapturously and repeatedly about his politically savvy girlfriend who was working back in Washington on the impeachment inquiry, and how much he was in love with her. What he did not convey was the degree to which she was already his closest confidante and adviser. From Washington, Hillary became a significant player in the campaign, phoning advice almost daily to the candidate and making her weight felt with Bill's campaign managers. Hillary's political advice to the Arkansans, however, didn't necessarily rub well. “She started calling from day one, several times a day at first,” campaign manager Ron Addington said. “She was telling me, You need to get this done, you need to get that done. What positions we had to fill.” The campaign's senior staff recognized that her insights about Bill were incisive. Indeed, with her work in McGovern's Texas campaign and now in Washington, her political experience was greater than some of Clinton's managers. But Hillary knew comparatively little about Arkansas, its unique history and political environment. Still, she didn't hesitate to give Addington and his deputies detailed lists of what she thought needed to be done. When her ideas weren't acted on, she was quick to express her dismay. On several weekends when she flew to Arkansas to be with Bill she invariably made her presence felt at campaign headquarters.

Betsey Wright, who was also commuting on weekends from Washington to help Clinton, was amazed at Hillary's ability to do her job on the impeachment inquiry and devote so much time to the campaign. Wright believes there was another reason Hillary traveled to Fayetteville: to run off Bill's other women. Bill and Hillary sometimes fought openly about it. “I was very much aware that he was dating other women,” Wright said.

At one point Hillary threatened in a phone call to go to bed with somebody in Washington if Clinton persisted in his womanizing. Campaign deputy Paul Fray said he overheard Bill's end of the conversation in which Clinton “about broke down and cried” and pleaded that Hillary not “go and do something that would make life miserable” for them both. Clinton had girlfriends in Little Rock and several towns in his campaign district, and, for several months, he had been seeing a young student volunteer from the University of Arkansas who worked at campaign headquarters. His staff, well aware of their candidate's propensities, turned a blind eye unless problems impeded on the campaign itself.

Wright, who for the next decade would devote herself to Bill Clinton's political life and the attendant task of minimizing damage to his future and his marriage from his sexual compulsions, described the environment of the 1974 campaign: “There were girls falling all over him like he was a rock star…just like they were for the rest of his life.” Bill's attitude, Wright said, was to pretend there was no inherent conflict with his relationship to Hillary, as if he were saying, in effect, “Hillary is a very important person to me, and she is one of the most incredible people I've ever known. And, hey, isn't this girl falling all over me cute? That was the context.” Wright didn't discuss it with Bill or Hillary. “I was chickenshit about it then, and I was chickenshit about it for the next twenty years of our lives.”

 

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bound by their mission, members of the impeachment staff formed extremely close relationships. “It had the characteristics of an intense political campaign but with much less sex,” said one of Hillary's colleagues. As she always did, Hillary formed important friendships with men in her orbit, but it seems they remained platonic.