First In His Class (45 page)

Because of his nonchalant attitude, Clinton at times could be underestimated. Pogue, though impressed by Clinton's seeming indefatigability, was skeptical about whether his housemate could “get into the deeper meaning” of his law studies.
He was
“flabbergasted” when he discovered that Clinton could. The revelation came when they decided to write a paper together for constitutional law. After spending hours talking out the themes with Clinton, Pogue offered to write the first draft. He “worked
and worked and worked on it,” but in the end Clinton “got totally exasperated” and decided that they should write separate papers. Pogue had been a championship debater in college and considered himself no slouch when it came to presenting and defending positions. But Clinton “produced something of such remarkable subtlety and fluidity” that it made Pogue feel dense and fuzzyheaded by comparison.

T
HE
Yale Law School sits grandly on the north side of campus, an imposing golden-stone Gothic fortress occupying the entire block enclosed by Wall, York, Grove, and High streets. Set off by a moat of ivy,
it is
a self-contained attachment of buildings known as the Sterling Law Buildings, with its own dormitory, dining hall, and library, graced everywhere by wood-paneled walls, vaulted hallways, brick floors, and bay windows. Carved into the Gothic stone arches leading in from Wall Street are symbolic scenes from the courtroom, including a goat-headed client holding a money bag and a lawyer as parrot. Above the inner doorway are more carvings, including one classroom scene that is perhaps less symbolic, showing a professor gesticulating as he lectures students dozing with their heads on their desks. The architecture of the school was as solid and distinct as its pedagogical reputation: select, activist, and clinically oriented. But its faculty
in the
early 1970s was harder to characterize.

Here was a brilliant, eclectic gallery of professors. Fleming James, Jr., was the tweedy, gravel-voiced authority on civil procedure. Alexander Bickel, a curmudgeonly, old-fashioned moderate in the mold of his mentor Felix Frankfurter, advocated judicial restraint and disdained many of the sweeping decisions of the Warren Court. Charles Reich had emerged that year as a shy, ethereal counterculture guru with his best-selling book
The Greening of America
, which heralded a generational revolution that he predicted would transform America's corporate mind-set so that beauty and humanity were more revered than status and achievement. He taught a course that students called Kindergarten II, in which they could read virtually anything they wanted and were required to write papers only if they sought honors. Tom Emerson was a devoted First Amendment scholar and champion of free speech who sympathized with the student protesters. Charles L. Black, Jr., a liberal constitutional law expert, saved his passion for writing poetry. Boris Bittker, a federal income-tax specialist, took a keen interest in black slave reparations. Guido Calabresi was beloved as the bright, twinkling-eyed magician of torts. Burke Marshall, a former assistant attorney general under Robert Kennedy, was widely admired by the activist students and was of particular interest to Clinton because of his Kennedy connections.

Somewhat less popular was Eugene Victor Debs Rostow, one of the
intellectual architects of the Johnson administration's Vietnam policies. Rostow had served as the law school's dean during the late 1950s and early 1960s, and was regarded as a first-rate dean, but when he returned in 1969 after his stint in Washington he discovered that the climate had changed. He would stroll into the student cafeteria in his three-piece suit and launch into lunchtime discussions with students in which he would tell them that if only they were privy to the secret knowledge he possessed they too would support the Vietnam War. Sometimes the students argued with him; more often they shunned him or satirized him. One weekend they held a Rostow Brothers Film Festival on the effects of American bombing in Vietnam.

One of the giants of the faculty was J. William Moore, known in the legal world as a god of procedure. “J. Willie,” as the students called him, was short, rotund, and crusty, a cigar-chomping conservative Montanan who demanded that his students stand when they addressed him—all good lawyers have to talk on their feet, he would say. The women students considered Moore a male chauvinist who was reluctant to call on them. But he was respected nonetheless, a powerful figure who knew all the rules of procedure because he had literally written the book on them. It is hardly surprising that Clinton considered Moore one of his favorite teachers and spent a great deal of time picking his brain. Always drawn to esteemed older men, especially ones who appeared intimidating, Clinton worked Moore just as he had courted his toughest professors at Georgetown, Quigley and Sebes and Giles. They were not father figures in any traditional sense, yet in dealing with them Clinton surely explored aspects of a paternal relationship that he had never had.

Moore was, according to Pogue, “the kind of guy who, if you got into an argument on procedures with him, he would say, ‘Okay, do you want to argue this on state principles or federal?' and whichever you chose he would take you apart on it. But Bill would get in there and mix it up with him—he had an ability to deal with teachers who intimidated everyone else.” It was an early expression of Clinton as policy maven, a side of his personality that would become more apparent in later decades. Many of the arguments Clinton got into with Moore seemed esoteric. Pogue saw something deeper at work. “The thing is, Clinton understood that it was government. It was government in a real way. When you got into the issues, you realized that they involved the fundamental questions of what was in the public interest.”

Finally there was Robert Bork, who taught first-year constitutional law to Clinton's section at eight in the morning. Bork enjoyed playing the role of contrarian, which in this case meant that he was a conservative strict constructionist who disparaged the concept of antitrust and most other
forms of legal liberalism. A bulky, bearded chainsmoker, he marched into class with the demeanor of the former Marine that he was, his lecture notes scrawled on yellow pads, and strove to challenge and intimidate his students. One student naively tried to best Bork in an argument by stating, “Mr. Bork, Oliver Wendell Holmes said …” only to have Bork respond curtly, “Just because you quote Oliver Wendell Holmes, don't think it's checkmate!” Bork employed the Socratic method and would seek out the most radical members of his class as prospective targets of humiliation.

The law school was careening toward the end of a rebellious period when Clinton arrived, an era that Abraham Goldstein, who was named dean that year, called “the Dark Ages.” The atmosphere of quiet diligence that traditionally enveloped the solemn corridors of the Gothic law building was overtaken by an anti-establishment mood. The year before Clinton enrolled, a troop of long-haired, tie-dyed, Frisbee-playing students set up tents and an inflated air trampoline in the Quadrangle, which they said they had liberated, and lived there for weeks, bouncing off the walls and boasting of their alternative lifestyle of sex and dope. Hippies, radicals, mainstream antiwar activists, and black power advocates coexisted, their various protests and controversies enlivening the daily grind. In the law school corridor, a chart was posted detailing the results of an anonymous poll on drug use among law students. At first it showed a typical bell curve, with some students claiming heavy use, a larger number saying they were moderate users, and a smaller number saying they rarely or never smoked dope. By the end of the term, the chart was full of deletions and revisions, with the numbers piling up on the heavy-use side.

Students ceaselessly challenged the relevance of the curriculum, and some professors in turn complained that their young charges had lost all semblance of civility, mouthing off in class and showing up in sloppy jeans and work shirts. Students who once would have coveted positions on the law journal instead conspired to put out an alternative social policy review.
Bands of
students gathered informally at their dorm rooms or apartments to discuss alternative readings on legal issues: one such study group included Pogue, Clinton, and Bob Reich. Black students, emboldened by the national black power movement, which was then at its peak, formed a black student alliance and a black table of solidarity in the cafeteria, and launched several protests against administration policies.

Clinton moved
easily in this clamorous environment. During his occasional visits to the law school cafeteria, he found a seat for himself at the black table, a place rarely entered by other whites. Most of Clinton's friends felt that if the black students chose to sit together in solidarity, they should not interfere. Many of them would not have known how to enter that world anyway. But Clinton broke the self-imposed color barrier simply by
sitting down and talking with Coleman, who was a regular at the table, and Coleman's friends, Eric Clay, Rufus Cormier, and Lani Guinier. At first some blacks stared at him as though he was an unwanted interloper, but he soon won them over. “It took him no time to penetrate the group,” according to Coleman. “He disarmed people and eased whatever suspicions they might have had by using his sense of humor. He brought laughter with him. He was natural.” Clinton would talk about whatever the black students were talking about, or tell his own tales about life in Arkansas, or joke about how he had not gone to class or read any of his law books. Part of Clinton's success might have been rooted in his southernness. Coleman developed a theory about southerners who had gotten beyond bigotry: “They feel some part of the soul that touches each other. There is something about the rhythm that creates a compatibility. Bill had it.”

C
LINTON
used his southernness in other ways. He played with the country-bumpkin myth, as he had at Georgetown, taking delight in tales about the oversized watermelons of Hope. Nancy Bekavac, who befriended Clinton after he had borrowed her notes, would sit at his side at law school gatherings and watch him pose as a poor kid from Arkansas who could not be very smart. She would sit there and say to herself of whomever Clinton was debating, “Oh,
you poor
bastard, you are about to be rolled over.” Occasionally she would intrude. “Now, Bill,” she would say. “It wasn't Oxford, Mississippi, where you were a Rhodes Scholar, was it?”

Bekavac and Clinton went to movies together and sometimes stopped at an all-night diner on the highway between the law school and Milford, where they devoured french fries smothered in gravy and talked into the night. They shared an interest in the subject of lost fathers. Clinton had lost two fathers. Bekavac, an undertaker's daughter who grew up in the blue-collar town of Clairton, Pennsylvania, had lost her father during her senior year in high school. They both had younger brothers. Bekavac said she thought her brother Dan had become withdrawn since their father's death. He could talk about sports but nothing else. Clinton said his brother Roger also seemed to be taking the loss very hard. Clinton talked about the long process of his father's dying of cancer, about driving from Washington down to Duke to see him. He told Bekavac that by the time he realized that his stepfather was dying, he had very little time to make a relationship. “But at least you had time,” Bekavac said. “I walked down-stairs one day and my dad was dead of a heart attack and I didn't have any warning.”

Even among the vivid array of characters at Yale, Bekavac stood out. Once, while listening to Robert Bork's attack on the legal foundations of the civil rights laws enacted during the previous decade, Nancy Bekavac,
dressed in her daily uniform of blue jeans and a denim work shirt, guffawed loudly from the back of the room and yelled out, “You're joking!” She had spent the summer before law school in Vietnam, working as a stringer for journalists in Da Nang, and had returned fiercely antiwar and pro-soldier—a delicate balance. Bob Reich was intrigued by this woman in his constitutional law class who seemed even less afraid to challenge Professor Bork than he
was a
nd who wore the same clothes to class every day. “What is this,” Reich asked, “some kind of uniform?” Bekavac replied, “Yes. That's what we had in the institution!” Wherever there was a loud discussion in the cafeteria, Bekavac could usually be found in the middle of it, which naturally interested Clinton. He would stop by and kibitz on her arguments, seeming bemused by the fury. Eventually, she would turn to Clinton and inquire, “Well, what do you care about?” To which Clinton would respond, “‘Lots of stuff. But you're doing fine.'”

What did Clinton care about? Sometimes Bekavac was not sure. “You could never view his performance in a totally positive way. You wondered, is it real? There were moments that were so genuine that there was no doubt about it, and moments when you wondered—is this posture?” The genuine moments usually involved civil rights and the Vietnam War. Clinton also cared about politics, of course, believed in it with an intensity that was unusual among his peers. “Politics,” housemate Bill Coleman came to realize, “was a natural part of him, like does a frog croak.” Yale Law was a political place in many respects, yet not political in the manner that Clinton was. “
If you
scratched the surface of any Yale Law student you would find a U.S. senator waiting to be appointed,” said David Schulte, who edited the
Yale Law Journal
in Clinton's years there. “Very few were willing to do the work to get elected senator, but they all wanted to be there.”

What sustained Clinton was his peculiar combination of realism and enthusiasm. When friends delved into political conversations with him, they understood that he was not naive or pollyannaish. He studied the weaknesses of various politicians as much as their strengths. The savvy, practical manner in which Clinton approached the political world was perhaps best illustrated by a letter he wrote to Cliff Jackson during his Yale years when Jackson, then at the University of Michigan Law School, sought a White House Fellowship and asked Clinton for advice on how to go about it. In his letter on Yale Law School stationery, Clinton wrote: