First In His Class (50 page)

“Frank's dead.” Clinton got the word from Brooke Shearer and passed it on. Clinton was the one who had the addresses and telephone numbers. He had a card file full of them, constantly revised and updated for letters and late night calls and future political solicitations. He notified friends in London and Oxford and Washington and Boston, who called friends, and soon everyone in the Rhodes crowd knew that Aller was gone.
They all
had their own perspectives along with the grief.

Aller's problems, thought Rick Stearns, “ran deeper than angst over how many bombs dropped on Hanoi that day.” What did it mean, wondered John lsaacson, that Aller killed himself just at the moment when the major crisis in his life seemed to have lifted? To lsaacson it implied that Aller “needed the war to stay alive. He needed the external crisis to avoid the internal crisis.” Brooke Shearer, too, concluded that the war might have
kept Frank alive. His own “personal demons” finally killed him, she thought. Mike Shea thought perhaps Aller was the victim of an unanticipated sense of nothingness, He did something—resist—which he took very seriously, with the view that it was an important statement, “and in the end it had no effect on anything, it didn't even have an adverse effect on him, which depressed him.” Willy Fletcher, the Rhodes Scholar who came out of Washington State with Aller, thought about the east-west tension that his home-state friend felt—not the tension between the United States and Vietnam but between the two sides of Washington. Aller was a boy from the east side of the mountains, the conservative side, but he crossed over and became a liberal and then a leftist when he went west to school in Seattle, and that tug between east and west was something that Fletcher saw Aller struggle with from the moment he met him.

But Fletcher, too, was stunned by word of Aller's suicide. He found out through a circuitous route, from a note sent to him by Sir Edgar Williams, the warden of Rhodes House in Oxford. He remembers sitting at his desk in the Office of Emergency Preparedness in Washington, D.C., where he was serving out his stint as a naval officer, and opening the letter and immediately calling Clinton in New Haven. “Hey, Bill, what happened?” he asked. They talked for an hour, a wandering conversation in which they tried to bring Aller back in their memories at least. “I didn't know Frank as well as I thought I did,” Fletcher said at one point, to which Clinton responded, “Well, maybe none of us did.”

But for Bill Clinton and Strobe Talbott and Willy Fletcher and the Rhodes Scholars of the class of 1968. the sixties ended that day in September 1971 when Frank Aller shot himself in the head.

T
HERE
is some evidence that Clinton fell into another dark period after Aller's death, a time when he questioned the path he had chosen in life and the worthiness of the government and society he hoped to serve. The humor dropped out of his letters again, as it had during the days of his torment over the draft, replaced by weariness and doubt. A letter that he sent to Cliff Jackson, his competitor from Arkansas who was seeking a job in the Nixon White House, revealed a cynicism and tone of resignation. Of Senator Fulbright, his first political role model, Clinton told the conservative Jackson, “
His politics
are probably closer to yours than to mine.” He was giving advice to Jackson, but he was also clearly writing to himself, wondering whether he still had the desire to reach his life's ambition as a world leader. “One final thing: It is a long way from Antioch to the White House, and it may not be a bad thing to make the leap,” he wrote to Jackson, who had grown up in Antioch, Arkansas, not far from Hot Springs.
“Just always remember it's far more important what you're doing now than how far you've come. The White House is a long way from Whittier and the Pedernales too; and Khrushchev couldn't read until he was 24, but those facts leave a lot unsaid. If you can still aspire go on; I am having a lot of trouble getting my hunger back up, and someday I may be spent and bitter that I let the world pass me by. So do what you have to do, but be careful.”

Jackson, in law school at the University of Michigan, was confounded by Clinton's advice. He had never before seen the disillusioned side of Clinton; he had always thought Clinton w
as to
o much the gladhander and conniver. Jackson wrote back asking Clinton to explain himself. Clinton sent him a short note that again sounded as though it was meant more for the writer than the receiver: “As to the ‘disturbing undercurrents' in my letter, they were not meant to sway you from your course, or to express disapproval at the kind of things you seem destined to do—only to say—these things too must be considered. You cannot turn from what you must do—it would for you be a kind of suicide. But you must try not to kill a part of yourself doing them either.”

Clinton took a seminar that year taught by Jan Deutsch which focused on corporations and society. The ideas at issue included whether corporations could be compelled to treat workers fairly, deal honestly with consumers, and refrain from polluting the environment. Corporate responsibility was a vital topic in intellectual circles in the early 1970s, with academics churning out monographs on concepts ranging from worker ownership to placing executives under psychoanalysis. Each student was required to write a paper and read it to the class. Clinton went first. The question his paper addressed was whether
the pluralist
model of society, with its mix of corporations, regulatory agencies, labor unions, consumer groups, environmentalists, citizen advocates, chambers of commerce, could place enough pressure on corporations to make them responsible. Leftist intellectuals led by Herbert Marcuse believed that the answer was no. The pluralist model was a fraud in the final analysis, Marcuse argued, and freedom and democracy were illusions in the corporate capitalist system.

Greg Craig, who was Rodham's friend and another student in the seminar, remembers Clinton's presentation and how surprised he was by it. Everyone at Yale Law knew that Clinton wanted to be a politician and that he still believed strongly in the system. But “the whole thrust of his paper,” Craig thought, was that “the pluralist model just didn't work. He said it didn't work because the money was out of whack. The corporations had all the money and they used it to defend themselves. Bill argued that the system was corrupted.” Clinton seemed in “the depths of despair” then about the system to which he wanted to devote his life. “But if you had
dreams, that was a terrible time,” Craig said later. “If it was a tough time for him, an angry, hostile period of his life, it was consistent with what a lot of us felt.”

What was the partnership of Clinton and Rodham like in those early days? The first public display came that spring, near the end of his second and her third year in law school. Rodham had decided to extend her studies at Yale Law to a four-year program. To look back on how they interacted then is to appreciate a dynamic that would change little through the years. Yale Law students were required to perform as lawyers either presenting appellate arguments in moot court or trying cases at mock trials. The trials, run by the Barristers Union, a student organization, were both major entertainment and serious competition. Cases were scripted like Broadway dramas. New Haven residents and Yale students were recruited to serve on the jury and enact the parts of witnesses. Student teams took the defense and prosecution cases and competed on two levels: the jury verdict was interesting but secondary. What counted was how each lawyer's performance was evaluated. At the end of the year
there was
a Prize Trial in which the top-ranked lawyers competed against each other, two to a side plus two alternates. A judge was brought in, usually one of national renown. The Prize Trial was an event in New Haven, drawing a packed house to a law school classroom transformed into a courtroom.

The Prize Trial for 1972 began at ten in the morning of April 29. Rodham and Clinton were the prosecution team. They had spent evenings and weekends for most of that month preparing their case, often working at the house of their alternate, Robert Alsdorf. Rodham ran the prep sessions. Alsdorf remembered at least one night when Clinton fell asleep—“he just nodded off'—while they were discussing the case. Michael Conway and Armistead Rood formed the defense team. Abe Portas came to New Haven to preside as judge, a rather controversial choice in that he had only recently resigned from the U.S. Supreme Court in some disrepute. Elliot Brown, a first-year student, wrote the case, basing it on a recent trial in the South. Posters tacked up around campus before the trial summarized the case: “Herb Porter is a tough cop who doesn't like long-haired kids. But is that enough motivation to beat and kill someone? What did happen at the infamous road block on Rte. 34 last October? The newspapers called this the worst case of police brutality in Kentucky history. ‘Maybe so,' says the defendant, ‘But don't blame me.'”

Early in the trial, Clinton made the key prosecution argument on the admission of evidence. He argued vehemently, several people in the audience that day remember, and openly displayed his chagrin when the evidentiary ruling went against him. “Hillary was much calmer,” according to Elliot Brown. “You could see her say, ‘Okay, we lost it, let's move on.' ”
Brown, as the scriptwriter, knew better than anyone that Rodham and Clinton had a difficult case. He had to give both sides an argument, which made it hard to write a scenario without a reasonable doubt, in essence stacking the deck against the prosecution. And along with the tough case, Rodham and Clinton were up against Michael Conway, perhaps the sharpest student in their class. Conway, who went on to become a top litigator in Chicago, had arrived at Yale Law after serving as editor of the student newspaper at Northwestern University. He had honed his skills like an ace reporter and could deliver an oral argument as though he were dictating a perfect story to the rewrite desk. The defense won the verdict and Fortas gave Conway the top prize.

But what lingers in the minds of most of those who watched the trial is the way the partnership of Clinton and Rodham operated. 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. Rodham was clear and all business. Alsdorf was struck by the contrasting styles, noting that Rodham was never concerned about stepping on toes whereas Clinton “would massage your toes.” Nancy Bekavac, watching from the back of the room, later said of the pair, “It was like Miss Inside and Mr. Outside. I thought, ‘What is this—Laurel and Hardy?' Hillary was very sharp and Chicago and Bill was very
To Kill a Mockingbird
.”

CHAPTER FIFTEEN
 
TEXAS DAYS

A
FTER MEETING THE
two state coordinators that the 1972 presidential campaign of South Dakota Senator George McGovern had dispatched to Texas for the general election, Houston political organizer Billie Carr lodged a sarcastic complaint with campaign manager Gary Hart. “
You said
you were sending some young men down to help us, but I didn't know they'd be this young!” Carr huffed. “One of them looks ten and the other twelve!”

The one who looked ten was the bushy-haired law student from Yale, Bill Clinton. Passing for twelve was a mustachioed political writer from Washington, D.C., named Taylor Branch. They were not only young but utterly unknown in Texas,
which was
how Hart wanted it. He realized that it was problematic to send out-of-state political operatives to a contentious place like Texas, where mortal enemies might conspire against an outsider who dared to tell them what to do. Yet he found it necessary. The historically sharp disputes between liberal, moderate, and conservative Democrats in Texas, to say nothing of the personality clashes within each of the factions, had intensified with the nomination of McGovern, a certified liberal. It would be virtually impossible to find native Texans who were not linked to one of the warring factions and thus unacceptable to others. Beyond that, Hart had established a policy of placing organizers in states other than their home states “so they would not be tempted to look after their own careers instead of McGovern's best interests.”