First In His Class (59 page)

W
HILE
C
LINTON DIVIDED
his time between teaching law in Fayetteville and roaming the back highways of northwest Arkansas, Hillary Rodham was holed up in an office on Capitol Hill in Washington, surrounded by documents, protected by a double line of security, her movements circumscribed by the sensitivity of her mission as one of thirty-nine lawyers constructing a case for the removal of a president.
More than
twelve hours a day and seven days a week, Rodham worked at a desk in a mildewed suite on the second floor of the old Congressional Hotel. She rarely associated with anyone outside the closed circle of legal compatriots brought to Washington by John Doar, special counsel for the House Judiciary Committee's impeachment inquiry staff.
She did
not have her own apartment, but took an extra upstairs bedroom at the house of Sara Ehrman, a liberal Democrat whom she first met during the McGovern campaign in Texas. Ehrman, whose four-bedroom, four-bath house was a virtual youth hostel, rarely saw her industrious young boarder except around midnight when they might meet at the refrigerator in search of yogurt.

Rodham was twenty-six, less than a year out of law school, untested in the legal community, yet playing a coveted if minor role in the century's most gripping presidential drama. She did not arrive at the inquiry staff a complete stranger.
She and
Doar had met the previous spring, when Rodham and Clinton served on the board of directors of the Barristers Union at Yale Law and invited Doar to judge that year's student Prize Trial. After being selected by the Judiciary Committee to direct the impeachment inquiry, Doar built a staff quickly. Along with a few seasoned attorneys, his so-called chiefs, he needed a band of young legal warriors who could come to Washington for an indefinite period to work brutal hours for little pay. Rodham fit the job description, as did her classmate Michael Conway.

Prize recruits who showed the slightest hint of interest apparently were not given much choice by Doar, at least based on the way he hired Con-way. After his luminous years as a student at Yale Law, where
he had
defeated Rodham and Clinton in the Prize Trial competition, Conway had joined a major Chicago law firm. He had barely settled in when he took a call in the first week of January from his former teacher and friend at Yale, Burke Marshall. They had a one-minute conversation during which Marshall asked Conway if he was interested in working for Doar on the impeachment staff and Conway responded that it was a “fascinating idea” and that he would have to think about it. An hour later Doar called. “Mike, I talked with Burke and he said you'll be here,” Doar said. “I'll see you Sunday.” Conway was in Washington that Sunday. Later that week he was given a tiny side office in a suite at the Congressional Hotel which he realized had once been a bathroom. Appropriate, he thought, since he was assigned to a task force looking into alleged misdeeds of the Watergate-related group known as “the plumbers.”

Rodham arrived at about the same time and took a desk next to Tom Bell, a recent graduate of the University of Wisconsin Law School who had been recruited out of Doar's law firm in New Richmond, Wisconsin.
Their windows
looked out on a back alley. Rodham's first assignment was less intriguing than investigating the plumbers. Doar had organized the staff into two sections. Most of the lawyers were assigned to task forces in a section called Factual Investigation, which was to collect and examine evidence on activities that fell under the rubric of Watergate, including the break-in itself, the alleged coverup, the use of other dirty tricks in the 1972 campaign, as well as several non-Watergate concerns, including the secret bombing of Cambodia. Rodham was placed in a smaller section known as Constitutional and Legal Research. Its first major project was to research the constitutional grounds for impeachment: an important but scholarly task that not everyone was eager to do.

Rodham'
s section
analyzed the constitutional intent of impeachment and its historical basis in four hundred years of English history. Virtually every word in
their report
delineating the grounds for impeachment carried weight. At one meeting they spent four hours arguing over whether to use the phrase “to the modern ear” in describing how high crimes and misdemeanors should be interpreted. Their report concluded that “to limit impeachable conduct to criminal offenses would be incompatible with the evidence concerning the constitutional meaning of the phrase … and would frustrate the purpose that the framers intended for impeachment.” They found that in thirteen American impeachment cases, including ten of federal judges, less than one-third of the articles of impeachment explicitly charged the violation of a criminal statute.

The thoroughness of the report impressed Doar, who believed that the
precise wording of articles of impeachment would be of supreme importance. Rodham became one of his staff favorites. It did not matter that she had a partisan past, that she had worked for McGovern, for she seemed discreet in her demeanor, reverent of the process, and impartial about the expected outcome of the endeavor, at least in front of the boss.

Doar was
a seemingly nonpartisan figure: a moderate Republican who had held a high-profile role in the Justice Department's civil rights division during the 1960s and later served as president of the New York Board of Education. From his impeachment staff, he demanded objectivity and discretion. Fred Altshuler, a University of Chicago Law School graduate, was nearly fired during his first week for making a political remark that he thought was inconsequential but which Doar found injudicious. From then on, he understood Doar's dictum: Just report the facts. Doar pounded into his staff the notion that they had to show respect for the office of the president. Even in private conversations they were to refer to Nixon as the president.

Doar was solemn and complicated, variously eliciting frustration, exhaustion, and admiration from those who worked for him. His aides joked that he was the type of person they would die for but did not want to live with. He kept the door to his office closed. His obsession with organizational detail and neatness included a clean desk policy. A clean desk, he told his troops, represented a thorough and methodical mind. Early on Sunday mornings he roamed from office to office to reassure himself that no one had taken a day off. His occasional pats on the back, known as “Doar fixes,” took on greater importance because of his belief in meritocracy. People were constantly being shifted up or down in the staff hierarchy depending on how Doar viewed their work, which gave the place a measure of egalitarianism but also increased the anxiety level in an already tense atmosphere.

The methodical approach that Doar took to the inquiry was in itself a point of tension. He was so intent on avoiding the appearance of being out to get Nixon that some partisan Democrats on the Judiciary Committee referred to him as “the Republican counsel.” They preferred the style of one of his three senior associate special counsels, Richard Gates, a trial attorney and professor from Madison, Wisconsin, who had been brought in to help Chairman Rodino decide whether and how to proceed with the impeachment inquiry before Doar arrived.
Cates and
Doar respected each other, and years later became close friends, but at the time they held sharply different ideas about how to conduct the investigation. Cates was willing to draw conclusions about the evidence that had already been accumulated from the Senate Watergate Committee hearings and earlier investigative work. Doar started with a blank slate. Cates was a master of
the story line. He spent hours each day developing theories, placing details in their probable context. Doar, in the words of Tom Bell, “doesn't give a whit about” the story. “
He is
looking for detail after detail after detail, and when he's done, the story will take care of itself.”

B
OTH
styles rubbed off on Hillary Rodham. Among the inquiry staff of ninety lawyers, researchers, and clerks, she seemed “the least perturbed by tensions inherent in Doar's meritocracy,” according to Robin Johansen, who thought of Rodham as a self-contained person immune from the occasional backbiting. This image might have been both a symptom and a cause of Doar's regard for her. Bell, Rodham's office mate, noticed that Doar had more confidence in her than in most of the other rookie lawyers on the staff. “
On occasion
he would call her in and bounce something off her.” One day Doar had Rodham stand by his side at a hallway press conference. (
The way
she would later tell the story, her presence inspired ABC News correspondent Sam Donaldson to yell out to her: “How does it feel to be the Jill Wine Volner of the impeachment committee?”—comparing Rodham with a young woman lawyer on the Watergate special prosecutor—s staff.
Donaldson has
no such memory. “I don't mean this as a slam … but you've seen pictures of her in those days,” Donaldson said later. “I don't think younger bucks like me paid any attention to her.”)

Perhaps the television reporter did not pay much attention to Rodham, but her bosses on the impeachment staff certainly did. Bernard W. Nussbaum, another of Doar's top assistants, who came down to Washington from a Manhattan firm, drove Rodham home to Sara Ehrman's house many nights, striking up a paternal friendship and legal interdependence that would continue for decades. And Bell noticed that just as Doar took to Rodham, so too did Cates. “
There were
some tensions between Cates and Doar, and both confided in her. Hillary was in the middle.” At the same time that she operated as one of Doar's favorites, she shared some of Cates's frustrations with the slow pace of the investigation. “This thing is going down in flames!” Tom Bell remembered Rodham fuming to him one day when one of the president's men was acquitted of perjury charges vaguely related to Watergate. She was “devastated with the verdict,” according to Bell, fearful that things were moving so slowly that Nixon and his men might prevail in the courts and in Congress. Bell, who felt that his job was to be loyal to Doar, urged Rodham to be patient. “I said to her, ‘This is how lawyers work.'”

Bell said that he and Rodham both “saw Nixon as evil,” but in different ways. “Her opinion of him was more a result of the McGovern campaign and Vietnam and those kinds of issues. I saw him as evil because he was
screwing with the Constitution. She came at it with more preconceived ideas than I did.” Their perspectives on Nixon paralleled to some extent the way in which the two young lawyers viewed their assignments in Washington. “She saw the work as absolutely the most important thing in the world,” Bell said. “I saw it as important but also as a job. To her it may have been more of a mission.”

The more Bell got to know Rodham, the more it became apparent to him that “
she wasn't
as ideologically pure as the program for the players would indicate. Not that she made any false pretenses or anything. We were just two young lawyers who shared confidences.” Their conversations were blunt and open. “She wasn't afraid to say that you were full of shit. And if you told her the same, she would take it.”

I
T
was natural for members of the impeachment staff to confide in each other so much because they had little time to interact with anyone outside their closed circle and were discouraged from doing so. “We'
re lawyers,
not historians,” Doar would tell them. “Don't keep a diary. Don't talk to anybody. Just do your work.” When they left the office, it was usually in self-contained groups to eat lunch or dinner at their regular Greek and Italian restaurant hangouts on Capitol Hill. “We'd go out in groups and come back and work some more,” recalled Fred Altshuler. This classic foxhole culture led to extreme familiarity and occasional explosions. Rodham was sometimes a consoling presence. Robert Sack, who had taken a leave of absence from a major New York law firm to serve on the inquiry staff, had “
a small
but nasty to-do” with one of the senior counsels and left the office one night feeling “very much put-down.” As he was walking to his car several blocks away, he heard some voices behind him—“and there were Hillary and Fred Altshuler.” Rodham wanted to buck him up and tell him that everything was fine.

Doar was
obsessive about security. He instructed his staff never to talk in front of a window and to keep the shades drawn. He hired a retired Air Force colonel to arrange security in the office and develop methods of controlling sensitive information. Two types of wastebaskets were placed in each room, one for normal waste and the other for sensitive waste, meaning any papers or carbons related to the inquiry. Two clerks collected the sensitive waste each day, carried it to a van in the basement garage, and drove out to the District of Columbia waste-disposal site near RFK Stadium. Watergate reporters were hovering nearby at all hours of the day, especially columnist Jack Anderson's gumshoe assistants. One Anderson aide would camp out in the lobby and toss unanswered queries at staff members as they came off the elevator. Bell, who lived in an apartment
building up the street from the Congressional Hotel, found notes slipped under his door by an Anderson assistant that said, “We know who you are and it is your constitutional duty to let the country know what is going on.”