Living History (11 page)

Looking back to that time and to the person I was, I realize how scared I was of commitment in general and of Bill’s intensity in particular. I thought of him as a force of nature and wondered whether I’d be up to the task of living through his seasons.

Bill Clinton is nothing if not persistent. He sets goals, and I was one of them. He asked me to marry him again, and again, and I always said no. Eventually he said, “Well, I’m not going to ask you to marry me any more, and if you ever decide you want to marry me then you have to tell me.” He would wait me out.

Soon after we returned from Europe, Bill offered to take me on another journey―this time to the place he called home.

Bill picked me up at the airport in Little Rock on a bright summer morning in late June. He drove me down streets lined with Victorian houses, past the Governor’s Mansion and the State Capitol, built to resemble the Capitol building in Washington. We made our way through the Arkansas River Valley with its low-slung magnolia trees, and into the Ouachita Mountains, stopping at overlooks and dropping by country stores so Bill could introduce me to the people and places he loved. As dusk fell, we arrived, at last, in Hot Springs, Arkansas.

When Bill and I first met, he spent hours telling me about Hot Springs, founded around the hot sulfur springs that Indians had bathed in for centuries and that Hernando De Soto had “discovered” in 1541, believing them to be the fountain of youth. The thoroughbred racetrack and illegal gambling had attracted visitors like Babe Ruth, Al Capone and Minnesota Fats. When Bill was growing up, a lot of the restaurants in town had slot machines, and the nightclubs featured the famous entertainers of the 1950s―Peggy Lee, Tony Bennett, Liberace and Patti Page. Attorney General Robert Kennedy shut down the illegal gambling operations, which slowed business for the big hotels, restaurants and bathhouses on Central Avenue. But the city rebounded, as more and more retirees discovered the area’s mild weather, its lakes and natural beauty―and the generous spirit of so many people who lived there.

Hot Springs was Virginia Cassidy Blythe Clinton Dwire Kelley’s natural element.

Bill’s mother was born in Bodcaw, Arkansas, and raised in nearby Hope, eighty miles to the southwest. During World War II she attended nursing school in Louisiana, and that’s where she met her first husband, William Jefferson Blythe. After the war, they moved to Chicago and lived on the North Side, not far from where my parents were living. When Virginia became pregnant with Bill, she went home to Hope to wait for the baby. Her husband was driving down to see her when he had a fatal accident in Missouri in May of 1946. Virginia was a twenty-three-yearold widow when Bill was born on August 19, 1946. She decided to go to New Orleans to train to become a nurse anesthetist because she knew she could make more money that way to support herself and her new son. She left Bill in the care of her mother and father, and when she got her degree, she returned to Hope to practice.

In 1950, she married Roger Clinton, a hard-drinking car dealer, and moved with him to Hot Springs in 1953. Roger’s drinking got worse over the years, and he was violent. At the age of fifteen, Bill was finally big enough to make his stepfather stop beating his mother, at least when he was around. He also tried to look out for his little brother, Roger, ten years younger. Virginia was widowed again in 1967 when Roger Clinton died after a long battle with cancer.

We first met in New Haven during a visit she made to see Bill in the spring of 1972.

We were each bewildered by the other. Before Virginia arrived, I had trimmed my own hair (badly) to save money. I didn’t use makeup and wore jeans and work shirts most of the time. I was no Miss Arkansas and certainly not the kind of girl Virginia expected her son to fall in love with. No matter what else was going on in her life, Virginia got up early, glued on her false eyelashes and put on bright red lipstick, and sashayed out the door. My style baffled her, and she didn’t like my strange Yankee ideas either.

I had a much easier time relating to Virginia’s third husband, Jeff Dwire, who became a supportive ally. He owned a beauty parlor and treated Virginia like a queen. He was kind to me from the first day we met and encouraging of my continuing efforts to build a relationship with Bill’s mother. Jeff told me to give it time, she would come around. “Oh, don’t worry about Virginia,” he would tell me. “She just has to get used to the idea. It’s hard for two strong women to get along.”

Eventually Virginia and I grew to respect each other’s differences and developed a deep bond. We figured out that what we shared was more significant than what we didn’t: We both loved the same man.

Bill was coming home to Arkansas and taking a teaching job in Fayetteville, at the University of Arkansas School of Law. I was moving to Cambridge, Massachusetts, to work for Marian Wright Edelman at the newly created Children’s Defense Fund (CDF). I rented the top floor of an old house, where I lived alone for the first time. I loved the work, which involved a lot of travel and exposure to problems affecting children and teenagers around the country. In South Carolina I helped investigate the conditions under which juveniles were incarcerated in adult jails. Some of the fourteen-and fifteen-year-olds I interviewed were in jail for minor transgressions. Others were already serious offenders.

Either way, none of them should have been sharing cells with hardcore adult criminals, who could prey on them or further educate them in criminality. CDF led an effort to separate out juveniles and provide them with more protection and faster adjudication.

In New Bedford, Massachusetts, I went door to door trying to identify the source of a troubling statistic. At CDF, we took census figures of school-age children and compared those numbers to school enrollments. We often found significant discrepancies, and we wanted to determine where these unaccounted-for children were. Knocking on doors was revelatory and heartbreaking. I found children who weren’t in school because of physical disabilities like blindness and deafness. I also found school-age siblings at home, babysitting their younger brothers and sisters while their parents worked. On the small back porch off her family’s home in a neighborhood of Portuguese-American fishermen, I met a girl in a wheelchair, who told me how much she wanted to go to school. She knew she couldn’t go because she couldn’t walk.

We submitted the results of our survey to Congress. Two years later, at the urging of CDF and other strong advocates, Congress passed the Education for All Handicapped Children Act, mandating that children with physical, emotional and learning disabilities be educated in the public school system.

Despite the satisfaction of my work, I was lonely and missed Bill more than I could stand. I had taken both the Arkansas and Washington, D.C., bar exams during the summer, but my heart was pulling me toward Arkansas. When I learned that I had passed in Arkansas but failed in D.C., I thought that maybe my test scores were telling me something.

I spent a lot of my salary on my telephone bills and was so happy when Bill came to see me over Thanksgiving. We spent our time exploring Boston and talking about our future.

Bill told me he enjoyed teaching and loved living in a rented house on the outskirts of Fayetteville, a friendly, slow-paced college town. But the political world called, and he was trying to recruit a candidate to run against Arkansas’s only Republican Congressman, John Paul Hammerschmidt. He hadn’t found another Democrat in northwest Arkansas willing to run against the popular four-term incumbent, and I could tell that he had begun to consider entering the race himself. If he decided to do it, I wasn’t sure what it would mean for us. We agreed that I would come down to Arkansas after Christmas 1973

so we could try to figure out where we were heading. By the time I arrived for New Year’s, Bill had decided to run for Congress. He believed that the Republican Party would be hurt by the Watergate scandal and that even well-entrenched incumbents could be vulnerable. He was excited by the challenge and had started to put together his campaign.

I was aware of the announcement from Washington that John Doar had been selected by the House Judiciary Committee to head up the impeachment inquiry to investigate President Nixon. We had met Doar at Yale, when he served as a “judge” during a mock trial, in the spring of 1973. As Directors of the Barristers Union, Bill and I were responsible for supervising a simulated case for course credit. Doar, recruited as the trial judge, was a Gary Cooper type: a quiet, lanky lawyer from Wisconsin who had worked in the Kennedy Justice Department to help end segregation in the South. He had argued some of the government’s most important voting rights cases in federal court, and he had worked on the ground in Mississippi and Alabama during the most violent episodes of the sixties. In Jackson, Mississippi, he had stepped between angry protesters and armed police to prevent a potential massacre. I admired his courage and his relentless, organized application of the law.

One day early in January, while I was having coffee with Bill in his kitchen, the phone rang. It was Doar asking him to join the impeachment staff he was organizing. He told Bill that he had asked Burke Marshall, his old friend and colleague from the Kennedy Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division, to recommend a few young lawyers to work on the inquiry. Bill’s name was at the top of the list, along with three other Yale classmates: Michael Conway, Rufus Cormier and Hillary Rodham. Bill told Doar he had decided to run for Congress, but he thought the others on the list might be available. Doar said he would call me next. He offered me a staff position, explaining that the job would pay very little, the hours would be long and most of the work would be painstaking and monotonous. It was, as they say, an offer I couldn’t refuse. I couldn’t imagine a more important mission at this juncture in American history. Bill was excited for me, and we were both relieved to put our personal discussion on hold for a while longer. With Marian’s blessing, I packed my bags and moved from Cambridge into a spare room in Sara Ehrman’s Washington apartment. I was on my way to one of the most intense and significant experiences of my life.

The forty-four attorneys involved in the impeachment inquiry worked seven days a week, barricaded in the old Congressional Hotel on Capitol Hill across from the House office buildings in southeast Washington. I was twenty-six years old, awed by the company I was keeping and the historic responsibility we had assumed.

Although Doar headed the staff, there were two teams of lawyers: one selected by Doar and appointed by the Democratic Chairman of the committee, Congressman Peter Rodino of New Jersey; the other, appointed by the Republican ranking member, Congressman Edward Hutchinson of Michigan, and selected by Albert Jenner, the legendary litigator from the Chicago-based firm of Jenner & Block. Seasoned lawyers under Doar directed each area of the investigation. One of them was Bernard Nussbaum, an experienced and pugnacious Assistant U.S. Attorney from New York. Another was Joe Woods, a corporate lawyer from California with a dry wit and meticulous standards, who supervised my work on procedural and constitutional issues. Bob Sack, a lawyer with an elegant writing style who frequently leavened our serious moments with puns and asides, was later appointed to the federal bench by Bill. But most of us were young, eager law school graduates who were willing to work twenty-hour days in makeshift offices, reviewing documents, researching and transcribing tapes.

Bill Weld, later the Republican Governor of Massachusetts, worked with me on the constitutional task force. Fred Altschuler, a superb legal draftsman from California, asked me to help him analyze the reporting structure of the White House staff in order to determine what decisions the President likely made. I shared an office with Tom Bell, a lawyer from Doar’s family firm in New Richmond, Wisconsin. Tom and I spent late nights together wrestling over fine points of legal interpretation, but we also laughed a lot. He didn’t take himself too seriously and wouldn’t let me either.

Andrew Johnson was the only previous President to be impeached, and historians generally agreed that the Congress had misused its solemn constitutional responsibility for partisan political purposes. Dagmar Hamilton, a lawyer and professor of government at the University of Texas, researched English impeachment cases; I took on the American cases. Doar was committed to running a process that the public and history would judge as nonpartisan and fair, no matter what the outcome. Joe Woods and I drafted procedural rules to present to the House Judiciary Committee. I accompanied Doar and Woods to a public meeting of the committee and sat with them at the counsel’s table while Doar presented the procedures he wanted the members to accept.

There were never leaks from our investigation, so the media were grasping for any nugget of human interest to report. Since women were rare in this environment, their mere presence was considered newsworthy. The only problem I encountered was when a reporter asked me how it felt “being the Jill Wine Volner of the Impeachment inquiry”

We had seen the media focus on Jill Wine Volner, the young lawyer who had served in the office of Special Prosecutor Leon Jaworski. Volner conducted the memorable crossexamination of Rose Mary Woods, Nixon’s private secretary, about the missing 18½-

minute section of a particularly significant tape. Volner’s legal skills and attractiveness were the subject of many stories.

John Doar was allergic to publicity. He enforced a strict policy of total confidentiality, even anonymity. He warned us not to keep diaries, to place sensitive trash in designated bins, never to talk about work out side the building, never to draw attention to ourselves and to avoid social activities of all kinds (as if we had time). He knew that discretion was the only way to achieve a fair and dignified process. When he heard the reporter ask the question comparing me to Volner, I knew I would never be let out in public again.

After working on procedures, I moved on to research the legal grounds for a presidential impeachment and wrote a long memo summarizing my conclusions about what did―and did not―constitute an impeachable offense. Years later, I reread the memo. I still agreed with its assessment of the kinds of “High Crimes and Misdemeanors” the framers of the Constitution intended to be impeachable.