Living History (13 page)

Bill had won the primary for Congress and the Democratic runoff in June, with a little help from my father and my brother Tony, who spent a few weeks in May doing campaign grunt work, putting up posters and answering phones. It still amazes me that my diehard Republican father worked for Bill’s election, a testament to how much he had come to love and respect him.

By Labor Day, Bill’s campaign was picking up momentum, and the Republicans began a barrage of personal attacks and dirty tricks. It was my first up-close exposure to the efficacy of lies and manipulation in a campaign.

When President Nixon was in Fayetteville for the 1969 Texas vs. Arkansas football game, a young man climbed into a tree to protest the Vietnam War―and Nixon’s presence on campus. Five years later, Bill’s political opponents claimed that Bill was the guy in the tree. It didn’t matter that Bill was studying in Oxford, England, at the time, four thousand miles away. For years after, I ran into people who believed the charge.

One of Bill’s mailings to voters was not delivered, and the bales of postcards were later found stashed behind a post office. Other incidents of sabotage were reported, but no foul play could be proved. When election night came that November, Bill lost by 6,000

votes out of over 170,000 cast―52 to 48 percent. Long after midnight, as Bill, Virginia, Roger and I were leaving the little house that had served as Bill’s campaign headquarters, the phone rang. I picked it up, sure that it would be some friend or supporter calling to commiserate. Someone shouted into the phone, “I’m so glad that nigger-loving Commie fag Bill Clinton lost,” and then hung up. What could inspire such bile? I thought. It was a question I would ask many times in the years ahead.

At the end of the school year I decided to take a long trip back to Chicago and the East Coast to visit friends and people who had offered me jobs. I still wasn’t sure what to do with my life. On the way to the air port, Bill and I passed a red brick house near the university with a “For Sale” sign out front. I casually mentioned that it was a sweetlooking little house and never gave it a second thought. After a few weeks of traveling and thinking, I decided I wanted to return to my life in Arkansas and to Bill. When Bill picked me up, he asked, “Do you remember that house you liked? Well, I bought it, so now you’d better marry me because I can’t live in it by myself.”

Bill proudly drove up the driveway and ushered me inside. The house had a screenedin porch, a living room with a beamed cathedral ceiling, a fireplace, a big bay window, a good-sized bedroom and bath room and a kitchen that needed a lot of work. Bill had already bought an old wrought-iron bed at a local antiques store and had been to Wal-mart for sheets and towels.

This time I said “yes.”

We were married in the living room on October 11, 1975, by the Reverend Vic Nixon.

Vic, a local Methodist minister, and his wife, Freddie, had worked on Bill’s campaign.

There for the ceremony were my parents and brothers; Virginia and Roger; Johanna Branson; Betsy Johnson Ebeling, now married to our high school classmate Tom; F. H.

Martin, who had served as treasurer of Bill’s 1974 campaign, and his wife, Myrna; Marie Clinton, Bill’s cousin; Dick Atkinson, a friend from Yale Law School, who had joined us on the law school faculty; Bess Osenbaugh and Patty Howe, a close friend who had grown up with Bill in Hot Springs. I wore a lace-and-muslin Victorian dress I had found shopping with my mother the night before. I walked into the room on my father’s arm, and the minister said, “Who will give away this woman?” We all looked at my father expectantly.

But he didn’t let go. Finally Rev. Nixon said, “You can step back now, Mr. Rodham.”

After the ceremony, Ann and Morriss Henry hosted a reception in their big backyard, where a few hundred friends gathered to celebrate with us.

After all that has happened since, I’m often asked why Bill and I have stayed together.

It’s not a question I welcome, but given the public nature of our lives, it’s one I know will be asked again and again. What can I say to explain a love that has persisted for decades and has grown through our shared experiences of parenting a daughter, burying our parents and tending our extended families, a lifetime’s worth of friends, a common faith and an abiding commitment to our country? All I know is that no one understands me better and no one can make me laugh the way Bill does. Even after all these years, he is still the most interesting, energizing and fully alive person I have ever met. Bill Clinton and I started a conversation in the spring of 1971, and more than thirty years later we’re still talking.

Bill Clinton’s first election victory as Attorney General of Arkansas in 1976 was anticlimactic.

He had won the primary in May and had no Republican opponent. The big show that year was the presidential contest between Jimmy Carter and Gerald Ford.

Bill and I had met Carter the year before when he gave a speech at the University of Arkansas. He had sent two of his top lieutenants, Jody Powell and Frank Moore, to Fayetteville to help in Bill’s 1974 campaign, a sure sign he was surveying the political landscape with an eye toward a national run.

Carter introduced himself to me by saying, “Hi, I’m Jimmy Carter and I’m going to be President.” That caught my attention, so I watched and listened closely. He understood the mood of the country and bet that post-Watergate politics would create an opening for a newcomer from outside Washington who could appeal to Southern voters. Carter correctly concluded he had as good a chance as any, and as his introduction implied, he certainly had the confidence necessary to undertake the ego-mangling of a presidential campaign.

He also guessed that President Ford’s pardon of Richard Nixon would be a good issue for the Democrats. Although I believed Ford’s pardon was the right decision for the country, I agreed with Carter’s analysis that it would remind voters that Gerald Ford had been Richard Nixon’s choice to succeed the disgraced Spiro Agnew as Vice President. At the end of our meeting, Carter asked me if I had any advice for him.

“Well, Governor,” I said, “I wouldn’t go around telling people you’re going to be President. That could be a little off-putting to some.”

“But,” he replied with that trademark smile, “I am going to be.”

With Bill’s election assured, we both felt free to get involved in Carter’s campaign when he became the Democratic nominee. We went to the July convention in New York City to talk to his staff about working for him in the election. Then we left for a glorious two-week vacation in Europe that included a pilgrimage to the Basque town of Guernica.

I had wanted to visit the site that inspired Picasso’s masterpiece since Don Jones showed my Methodist youth group a reproduction of the painting. Twentieth-century warfare started in Guernica in 1937 when Francisco Franco, Spain’s fascist dictator, called in the Luftwaffe, Hitler’s air force, to annihilate the town. Picasso captured the horror and panic of the massacre in a painting that became an antiwar emblem. When Bill and I walked Guernica’s streets and drank coffee in the central plaza in 1976, the rebuilt town looked like any other mountain village. But the painting had branded Franco’s crime into my memory.

Upon our return to Fayetteville, Carter’s staff asked Bill to head the campaign in Arkansas and me to be the field coordinator in Indiana. Indiana was a heavily Republican state, but Carter thought his Southern roots and farming background might appeal even to Republican voters. I thought it was a long shot, but I was game to try. My job was to set up a campaign in every county, which meant finding local people to work under the direction of regional coordinators, mostly brought in from around the country. The Indianapolis campaign office was in a building that had housed an appliance store and a bailbonding firm. We were right across the street from the city jail, and the neon sign flashing “Bail Bondsman” still hung above the Carter-Mondale posters in the front windows.

I learned a lot in Indiana. One night I had dinner with a group of older men who were in charge of the Democratic Party’s get-out-the-vote efforts for Election Day. I was the only woman at the table. They wouldn’t give me any specifics, and I kept pressing for details about how many phone calls, cars and door hangers they planned to put out on Election Day. All of a sudden, one of the men reached across the table and grabbed me by my turtleneck. “Just shut up, will you. We said we’d do it, we will, and we don’t have to tell you how!” I was scared. I knew he had been drinking, and I also knew that all eyes were on me. My heart was beating fast as I looked him in the eye, removed his hands from my neck and said, “First, don’t ever touch me again. Second, if you were as fast with the answers to my questions as you are with your hands, I’d have the information I need to do my job. Then I could leave you alone―which is what I’m going to do now.”

My knees were shaking, but I got up and walked out.

Even though Carter did not carry Indiana, I was thrilled that he won the national election, and I looked forward to the new administration. But Bill and I had more immediate concerns. We had to move to Little Rock, which meant leaving the house we had been married in. We bought a 980-square-foot house on a quaint street in the Hillcrest section not far from the Capitol. Fayetteville was too far to commute, so I couldn’t continue teaching at the university, which saddened me because I enjoyed my colleagues and students.

I had to decide what to do next, and I didn’t think it was a good idea to work for any state-funded institution or in any other public job such as prosecutor, defender or legal aid lawyer where my work might overlap or conflict with that of the Attorney General.

I began to seriously consider joining a private firm, a career choice I had resisted before.

Representing private clients, I thought, would be an important experience and would help us financially since Bill’s salary as Attorney General would be $26,500.

The Rose Law Firm was the most venerable firm in Arkansas and reputed to be the oldest firm west of the Mississippi River. I had gotten to know one of the partners, Vince Foster, while I was running the legal aid clinic at the law school. When I tried to send law students into judge Butt’s court to represent indigent clients, the judge required the students to qualify their clients under a nineteenth-century statute that permitted free legal assistance only when a person’s assets were worth no more than ten dollars and the clothes on his or her back. It was an impossible standard to meet for anyone who owned an old clunker car or a television or anything else worth more than ten dollars. I wanted to change the law, and I needed the help of the Arkansas Bar Association to do it. I also wanted the bar to provide financial assistance to the legal aid clinic at the law school to help pay for a fulltime administrator and legal secretary since it provided real-world experience to future lawyers. Vince was the head of the bar committee that oversaw legal aid, so I went to visit him. He enlisted several other leading lawyers to help me, including Henry Woods, the state’s premier trial lawyer, and William R. Wilson, Jr., a selfproclaimed mule-skinner’s assistant―a “swamper”―who was also one of the best lawyers around. Judge Butt and I appeared before the state bar’s executive committee and presented our opposing arguments. The committee voted to support the clinic and endorsed repealing the statute, thanks to the support Vince recruited.

After the 1976 election, Vince and another Rose Firm partner, Herbert C. Rule III, came to see me with a job offer. In keeping with the firm’s steadfast efforts to follow proper procedures, Herb, an erudite Yale College alum, had already obtained an opinion from the American Bar Association that approved the employment by a law firm of a lawyer married to a state’s Attorney General and set forth the steps to be taken to avoid conflicts of interest.

Not all the Rose Firm lawyers were as enthusiastic as Vince and Herb about having a woman join them. There had never been a woman associate, although the firm had hired a female law clerk in the 1940s, Elsijane Roy, who stayed only a few years before leaving to become the permanent clerk for a federal judge. Later appointed to succeed that judge by President Carter, she became the first woman appointed to the federal bench in Arkansas.

Two of the senior partners, William Nash and J. Gaston Williamson, were Rhodes Scholars, and Gaston had served on the committee that had selected Bill for his Rhodes Scholarship. Herb and Vince took me around to meet them and the other lawyers, fifteen in all. When the partners voted to hire me, Vince and Herb gave me a copy of Hard Times by Charles Dickens. But who could have known what an appropriate gift that would be?

I joined the litigation section, headed by Phil Carroll, a thoroughly decent man, former prisoner of war in Germany and first-class lawyer who became President of the Arkansas Bar Association. The two lawyers with whom I worked most were Vince and Webster Hubbell.

Vince was one of the best lawyers I’ve ever known and one of the best friends I’ve ever had. If you remember Gregory Peck’s performance as Atticus Finch in To Kill a Mockingbird, you can picture Vince. He actually looked the part, and his manner was similar: steady, courtly, sharp but understated, the sort of person you would want around in times of trouble.

Vince and I had adjacent offices at the firm, and we shared a secretary. He was born and raised in Hope, Arkansas. The backyard of his boyhood home bordered the backyard of Bill’s grandparents, with whom Bill lived until he was four. Bill and Vince played together as little boys, although they lost touch when Bill moved to Hot Springs in 1953.

When Bill ran for Attorney General, Vince became a strong supporter. .

Webb Hubbell was a big, burly, likeable man, a former University of Arkansas football star and an avid golfer, which endeared him to Bill from the outset. He was also a great raconteur in a state where story telling is a way of life. Webb had a wealth of experience in all sorts of fields; he would eventually become Mayor of Little Rock, and he served for a time as Chief Justice of the Arkansas Supreme Court. He was great fun to work with and a loyal, supportive friend.