Living History (9 page)

Although these children lived harsh lives, they were bright, hopeful and loved by their parents. The children dropped whatever they were doing to run down the road when their families came home from the fields. Fathers would scoop up excited kids, and mothers would bend over to hug toddlers. It was just like my neighborhood when fathers came home from the city after work.

But as I conducted my research, I learned how often farmworkers and their children were―and still too often are―deprived of basics like decent housing and sanitation. Cesar Chavez started the National Farm Workers Association in 1962, organizing workers in the California fields, but conditions in most of the rest of the country hadn’t changed much since 1960.

The hearings I attended in July 1970 were part of a series the Senate Committee had been holding to take testimony and evidence from farmworkers, advocates and employers.

Witnesses presented evidence that some corporations owned large farms in Florida where migrants were treated as badly as they had been a decade before. Several students I knew from Yale attended on behalf of the corporate clients of the law firms they were working for as summer associates. The students told me they were learning how to rehabilitate a corporate client’s tarnished image. I suggested that the best way to do that would be to improve the treatment of their farmworkers.

When I returned to Yale for my second year in the fall of 1970, I decided to concentrate on how the law affected children. Historically, children’s rights and needs were covered in family law and usually de fined by whatever their parents decided, with some notable exceptions, like the right of a child to receive necessary medical treatment even over the religious objections of his or her parents. But starting in the I g6os, courts began finding other circumstances in which children had, to a limited extent, rights separate from their parents.

Two of my law school professors, Jay Katz and Joe Goldstein, encouraged my interest in this new area and suggested that I learn more about child development through a course of study at the Yale Child Study Center. They sent me to meet the Center’s Director, Dr. Al Solnit, and its chief clinician, Dr. Sally Provence. I persuaded them to let me spend a year at the Center attending case discussions and observing clinical sessions. Dr.

Solnit and Professor Goldstein asked me to serve as their research assistant for Beyond the Best Interests of the Child, a book they were writing with Anna Freud, Sigmund’s daughter. I also began consulting with the medical staff at Yale-New Haven Hospital about the newly acknowledged problem of child abuse and helping to draft the legal procedures for the hospital to use when dealing with suspected child abuse cases.

These activities went hand-in-hand with my assignments at the New Haven Legal Services office. A young legal aid lawyer, Penn Rhodeen, taught me how important it was for children to have their own advocates in situations involving abuse and neglect.

Penn asked me to assist him in representing an African American woman in her fifties who had served as a foster mother for a two-year-old mixed-race girl since the child’s birth. This woman had already raised her own children and wanted to adopt the little girl.

The Connecticut Department of Social Services, however, followed its policy that foster parents were not eligible to adopt and removed the girl from the woman’s care and placed her with a more “suitable” family. Penn sued the bureaucracy, arguing that the foster mother was the only mother the little girl had ever known and that removing her would inflict lasting damage. Despite our best efforts, we lost the case, but it spurred me to look for ways that children’s developmental needs and rights could be recognized within the legal system. I realized that what I wanted to do with the law was to give voice to children who were not being heard.

My first scholarly article, titled “Children Under the Law,” was published in 1974 in the Harvard Educational Review. It explores the difficult decisions the judiciary and society face when children are abused or neglected by their families or when parental decisions have potentially irreparable consequences, such as denying a child medical care or the right to continue school. My views were shaped by what I had observed as a volunteer for Legal Services representing children in foster care and by my experiences at the Child Study Center in Yale-New Haven Hospital; I advised doctors on their rounds as they tried to ascertain whether a child’s injuries were the result of abuse and, if so, whether a child should be removed from his or her family and put into the uncertain care of the child welfare system. These were terrible decisions to make. I come from a strong family and believe in a parent’s natural presumptive right to raise his or her child as he or she sees fit. But my experiences in Yale-New Haven Hospital were a long way from my sheltered suburban upbringing.

There may have been child abuse and domestic violence in Park Ridge, but I didn’t see it. In New Haven, by contrast, I saw children whose parents beat and burned them; who left them alone for days in squalid apartments; who failed and refused to seek necessary medical care. The sad truth, I learned, was that certain parents abdicated their rights as parents, and someone―preferably another family member, but ultimately the state―had to step in to give a child the chance for a permanent and loving home.

I thought often of my own mother’s neglect and mistreatment at the hands of her parents and grandparents, and how other caring adults filled the emotional void to help her.

My mother tried to repay the favor by taking in girls from a local group home to assist her around our house. She wanted to give them the same chance she had been given to see an intact supportive family in action.

Who would have predicted that during the 1992 presidential campaign, nearly two decades after I wrote the article, conservative Republicans like Marilyn Quayle and Pat Buchanan would twist my words to portray me as “anti-family”? Some commentators actually claimed that I wanted children to be able to sue their parents if they were told to take out the garbage. I couldn’t foresee the later misinterpretation of my paper; nor could I have predicted the circumstances that would motivate the Republicans to denounce me.

And I certainly didn’t know that I was about to meet the person who would cause my life to spin in directions that Icould never have imagined.

Bill Clinton was hard to miss in the autumn of 1970. He arrived at Yale Law School looking more like a Viking than a Rhodes Scholar returning from two years at Oxford.

He was tall and handsome somewhere beneath that reddish brown beard and curly mane of hair. He also had a vitality that seemed to shoot out of his pores. When I first saw him in the law school’s student lounge, he was holding forth before a rapt audience of fellow students. As I walked by, I heard him say: “… and not only that, we grow the biggest watermelons in the world!” I asked a friend, “Who is that?”

“Oh, that’s Bill Clinton,” he said. “He’s from Arkansas, and that’s all he ever talks about.”

We would run into each other around campus, but we never actually met until one night at the Yale law library the following spring. I was studying in the library, and Bill was standing out in the hall talking to another student, Jeff Gleckel, who was trying to persuade Bill to write for the Yale Law Journal. I noticed that he kept looking over at me.

He had been doing a lot of that. So I stood up from the desk, walked over to him and said, “If you’re going to keep looking at me, and I’m going to keep looking back, we might as well be introduced. I’m Hillary Rodham.” That was it. The way Bill tells the story, he couldn’t remember his own name.

We didn’t talk to each other again until the last day of classes in the spring of 1971.

We happened to walk out of Professor Thomas Emerson’s Political and Civil Rights course at the same time. Bill asked me where I was going. I was on the way to the registrar’s office to sign up for the next semester’s classes. He told me he was heading there too. As we walked, he complimented my long flower-patterned skirt. When I told him that my mother had made it, he asked about my family and where I had grown up. We waited in line until we got to the registrar. She looked up and said, “Bill, what are you doing here? You’ve already registered.” I laughed when he confessed that he just wanted to spend time with me, and we went for a long walk that turned into our first date.

We both had wanted to see a Mark Rothko exhibit at the Yale Art Gallery but, because of a labor dispute, some of the university’s buildings, including the museum, were closed. As Bill and I walked by, he decided he could get us in if we offered to pick up the litter that had accumulated in the gallery’s courtyard. Watching him talk our way in was the first time I saw his persuasiveness in action. We had the entire museum to ourselves.

We wandered through the galleries talking about Rothko and twentieth-century art. I admit to being surprised at his interest in and knowledge of subjects that seemed, at first, unusual for a Viking from Arkansas. We ended up in the museum’s courtyard, where I sat in the large lap of Henry Moore’s sculpture Draped Seated Woman while we talked until dark. I invited Bill to the party my roommate, Kwan Kwan Tan, and I were throwing in our dorm room that night to celebrate the end of classes. Kwan Kwan, an ethnic Chinese who had come from Burma to Yale to pursue graduate legal studies, was a delightful living companion and a graceful performer of Burmese dance. She and her husband, Bill Wang, another student, remain friends.

Bill came to our party but hardly said a word. Since I didn’t know him that well, I thought he must be shy, perhaps not very socially adept or just uncomfortable. I didn’t have much hope for us as a couple. Be sides, I had a boyfriend at the time, and we had weekend plans out of town. When I came back to Yale late Sunday, Bill called and heard me coughing and hacking from the bad cold I had picked up.

“You sound terrible,” he said. About thirty minutes later, he knocked on my door, bearing chicken soup and orange juice. He came in, and he started talking. He could converse about anything―from African politics to country and western music. I asked him why he had been so quiet at my party.

“Because I was interested in learning more about you and your friends,” he replied.

I was starting to realize that this young man from Arkansas was much more complex than first impressions might suggest. To this day, he can astonish me with the connections he weaves between ideas and words and how he makes it all sound like music. I still love the way he thinks and the way he looks. One of the first things I noticed about Bill was the shape of his hands. His wrists are narrow and his fingers tapered and deft, like those of a pianist or a surgeon. When we first met as students, I loved watching him turn the pages of a book. Now his hands are showing signs of age after thousands of handshakes and golf swings and miles o£ signatures. They are, like their owner, weathered but still expressive, attractive and resilient.

Soon after Bill came to my rescue with chicken soup and orange juice, we became inseparable.

In between cramming for finals and finishing up my first year of concentration on children, we spent long hours driving around in his 1970 burnt-orange Opel station wagon―truly one of the ugliest cars ever manufactured―or hanging out at the beach house on Long Island Sound near Milford, Connecticut, where he lived with his roommates, Doug Eakeley, Don Pogue and Bill Coleman. At a party there one night, Bill and I ended up in the kitchen talking about what each of us wanted to do after graduation. I still didn’t know where I would live and what I would do because my interests in child advocacy and civil rights didn’t dictate a particular path. Bill was absolutely certain: He would go home to Arkansas and run for public office. A lot of my classmates said they intended to pursue public service, but Bill was the only one who you knew for certain would actually do it.

I told Bill about my summer plans to clerk at Treuhaft, Walker and Burnstein, a small law firm in Oakland, California, and he announced that he would like to go to California with me. I was astonished. I knew he had signed on to work in Senator George McGovern’s presidential campaign and that the campaign manager, Gary Hart, had asked Bill to organize the South for McGovern. The prospect of driving from one Southern state to another convincing Democrats both to support McGovern and to oppose Nixon’s policy in Vietnam excited him. Although Bill had worked in Arkansas on campaigns for Senator J. William Fulbright and others, and in Connecticut for Joe Duffey and Joe Lieberman, he’d never had the chance to be in on the ground floor of a presidential campaign.

I tried to let the news sink in. I was thrilled.

“Why,” I asked, “do you want to give up the opportunity to do something you love to follow me to California?”

“For someone I love, that’s why,” he said.

He had decided, he told me, that we were destined for each other, and he didn’t want to let me go just after he’d found me.

Bill and I shared a small apartment near a big park not far from the University of California at Berkeley campus where the Free Speech Movement started in 1964. I spent most of my time working for Mal Burnstein researching, writing legal motions and briefs for a child custody case. Meanwhile, Bill explored Berkeley, Oakland and San Francisco.

On weekends, he took me to the places he had scouted, like a restaurant in North Beach or a vintage clothing store on Telegraph Avenue. I tried teaching him tennis, and we both experimented with cooking. I baked him a peach pie, something I associated with Arkansas, although I had yet to visit the state, and together we produced a palatable chicken curry for any and all occasions we hosted. Bill spent most of his time reading and then sharing with me his thoughts about books like To the Finland Station by Edmund Wilson.

During our long walks, he often broke into song, frequently crooning one of his Elvis Presley favorites.

People have said that I knew Bill would be President one day and went around telling anyone who would listen. I don’t remember thinking that until years later, but I had one strange encounter at a small restaurant in Berkeley. I was supposed to meet Bill, but I was held up at work and arrived late. There was no sign of him, and I asked the waiter if he had seen a man of his description. A customer sitting nearby spoke up, saying, “He was here for a long time reading, and I started talking to him about books. I don’t know his name, but he’s going to be President someday.” “Yeah, right,” I said, “but do you know where he went?”