A Woman in Charge by Carl Bernstein
With Rhodeen, she represented a black foster mother in her fifties who had cared for a two-year-old since the child was born. The foster mother sought to adopt the girl, who was of mixed race. The woman had already raised two grown children of her own. However, the Social Services Department of Connecticut enforced its rule forbidding foster parents from adopting, and ordered the little girl placed with “a more suitable family.” Hillary and Rhodeen drafted a lawsuit against the state, but lost.
Despite losing the case, a children’s rights movement seemed to be on the horizon, in which the courts would protect the interests of children as an aggrieved class, much as civil rights law had addressed the inequities and cruelties of racial segregation. In the next few years Hillary would write a series of articles in scholarly journals, beginning with “Children Under the Law,” published in 1974 in the Harvard Educational Review. It examined the legal problems and civic consequences of children suffering abuse or neglect, including those denied medical care by their parents or the right to continue school. Abused children, she argued, were “child citizens,” entitled to the same procedural rights under the Constitution as adults. She saw a connection between her mother’s mistreatment as a child and the horrible things some parents were doing to their children. She wanted to help those children.
Hillary’s academic writings and work as a children’s advocate would later become a target of attack by the Clintons’ enemies. The caricature of her work and its “subversive” implications were seen as part of the makeup of a leftist ideologue. By the 1992 presidential campaign, she was being characterized as “anti-family,” a woman who “believes that twelve-year-olds should have the right to sue their parents, and…compared marriage as an institution to slavery,” in the words of Patrick Buchanan, addressing the 1992 Republican convention. In fact, her scholarly writings were carefully wrought, highly regarded in the field of family law, and not terribly controversial. Historian Garry Wills, reviewing some of her writings in The New York Review of Books, found them impressive enough to call Hillary “one of the more important scholar-activists of the last two decades.”
Her decision to pursue children’s studies at Yale and her work with Marian Edelman’s Washington Research Project had left Hillary unusually settled and at ease with herself. Finally, she seemed to know what she wanted to do with her life. “I want to be a voice for America’s children,” she said.
IN HER FORTY-FIFTH YEAR, not long after deciding against divorcing her husband and soon before moving to the White House, Hillary was asked to recall the most ecstatic experience of her twenties. She answered without hesitancy. “Falling in love with Bill Clinton.” There is no reason to disbelieve the spontaneity or substance of her response. Though ecstasy is a word not often associated with this most disciplined, controlled, and controlling of characters, it is perhaps the best explanation of the path she put herself on in the spring of 1971.
Having finally arrived at an exciting, satisfying choice of vocation, having settled into an easy relationship with an interesting, attractive man, and having seen her image burnished as one of her generation’s brightest stars after only eighteen months of law school, Hillary suddenly allowed her life to be turned upside down in the most traditional of ways: by falling head-over-heels in love. Bill Clinton “was the wild card in her well-ordered cerebral existence,” said a friend. She had been seduced. But so had Bill Clinton. “He was the first man I’d met who wasn’t afraid of me,” she said. His friends doubted his fearlessness. “I was afraid of us,” he said. More likely, his friends believed, he masked his fear of her. She was so out of the realm of his previous girlfriends, and he was so captivated by her attributes, that his self-assurance was severely tested. Meanwhile, she confessed to feeling a degree of comfort she had never known previously.
Their own oft-told story of meeting and falling in love—a version suitably dramatic, unencumbered by awkward mention of mutual ambition, clouded by several degrees of self-generated myth—ignores the fact that they had already been introduced and hardly took notice of each other on the first day of classes at Yale in the fall of 1970.
Bill Clinton arrived at Yale Law School from Oxford two semesters shy of a graduate degree, determined to embellish his credentials among the brightest and best of his generation of Americans. He was looking forward to going back to Arkansas to run for public office and eventually get to Washington as a congressman. If he succeeded, the whole gaudy panorama of political possibility would spread before him. Since high school his friends had been saying that he was destined for the White House. But he understood that, after Oxford, to fulfill his ambitions he needed the American equivalent of High Church, establishment credentials of the kind that could never be found at the University of Arkansas Law School, where he had briefly considered alighting. Yale Law School in 1970 was the perfect perch from which to glide toward his destination.
He arrived at precisely the right place and at the most politically opportune moment. Though Eugene McCarthy had been swamped by traditional Democrats at Chicago, and Robert Kennedy was dead, a single Senate race that year—in Connecticut—had captivated the imaginations of their acolytes. Joseph D. Duffey, a former seminarian, thirty-eight years old, president of the liberal Americans for Democratic Action, a professor of ethics, and ardent campaigner for civil rights and peace in Vietnam, meant to revive the electoral hopes crushed by the nomination of Hubert Humphrey and the election of Richard Nixon. Fueled by the shootings at Kent State and the extension of the war to Cambodia, the itinerant irregulars of the antiwar army massed in New Haven to push Duffey’s candidacy forward. The war would not be stopped unless opposition votes in Congress forced the president’s hand, they believed. Duffey faced the same dilemmas that would confront Clinton throughout his career as a progressive, Southern Democrat: how to create a center from the competing elements within the Democratic Party and still attract independent votes; how to spur basic political and civic change without antagonizing middle-class white voters.
Though Duffey failed—in a three-way race against the incumbent senator, Thomas J. Dodd, running as an Independent; and Republican congressman Lowell P. Weicker Jr.—Bill Clinton did not. He acquired an encyclopedia of practical political knowledge and a retinue of friends who would make the jump enthusiastically from Duffey’s candidacy to Clinton’s in Arkansas, and later onto the national stage. Thus, Duffey’s unsuccessful Senate campaign was invaluable in establishing the Clinton political network and philosophy. Its ethic was articulated by Duffey in a self-evaluation of his run:
It is always tempting to blame our defeat on those people who never understood what we were trying to say or who rejected our efforts to lead them. But the fact is that the search for a new politics in America is still at a very primitive stage…. Many of our policies have been formulated as if the nation were composed of only two major groups—the affluent and the welfare poor. But somewhere between affluence and grinding poverty stand the majority of American families living on the margins of social and economic insecurity. The new politics has thus far not spoken to the needs and interests of those Americans. We have forgotten that they, too, feel the victims of decisions in which they have no voice.
Until election day in November, Clinton had hardly attended his law school classes. He’d worked from dawn until past midnight on Duffey’s campaign, and then returned from Third District congressional headquarters in New Haven to sack out in the rambling beach house he rented on Long Island Sound with three classmates. After election day, his study habits changed little. Roommates would find him reading a book after midnight, assume it was a law text, and then discover it was a novel. He slept less than five hours a night, wrote copious letters to former girlfriends (who were numerous), and, when he did study, managed an intensity that could push him successfully through an exam with barely a couple of hours of preparation.
Within weeks of his arrival in New Haven, it was obvious that he possessed an extraordinary appeal that attra
Bekavac would become president of Scripps College in California. She had spent the summer before law school in Vietnam as a journalist, working for the Catholic Welfare News and Metromedia. Bill Clinton, she believed, regarded his own life, too, in novelistic terms, with his surprising, simultaneous capacity for both self-awareness and denial, and—for someone so focused—his tortured road to decision-making.
And then there were the women.
“While law school and politics were going well,” Clinton said later, “my personal life was a mess. I had broken up with a young woman who went home to marry her old boyfriend, then had a painful parting with a law student I liked very much but couldn’t commit to. I was just about reconciled to being alone and was determined not to get involved with anyone for a while.”
Enter Hillary Rodham.
“One day,” he recalled, “when I was sitting in the back of Professor Emerson’s class, I spotted a woman I hadn’t seen before…. She had thick dark blond hair and wore eyeglasses and no makeup, but she conveyed a sense of strength and self-possession I had rarely seen in anyone, man or woman.”
By then, it would have been almost impossible for Clinton not to have known about her. She was a recognizable star on campus, much discussed among the law school’s students, known as politically ambitious, practical, and highly principled.
When they had been introduced on the first day of classes, neither had taken much notice. Clinton was at a table in the law school cafeteria with old friends, among them Bob Reich, who had been at Oxford with him and knew Hillary from her undergraduate days as a student leader. Reich remembered sitting next to Clinton, “And Hillary came up in back of us, and I just said, ‘Hillary, it’s great to see you.’ Blah-blah-blah. Small talk. ‘Let me introduce you. This is Bill Clinton. Hillary, Bill. Bill, Hillary,’ and that was it…. Obviously my introduction didn’t take.”
Clinton was dating another woman at the time, and was perhaps preoccupied with his work on Duffey’s campaign. Whatever the case, neither he nor Hillary seems to remember the introduction. But the impression she made on him the next semester in Professor Emerson’s class, where her hand seemed always upraised and she invariably knew the right answers, was irrevocable.
He began conspicuously trailing her around campus. Hillary said she first took notice of him in the law school student lounge, “looking more like a Viking than a Rhodes scholar”—long hair, ragged beard, six foot two and a half and 220 pounds. He was talking to someone about how Arkansas grew the biggest watermelons in the world—something he talked about a lot.
Yet, according to their autobiographies, they didn’t exchange a word until the spring of 1971 in the Yale Law library one evening. Clinton had spotted a friend in the stacks, Jeffrey Gleckel, and went over to say hello to him. As they conversed, Gleckel noticed that “little by little…his concentration was disappearing. He listened but was saying much less. His glance began to wander and he seemed to be looking over my shoulder. I was trying to find a way to look in an inconspicuous manner and so I sort of turned around halfway as an excuse to scratch my leg or something and there I saw, seated nearby at a desk with a stack of books and notepads, Hillary Rodham, who was also an acquaintance.”
Gleckel “politely excused myself,” leaving no other witnesses except the two protagonists.
Hillary, in Living History, said he had been glancing at her off and on so she went and introduced herself. Bill, who said he had been literally dumbstruck by the boldness of her approach, said hello and they soon parted company.
At the time, Hillary was still dating David Rupert and spending weekends with him and another couple in Bennington, Vermont, in a two-bedroom apartment carved out of the corner of a barn that they called the “chicken coop.” Apparently two more months passed before she and Clinton spoke again.
On the last day of the spring term, while walking from a politics and civil rights class, Bill asked Hillary where she was headed. She said she was on her way to register for the next semester’s classes. They arrived together at the office of the registrar, who asked why Bill was there since he had already registered.
Hillary laughed when Bill confessed it was a ploy to be with her, and they “went for a long walk that turned into our first date,” Hillary wrote.
Bill suggested they walk to a Mark Rothko exhibit at the Yale Art Gallery, but they found the museum closed because of a campus-wide strike by unionized employees. He talked his way in by volunteering to remove the garbage that had piled up. Hillary was impressed. That night, he took her up on her invitation to come to an end-of-term party Hillary and her roommate, Kwan Kwan Tan, were giving in their dorm. Bill phoned a few days afterward and could tell from Hillary’s voice that she was ill. He showed up thirty minutes later with some orange juice and chicken soup, Hillary said. She was impressed by his range of interests, everything “from African politics to country and western music.” Hillary now knew that he “was much more complex than first impressions might suggest.” They soon became a couple.
Nancy Bekavac was one of the first friends he introduced her to. “I remember being struck by this aggressive, ambitious, bright woman who studied child development and cared about children,” she said. “It was unusual in some ways. Every young woman was running away from, you know, childhood and family issues. Jesus Christ, the last thing you wanted to do was family law…. It was very unusual. And you couldn’t find an obvious biographical or autobiographical hook. For me, it was a given: That’s where she was going.”
Though Clinton later professed to not want another romantic involvement so soon after the breakup of his latest relationship, his housemates discerned in him almost a desperation that he not lose her. He coached them on helping him impress Hillary during her early visits to the beach house. His roommates—Douglas Eakeley, a friend from Oxford, Douglas Pogue, and William T. Coleman III (whose father was serving as secretary of transportation and was the only black in Richard Nixon’s cabinet)—were amused at the unusual deference Clinton exhibited toward this new woman in his life. The pair seemed to be doing a kind of pas de deux, pushing and pulling yet with a lightness of step that was uncharacteristic of both of them. There was an ease. “They were very funny together, very lively,” said Pogue. When Bill would lapse into his home-fried, good ole boy Southern caricature, she would affectionately mock him. “Get to the point, will you, Bill!” she’d say (she would do that throughout their lives together). It took some time for him to adjust to her straightforward Midwestern ways.
Early on, their discussions turned political. She sensed in him a commitment to public service that transcended mere ambition for office. He came from a state that lagged behind the rest of the country in education, economic prosperity, and cultural sophistication, but “he cared deeply about where he came from, which was unusual,” she noted. “He was rooted, and most of us were disconnected.”
Within a few weeks of their encounter in the library, Hillary and Bill were to be seen striding across campus hand in hand, obviously smitten. Deborah
She “looked like a hippie,” according to one close friend, dressed in blue jeans and sandals, her hair below her shoulders, her face enunciated by thick glasses, the frames of which she was constantly changing. Physically, it seemed she almost went to lengths to hide her more attractive features.
“Their values are the same. Their ambitions are the same,” Sale recognized. “The passions that they have in life are the same. The kind of engagement that they have, intellectual and otherwise, is really something. And to my mind they were a perfectly reasonable couple.” Sale could see that Hillary, despite disguising it, “was always very attractive in many ways,” including physically, though her glasses tended to overpower some of her best features. Hillary’s reputation was “of someone who was thoughtful…and deep. He really had the reputation of being quick.” In fact, as Sale and others would come to recognize, he was the deeper one.