A Woman in Charge by Carl Bernstein
Diane, nine years older than Hillary, had also left Washington for Fayetteville to join an Arkansas man, her first husband, in 1965. She shared with Hillary a common political outlook and views about their generation of women, particularly women like themselves who wanted both careers and families. The daughter of a devout Irish Catholic father and a Polish, Orthodox Jewish mother, she was pleased to enlist another kindred spirit in the causes and movements of women who saw themselves as Southern progressives. Neither Hillary nor Diane was truly radical in her politics, but both were committed to concepts that situated them on the outer edges of Arkansas liberalism. They shared a belief in an activist government that asserted and protected the equal rights and opportunities of all Americans, including women and their reproductive rights.
With two children from a prior marriage, Diane was the partner of one of the most powerful (and richest) political figures in the state, Jim Blair, who would become a counselor to Bill and loom large in Hillary’s life as well. Because Hillary had “somebody like me, what might have festered if you felt totally isolated would become an endearing eccentricity,” Diane said. She connected emotionally with Hillary “because I had been through a very similar experience.”
The smallest town I had ever lived in before was Washington, D.C. Fayetteville then had 25,000 people. The only place to eat downtown was Ferguson’s Cafeteria, and if you really wanted to get fancy you drove up to Tontitown for spaghetti. Women still put on white gloves and had bridge parties and tea parties. People dressed up for football games. I just knew the kind of culture shock that she was going to go through because I’d had an Ivy League education and all that kind of stuff. I just knew what was coming. But, I also had been here long enough by the time she came to be able to see the positives and the sweetness to life here. So, I felt like I could be her guide, and more to the point, I think before she even came, Bill thought that I could. He wanted her to love it here.
Racial segregation, poverty, the psychological and physical barrier of the Ozarks themselves, had mired Arkansas in relative isolation, but the state also had a vigorous tradition of populism and progressivism. The legacy of the state’s competing forces were reflected in the student body of the university where Diane taught political science to undergraduates, and its law school, where Hillary thought too many of her pupils were constrained by convention. “We both took teaching very seriously,” Diane said. “We wanted to lift people’s expectations. Arkansas kids, we thought, just didn’t think big enough about the world and their place in it. And we were concerned about women students who were still thinking of themselves as having very limited existence.” Both were amused but frustrated with their students’ evaluations of their teaching. “Hillary and I got a lot of comments about the way we dressed, which we thought was hilarious,” Blair said. Hillary was told that turtleneck sweaters made her look fat. “It was just so absurd to us that students who had this opportunity to critique ways in which you could improve your teaching instead [were focused on] dress code.”
Hillary and Diane traded books, played tennis, and met regularly at the student union for lunch. There weren’t many women on the university faculty. They took long walks and discussed their disappointment at the failure of ratification of the Equal Rights Amendment in the Arkansas legislature.
Hillary had the natural coordination of her father. Neither she nor Diane had anything approaching good tennis form, but they thrived on competing. “We’d go out and just whack balls at each other until we drove each other into the ground,” said Diane.
When Hillary would call Diane to tell her about some aspect of Arkansas life she was experiencing for the first time, Diane would share a similar anecdote from her first days in town and they would laugh together. “There would be frustrations, but I never, ever heard her say, Oh, I ruined my life. I could have done this, I could have done that,” said Diane.
Yet there were concessions Hillary had to make to Arkansas’s conservative political and social milieu. The first was to continue to live separately from Bill, an arrangement that left their friends from Yale flabbergasted.
VENOMOUS RUMORS and allegations would follow Bill Clinton throughout his political career—some of them true (his carefree sexual ways, his elusive Selective Service status), some of them wildly exaggerated, many of them outright false—and they were a major factor in his first campaign, a source of animated discussion in the Third Congressional District and political circles around the state, even on the University of Arkansas campus. Though he had never sought election before, he already had enemies. Max Brantley, one of the ablest journalistic observers of his state’s politics and traditions (his wife was Ellen Brantley), believed part of Bill’s problem—and Hillary’s eventually—was the nature of the electorate itself. “There is a strong feeling in Arkansas, that was taught in school a while ago, that you could build a wall around Arkansas and we could survive without the rest of the world just fine, thanks. And even though Clinton was a local boy, he’d gone away. He had put on airs, going off to Eastern schools and even going abroad for education. A lot of people read into that that somehow what we have here isn’t good enough. It’s an implicit insult.” Ideology was also a factor. Clinton was running for a seat in a strongly Republican congressional district, and he generated antipathy, on the far right especially, because he allowed himself to be identified as a liberal in ways that he more successfully shrugged off in later campaigns, by which time his identity as a centrist had solidified.
Some voters held it against Clinton that he had “imported” a Miss Fancy Pants from New England and Washington. (Hillary’s Midwest credentials were often ignored.) Even Bill’s band boy history became freighted with sexual overtones: not only were there rumors that Clinton was gay, but he was simultaneously said to be living in sin with a woman to whom he wasn’t married (though he and Hillary lived apart). Conservative preachers around the state took to the pulpit to denounce the Clinton campaign as an iniquitous den of drug use and perfidious women.
Though Hillary became a dominating presence at headquarters upon her arrival, Bill fitfully continued his relationship with the student volunteer. He told his staff to watch for Hillary’s car in the driveway and often sent the young woman out the back door to avoid confrontations. In fairly short order, Hillary succeeded in having the student banned from headquarters. Hillary made it known that she thought women from Bill’s past, and by implication any others still in his orbit, were intellectually from another world than her and Bill’s, and thus represented no serious competition. This would be her condescending assertion through many an election season, the degree of venom and how publicly she expressed it often dependent on the commensurate political danger to him and embarrassment to her.
Hillary’s relationship with Bill during the period was often explosive. She was fiercely determined to keep her man—and make sure the political dream was kept on track, as much on her terms as possible. It was not unusual for the campaign’s managers to stand by silently while Hillary and Bill shouted at each other, often about a matter of strategy, but there were obviously other underlying tensions. She was not exempt from the famous Bill Clinton temper that hundreds of campaign workers and even, occasionally, cabinet members were to be subjected to over the next quarter-century. Unlike them, she gave as good as she got, both in tone and language. On one such occasion, while being driven to a campaign stop, she angrily announced at a stoplight, “I’m getting out.” After she did, she slammed the car door and began walking down the road.
“They would constantly argue, and the next thing you know, they’d be falling all over each other with ‘Oh my darling…come here baby…you’re adorable…’ then throwing things at each other, and then they’d be slobbering all over each other,” a disaffected Clinton aide said with exaggerated disdain. Yet this dynamic would persist.
As would happen when Bill ran for president in 1992, rumors about his sexual involvements intensified as election day drew near, most of
From the time of her arrival, the campaign’s top managers clashed with her substantively and stylistically. Both sides seemed bewildered by the other. The three male principals—Clinton, Fray, and Addington—talked to each other in their own kind of mock-redneck patois that eluded her at first (“the Boy” was their name for Clinton).
“Our organization went to shit” after Hillary’s arrival, said Addington. He felt her presence led to a general atmosphere of infighting and bickering. Hillary, however honorable her intentions, “managed to antagonize the entire staff,” Clinton’s press secretary complained in a memo to the candidate.
As election day approached, Bill was again caught between Hillary’s high-minded ethical insistence and his managers’ ground-level strategic realism. Desperate for last-minute funds, the campaign had been offered $15,000 from a lawyer who represented state dairy interests, earmarked for use in Sebastian County, where it was known voting results could be bought and certified. The contribution was also intended to help secure Clinton’s agreement to serve the interests of the dairy industry once he was in office. But Hillary fought the deal during a heated election eve meeting. Clinton remained quiet, but, according to Fray, Hillary was unyielding, telling Bill: “No! You don’t want to be a party to this!”
Did they want to win or did they want to lose? Fray asked.
“Well, I don’t want to win this way. If we can’t earn it, we can’t go [to Washington],” Hillary answered, according to Fray.
In September, Bill had been behind 59 percent to 23 percent, according to the polls. By election day, he and Hammerschmidt were locked in a tight race, partly because Hammerschmidt hadn’t felt it necessary to campaign until three weeks before the election, so confident had he been of coasting to victory. Bill had been doing door-to-door campaigning for eight months in every hamlet and hollow in the district. The Clinton camp was optimistic on election night. By midnight, Bill had pulled ahead in a close race, with only the votes from Sebastian County outstanding—long past the hour when they should have been reported. Hillary was seated at a desk, calmly working a calculator and trying to analyze the vote. Clinton volunteers at the county courthouse were hearing tales of chicanery with the ballot boxes. When Fort Smith, the county seat, fell to Hammerschmidt by a big—and unlikely—margin, Fray went on a tear, throwing things and swearing. “It was the goddamn money!” he shouted. Clinton had lost the election by six thousand votes. Fray claimed that Hillary’s ethics kept Clinton out of Congress.
She processed the campaign’s lessons. Subsequently, she would be far less committed to the high road and much more concerned with results. The question of Bill’s other women would become a prominent feature of the Clinton electoral landscape and, when raised by opponents or when the women themselves surfaced, Hillary would set the strategy of response: to attack the women as gold diggers and lying opportunists trying to capitalize on her husband’s prominence. By the time of her husband’s reelection as president (and a decade after that, her own preparations for running for president), she would preside over a vast fund-raising apparatus and bowed to no one in her willingness to stretch the rules of campaign finance.
BILL’S CONGRESSIONAL race was a turning point in Arkansas politics. Though he had lost by 2 percentage points and agonized for days afterward about what might have been (seventy-five Democratic freshmen were elected to Congress on November 5, part of a generational transformation on Capitol Hill, in which he would have been a standout), he became the inevitable leading young man of the state Democratic Party for his challenge of Hammerschmidt, a four-term incumbent, who had previously been reelected with ease. The major question about his political future was now what office he would run for in 1976, two years hence, and how fast and far he could go.
Hillary, however, now had to deal with the practical consequences of his loss. She seemed more on the fence than ever about whether to marry Bill. They were not going to Washington together anytime soon. Their grand vision seemed to be derailed, and she was left with choices she had not wanted to face: remain with the man she loved or strike out on her own, either in New York practicing law (which meant yet another bar exam to study for) or moving back to Washington, which, compared with Manhattan or even Cambridge, was still tea-pouring country when it came to welcoming strong, able professional women.
She wondered if she could build a meaningful professional and politically influential life in Arkansas while her husband climbed the state electoral ladder, which she judged the likely course he would pursue, rather than trying to get elected to Congress again. She did not relish becoming a local politician’s wife in a poor Southern state. Less talented women were getting plum jobs in New York and Washington, where the action was.
Two weeks after Bill’s defeat, Nancy Bekavac, their law school classmate, arrived in Fayetteville to visit. Bekavac thought Bill seemed “oddly elated” as he launched into an analysis and explanation of his loss. “We know how to whip them next time,” he said. Hillary was less upbeat, expressing particular disappointment that she and Bill wouldn’t be going to Washington together to advance the causes—local and national—they believed were important. Bill sounded a lot like he intended to stay in Arkansas and run for statewide office. Hillary, sounding desultory, enumerated some reasons for her to stay, too. She really cared about her students. There were plenty of local issues to get involved in, education especially. The Arkansas education system was one of the weakest in the country. Many of her students lacked the requisite writing skills and vocabulary for a legal career. Arkansans desperately needed help on urban issues, women’s rights, the stubborn rural poverty that afflicted the state, which ranked forty-ninth in per capita income and forty-ninth in educational achievement. There were many ways for her to contribute. But she was frank with Bekavac about her fear that Arkansas would smother her ambitions and chances for personal achievement such as she had once envisioned for herself.
Bekavac, given a guided tour of the local scene on her first night in town, was certain suffocation would come sooner rather than later. At a payback chicken dinner for campaign supporters, Bill arrived late and went to sit with the politicos. After the speeches, Bekavac started to move to the back of the room where the serious political discussions were going on. Hillary stopped her.
“Sit down. We sit here,” she instructed. They had to remain seated with the women through dessert and coffee, until the event was over and the men had concluded their backslapping.
Bekavac was shocked. Later, the three could go to Bill’s house for drinks, said Hillary, who was still living in town with her brother Tony.
Bekavac told Hillary she couldn’t believe she was in modern America. “This is Australia in 1956,” she said. “This is like mind Jell-O. You can’t do this. It’s like Antigone, you know, it’s like, ‘Jump in the tomb.’ You can’t do this.”
Hillary responded: “Well, I know, but I love him.”
“Hillary, you’ve got to love him a whole lot to do this,” Bekavac said.
“I do,” Hillary said. Her clear, measured way of discussing the matter convinced Bekavac that Hillary was carefully weighing her o
“When will you know if you can do this?” Bekavac asked.
“When I know,” said Hillary.
It was a choice unlike any faced by Bekavac or Hillary’s other friends. “Because you’re buying this guy, and you’re buying this life, which is not New Haven. It’s not anything,” Bekavac recalled thinking. She was stunned. “Because I identified with her. She was smart. She was funny. She was warm. She was ambitious. She had done all these accomplished things.”
As Bekavac drove out of Fayetteville in her Pinto a few days later, she thought to herself: “This is a nightmare!…Thank God, it’s not me.”
BEKAVAC WAS IGNORING how good Hillary and Bill could be together, how much fun they had, how they reveled in each other’s company, how they connected, the deep commitment they shared to an old-fashioned concept of public service, the belief of each, naive as it sounded, that together there was a way to make things better for people whose lives were not as blessed as their own. Bekavac knew they were, in their respective ways, the two most ambitious people she had probably ever met. Yet she felt the sharper edge of their ambitions seemed to become blunted, less threatening when they were together. Others found the joint ambitions of Hillary and Bill terrifying.
Their friends observed a remarkable chemistry. “She’s the one that gets up in the morning with a dark cloud over her head, and he gets up with the bright sun,” said a photojournalist who followed the Clintons in Arkansas and in Washington. “As the day goes on, he’s the one who falls into a funk and she’s the one who will refocus him. It’s one of those things that if they had never met neither of them would have reached the heights that they did.”
Bill supplied the passion and Hillary the focus, though obviously there was far more to the bond. “They’re not whole without each other,” said their friend Deborah Sale. “He is enormously dependent on her, and I think she on him as well. He loves getting up in the morning and seeing what the day’s going to bring, seeing what he can do. Living with someone who has that kind of passion for life is wonderful. And she’s someone who wakes up thinking about what she’s going to accomplish that day, what she has to do, who she should be seeing, what she should be doing.”