A Woman in Charge by Carl Bernstein
THE CARTER CAMPAIGN was an opportunity for Hillary to increase her own considerable political knowledge, to help raise her husband’s stature in the Democratic Party (and perhaps in the next presidency), and to get herself placed on the list of the most promising prospects for appointment to presidential boards and commissions. If Bill was going to stay in Arkansas, she wanted a foot in Washington. Upon returning from Europe, she went immediately to Indianapolis. As director of Indiana field operations, she would be in charge of executing the campaign’s strategy in ninety-two counties, dispatching hundreds of volunteers to storefront offices throughout the state, and managing some very tight finances. She brought to the challenge a combination of useful political experience and received wisdom: from Texas during the McGovern campaign, from Bill’s campaign and his tutelage, from Marian Edelman, and from John Doar and her time in Washington. She was in her element—though the odds of Carter winning Indiana were daunting. From her father’s politics and her own Midwestern roots in neighboring Illinois, she understood Indiana’s voters, their interests, and their prejudices with almost intimate familiarity. Her manner with subordinates and the state’s top Democrats, from Senator Birch Bayh down, was direct and to the point, with little of the gift of her husband’s gab. Yet she seemed comfortable whether dealing with Bayh or a ward-heeler, a company president or a union shop steward. And she was decisive, partaking in almost none of the agonizing temperature-taking and enervating debate with aides that Bill indulged in on his circumlocutious way to action. She imaginatively embraced the underdog mentality of Carter’s situation in Indiana, luring phone-bank workers by offering the legal minimum wage and then hiring senior citizens or accused criminals, whose bond had been posted by the bail-bonding firm that had previously occupied the office space of Carter headquarters in Indianapolis.
Election day produced a double victory for Hillary. As expected, Carter did not carry traditionally Republican Indiana but he had captured a very respectable 46 percent of the vote, compared with Gerald Ford’s 53 percent. He won the presidency with a popular vote majority of 50 percent to 48 percent, and 297 electoral votes to Ford’s 240. In Arkansas, Bill Clinton overwhelmingly won the attorney general’s race, carrying sixty-nine of seventy-five counties. Hillary chose to celebrate in Indianapolis—Bill agreed—with her comrades from the Carter campaign.
BILL’S ELECTION meant that he and Hillary would have to move to Little Rock. She had “slipped into Fayetteville like a duck to water,” Jim Blair noted, but Fayetteville was not typical of Arkansas. Little Rock was a very different place, with a far more formal power and social structure, characterized by restricted country clubs, debutante balls, and business conducted in the tap room of the Capital Hotel, where state officials and overlords of the state’s enormous deposits of private wealth broke bread together. Little Rock was a state capital but not really a big city, “an insulated big town, a place that ran according to unwritten rules,” in the words of its mayor from 1979 to 1981, Webb Hubbell. He noted that “Rule 1 might well have been: Little Rock women don’t have careers.” Later the Clintons would move to another capital that was not really a big city, another insulated big town that managed according to its own unwritten rules. But their adjustment to Washington, D.C., would be much more difficult. Bill Clinton was a native Arkansan, and though he had moved away for college for a spell, he knew the people of his state and their ways inside and out. He was always one of them, and Hillary proved to be surprisingly adaptable. But during the Clintons’ occupancy of the White House, he and Hillary remained rank outsiders, from the moment they ungraciously swept into town with ill-disguised contempt for the capital’s unwritten rules and protocols. This, too, taught Hillary. When she ascended to the U.S. Senate, she kept her head down and deferred to the institution and the town and its ways—until the critical moment when she recognized it was time to raise her head, after which she outsmarted and outwitted just about everybody in the Senate chamber and the press in a New York minute, and made herself so outsized that the people who lived and breathed the capital’s old rules didn’t know what had hit them.
Hillary had adjusted to the town of Fayetteville far more easily than she could have envisioned. She made friends quickly—good friends—and a name for herself in the town’s tight-knit academic and legal communities. She even lost some of her flat Midwest accent. After only four or five months, Woody Bassett could see that “she not only became very comfortable living here, but she enjoyed living here.” When Richard Stearns, one of Bill’s fellow Rhodes Scholars, came to visit, he was stunned to hear her talking about how the biggest watermelons anywhere came from Arkansas. “She could recite with pride all of these firsts that Arkansas accomplished. She had become at least by outward appearances a fanatic University of Arkansas football fan.” What Stearns found most interesting was that “she had pretty much mastered an Arkansas accent. She had absorbed it.” As she would do for the next quarter-century, she could turn it off and on.
She also took obvious satisfaction from her teaching. She was pleased that so many of her students seemed to respond to her rigorous standards. She had been put in charge, upon her arrival, of a moribund legal aid clinic. Her perseverance and government experience rapidly produced tangible results. By first semester’s end she had obtained support from the county’s judges and the bar association, and federal grants were approved to fund a new University of Arkansas legal clinic. In its initial year under her direction, the clinic served three hundred clients; student-lawyers, supervised by bar members, appeared in fifty court cases. With the help of Diane Blair and other women whom Diane had introduced to her, she was the leading force in creating Fayetteville’s first rape crisis center, the consequence of a student coming to Hillary and telling of her experience after being raped. There seemed to be a prevalent attitude in town, held by older women as well as men, that the young victim had somehow been to blame for the incident because she had been wearing tight clothing and was walking alone at night.
As part of Hillary’s faculty assignment to assist prison inmates seeking legal representation, she helped prepare the successful appeal of a prisoner on death row. Her opposition to the death penalty seemed unequivocal at the time, and during Bill’s campaign for attorney general she was fortunate that no one asked her to address the question publicly. At some point between his service as attorney general and governor—when Bill was forced to consider, and sometimes subsequently denied, stays of execution—she changed her position.
While she would miss Fayetteville and university life, Arkansas was a small state, and she would constantly shuttle between the political, academic, and corporate worlds of Little Rock, Fayetteville, and northwest Arkansas. She came to understand, enjoy, and appreciate the role of college football, which, as in any Southern state, united the local population. Her father and brother had been football players, but she had never before considered football as a social leveler, a basic communal rite that, in the enthusiasm and energy it produced, transcended almost all else.
While Bill had become a very big fish in a small-state pond, she had learned to swim in the same waters—warm but still treacherous—with considerable command. Hillary, an outsider to the system, had prodded the male-dominated legal community to action. People took note. Her developing role underscored a division of labor that would endure between herself and her husband. She was the hands-on player, addressing with real-time practicality the social problems he approached through a politics emanating from his intuitive sensitivity, his voracious intellectualism, and his willingness to compromise. Whether by happenstance or design they were moving toward a synthesis in their unique joint political venture.
“IT WAS HILLARY who decided that she wanted to be financially secure, and took the steps to accomplish that,” said Betsey Wright. “Those decisions you wouldn’t expect Bill Clinton to make. Bill Clinton would live under a bridge—as long as it was okay with Chelsea. He just doesn’t care.”
Upon Bill’s
Foster had met Hillary the previous year, as a member of the state bar association’s committee on legal assistance, when Bill was campaigning and she was attempting to establish the university’s legal aid clinic. “[Vince] came back to the firm raving, uncharacteristically, about a smart female professor he had worked with up there named Hillary Rodham,” recalled Hubbell. “He came home from Fayetteville saying we should be thinking about hiring her—that surely they would move to Little Rock, and surely she would be looking for a job.” At the time, the Rose Law Firm had no women lawyers. Foster argued that it was time for a change, and that another firm would move fast to lure Hillary, because her husband was about to become the state’s chief legal officer and was already marked as the most promising young politician in Arkansas. Setting aside the conflict of interest question, Hillary was indeed an attractive candidate.
Before she reached a decision to practice corporate law, Hillary consulted with Jim Blair, who extolled its obvious financial advantages over public interest law, while touting its intellectual stimulation. Phil Kaplan, a Little Rock lawyer in private practice, had established a major public interest practice, but Hillary did not attempt to join his firm. Instead she decided to respond to Foster’s siren song in hopes of joining the state’s most well-connected blue-chip firm. It was a long way from Treuhaft, Walker and Burnstein, the only other law office she’d worked in.
Rose was the ultimate establishment law firm, representing the most powerful economic interests in the state: Tyson Foods, Stephens Inc. (the state’s biggest brokerage firm), Wal-Mart, Worthen Bank, the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette, and the Hussman media empire in southwest Arkansas. In the capital of a small state in which business was a matter of backslapping and backscratching, its primacy was undisputed. Though the reforms of Watergate were putting pressure on politicians in Washington to be more careful about conflicts of interest, such concerns remained muted in Arkansas’s capital, where the line between public and private business had never been much delineated.
Foster dispatched Webb Hubbell to convince the other associates of the firm that hiring Hillary was a good idea. Others would later say that Foster—tall, with impeccable manners and a formal mien—worshipped Hillary from the start, or that he had been awed by her from the time they met in Fayetteville, or that he had never met a woman like her who was so whip-smart and almost sassy. What is unquestionable is that he and Hillary grew incredibly close. For the next twenty years, the relationship would confound Foster’s wife (but not Bill Clinton), their colleagues at the law firm and the White House (but not Webb Hubbell), and women who had known Bill intimately and didn’t like his wife.
OTHER PARTNERS in the firm were less enthusiastic about hiring Hillary than Vince and Webb. Some were perhaps more sensitive than Foster to the potential conflict of interest, which seemed inherent if a member of the firm were married to the state attorney general. Foster, however, argued that the firm had little business with state agencies and none with regulated utilities. Nor did it do criminal work, in which defendants were prosecuted in the name of the state by the attorney general. The argument seemed a bit hollow because the firm’s major clients included the state’s highest-earning corporations and manufacturing industries. The Rose Law Firm, at Foster’s direction, was able to get an opinion from the American Bar Association holding that it could hire the wife of the attorney general, and specifying procedures to avert conflicts of interest. Their effectiveness was illustrated by a hearing early in that year’s legislative session at the statehouse. Bill Clinton, representing the state, spoke against the particular piece of legislation being considered. Among the numerous witnesses arguing for the measure was Vince, with Hillary present as his co-counsel. All proceeded to conduct business as usual.
But the most powerful and hushed argument against Hillary joining the firm was that she was a woman. “How will we introduce her to our clients?” an associate asked Foster and Hubbell. All of Rose’s important clients were male. “What if she gets pregnant?” The firm’s partners were all white men, most of whom were already wealthy and graduates of the two Arkansas law schools. Hillary, with her Wellesley and Yale credentials and her view of the law as an instrument for social reform, would be a radical departure.
On the day of Hillary’s interview, the law firm’s partners were the ones who were nervous, remembered Hubbell. As usual under such circumstances, her performance was near flawless. On February 1, 1977, less than a month after her husband was sworn in as attorney general, she became an associate at the firm. Her starting salary was just under $25,000 a year, up from $18,000 as a law professor. On the third floor of a former YMCA building, Hillary, Hubbell, and Foster occupied corner offices. Bill’s salary, recently raised by the state legislature, was $26,000. She would earn more than he every subsequent year until he became president. Meanwhile, he settled into a spacious office a stone’s throw from Hillary’s, decorating his adjacent bathroom with a poster of a scantily clad Dolly Parton.
THE ATMOSPHERE at the Rose Law Firm was not always welcoming. Some secretaries made disparaging comments about Hillary out of her presence. Much of the gossip was about her appearance, and some reflected obvious envy of an accomplished woman in an executive position. Even her own secretary mocked Hillary’s attempts at creating a career woman image: “At first, she didn’t wear stockings and the old ladies in the firm were horrified. She was a comic figure as a lady lawyer. Her hair was fried into an Orphan Annie perm. She had one large eyebrow across her forehead that looked like a giant caterpillar. We laughed until we cried. She tried to look good when she went to court, and she would put on some awful plastic jewelry. She’d be wearing high heels she couldn’t walk in. There wasn’t one stereotypically womanly or feminine thing about her.” Hillary’s weight was a regular topic of conversation, spurred by her inability to shed the few pounds that would have made her more attractive. “She was on a perpetual diet. She would show up for work with a big bag of lettuce and eat out of it all day,” said her secretary.
Hillary once represented a jewelry sales company whose representatives were mostly women with beehive hairdos. Hubbell liked to recall that “Hillary won their lawsuit, and the beehive ladies revered her as their hero. Every one of them volunteered to give her a makeover. Even then, Vince and I kidded her about it. She said she loved those ladies but didn’t want to look like them.” Hillary’s manner with other members of the firm and their clients could be intimidating—not because she was particularly aggressive, but because she was rarely, if ever, deferential. It had never been her style nor would it ever be. “In our morning meetings she didn’t hold her tongue,” Hubbell noted. “She was simply never intimidated by anyone, partner or client, and that in itself is often intimidating to others.” Would a new associate who was male be judged on similar grounds? Probably not, and it took Hillary a long time to feel at ease in Little Rock and at Rose, except with Vince and Webb—the Three Amigos, as they came to refer to themselves.
At office parties, wives of Rose partners and associates tended to ask her what it was like to work in a place full of men (which spoke volumes about their view of women who were secretaries and clerks there). They frequently tried to get Hillary to join them in working for their favorite local charities. “But if she spent time with the wives, the partners would reinforce their suspicion that she was, after all, a woman, not a real lawyer. And the wives would stil
Despite the sometimes tense atmosphere, Hillary came to enjoy her workdays, largely because of her relationship with Foster and Hubbell. They poked fun at her intensity, tutored her in the traditions of the capital (and how she might take advantage of them), and looked out for her like a little sister. The three often went to lunch together at the Lafayette Hotel. Sometimes they watched lingerie shows there, a popular form of lunchtime entertainment of the era, in which models from upscale lingerie stores showed off nightgowns and their bodies. Hillary simply laughed at her two partners and told them what Neanderthals they were. Physically Hubbell and Foster were polar opposites. Vince was rail-thin, elegant in perfectly tailored suits, and soft-spoken to the point of taciturnity. Hubbell was a whale of a man, a former college quarterback who (unlike Hillary’s father) actually had been drafted to play pro ball, but was injured before his career could take off. Hubbell carried close to three hundred pounds, and his back suffered the load, requiring sometimes that he lie on the floor while working. Once, as the three prepared for a case, Webb was sprawled on the carpet airing hundred-year-old case law, while Hillary was dispatched to the library to produce the documentation.