It was clear to Kirkpatrick that Hillary was “besotted,” “absolutely, totally crazy about Bill Clinton” the two or three times he was on his way to Washington to visit, Hillary’s “face would change. It would light up.”
Others regarded her as near-obsessed with her relationship with Bill to the extent that her moods were dictated by the frequency of her phone conversations with him and the vibes she was picking up over the line from Arkansas. Tom Bell, with whom she shared an office, saw her “come in some mornings mad because he wouldn’t have called her. She would be cranky. But she would come in other mornings, hit me in the biceps, and say, ‘You know, Tom Bell, Bill Clinton is going to be president of the United States someday.’”
Bernard Nussbaum, a former assistant U.S. attorney from New York, class of ’61 at Harvard Law, was her immediate supervisor. One night when they were the last to leave the office, Nussbaum offered Hillary a ride home and she talked about Bill. Nussbaum, who regarded himself as Hillary’s mentor, suggested that perhaps her young man needed some experience beyond law school before seeking a congressional seat.
“You don’t understand,” she said. Her umbrage was palpable. “He’s going to be president of the United States.” Nussbaum drew a deep breath, as he remembered it, and pronounced the idea absurd. Hillary remained unbowed. “You don’t know him—I do. He is going to be president. You may think it’s silly. It’s not.” He’d never seen her angry before. At Sara Ehrman’s house, she got out without saying another word and slammed the car door. Nussbaum did not understand that much more than a seat in Congress was at stake in Bill’s candidacy. His victory would mean a life in Washington for Hillary, and she wouldn’t be tethered like an Arkansas prisoner on a ball and chain.
WHILE HILLARY was virtually locked up in a building on Capitol Hill, Bill declared his candidacy from the Third Congressional District of Arkansas on February 25, 1974, with press conferences in the state’s four principal cities: Hot Springs, where he grew up; Little Rock; Fort Smith, with the biggest concentration of voters in the Third District; and Fayetteville, where he set up his campaign headquarters not far from the University of Arkansas campus.
From the outset, his campaign staff heard Bill speak rapturously and repeatedly about his politically savvy girlfriend who was working back in Washington on the impeachment inquiry, and how much he was in love with her. What he did not convey was the degree to which she was already his closest confidante and adviser. From Washington, Hillary became a significant player in the campaign, phoning advice almost daily to the candidate and making her weight felt with Bill’s campaign managers. Hillary’s political advice to the Arkansans, however, didn’t necessarily rub well. “She started calling from day one, several times a day at first,” campaign manager Ron Addington said. “She was telling me, You need to get this done, you need to get that done. What positions we had to fill.” The campaign’s senior staff recognized that her insights about Bill were incisive. Indeed, with her work in McGovern’s Texas campaign and now in Washington, her political experience was greater than some of Clinton’s managers. But Hillary knew comparatively little about Arkansas, its unique history and political environment. Still, she didn’t hesitate to give Addington and his deputies detailed lists of what she thought needed to be done. When her ideas weren’t acted on, she was quick to express her dismay. On several weekends when she flew to Arkansas to be with Bill she invariably made her presence felt at campaign headquarters.
Betsey Wright, who was also commuting on weekends from Washington to help Clinton, was amazed at Hillary’s ability to do her job on the impeachment inquiry and devote so much time to the campaign. Wright believes there was another reason Hillary traveled to Fayetteville: to run off Bill’s other women. Bill and Hillary sometimes fought openly about it. “I was very much aware that he was dating other women,” Wright said.
At one point Hillary threatened in a phone call to go to bed with somebody in Washington if Clinton persisted in his womanizing. Campaign deputy Paul Fray said he overheard Bill’s end of the conversation in which Clinton “about broke down and cried” and pleaded that Hillary not “go and do something that would make life miserable” for them both. Clinton had girlfriends in Little Rock and several towns in his campaign district, and, for several months, he had been seeing a young student volunteer from the University of Arkansas who worked at campaign headquarters. His staff, well aware of their candidate’s propensities, turned a blind eye unless problems impeded on the campaign itself.
Wright, who for the next decade would devote herself to Bill Clinton’s political life and the attendant task of minimizing damage to his future and his marriage from his sexual compulsions, described the environment of the 1974 campaign: “There were girls falling all over him like he was a rock star…just like they were for the rest of his life.” Bill’s attitude, Wright said, was to pretend there was no inherent conflict with his relationship to Hillary, as if he were saying, in effect, “Hillary is a very important person to me, and she is one of the most incredible people I’ve ever known. And, hey, isn’t this girl falling all over me cute? That was the context.” Wright didn’t discuss it with Bill or Hillary. “I was chickenshit about it then, and I was chickenshit about it for the next twenty years of our lives.”
IN WASHINGTON, bound by their mission, members of the impeachment staff formed extremely close relationships. “It had the characteristics of an intense political campaign but with much less sex,” said one of Hillary’s colleagues. As she always did, Hillary formed important friendships with men in her orbit, but it seems they remained platonic.
Still, Hillary and a few of her women colleagues reacted to what they regarded, not unreasonably, as the underlying sexist attitude of many men in the office. She was among those responsible for a sign on a coffee machine near the library, where many of the women worked, that read: “The women in this office were not hired to make coffee. Make it yourself or call on one of these liberated men to do so.” There followed the names of male lawyers on the staff.
Albert Jenner, the committee’s senior Republican counsel, found himself challenged by Hillary when he offhandedly remarked that there were no celebrated trial lawyers who were women. Terry Kirkpatrick remembered Hillary telling him that “the reason was because women generally did not have wives. She said that the reason male trial lawyers could be famous was because their wives packed their bags and ironed their clothes and were supportive of them while they were doing their work.”
That spring, during a visit to Fayetteville, Hillary attended a dinner party with a group of Bill’s law school colleagues, including the dean, who invited her on the spot to join the faculty. Bill had been lobbying the dean to make just such an offer. A few weeks later she scheduled a formal interview with a faculty review committee. “Hillary came dressed as if she had been shopping at Bloomingdale’s the day before,” one of the interviewers remembered. “It looked strange in Arkansas. She was wearing one of those long skirts and black stockings and horn-rimmed glasses. She did not look Arkansas.” Hillary easily won over the faculty, but could this Ivy League–educated Yankee from the Midwest fit in?
Her taste in clothes was something that people who met her over the next twenty years always seemed to comment on. “She didn’t care a flip about” clothes, said Kirkpatrick. Nor had she ever liked to shop. “But once she got started, she had a great time.” Shopping was a manifestation of Hillary’s inclination to sometimes go overboard with a new enthusiasm, not necessarily with great skill.
THE ARRIVAL in Fayetteville that summer of Hillary’s father and brother Tony was believed by some campaign volunteers to be part of her effort to keep tabs on Bill, to prevent his chasing other women. But more than anything else it was a sign of how seriously Hillary was trying to make a commitment to him; the same attitude had been reflected in her willingness to interrupt her work and prepare for a job interview at the university, taking off three days (to Doar’s displeasure) to do it.
/> Hillary had told Bill how difficult it would be for her to live in Arkansas without family and friends. When her father and Tony arrived in Hugh’s Cadillac, campaign manager Addington was surprised. He had no memory of Hillary saying they were coming to town.
“Well, how long are you going to be here to visit?” Addington asked Hugh. “Hell, I don’t know. Hillary told me I ought to come down here and help you out.” The next day, the Cadillac was loaded with piles of “Clinton for Congress” signs, and father and son headed for the back roads of Arkansas’s rural counties. Occasionally, calls were received at campaign headquarters about “the Yankees in the Cadillac.”
Hugh Rodham had come a long way—for him—since Hillary had gone off to Yale. The first summer she and Bill dated, she’d brought him to meet her family at the cabin on Lake Winola, where her father promptly ordered his daughter’s suitor, who was long-haired and bearded, to sleep on the porch—ostensibly because he didn’t like the way Bill looked. In fact, her father’s attitude at that time would have been the probable fate of any young man who came calling on his daughter, with whom he had made a grudging peace since Wellesley. He’d taken silent pride in her accomplishments, not least of which had been a gradual but obvious attempt at being less provocative toward him and more accepting of his rough edges. Bill’s charm and ability to mix well with pretty much anybody, and enjoy it, helped win Hugh over.
There had never been a strong male figure in Clinton’s family life—his probable father, William Jefferson Blythe, having died in a car accident before he was born, and his alcoholic stepfather, Roger Clinton, whom he came to love and understand only as he succumbed to cancer, died while Bill was at Georgetown University. Bill wanted very much to fit in with the Rodham family. He and Hugh Jr. would stay up late discussing the state of the world, while Bill taught him to play Hearts. Clinton enjoyed the sparring over politics (and almost any other subject) that seemed to be part of every meal at the Rodham dinner table, and exhibited much more patience with Hugh’s dogmatic pronouncements than did his daughter. Bill could explain to him, as Hillary seemed incapable of doing calmly, the history and reasoning behind so many aspects of liberal and Democratic tradition. The fact that he was someone who had grown up in the conservative Deep South also carried weight. Hillary’s father taught Bill (as he had taught his daughter at a very young age) to play pinochle, and Bill enjoyed telling Hugh tales about good ole boys from the piney woods back home, about high rollers and hellish women from Hot Springs, and the pols and mobsters who’d set the tone of life there in the 1930s, 1940s, and 1950s, the same kinds of characters who enlivened the underside of life in Hugh’s native Scranton.
Dorothy was intrigued with Bill and his stories from the start. She judged him exceedingly interesting and sincere, and was surprised that he’d traveled so widely. When she asked him what he intended to do after Yale, and he said without blinking that he was planning to go back to Arkansas to help his home state, she was impressed, not “least [because] he knew what he wanted.” However, when it came time for Hillary to decide whether to follow Bill back to Arkansas, she was unsure if it was the right choice for her daughter. “But you know, I’ve never told my children what to do. I had to rely on Hillary’s judgment—there’d never been any reason not to.”
JOHN DOAR regarded Hillary as among the most able of his young recruits and he tended to entrust her with a bit more responsibility than others at her level. Occasionally he would summon her to his office—his desk was invariably almost bare except for a notepad and pencil, which was indicative of the mysterious aura that surrounded him—and ask her opinion of something; it was never a major item affecting evidence or the totality of the case against Nixon, but important enough to signal his unusual confidence in her. The case he was assembling was meticulously registered on five-by-seven-inch cards of evidentiary materials that came to number more than half a million eventually, filed and cross-indexed (each was seven-ply) in card cabinets in the library. By design, only he and two or three of his “chiefs,” as he called his principal deputies, knew the coherent story of what the collected entries told. But “the cards” became a famous symbol of the impeachment investigation, and indeed were the heart of Doar’s process.
Doar, once nominally a Republican himself, had made his name as a courageous aide to Attorney General Robert Kennedy, protecting blacks and asserting their civil rights in the South. He was insistent that staff members maintain the appearance of absolute nonpartisanship and convey that no prejudgment of Nixon had been made. However, his own prejudgment had already been made, based on the abundance of facts already known from the Senate Watergate hearings and the fuller record assembled by the special prosecutor’s office. His job was to protect the integrity and secrecy of the Judiciary Committee investigation, he believed, to assemble all the facts as they continued to develop, especially from analysis and transcription of Nixon’s secret tapes. From these sources, he intended to build an airtight case that would convince the Congress that the president had grievously violated his oath of office and should be impeached. Conviction in the Senate, he was confident, would follow if Doar and his staff, and by extension, the Judiciary Committee, proceeded with sufficient care and meticulousness. Doar succeeded, in no small measure because of his methodology, which, among other attributes, resulted in virtually no information leaking to either the press or unauthorized members of Congress. His obsession about secrecy and security was extreme but well reasoned. Reporters were constantly trying to pry and wheedle information from staff members, from trash collectors (though Doar had instituted an elaborate and impregnable shredding and trash-burning procedure), and from friends and relatives of anyone who worked on the inquiry.
Upon her arrival for duty, Hillary had strong opinions about Nixon and his transgressions (since the McGovern campaign and Nixon’s response to the war in Vietnam she’d described him as “evil”) and had little doubt that he deserved to be impeached. Even many Republican staff members agreed. But from Doar she learned the value of working in extreme secrecy and of building a meticulous case to obtain a desired objective as well as the ability to keep outsiders, especially the press, from changing the internal dynamic of a working project. Unfortunately, over the ensuing decades, Hillary often applied these principles to situations that did not justify such control.
During the investigation, Hillary also learned a great deal from Bernie Nussbaum, whom she came to regard as a teacher and avuncular figure. At her age and level of experience, the difference of eleven years between them seemed particularly significant. Nussbaum was a partner in a high-class New York law firm, but his experience as a litigator had been forged in the U.S. Attorney’s Office of the Southern District of New York, with its tradition of brilliant book-lawyering and tough-guy street smarts. He could be blustery and ball-busting and believed in scorched-earth tactics if they would bring about the desired result and did not extrude to the farther ethical reaches of the judicial swamp. He also could be sweet-talking if the strategy required it.
Following her initial assignment to research the procedures of impeachments, Doar and Nussbaum assigned her with some colleagues to determine what the precise grounds or standards had been for previous impeachments. The report she co-authored focused on the meaning of the phrase “high crimes and misdemeanors.” It propounded that “to limit impeachable conduct to criminal offenses would be incompatible with the evidence concerning the constitutional meaning of the phrase…and would frustrate the purpose that the framers intended for impeachment.” This was heady stuff.
Since March, Nixon’s tapes had been arriving from the special prosecutor’s office, to devastating effect for the president. In early July, members of the Judiciary Committee staff listened to the Oval Office tape recording in which Nixon’s culpability and centrality to the cover-up was established beyond any doubt. “I don’t give a shit what happens,” Nixon had said to his top aides on March 22, 1973. “I want you to stonewall it, let them plead the F
ifth Amendment, cover up or anything else…. That’s the whole point.” There was no doubt in Hillary’s mind, or hardly anyone else’s in the office, that the conversation established that the president was guilty of high crimes and misdemeanors and would be impeached. On July 19, 1974, Doar formally presented articles of impeachment to the full Judiciary Committee. Three—citing abuse of power, obstruction of justice, and contempt of Congress—passed the Judiciary Committee with overwhelming bipartisan majorities.
When Nixon recognized he would be impeached by the full House and convicted by the Senate, he resigned, on August 9, 1974. Rather than make plans to stay in Washington and study for the bar (later, she would say she had been approached for a job interview by acquaintances at the firm of Williams & Connolly and at other Washington law offices), or even see the impeachment investigation through to its final report, Hillary that day accepted the job she had been offered to teach at the University of Arkansas Law School, and told Bill she would come to Fayetteville.
If Bill and Hillary were truly to be a couple, one of them had to compromise, said Hillary. “With the unexpected end of my work in Washington, I [could] give our relationship—and Arkansas—a chance.”
LOOKING BACK over her life upon her arrival in Arkansas, she could have reflected on the path that brought her to this point. In an early letter to the Reverend Don Jones from Wellesley, Hillary had declared that her undergraduate days would be a period for her to “try out different personalities and lifestyles” and in her junior year, she wrote to her boyfriend Geoff Shields at Harvard: “I want to go to Africa and then Europe and then back to the U.S. to travel—really ‘bum around’ for a year doing all the things which strike my bountiful fancy.” She wanted to work at a crafts center in the Carolinas; try her skills at theater; head for Southern California or Mexico, to “work at a series of day jobs for about a month, just to meet various types of people.” Northern California and “the Nevada caves where all the ‘real’ hippies are moving” also beckoned. She had been told that Mount McKinley “is the most beautiful sight in the world,” and planned to get there (which she did). “Working in television or movies for a short while would really be fun.” All of this she intended to pack into the year she was planning between Wellesley and graduate school.