A Woman in Charge

  For a few days after his defeat Bill traveled through the Third Congressional District thanking voters for their support or if they hadn’t voted for him, for merely considering the merits of his candidacy. Then, for the next six weeks, “I went into a funk,” he said. He spent most of his time at Hillary’s house lying on the floor and feeling sorry for himself. Then, as became the rhythm of their life, with her encouragement, he grasped her stronger, extended hand, picked himself up, and turned to action: in December Hillary coerced him to take her dancing and that seemed to lift his spirits. He also knew that only two sitting senators (and no House members) had been elected president in the twentieth century, Kennedy and Harding. Most of the others had been governors. He convinced himself that if he’d won and they’d gone to Washington, he might never have been elected president.

  With renewed vigor, he set out to win over Arkansas voters, whatever office he decided to seek, and to win over Hillary as well. She wrote later that he asked her so many times to marry him that he finally said she should let him know if and when she was ready.

  She sought counsel from Jim Blair, who was familiar with almost all of Bill’s complexities and proclivities. “Well, Bill has asked me to marry him several times, and I’ve turned him down several times,” Hillary said. “And he’s asked me again and this is something I want to do someday—but just not right now.” Abruptly, she switched gears: “On the other hand…I’m afraid that if I turn him down he will never ask me again.” Innately, Hillary recognized that she was “happier with Bill than without him” and that her heart was still telling her “that I was going in the right direction.”

  “Oh hell, Hillary, go ahead and marry him ’cause if it doesn’t work out you can always get divorced,” said Blair.

  She also sought advice from Ann Henry, who had married a state senator, was the mother of three young children, and was herself a prominent figure in the state Democratic Party. She was among the women Hillary felt closest to in Fayetteville. She had spent hours sitting by the Henrys’ backyard swimming pool with Ann, Diane, and others, talking about their lives, the problems of their state, and issues of particular concern to women—and organizing to try to change things.

  Ann elaborated for Hillary the constant compromises demanded of a politician’s wife, especially in Arkansas. There was no way to fully pursue your own professional and political ambitions, or even express yourself adequately, without jeopardizing your husband’s agenda and career, she said.

  Hillary disagreed, and aggressively questioned some of the choices Henry had made as a political wife. “Whether I wanted to run for office myself or take a big public job was beside the point,” Henry tried to explain to Hillary, “because I was married to somebody who was in politics. And I was not willing to take on a real public profile in some areas. It might get Morriss [her husband] defeated, and I would take the blame. And I didn’t want that.”

  Hillary suggested that Ann’s decisions had been far too accepting. “She wouldn’t call me a coward, but she just thought I was wrong,” Ann remembered. “But she was young and not married. And I was married with three children, and had already gone through campaigns where your lives are disrupted.”

  Hillary cited Eleanor Roosevelt in order to contradict Ann.

  “That’s right,” said Ann, who had just finished reading Joseph Lash’s recently published biography of Eleanor, documenting for the first time that FDR had had an affair with Lucy Mercer. Eleanor “never found her voice until after that marriage was over—until she didn’t care about the marriage!”

  Ann concluded that Hillary had already made up her mind to marry Bill. But the question of Arkansas, the character of the place (more than the character of Bill), its provincial outlook, its Southernness, continued to propel her doubt, especially when she listened to stories like Ann’s and looked beyond the congeniality of a university town like Fayetteville and its bucolic setting. Little Rock beckoned, but it did not call to her.

  Hillary took a long, soul-searching trip in the fall of 1975 to Boston, New York, Washington, and Chicago to assess what she was missing, including in the job market. Her trip may have been at least partially instigated by Bill’s decision to seek election as Arkansas’s attorney general, rather than run again for Congress. “I had lost my desire to go to Washington. I wanted to stay in Arkansas,” he said. In New York, Carolyn Ellis, her law school friend who was raised in Mississippi, told her that Arkansas “wasn’t Mars,” and that “to love somebody and not marry them because of where they were living was the height of foolishness.” Other friends thought she was on the verge of jumping off a marital cliff with Bill Clinton.

  He sometimes gave the impression that he, too, had doubts. “All we ever do is argue,” he told Carolyn Yeldell Staley, a friend since high school. However, he didn’t tell her that underlying much of the fighting was Hillary’s perception that he still wanted to see other women, which he did. Later, he claimed to Betsey Wright that he had actually tried to “run Hillary off, but she just wouldn’t go,” not because he worried about Hillary being hurt by his promiscuous ways, but because marrying him and living in Arkansas would restrict Hillary’s career and political independence.

  “He was surprised she really wanted to marry him because he felt that she could have so much more,” Betsey said. Wright attributed part of this to “Bill Clinton’s ongoing inferiority complex…. Bill Clinton has spent his whole life scared that he’s white trash, and doing whatever he could to try to prove to himself that he isn’t.”

  He had told his mother to “pray that it’s Hillary. Because I tell you this: It’s Hillary or it’s nobody. I don’t need to be married to a beauty queen or a sex goddess. I am going to be involved all my life in hard work in politics and public service, and I need somebody who is really ready to roll up her sleeves and work for me.” He did not mention a corollary of the equation: that he had no money and, if he stayed in politics, would have little opportunity to amass any on his own. Hillary’s earning potential as a lawyer was considerable, though the whole question of money was something he rarely considered.

  Hillary’s trip to Chicago and the East Coast rattled whatever complacency he might have been feeling. He told his friend Jim McDougal and McDougal’s then girlfriend (and eventual wife), Susan, over a meal at Frankie’s Cafeteria in Little Rock, that Hillary had totally won him over.

  Bill and McDougal had worked together one summer in Washington, in the office of Senator J. William Fulbright, while Bill was at Georgetown. Jim encouraged Bill to do it. “Don’t worry about marrying someone different,” he said. “You’ll need someone stronger to support you.”

  It seems likely that Bill’s expressions of doubt were as much preparation for the possibility of being rejected than a genuine desire to send Hillary off to another life.

  Bill sent a letter to a friend that contained a more plausible description of what was in his mind and his heart. The friend said that in the letter Bill talked about his shared values with Hillary, about how different she was from the other women he had dated. “That’s not to say he hadn’t known smart women,” said the friend. “But, you know, he liked boobs and big hair and—I mean he liked lookers. He’s from a state where beauty pageants are a big deal. There was a kind of Southern look that Bill was attracted to. But Hillary fit none of those, and had no cultural connection. She was as far and removed as if he had gone to a foreign country and found her.”

  When Bill picked Hillary up from the airport upon her return from the East Coast, he reminded her about a small brick house with a “For Sale” sign on it that they had passed on their way to the airport when she left for her trip. “Well, I bought it,” he told her, “so now you’d better marry me because I can’t live in it by myself.”

  Hillary said that was the moment she agreed to marry him.

  Not long after she accepted, he told Betsey Wright that he and Hillary were going to be married. Wright was not pleased. “I really started in on how he coul
dn’t do that. He shouldn’t do that. That he could find anybody he wanted to be a political wife, but we’d [the women’s movement] never find anybody like her” to run for political office. Wright promptly called Hillary and told her she hoped Hillary wouldn’t marry Bill. Hillary laughed and said she was going to marry Bill and live in Arkansas. Elective office was not the only way to lead. She was going to make a difference wherever she was living.

  Deborah Sale considered Hillary’s decision the natural one. “I think she was happy to make it. I think she could have done something else, but she could not have done something else with him that would have been as satisfying. And she could not have done something else that would have so united her goals and her heart.”

  The wedding was set for October 11, 1975, in the front room of the house he had just bought at 930 California Street in southwest Fayetteville. Their new home, all of one thousand square feet, had a beamed A-frame ceiling, a fireplace, and a bay window. An attic fan and a screened porch compensated for the lack of air-conditioning. Bill took the first steps toward making the house a home by buying some old wooden furniture, an antique cast iron bed, and Wal-Mart sheets with green and yellow flowers. He had made a $3,000 down payment on the $20,000 house. The monthly mortgage was $174.

  Hillary did not want an engagement ring, but she and Bill did have an engagement party in Hot Springs in early October. Guests remembered Bill sitting in a chair and Hillary sitting on the arm, and the two “holding hands and looking very much in love,” as one described it.

  Hillary seemed supremely uninterested in planning her own wedding. She happily accepted Ann Henry’s offer to throw a reception in her backyard and left the details up to her. Hillary was “looking more at life to come than at the wedding itself,” Henry concluded. No printed invitations were sent to the guests for either the ceremony or the reception. Hillary’s conformity with wedding protocol was pretty much limited to registering at Dillard’s department store for Danish modern dishware. It wasn’t until the day before the ceremony, when Dorothy asked what her daughter’s dress looked like, that Dorothy discovered Hillary hadn’t bought one and didn’t intend to. Dorothy insisted that they head to Dillard’s, on the town square, the only place in town that sold bridal gowns. Hillary chose the first dress she took off the rack, in Victorian lace style, designed by Jessica McClintock. “This will be fine,” she said.

  The details Hillary seemed most concerned with were putting the finishing touches on her new home, which was to be the site of the ceremony. She and Dorothy were painting and putting in bookshelves and light fixtures until the day before the wedding—much to the horror of Hillary’s mother-in-law-to-be, who arrived with her guests and was appalled that the house was still such a mess.

  When the minister said “Who will give away this woman?” at the beginning of the brief Methodist ceremony, everyone looked at Hugh Rodham, but he seemed frozen in place and continued to hold his daughter’s arm. The minister finally said, “You can step back now, Mr. Rodham.” Bill and Hillary exchanged old family rings in front of about twenty guests in their living room. Roger Clinton was the best man and Betsy Ebeling, who arrived late from Chicago, was Hillary’s maid of honor. Both choices reflected an important fact in the lives of Bill and Hillary. They each had a large and devoted circle of friends but even the closest of their friendships were in some way restrained or compartmentalized. Neither had a real confidant, an intimate with whom deepest confidences were comfortably exchanged and to whom even dark secrets could be disclosed. The real intimacy in their lives was reserved for each other and perhaps always would be. But there would always be secrets.

  More than two hundred relatives and friends—many from Yale, Oxford, Wellesley, Georgetown, Park Ridge, and Hot Springs—crowded into Ann and Morriss Henry’s backyard, several blocks away, for the reception. There was a champagne fountain, a wedding cake decorated with yellow roses, and a piano player. The party was also something of a political rally. Many of Bill’s students, but few of hers, attended. “It was like a big reunion,” said Ann. “People like Don Tyson [of Tyson Foods, the state’s biggest business enterprise], who were interested in Bill’s future. A lot of business people who saw he was going somewhere. People who had money…. And a lot of the local Democratic Party people from all over the whole district.”

  Some thought Hillary was having a difficult time seeing her guests clearly since she wasn’t wearing her glasses. She stunned the crowd—especially those from Arkansas—when she announced that she would not be taking her husband’s name and would remain Hillary Rodham. Bill had told Virginia that morning, as she and a friend ate breakfast at the Holiday Inn coffee shop. Virginia had cried at the news. Paul Fray, already planning the next campaign, was upset about the political implications of Hillary’s decision. When the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette printed their wedding announcement, and underscored the fact that Hillary was keeping her maiden name, Fray told Bill, “Hillary Rodham will be your Waterloo.”

  The whole saga of Hillary’s name-changing was, for her, for Bill, and for the Clintons’ friends, a dispiriting index of attitudes in Arkansas and (later, when he sought the presidency) much of the nation toward women in public life and independent women generally. Hillary had resolved to keep her maiden name as a young girl, even before the practice was encouraged by a nascent women’s movement. To Hillary, her name was her identity—something, she told Ann Henry and others, that would always ensure she remained “a person in my own right,” and not a “sacrificial” political wife.

  HILLARY AND BILL spent their wedding night in their new house. At 4 A.M. they got a call from the Washington County Jail, where Tony Rodham had been incarcerated after departing the wedding festivities. His car had been pulled over by a state trooper who noticed that a passenger was dangling her feet through the back window and that Tony had been drinking. Bill bailed him out—not for the last time.

  The Clintons’ honeymoon was postponed for two months, until the end of the school term, when they took a penthouse suite at a hotel in Acapulco and, with the whole Rodham family (Dorothy had noticed a vacation package ad and booked the trip) and a girlfriend of one of Hillary’s brothers, spent a week by the sea.

  They saw far less of each other in the next year than most newlyweds. In January, Bill set up headquarters in Little Rock for his campaign for the Democratic nomination as attorney general of Arkansas. His old childhood friends Mack McLarty and Vince Foster helped him reach into the state capital’s business establishment for support. Hillary continued her teaching. During the first six months of 1976, Bill crisscrossed the state, sometimes aided and attended by the Rodham brothers, both of whom had moved to Arkansas (Hugh Jr. had finished serving two years in the Peace Corps in Colombia) and enrolled at the university.

  Some of the issues and political positions embraced by her husband’s campaign were antithetical to, or harder-edged, than Hillary’s own beliefs, and were touted by Bill as intended to “significantly improve the quality of life in Arkansas.” This included capital punishment, which, for the first time, he publicly said he favored when he was asked about it in a television interview, and seemed to be caught off-guard. His platform for attorney general included mandatory “minimum prison sentences, victim compensation programs, improved work release, and rapid assistance to law enforcement agencies in interpreting the new criminal code, issues related to criminal justice and the office.” More to Hillary’s liking, Bill also ran on issues that would appeal to working-and middle-class voters: “fair utility rates, citizens’ rights to consumer protection in small claims courts, effective antitrust laws, and a right to privacy.” His campaign slogan was “Character, Competence, and Concern.”

  Clinton won the Democratic primary in May with 55.6 percent of the vote, a triumph against two opponents. His victory virtually ensured his election to the job that November. With the most difficult part of the race behind him, his political fortunes rising, Bill and Hillary attended the Democratic convention i
n New York that July, which nominated Jimmy Carter for president. They were a conspicuous presence at social and political events there, almost glamorous in their somewhat disheveled, youthful way, proud exemplars of the next generation of the New South of which Carter, the governor of Georgia, was the current embodiment. Already there was an assumption in Arkansas that Bill was in line to become governor of his state in the next few years. Part of Hillary and Bill’s plan in going to New York was to talk to Carter and his deputies about working seriously in the campaign: Bill signed on as Arkansas state chairman and Hillary was named field coordinator for Indiana. Betsey Wright, working out of Washington, had urged campaign officials to give Hillary the top position in Indiana, but “she was to be the number two, which is what they always did to women,” Betsey said.

  Hillary was feeling far more hopeful about the future than when she’d embarked on her last trip north. From New York, they flew to Europe for a two-week vacation, the highlight of which was intended as “a pilgrimage” to the Basque town of Guernica, which inspired Picasso’s emblematic masterpiece that Don Jones had cited in talking about both art and fascism. Generalissimo Francisco Franco had succeeded in persuading Hitler to send the Luftwaffe to level the town in 1937. The newlyweds explored its rebuilt streets and took coffee in the central plaza. Like many of their generation, they were still idealistic young thinkers and doers who wanted to influence their own time for the better. But there was something different (though not necessarily unique) about them from most people their age making their way through the ranks of either American political party: a powerful connection to the threads of the history of the century and their country, a deep feel for what had gone before, intimate knowledge of the conflicting currents that had defined the generation of their parents and the places of their own past. Their uniqueness, however, was in the intertwining of their dreams—as a political mission to be achieved together, conceptually premeditated, breathtakingly ambitious, a true partnership, and yet flexible enough to adapt to all manner of personal, political, and cultural upheaval and possibility.