It was perhaps a measure of how seriously Arkansas took its politics (and of the seniority system in the United States Congress) that a state with a population of fewer than two million people and an antediluvian economy produced five politicians (all Democrats) in two generations who were among the most powerful of the second half of the twentieth century: Bill Clinton, Orval Faubus, Congressman Wilbur Mills, and Senators J. William Fulbright and John L. McClellan. At age eighty-two, McClellan had announced his retirement, and Clinton was his choice to succeed him. When Bill had told McClellan that he was considering running for governor instead, McClellan said it was a bad idea, “that all you did in the governor’s office was make people mad. In the Senate you could do great things for the state and the nation.” The governor’s office was “a short trip to the political graveyard,” partly because it held a two-year term, and only two of its occupants since 1876—one of them Faubus, who became enormously popular because of his segregationist stand in the schoolhouse door—had served more than four years. The worst that could happen, said McClellan, was that if Bill lost, as the senator himself had done on his first try (early in the century), well, he was young and could win again. This was hardly Hillary’s or Bill’s outlook. One loss had been enough.
In the fall of 1977, Steve Smith, Clinton’s chief of staff in the attorney general’s office, phoned an obscure, thirty-year-old political consultant, Dick Morris, who was approaching every Democratic Senate or gubernatorial candidate across the country, seeking employment. Morris, a New Yorker, had never had an out-of-state client, and he was awed by Clinton; like himself, the young attorney general had sideburns, long hair, and a razor-sharp sense of politics. Clinton was fascinated with Morris’s unusual polling techniques, recognizing that they were uniquely penetrating and advanced in terms of the underlying meaning of the numbers. Morris was certain he could help Clinton in his decision about whether to run for governor or the Senate. Which office would Bill really prefer? “I’d like to be governor; I feel there’s a lot more I can do here,” Clinton answered. “But the real action is in Washington.” If he sought the Senate seat, he would probably have to run against three strong Democrats for the nomination, including then Governor David Pryor, a relatively popular figure.
Morris was aware of Hillary’s preference that Bill roll the dice and try to get to Washington. He suggested that he poll Clinton’s chances in the two races. The results showed that Clinton might be able to win the Senate race, but victory was hardly certain. He would start perhaps ten points behind Pryor, who (like most of his predecessors) had been weakened in his second term in office. The governorship seemed a clearer shot for Bill. Pryor was pleased when Clinton informed him he would not challenge him for the nomination—a decision that helped keep the state’s Democratic Party in reasonably good order over the next decade.
Bill, with Hillary, his mother, and his brother at his side (in the state capitol building he’d driven past the first day Hillary set foot in Arkansas), announced his decision to an excited press corps (already the Clintons were good copy) and enthusiastic supporters, explaining that being governor was what he “really wanted because a governor can do more for people than any other office.” He paused. “Any office except the president.” It was a remark not lost on those present.
Compared with subsequent campaigns, Hillary’s involvement in Bill’s 1978 gubernatorial race was minimal, just as her fitful involvement in his first term as governor would contrast with her dominance in the two decades that followed. For now, they were a two-career family. “She had a law practice and he had politics,” Morris noted. And she was enjoying her days spent in the company of Vince Foster and Webb Hubbell. At the Rose firm, they were forming almost a private subsidiary, so much did they enjoy each other’s company and support. Morris perceived that she meant to keep her independence. “Working at the Rose Law Firm, she seemed no different from dozens of wives (or husbands) of other candidates,” he said. “She wished Bill well, would help him in any way she could, but gave no appearance of having a personal stake in his professional accomplishments.”
Though Hillary was not present for the polling and strategy sessions with Morris, she remained involved enough in Bill’s campaign to critique his speeches and suggest how, as a candidate, what he did and said to get elected might smoothly lead to policy once in office. She knew how to look out for her husband’s interests. But the experience of his first campaign for Congress, when his advisers had wanted him to steal the election if necessary, still cautioned her to put some distance between herself and his aides. “Bill sees the light and sunshine about people, and Hillary sees their darker side,” Clinton’s 1978 campaign manager and chief of staff in his first term, Rudy Moore, said. “She has much more ability than he does to see who’s with you, who’s against you and to make sure they don’t take advantage of you. He’s not expecting to be jumped, but she always is. So she’s on the defensive.” Later, her expectations invariably put her on the offensive.
All Bill had to do to coast to the governor’s mansion, according to Morris’s numbers, was keep the big lead he was starting with. Though Hillary’s public contributions to the campaign were comparatively sedated—“She did not do so much on the campaign trail that year. A woman was expected to smile and not give speeches,” Morris said—for the first time she herself became an object of considerable enthusiasm by many voters inclined to support Bill. Already, the Rodham-Clintons were being perceived in the electorate and the press as a package and a partnership, smooth, smart, and idealistic. The promise of what they might be able to do together to improve the lives of Arkansas made some people’s skepticism fade away. Others seemed frightened, or incensed.
As would increasingly become the case over the next twenty years, Hillary was seen by many as a polarizing figure. For the first time, she became the object of intense dislike and verbal abuse. Clinton’s opponents criticized him for having a wife with a career—a lawyer to boot—who was so independent-minded that she wouldn’t take her husband’s name. The “name issue” would become one of the most talked about of the campaign. Men and women around the state argued publicly and privately about it. “People thought even his wife didn’t like him enough to take his name,” said an acerbic political columnist for the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette, Meredith Oakley, who would make a name for himself writing about the Clintons. Within the campaign itself and among supporters, there were a number who urged Hillary directly to change her mind.
Despite the name issue, Clinton easily won the Democratic primary with 60 percent of the vote and was in a solid position to win the general election. In the final months before election day, Bill and his top campaign aides, Steve Smith, Rudy Moore, and Hillary, started planning Clinton’s gubernatorial agenda. Hillary would perform the same role—formulating policy ideas and reviewing candidates for her husband’s staff—that she would play during his transition from president-elect to president, with disastrous consequences. Increasingly, his staff would bear her imprimatur, to the point where it became impossible to see clearly where the influence of one Clinton began and the other ended.
Though Bill and Hillary were thrilled at the prospect of his imminent victory, two ominous events occurred in the final weeks before the election that would haunt them in the years to come. The first was a press conference by retired Air Force Lieutenant Colonel Billy G. Geren, who accused Clinton of dodging the draft during the Vietnam War. Geren, a Republican, charged that Clinton had obtained a draft deferment in 1969 by signing up for the University of Arkansas ROTC, but had broken this agreement by returning to Oxford University for a second year of study. Clinton denied that he received a deferment, saying that when he did not attend ROTC training his name had been placed back in the draft. Fortunately for Clinton in 1978, his history with the draft remained an issue in the governor’s race for only two days.
Frank Lady, an evangelical Christian with backing from Moral Majority voters, meanwhile, became the first (but har
dly the last, as Bill noted) Clinton opponent to attack Hillary both for being a lawyer (as Pat Buchanan would remind Republicans at their 1992 national convention) and keeping her maiden name. Here were some early traces of the vast right-wing conspiracy, fueled by Lady’s charges that she had used her position as a corporate lawyer to win clients favors from the state government in which her husband served as attorney general.
In fact, the potential conflicts were obvious and almost unavoidable in a state in which a single law firm represented the enormously wealthy few (“the ArkoRomans,” in local parlance) and maintained close friend-and-family relationships with members of the political class. Hillary had done work for the Little Rock Airport Commission, which was headed by Seth Ward, whose son-in-law was Hillary’s colleague Webb Hubbell. Hillary herself represented a subsidiary of the Stephens empire in court, despite the regulation of many of the parent company’s assets by Bill’s office. Meanwhile, he was receiving campaign contributions from Tyson, Stephens, and other ArkoRoman enterprises his office had to deal with.
Hillary’s presence next to Bill at campaign events—and the vigorous support of each for the Equal Rights Amendment—further inflamed the Moral Majority right, still in its infancy but, in Arkansas, motivated increasingly by Bill’s and Hillary’s rise. At a campaign stop in Jonesboro, a woman wearing a Frank Lady T-shirt started hollering angrily at Bill, “Talk about the ERA! Talk about the ERA!” The Clintons’ friend Diane Kincaid had recently overwhelmed Phyllis Schlafly, the country’s leading ERA opponent, in a debate over a second attempt in the Arkansas legislature to ratify the amendment (which nonetheless failed there again). “Okay,” said Bill, “I’ll talk about it. I’m for it. You’re against it. But it won’t do as much harm as you think it will or as much good as those of us who support it wish it would. Now let’s get back to schools and jobs.” But his interlocutor was unwilling. “You’re just promoting homosexuality,” she screamed. Bill looked back at her and smiled. “Ma’am, in my short life in politics, I’ve been accused of everything under the sun. But you’re the first person who ever accused me of promoting homosexuality.” The crowd roared, Bill noted later.
On election day, Clinton became governor-elect with 63 percent of the vote and became the youngest governor in America since Harold Stassen in 1938 (not necessarily a good omen, given Stassen’s repeated and eventually quixotic failure to reach the presidency). The New York Times covered Bill’s triumph as a story of major importance and described him as “the 31-year-old whiz kid of Arkansas politics.” This was Clinton’s first important national interview, with Howell Raines, then a thirty-five-year-old correspondent covering the South for the Times. There had been vague references during the campaign (not by the Clintons) to Camelot and the glamour of the Kennedys as a couple. In the interview with Raines, Bill described the people of his state in terms inspired by Hillary’s often expressed view to him, in private: his victory, he said, represented the wishes of Arkansans to no longer “be perceived, especially by themselves, as being backward.” There was no way to retract what he had said once it was out of his mouth, and it gave the impression that he—and she—held a condescending and patronizing view of the people he had been elected to serve. The experience with Raines would be a harbinger: as the Times’s Washington bureau chief during the 1992 presidential campaign and in the Clintons’ first year in the White House, Raines—a fellow progressive Southerner from Birmingham, Alabama, 370 miles from Little Rock—would send his reporters out on the White-water trail with what Hillary and Bill thought was a vengeance. Others in journalism attributed it to some sort of good ole boy competition with Bill Clinton that motivated Raines. In any case, when Raines was promoted to editorial page editor of the Times in 1993, he would crusade without mercy against the Clintons and what he believed their unforgivable ethics—though against Bill’s impeachment—until they left the White House.
On election night 1978, when the votes confirmed the magnitude of his triumph, Clinton became emotional in accepting victory, cheered by thousands of supporters and campaign workers, including many friends from his days at Georgetown, Oxford, and Yale. Looking at Hillary, who was standing next to Virginia, he said, “I am very proud of the campaign we have run.”
The customary inaugural ball was preceded by an extravaganza of Arkansas entertainment they called “Diamonds and Denim,” not too distant a concept from “The People’s Inaugural” invented by Hillary and others for Bill’s inauguration as president thirteen years later. Both events were intended to symbolize a new era of generational and philosophical change in political power and its use. All the entertainers for “Diamonds and Denim” were from Arkansas, among them soul singer Al Green, country singer Jimmy Driftwood, and Bill Clinton on sax. “The whole theme of the evening was country come to town—we’re just Arkansas folks, but we’re kinda sophisticated,” said an aide to the new governor, but it came off less hokey than it sounded. Hundreds of Bill’s and Hillary’s friends, far more than on election night, from every phase of their lives since grammar school, had come to Little Rock for the festivities—and to watch the man many of them had long thought might someday be president take his first big step, with Hillary by his side.
THE ARKANSAS GOVERNOR’S mansion, though reasonably commodious, is not one of the nation’s more distinguished. Built in 1950 in downtown Little Rock, on the site of a former school for the blind, with Greek revival columns and a facade of red bricks retrieved from the demolished school, it resembles—inside and out—a rather grand suburban spec house.
When Bill took the oath of office, a limitless future seemed to stretch out before him. “Our vote was a vindication of what my wife and I have done and what we hope to do for the state,” he had said from the podium to cheers on election night. But the Clintons’ first two years in the governor’s mansion would be disastrous, marked by huge political mistakes, some of them a result of Hillary’s tin ear, some the result of her refusal to act like a traditional first lady, some the result of Bill’s tendency to want to do too much, too fast. Many of the same problems, especially those related to Hillary’s role, would also occur in the first two years of the Clinton presidency. Later, Hillary would describe the years 1978 to 1980 as “among the most difficult, exhilarating, glorious and heartbreaking in my life,” which would fit as well her first two years in the White House.
What was so extraordinary about Hillary’s failures in the White House more than a decade later was that she seemed to have learned almost nothing from her experience those first two years in the governor’s mansion, though there were obvious differences in circumstances. Hillary’s finely tuned sense of her own evolution, the ability to learn from her mistakes, to replay in her mind the macro-and micro-factors that moved a project from conception to realization or collapse and then rearrange them to get a more satisfactory result the next time, had always been part of her makeup. These characteristics were among the most valuable in her ability to help her husband, whose process and emotional constitution were so different from hers. But her experience those two years in Little Rock seemed to have hardly registered in her memory bank when she got to Washington.
HILLARY, AS THE WIFE of the attorney general and (simultaneously) a corporate lawyer in the capital of the state, had managed with purposeful skill to keep comfortably below Arkansas’s political radar. She could go almost anywhere in the state and few people would recognize her, even on the streets of downtown Little Rock. That was impossible as the governor’s wife. Meanwhile, through her increasing work in Washington during Bill’s governorship, she purposefully raised her national profile.
Rather than attend to the traditional ceremonial and social role of being first lady of Arkansas, she chose instead to work substantively with her husband, and until shortly before the birth of Chelsea in 1980, she hardly reduced her workload at the Rose Law Firm. “Hillary was very active in shaping public policy, but not in being a political wife,” recalled Bev Lindsey, who worked for Bill Clin
ton during part of his governorship, and was married to (and then, after the White House years, divorced from) Bruce Lindsey, Clinton’s all-purpose factotum. “She thought then that Bill could be governor and she could shape policy and be a corporate lawyer, and not have to do the rest, not have to go to ladies’ lunches, or travel with him and not speak.” Arkansas Times columnist John Brummett said that during the first term Hillary wanted to make “no concessions to any obligations of the office. She just went her own way and got a job, got involved in things she was interested in…. A lot of people thought she was remote, distant.”
Bill and Hillary quickly formed their routines. Hillary didn’t read newspapers or watch television news. Instead, she listened to National Public Radio or classical music in the morning. If there was anything else she really needed to know she figured she’d be told about it early in her day, either by Bill on the phone or Vince in the office. But even in her earliest days as first lady of Arkansas, “she didn’t want to read about things that would bother her and about which she could do nothing,” said Betsey Wright. “She saw it as an irritant.”
Rather than be chauffeured in an official car by a state trooper, Hillary preferred to drive her own Oldsmobile Cutlass. She’d be at her desk at the Rose firm for coffee with Vince or Webb by 7:30 A.M. Bill awakened late, faded for a while in the afternoon, then got reenergized around the time Hillary was ready for bed; he stayed up until two or three conducting all manner of business, playing cards with friends, picking up the telephone, plowing through piles of paper—often simultaneously. Hillary didn’t have his stamina, but she paced herself better. She knew when she needed rest and could easily fall asleep in a car or on a plane and wake up with her batteries recharged. Hillary didn’t have her own staff in the governor’s mansion. Instead, she was assigned someone from the governor’s office to help her on specific projects. The mansion staff of five consisted of cook, assistant cook, maid, landscape-maintenance worker, and mansion manager, who, after Chelsea’s birth, was enlisted to babysit so Hillary and Bill didn’t have to pay a sitter out of their own pockets.