American Evita: Hillary Clinton's Path to Power (6 page)

Hillary would not be surprised to learn that Bill had also been traumatized and transformed by the assassinations of Martin Luther King and Bobby Kennedy. Determined to make his own contribution, Bill spent the summer after his Georgetown graduation campaigning for Arkansas Senator J. William Fulbright, chairman of the powerful Senate Foreign Relations Committee and an outspoken critic of the Vietnam War.

As a Rhodes Scholar at Oxford, Bill also marched in several antiwar demonstrations during his time abroad, and even made a curious side trip to the Soviet Union. But one concern would overshadow all others to the point where he could not simply “box it off.” Bill spent most of his time at Oxford trying to find ways to avoid being drafted—a mission that grew all the more urgent after he received his induction notice just as the American death toll crept past the forty-thousand mark.

With the help of his mentor Senator Fulbright, Bill managed to get the rules bent so he could join the Reserve Officer Training Corps. But once a draft lottery was instituted and it became clear his number was so high he would never be drafted, Bill wrote a letter to the head of the ROTC program at the University of Arkansas telling him that he was one of those who found themselves “loving their country but loathing the military.” Bill had conned his way into the ROTC appointment, which he now spurned, for one reason: “to maintain my political viability within the system.”

The letter, which Clinton would take pains to keep secret, would come back to haunt him decades later when he sought the presidency. Until then, not even Hillary would be aware of its existence.

By the time Hillary began dating Bill in the spring of 1971, she was just winding down her romance with David Rupert—her first and only serious relationship. Bill, on the other hand, had cut a wide swath through Arkansas, Georgetown, and the United Kingdom.

Hillary, warned from the outset that Bill was already juggling a number of girlfriends at Yale, seemed not to care. She was happiest driving around New Haven with Bill in his hideously orange Opel station wagon.

Before long, Hillary was spending weekends at the beach house in Milford, Connecticut, that he shared with three roommates. They, like nearly everyone else at Yale, were intimidated by Hillary’s
intellect—and by her directness. She respected Bill, and believed without question that he would someday be President. But that didn’t stop her from delivering the coup de grâce whenever Bill was getting too full of himself. “Knock it off, Clinton,” she’d say when he’d gone on too long extolling the virtues of his home state. “Cut the crap!”

At the beach house one night, Bill and Hillary were sitting in the kitchen, talking about their plans. Hillary was not quite sure which direction she was going in, or even where she wanted to live. She was impressed that, hokum aside, Bill loved Arkansas and knew that he wanted to hold office there.

That summer, Hillary accepted an offer to clerk for a law firm in California, and to her surprise, Bill wanted to tag along. They shared a small apartment not far from the Berkeley campus of the University of California, and while Bill spent most of his time reading and sightseeing, Hillary did research and wrote legal motions for the Oakland firm of Treuhaft, Walker, and Burnstein.

Hillary had first met Robert Treuhaft and his wife, Jessica Mitford, when they came to New Haven to raise money for the Black Panthers. More recently, she caught their eye when the
Yale Review
—Hillary was now on the
Review
’s editorial board—ran an article defending Black Panther defendant Lonnie McLucas. The piece was illustrated with drawings of policemen as pigs; one had been decapitated.

Treuhaft and Mitford, who had written a bestselling exposé of the funeral industry called
The American Way of Death,
were avowed Stalinists. Treuhaft formally resigned from the Communist Party in 1958 because by then it had lost so many members it lacked any real clout. But he and his wife, who dismissed the heroic 1956 Hungarian uprising against Communist rule as the work of “grasping neo-Fascists,” remained staunchly committed to the cause. In addition to the Panthers, Oakland’s “Red Lawyer” represented a wide range of radicals and indigents. In later years
Hillary would say nothing of her friendship with Treuhaft and Mitford, and refer to Treuhaft, Walker, and Burnstein only once in her memoirs, simply as “a small law firm in Oakland, California.”

Hillary returned to New Haven hating the war and Richard Nixon (“He’s pure evil”) more than ever. She and Bill rented a ground-floor apartment just off campus at 21 Edgewood Avenue for seventy-five dollars a month, and Bill used his own money to set up a “McGovern for President” headquarters. Much of the time, Bill worried aloud that his new relationship was not fair to Hillary. He told her that he wasn’t sure he wanted to fall deeper in love with her because she would never be happy in Arkansas. “If you wanted to run for office, you could get elected. You could even be a senator,” he said, “but I’ve got to go home.”

After Christmas, Bill drove up to Park Ridge to spend time with the Rodhams. While he had no difficulty winning over Dorothy and the boys, Dad was his usual implacable self. Gradually, over football and card games, Hugh Rodham began to crack. Interestingly, it was Dorothy who confronted Bill on the question of her daughter’s future—and why he felt it was fair for Hillary to relinquish her own political ambitions while he sought office back home in Arkansas.

That summer of 1972, Hillary joined Bill in Austin, Texas, where they both worked on the McGovern campaign. She had managed to keep an eye on her boyfriend’s extracurricular activities in New Haven. But with Bill making frequent out-of-town trips to whip up support for his antiwar candidate, there was little she could do to rein him in. At numerous times in front of other campaign staffers, they quarreled bitterly about the other women he was seeing—as many as three in the span of a single week.

Bill continued to impress everyone he met with his prodigious energy—he managed to get by on just five hours of sleep a night—and his innate political savvy. But Hillary was also attracting notice from seasoned party operatives. One of these, no-nonsense,
chain-smoking Betsey Wright, was far more interested in Hillary’s future than she was in Bill’s. “I was obsessed with how far Hillary might go,” Wright said, “with her mixture of brilliance, ambition, and self-assuredness.” She would later say that Bill and Hillary’s marriage would leave her feeling “disappointed. I had images in my mind that she could be the first woman president.” None of this kept Hillary from signing on for an additional—and unnecessary—fourth year at Yale Law School simply so she could be close to Bill.

After graduation, Bill took Hillary on her first trip to Europe. It was while strolling along the shores of Lake Ennerdale in England’s scenic Lake District that Bill first asked Hillary to marry him. With the specter of her grandparents’ divorce and the havoc it caused in her own mother’s life still looming large in Hillary’s mind, she turned him down. “No, not now,” she said. “Give me time.”

Undaunted, Bill took her home to Arkansas—but not before using his contacts to secure a $25,000-a-year job teaching law at the University of Arkansas in Fayetteville. In Hot Springs, Hillary met an icy reception from Virginia and Bill’s brother, Roger. “I didn’t know what to think,” Hillary’s future mother-in-law recalled of that first meeting. “No makeup. Coke-bottle glasses. Brown hair with no apparent style.”

And style—if not taste—was something Virginia had in abundance. Her skin dangerously dark from too much sun, Bill’s mother favored shorts, open-toed shoes, hot pink lipstick (“I always figure the brighter the better”), and Minnie Mouse eyelashes. Her own hairstyle was distinctive all right: a bouffant dyed black on two sides, with a wide white “skunk stripe” down the middle. Virginia had wanted her son to marry someone she felt was more his type—perhaps one of the tall blond beauty-pageant contestants he seemed to favor. Hillary was equally taken aback. She and Virginia seemed to be, Hillary later said, “from different planets.”

Hillary had also made several visits over the previous year to New York, in part to investigate the living conditions of disadvantaged
children for her various Marian Wright Edelman–inspired projects, but also to connect with various activist groups in the city. Through her many left-wing friends and contacts—including avowed Communists Robert Treuhaft and Jessica Mitford, Black Panther lawyer Charles Garry, and her old mentor Saul Alinsky—Hillary was introduced to dozens of like-minded radicals. Among her new friends: New York–based representatives of the Palestine Liberation Organization who were lobbying feverishly to be recognized as a diplomatic entity by the United Nations. (A year later, the PLO would be granted “permanent observer” status and, ironically, would ultimately open its mission in an Upper East Side town house one block from the homes of David Rockefeller and Richard Nixon.)

At a time when elements of the American Left embraced the Palestinian cause and condemned Israel, Hillary was telling friends that she was “sympathetic” to the terrorist organization and admired its flamboyant leader, Yasser Arafat. When Arafat made his famous appearance before the UN General Assembly in November 1974 wearing his revolutionary uniform and his holster on his hip, Bill “was outraged like everybody else,” said a Yale Law School classmate. But not Hillary, who tried to convince Bill that Arafat was a “freedom fighter” trying to free his people from their Israeli “oppressors.”

Antipathy toward Israel was so strong on the American Left that even New York Congresswoman Bella Abzug, an active Zionist in her college days, was branding Israel an “imperialist aggressor” by the late 1960s. “It was de rigueur to support the PLO in the mid-seventies,” recalled a onetime Arafat sympathizer who would later become an executive with a major advertising firm. “It was just more of the radical chic thing. But this time it was the PLO instead of the Panthers.” Four years after Arafat’s scorching attack on Israel at the UN, one of his staunchest supporters, Vanessa Redgrave, showed up at the Academy Awards to accept a best supporting actress Oscar for
Julia
and blast the “Zionist hoodlums” who
picketed her presence at the ceremony. Redgrave was practically booed off the stage for her remarks, but according to a friend in Arkansas, Hillary defended the actress’s stance. “Hillary’s line basically was that there were two sides to the Palestinian question, and that Jews in this country had too much money and power and that they’d pretty much shut off all debate.”

In late July of 1973, however, Hillary’s mind was on practicing law. She and Bill made another trip to Arkansas to take the bar exam—and passed on the first try. (Hillary would not be so fortunate in Washington, D.C., where she had taken the exam twice before passing.) It was during this trip to his home state that Bill took Hillary to meet a politically well-connected friend. When they drove up to the house, Bill and Hillary noticed that a menorah—the seven-branched Hebrew candelabrum (not to be confused with the more common and subtler mezuzah)—had been affixed to the front door.

“My daddy was half Jewish,” explained Bill’s friend. “One day when he came to visit, my daddy placed the menorah on my door because he wanted me to be proud that we were part Jewish. And I wasn’t about to say no to my daddy.”

To his astonishment, as soon as Hillary saw the menorah, she refused to get out of the car. “Bill walked up to me and said she was hot and tired, but later he explained the real reason.” According to the friend and another eyewitness, Bill said, “I’m sorry, but Hillary’s really tight with the people in the PLO in New York. They’re friends of hers, and she just doesn’t feel right about the menorah.”

“Do you mean to tell me,” Bill’s friend shot back, “that she is going to be part of Yasser Arafat and all those people?”

Bill shrugged. “Hillary really backs the PLO and doesn’t like what Israel is up to,” he said, looking sheepish. “Anyway, she just thinks having a menorah on your front door…she just doesn’t like it, that’s all.”

After a brief stint in Boston doing fieldwork for Marian
Wright Edelman’s Children Defense Fund, Hillary returned to Arkansas—and to Bill, who by now had decided to run for Congress. Watergate and talk of impeachment dominated the news. Bill was convinced that, as the Nixon administration proceeded to self-destruct, the Republican Party would inevitably be hard hit in the 1974 congressional elections.

Hillary soon learned what part she would play in the unfolding drama. In January of 1974, John Doar, the House Judiciary Committee’s new chief counsel, offered both Bill and Hillary a chance to work on the impeachment inquiry staff. Bill was already planning his run for the Third Congressional District seat occupied by Republican John Hammerschmidt. But Hillary, who like most McGovernites never attempted to mask her hatred of the incumbent President, jumped at the chance. Now she would be able to play a role in bringing down the “evil” Richard Nixon—a man whose removal from office she called for long before the Watergate break-in occurred. She also had a vested interest in the outcome: an impeachment trial would make it especially hard for incumbent congressmen like John Hammerschmidt, Bill’s conservative Republican opponent, to get reelected.

Hillary’s main job was to look up legal precedents for impeachment—an experience she would later recall without the slightest trace of irony—but she did get to listen to several of the infamous Nixon tapes. In her daily calls to Bill, she shared some of the more damning details of the investigation in general and the tapes in particular. Bill was more confident than ever that, armed with this sensitive information, he could destroy Hammerschmidt at the polls.

Working up to twenty hours at a stretch, Hillary ate, slept, and breathed Watergate. Yet she was still obsessed with Bill. Whenever the opportunity arose, she blithely informed her coworkers that her boyfriend was going to be President someday. “She said it to me,” said fellow staffer Tom Bell. “She said it to a lot of people.”

Hillary had come to rely on one senior staff member in particular
for advice. But Bernie Nussbaum made it clear that he felt Hillary’s predictions about her boyfriend’s future were inappropriate. Nussbaum was giving her a ride home one night when Hillary launched into her “Bill’s going to be President someday” speech. Angered by Hillary’s presumptuousness, Nussbaum told her it was “insane” to be making such comments while they were in the process of seeking ways to remove Richard Nixon from office.