American Evita: Hillary Clinton's Path to Power (7 page)

Hillary, red-faced, ordered Nussbaum to stop the car. “Bernie,” she shouted, slamming the car door behind her, “you are an asshole!”

Back home in Arkansas, Bill was already on the road to fulfilling Hillary’s prophecy—literally. Crisscrossing the state, he charmed voters and began to build a formidable war chest for his campaign.

Despite her own demanding schedule, Hillary somehow managed to pepper Bill with a half-dozen or more calls a day. A harbinger of things to come, Hillary virtually ran the campaign over the phone. Speeches, schedules, staff assignments—all had to be run by Bill’s girlfriend for her approval.

Hillary’s involvement did not stop there. She was hearing rumors that Bill was spending time with a precocious eighteen-year-old volunteer, as well as with his old high school flame Dolly Kyle, who had just divorced her first husband. Hillary dispatched her father and her younger brother, Tony, down to Arkansas to “help out with the campaign.” Translation: to check out those disturbing rumors about Bill and other women.

When they reported back that Bill was involved with at least a half-dozen women in Fayetteville and Little Rock, Hillary got on the phone and tore into Bill. Coming over the receiver, her blistering obscenities were clearly audible to campaign workers seated nearby.

Bill pleaded tearfully for Hillary to forgive him, and she did, grudgingly. Two weeks later she was at his side as the primary campaign wound down. “I’ve got to be there,” she told a fellow
member of the Watergate impeachment staff, “just to make sure they don’t fuck it up.”

On May 28, 1974—primary day—Bill and Hillary flew to Little Rock for one final TV interview. Bill, distracted by the pressures of the campaign, had forgotten that Dolly Kyle—his nickname for her was “Pretty Girl”—would be meeting them at the airport. The good-looking blonde in the clingy white summer dress was not prepared for the sight of Hillary—matted hair, thick glasses, body odor (even in the oppressive Arkansas heat Hillary abstained from wearing deodorant), unshaven legs, and all. For one fleeting moment, Kyle thought this was a practical joke, and that Bill had hired an actress to play Hillary. But then she “knew from looking at Hillary that she’d make him pay” for this awkward moment.

Bill handily won his party’s nomination, but the campaign against Hammerschmidt would be an uphill battle. Hillary, meanwhile, returned to her job on the House Judiciary Committee staff and resumed feeding Bill valuable, behind-the-scenes details.

Hillary’s most important assignment had been to draw up procedural rules for presentation of evidence to the House—in other words, the blueprint for prosecuting a case against the President. Among other things, Hillary argued that the constitutional definition of impeachable offenses was outmoded and should be disregarded, and that the President had no right to legal counsel in impeachment proceedings (her husband would have no fewer than seven lawyers represent him during
his
impeachment trial). Hillary, along with Doar and Nussbaum, also wanted Judiciary Committee members barred from cross-examining witnesses or disclosing any of the evidence in the case—rules that would have given Hillary and other members of the legal staff more or less complete control of the proceedings. “It would then have been a secret star chamber proceeding,” said another staff member, “without the public ever really knowing what the evidence against the President was.”

Judiciary Committee members rejected Hillary’s ideas, but went ahead and crafted three articles of impeachment on their own. Fellow Judiciary Committee staff member William Dixon would go on to be a supporter of Clinton’s. But even Dixon claimed that in her zeal to destroy Nixon, Hillary “paid no attention to the way the Constitution works in this country, the way politics works, the way Congress works, the way legal safeguards are set up.”

There were others, like chief counsel to the Judiciary Committee Jerry Zeifman, who railed against the “polished and sophisticated arrogance and deceit” of Doar’s top assistants—most notably Hillary Rodham. Zeifman accused her of withholding information from the committee in an effort to steer it in the direction she wanted. As lawyers go, said Zeifman, Hillary was “less than honorable.”

On August 8, 1974, Richard Nixon went on television to announce that he would resign the next day rather than subject the nation to a drawn-out impeachment trial in the Senate. Hillary, whose own husband would not make the same sacrifice for his country despite calls for his resignation from members of his own party, was elated at the news of Nixon’s resignation. Thirty years later, she would boast that the 1974 impeachment effort “forced a corrupt President from office and was a victory for the Constitution and our system of laws.”

A world of possibilities now opened up to Hillary. Would she take a high-paying position with a top Washington law firm, accept Marian Wright Edelman’s standing offer of a job at the Children’s Defense Fund, or—as several of her closest friends thought she would do—make her own run for office?

But Hillary had already made up her mind. She was going to take a teaching position at the University of Arkansas—and do whatever she could to get Bill elected to Congress. Not that she was entirely taken with moving to the land of pie suppers, hog-calling contests, and june bugs the size of Buicks. Echoing the sentiments of all Hillary’s friends, Sara Ehrman wanted to know, “Are
you out of your mind? Why on earth would you throw away your future? You are crazy….”

For emotional support, Hillary persuaded her brothers, Hughie and Tony, to move to Fayetteville and enroll at the university. “It was never in the game plan to grow up and fall in love with someone from Arkansas,” Hillary conceded. Although she would often say she chose “heart over head—and that’s never wrong,” Hillary was in fact making a conscious change in her game plan—a calculated decision to cast her lot with the man she was convinced would someday occupy the White House.

Hillary had no intention of abandoning her own dreams. She would run for national office someday, she was confident of that. But from the vantage point of 1974, the presidency was the longest shot for her or for any woman. It was, conversely, not beyond imagining that Bill could pull it off. To help him in his quest for the White House and then share power as equals—this was an attainable goal, and one for which Hillary was willing to make some adjustments.

“I think she believed he had what it takes to be President—the charisma, the intelligence, the drive,” said longtime Clinton family friend Carolyn Yeldell Staley. “But Hillary also knew that Bill had a tendency to be all over the map, and that he wasn’t as good a strategist as she was.” She would have to be there overseeing every detail, Hillary said, “to make sure there are no screwups.”

None of which sat very well with veteran political operative Paul Fray and Fray’s wife, Mary Lee, who were managing Bill’s campaign. With her take-charge manner and frequently belligerent tone, Hillary instantly made enemies. She also resisted any attempts on the part of Bill’s mother and Mary Lee Fray to get her to change her image. Hillary still refused to wear makeup, brighten up her wardrobe, ditch her glasses, or even shave her legs.

Now that she was in Arkansas, Hillary presented another problem to the campaign. She had lived openly with Bill while attending
Yale, but that kind of cohabitating could sink a candidate in the Bible Belt. So Bill stayed behind in his tiny bungalow in Fayetteville while she moved into a spacious contemporary lent to her by an Arkansas lawyer who had served with her on the impeachment staff.

Hillary believed that Watergate was the most formidable weapon in Bill’s arsenal. Hammerschmidt had been a friend of Nixon’s and one of his most outspoken defenders. Now was the time, Hillary told Bill, to “really let him have it. No one who backed Nixon through this thing should be allowed to remain in office. No one.”

Perhaps. But Arkansas voters were often swayed by other, less weighty issues—like the appearance of the candidates’ wives. Hillary’s decidedly unfeminine look and humorless demeanor was anathema in a state where political wives were expected to hide behind thick coats of makeup and frozen smiles. Before long, there was talk among members of both parties that the Yankee Bill Clinton had chosen to marry was gay.

“The lesbian rumors were really starting to hurt us,” said Fray, who felt he had no choice but to ask Bill if they were true. Incredibly, Bill would not deny them. Instead, he merely shrugged.

When Fray asked Hillary, she fired back that it was “nobody’s goddamn business.” When Fray pointed out that the gossip was losing Bill votes, Hillary blasted him again. “Fuck this shit!” she screamed before turning to leave, slamming the door of the campaign office behind her.

Hillary was proving to be a handful for other reasons as well. The Frays were expending a considerable amount of time and energy trying to conceal Bill’s numerous infidelities from Hillary. The list of “Special Friends” kept by Mary Lee swelled to include scores of names—many the wives and daughters of some of his most ardent supporters. Hillary periodically vented her frustration by raiding Bill’s desk, searching for his girlfriends’ phone numbers, then tearing them up in a frenzy when she found them.

It was not atypical behavior for either Hillary or Bill. Both had
hair-trigger tempers, and neither seemed to care if there was an audience on hand or not. Campaign organizer Ron Addington remembered pitched battles between the two—not over Bill’s flagrant womanizing (“He had a woman in every county, and there were thirty counties”), but over differences in how to run the campaign.

“Politics, not sex, is what really got Hillary worked up,” Paul Fray said. During one argument at campaign headquarters, Hillary picked up a book and flung it at Bill, catching him in the ribs. “She was frightening—she liked to yell, and man, did she like to throw things,” Fray recalled. “Hillary could just scare the living shit out of you if she wanted to, and I mean that.” Ironically, Fray and his wife were sucked into the same argument and wound up hurling projectiles and invective until Mary Fray detonated a megaton bomb. They had been given the onerous task, she told Hillary, of hiding the fact that Bill was “sleeping with half the district.”

Hillary did not react with histrionics; she barely seemed to react at all. Her response led the Frays to conclude that she had been well aware of the nature of Bill’s extracurricular activities, if not the scope. Still, in the aftermath of her explosive statement, Mary Fray waited for Hillary to say
something.
When she didn’t, it became instantly clear to the Frays that what mattered most to Hillary right now was winning this election.

What most upset Hillary during the 1974 congressional campaign was Bill’s reluctance to bludgeon Hammerschmidt over his long-standing allegiance to Nixon. Campaign worker Ron Addington was driving Bill and Hillary to another stop when they began shouting at each other in the car.

Screaming from the backseat that he was going to lose the election because he was “chickenshit,” Hillary demanded to be let out of the car. Bill, yelling back at the top of his lungs, was happy to oblige. Hillary got out, slammed the car door, and stomped off alone. “You’re going to lose, asshole,” she shrieked over her shoulder. “You’re going to lose!”

Hillary was right. Bill lost by a hairbreadth—a margin of just 1.5 percent. She was disappointed that Bill had not followed her advice, but not upset enough to keep him from moving in with her. Now both Bill and Hillary—infamous among their friends for never picking up the check—lived rent-free in Terry Kirkpatrick’s large home. “Bill sponged off people,” Fray said of Clinton, and Hillary “wasn’t much better.”

Hillary and Bill returned to their teaching jobs at Fayetteville, where she outshone him as a professor. “Bill wanted to be treated like one of the guys,” said Woody Bassett, a student who had them both as teachers. “He was laid-back in the extreme.” Hillary, on the other hand, “was no-nonsense, analytical, demanding—all business, all the time. People loved him, but they respected her.”

Hillary also founded the law school’s first legal aid clinic. In one case she was asked to represent a woman who was about to be sent to a state mental hospital for loudly preaching the Gospel on street corners. By way of a compromise, Hillary suggested that the judge buy her client a one-way bus ticket back to her home state of California, where, Hillary said, the citizens were much more in need of spiritual guidance. The questionable ethics involved in shipping the mentally ill of one state to another did not bother Hillary, who would boast of this Solomonic moment in her memoirs.

In addition to her satisfying legal work, Hillary had expanded her own circle of friends beyond Bill’s legion of fans. Diane Kincaid, a political science professor at the University of Arkansas, would become Hillary’s best friend. Another transplant from Washington, D.C., Kincaid shared Hillary’s feminist views and debated conservative activist Phyllis Schlafly in front of the Arkansas General Assembly on the merits of the Equal Rights Amendment. Diane and Hillary were incensed when the Arkansas papers covered the debate in their women’s section, and wrote mainly about the debaters’ outfits and hairstyles.

Kincaid would later marry Jim Blair, chief counsel for Spring-dale,
Arkansas–based Tyson Foods and one of Bill’s most enthusiastic boosters. It was Blair who brought company chairman Don “Big Daddy” Tyson into the Clinton fold, and acted as go-between whenever Bill needed large infusions of cash. The fact that the flamboyant, tough-talking Tyson was both notoriously antiunion and one of the state’s most egregious polluters—his poultry processing plants spewed tons of chicken feces into state waterways—was apparently something Hillary was willing to overlook. That is, as long as Big Daddy continued writing the big checks.

“Hillary was fortunate,” Diane said, “in that Bill fully appreciated what she was giving up. He felt she could do anything she put her mind to, and it bothered him that he was asking her to make such a big sacrifice. But he also felt they were equal partners, and that whatever he achieved they would share fully in.”