Hell To Pay Part 3

Treuhaft is not like the Black Panthers. Treuhaft is a man who dedicated his entire legal career to advancing the agenda of the Soviet Communist Party and the KGB.*35 Treuhaft had formally left the Communist party in 1958, but only because it had lost so many members that it was no longer a viable organization. Mitford, an unreconstructed acolyte of Joseph Stalin, would later condemn the Hungarian Freedom Fighters who threw Molotov c.o.c.ktails at Soviet tanks as "grasping neo-Fascist types."*36 In 1972 Treuhaft offered Hillary a summer internship working on behalf of indigent criminal defendants in Berkeley. Hillary accepted and worked for Treuhaft for a summer. She later paved the way for Mitford to lobby Governor Bill Clinton on the death penalty.*37 Hillary has never repudiated her connection with the Communist movement in America or explained her relationship with two of its leading adherents. Of course, no one has pursued these questions with Hillary. She has shown that she will not answer hard questions about her past, and she has learned that she does not need to--remarkable in an age when political figures are allowed such little privacy.

THE RADICAL WRITE.

At Wellesley, Hillary began to follow radical publications. At Yale, she served the movement as an editor. She also became a writer herself, defining and extending the terms of a Crit idea, the burgeoning field of "children's rights."

At first, radical politics had started as an outgrowth of her Methodism. Now it became increasingly driven by a realization that her goals could be achieved only by the application of power.

"My sense of Hillary is that she realizes absolutely the truth of the human condition, which is that you cannot depend on the basic nature of man to be good and you cannot depend entirely on moral suasion to make it good," the Reverend Jones told reporter Michael Kelly in his courageous 1993 "Saint Hillary" piece in the New York Times Magazine.

"You have to use power. And there is nothing wrong with wielding power in the pursuit of policies that will add to the human good. I think Hillary knows this. She is very much the sort of Christian who understands that the use of power to achieve social good is legitimate."*38 For Hillary, the convergence of power and Christian ends had come together in Motive, a magazine for college-age Methodists.

"I still have every issue they sent me," Mrs. Clinton would later say as first lady.*39 She told a writer for Newsweek that she still treasured a 1966 Motive article by theologian and SDS leader Carl Oglesby called "Change or Containment."

Oglesby is variously described as a Marxist or Maoist theoretician, in the piece so admired by Hillary, Oglesby defended Ho Chi Minh and Castro, and Maoist tactics of violence. "I do not find it hard to understand that certain cultural settings create violence as surely as the master's whip creates outcries of pain and rage. I can no more condemn the Andean tribesmen who a.s.sa.s.sinate tax collectors than I can condemn the rioters in Watts or Harlem or the Deacons for Defense and Justice. Their violence is reactive and provoked, and it remains culturally beyond guilt at the very same moment that its victims' cultural innocence is most appallingly present in our imaginations."*40 "It was the first thing I had ever read that challenged the Vietnam War," Hillary said, adding that Motive had given her the impetus to move from being a Goldwater Republican to a McGovern Democrat.

At Yale, she found the chance to partic.i.p.ate in radical scholarship more directly. A good, though not brilliant, law student, she could have played the angles and tried to make the Yale Law School Journal, the obvious route to prestige and a solid job offer to a partner-track position with a big law firm. Perhaps she doubted her ability to make the Journal on merit. Or perhaps for other reasons, she chose instead to serve as one of the editors of the Yale Review of Law and Social Action, where she worked side-by-side with future Clinton insiders Mickey Kantor and Robert Reich.

Founded during Hillary's first year at Yale Law School by a group of third-year students, the Review was more than just a radical version of the traditional law journal. It was to be a purveyor of radical scholarship and ideas. Hillary served as one of the Review's initial nine editors, critiquing articles and offering her advice.

The maiden issue of the Review in 1970 declared, "For too long, legal issues have been defined and discussed in terms of academic doctrine rather than strategies for social change."

There were articles by or about William Kunstler, Charles Garry, and Charles Reich of Greening fame. Although not a legal scholar, radical gadfly Jerry Rubin appeared in the Review to exhort parents "to get high with our seven-year-olds" and students to "kill our parents."

"Only gradually," two Review editors note on a profile of Rubin's appearance at Penn State, "does the dialectic of the new myth appear.

Youth's language is its strength. For a moment, Rubin plays McLuhan. The youth culture, particularly their language, is continually being commercialized by the Establishment. 'We have revolutions in toilet paper, s.e.x through Ultrabrite, trips to the Bahamas, Dodge rebellions. But the key word is f.u.c.k; they (Rubin smiles) can't co-opt f.u.c.k.'" By the 1990s, it became apparent that Rubin was as wrong about that as he was about everything else.

Rubin was told by a student in the audience that his father was a judge. "To this, Mr. Rubin queried, 'Why don't you kill him?' Of course, we all thought he was joking but then, he explained how it really would be dramatic and dwelled on the subject of a.s.sa.s.sination to the point where none of us in the room doubted his seriousness."

A more typical Review article discussed rent strikes, under the heading "The Law as a Tactic," the Crit concept of law as a means "both to protect the strikers and educate them."

The combined second and third law issues of the Review in the fall/winter of 1970, on which Hillary served as a.s.sociate editor, centered on Bobby Seale and the Black Panther trials. It included many cartoons depicting the police as hominid pigs, their snouts wet while they mutter, "n.i.g.g.e.rs, n.i.g.g.e.rs, n.i.g.g.e.rs, n.i.g.g.e.rs." Another cartoon, under the caption "What Is a Pig?" shows a wounded pig-man, bruised, bandaged, and on crutches from a severe beating. The answer to the question in the cartoon is "A low natured beast that has no regard for law, justice, or the rights of people; a creature that bites the hand that feeds it; a foul depraved traducer, usually found masquerading as the victim of an unprovoked attack."

Another cartoon, under the caption "Seize the Time!" shows a pig-man surrounded by flies, decapitated and cut in half.

Other articles were less gruesome in presentation, if not intent.

James F. Blumstein, fourth-year law student, and James Phelan, second-year law student, for instance, wrote "Jamestown 70," a radical manifesto that proposed "migration to a single state for the purpose of gaining political control and then establishing a living laboratory for experimentation." They write: Revolution is impossible when armed revolt by the citizenry-at-large would inevitably be put down by the nilitary might at the disposal of those in control. We see the best way out in reeducating this nation to its heritage; reopening the frontier, where alienated or deviant members of society can go to live by their new ideas; providing a living laboratory for social experimentation through Radical Federalism; and restoring effective political communication in a multimedia society.

What we advocate is the migration of large numbers of people to a single state for the express purpose of effecting the peaceful political takeover of that state through the elective process. The goal of this takeover would be to establish a truly experimental society in which new solutions to today's problems could be tried, an experimental state which would serve as a new frontier and encourage imaginative local innovation.

The goal was to forge a society based on "a New Consciousness."

"Experimentation with drugs, s.e.x, individual lifestyles or radical rhetoric and action within the larger society is an insufficient alternative. Total experimentation is necessary."

The marches on Washington, Woodstock--they had all been lost, were nothing but drops in the great, oblivious sea of apple pie consumerisn. It was time for those with a heightened consciousness to migrate to a safer place, much as African Americans migrated from the sharecropper farms of the South to create their own new realities in Chicago and New York.

"An American-style Kampuchea," is the memorable description Daniel Wattenberg used to describe "Jamestown 70" for the American Spectator magazine.*41 For all its utopianism and fantasy-like qualities, radical federalism was a kind of a Frederick Jackson Turner thesis for the psychedelic frontier. It may even have led to the settlement of so many hippies in Vermont and Northern Idaho--or San Francisco.

Hillary complained that early drafts of "Jamestown 70" were "mental masturbation." She worked with its authors to make it more specific, more "down to earth."

Wattenberg reported that "Hillary provided a detailed sympathetic critique of the article, according to a source at the journal. Her main problem with the piece was that it was long on rhetoric, short on action.*42 For Hillary, the mental exercise of imagining a "New Consciousness" was fatuous unless there were forceful steps that could be taken to enact it.

While some 1960s radicals on the wilder fringes might have been merely self-indulgent fantasists, or spoiled college kids seeking to avoid the responsibilities of their parents, Hillary was a budding Leninist. Menshevik, Bolshevik, Trotskyite--they were all debating societies. What really mattered to Lenin--and what Saul Alinsky taught Hillary to value--was power.

DEFENDER OF VIOLENCE.

At the end of the Johnson administration, Eugene Rostow, one of the main policy architects of the Vietnam War, returned from the State Department to the Yale Law School faculty.

After Rostow's office was ransacked by antiwar vandals, "a number of us identified with the antiwar movement, including Hillary, were considering going to Rostow and saying even though we disagree with you on the war, this is unforgivable. Hillary took a different approach, one of our few disagreements," a Hillary colleague told David Brock. "She said, 'You know, I wouldn't put down those people so easily. You've got to understand the rage they feel. You know, because they are disenfranchised; they are not empowered.' She was sort of taking the position that well, our real enemies are society and the establishment."*43 Throughout her life, Hillary has been marked by a desire to dedicate her life to achieve a transcendent ideal. That ideal has changed over the years. It was represented first by Barry Goldwater, then by liberal Republicans like John Lindsay. Then it became George McGovern, the Black Panthers, the Crits, and even Stalinists like Jessica Mitford and Robert Treuhaft.

Like others of her time, she had begun her journey on Eisenhower's interstate highway system only to find herself deep in the Ho Chi Minh trail; from the comforts of prosperous 1950s American suburbia to a Marxist critique of everything that had shaped her, Hillary had liberated herself from Hugh Rodham and his grim empire. While her family had struggled to get ahead, their money, the expensive education they provided Hillary, allowed her to be a free agent, exploring, a.s.sessing, finding her own path in a way her parents could not have dreamed for themselves. Now Hillary believed she had the answers she sought. Now was the time for action.

She found a partner, a fellow power seeker who would take her to the unlikely destination of Arkansas.

FOUR.

OF ONE MIND.

"What was my alternative? To draw myself up into righteous moral indignation, saying, I would rather lose than corrupt my principles, and then go home with my ethical hymen intact?"

-- SAUL ALINSKY, RULES FOR RADICALS.

When told that he had become president, Harry Truman said that he felt as if all the stars and the moon had fallen on him. Ronald Reagan, in his memoirs, recalled walking into the White House with Nancy, seeing the furniture from their home moved into the grand rooms of the mansion, and suddenly being overwhelmed by the realization that the presidency was truly his to command.

In their respective memoirs, the Clintons will one day each tell of similar emotions on their first day as president and first lady.

Untold, likely, will be the real tone and tenor of that day, or the reason for their very public fight that day as reported by Time magazine. Standing on the steps of Blair House on Inauguration Day, 1993, Bill Clinton yelled at his wife through the cold morning air.

"f.u.c.king b.i.t.c.h!" he screamed, causing Secret Service agents and well-wishers to cower. "Stupid motherf.u.c.ker," was the reply from our first lady.*1 This was a rare lapse in a carefully contrived image. For the most part, the public sees the marriage the Clintons wish us to see.

There is the loving couple on the beach, studiously unaware of nearby photographers, gently dancing in each other's arms to a lovers' waltz only they can hear. There was the tender moment during the State of the Union address when the president looked up from the podium, made direct eye contact with his wife, and mouthed the words, "I love you"

for the entire viewing audience to see. One could only marvel at the chutzpah that it took for Bill Clinton to try such a stunt in the midst of the Monica Lewinsky scandal. It was a moment that seemed like a scene out of a 1950s grade "B" movie.

Given all that is known about the Clintons today, it is likely this moment was, in fact, scripted by someone with a Hollywood or television soap opera touch. Their good friends, television sit-com producers Harry and Linda Bloodworth-Thomason, were indeed called back to the White House during the impeachment crisis to manufacture the best possible pro-Clinton gloss to the spectacle. It has taken every trick in the book--from Hollywood advice to trashing former presidents from Washington and Jefferson to Eisenhower and Reagan--to keep the myth of the Clinton's marriage alive. Hillary even went so far as to blame her family troubles on "a vast right-wing conspiracy"

to laying it off on child abuse from an argumentative grandmother.

The president she now claims is a victim of a weakness for which he is not responsible. The victim of personal tragedy: "There was terrible conflict between his mother and grandmother," Hillary told an interviewer in the premier issue of Talk magazine in August 1999.

"A psychologist once told me that for a boy, being in the middle of a conflict between two women is the worst possible situation. There is always the desire to please each one."

So the president, according to the most recent Clinton theory, cannot help himself. Torn between a doting mother and a devoted grandmother, he must now try to please every woman he encounters.

This, we are expected to believe, justifies exposing himself to Paula Jones, groping Kathleen Willey, and forcibly raping Juanita Broaddrick. These and scores of similar incidents Hillary expects us to believe are merely sins of weakness, if they are sins at all, to be laid at the feet of his deceased mother and grandmother. The sins of malice by comparison are those of Kenneth Starr's, Henry Hyde's and every journalist who has ever tried to tell the truth about the Clintons.

Hillary's comments were a dramatic affirmation that the true nature of the Clintons' relationship is that they are of one mind, if not one flesh. They are united by an insatiable drive for power and prominence, by a calculating belief that their grip on power is more important than any abuse of it, and justifies the comprehensive employment of Saul Alinsky's principles to manipulate the public mind to maintain that position of power.

Decades before her "vast, right-wing conspiracy" Today show defense of her husband during the "Year of Monica,"

Hillary was well aware that her husband was incorrigibly promiscuous.

For reasons which are now much more apparent, Hillary chose to pretend that she believed his denials. As she has from the very beginning of their relationship, Hillary has again and again acted to protect Bill Clinton from the consequences of his actions.

Before they were even married, during his first political campaign, Hillary went through Bill Clinton's desk on a search-and-destroy mission to tear up phone numbers she knew he collected during the day's campaigning. Most self-respecting women would have left.

Hillary chose to stay. She behaves as both a desperate lover, and like a frantic campaign manager protecting a flawed candidate. Over time, protecting Bill has been more about the perpetual campaign and less about the marriage. Hillary, it seems, long ago accepted Bill Clinton as someone who could advance her goals, as a necessary complement to her more intellectual cold-blooded pursuit of power.

After all, it is Bill, not Hillary, who can seem to search one's soul with his blue eyes. It is Bill Clinton who can give "the meaningfuls" as no other. It is Bill more than Hillary, who can engage people around a coffee counter or across the nation on television. She accepts him as he is, because he is willing to return the favor. He is the willing vehicle for her ideas and her quest for power. And he could be the launch pad for a presidential candidacy of her own.

Still, it is important to remember that their romance did not begin as a power play or a purely political partnership.

POWERS OF PERSUASION.

Candidate Clinton told Newsweek of his first encounters with Hillary Rodham at Yale Law School: "And I saw her across the hall. And I'd been trying to work up the guts to talk to her. And she threw a book down at the end of the library--it's a long skinny room--and she walked the length of that room and she said, 'Look, if you're going to keep staring at me and I'm going to keep staring back, we should at least introduce ourselves. My name's Hillary Rodham. What's yours?' At that moment," he now claims, "I could not remember my name."*2 They had been introduced before at the cafeteria by mutual friend Robert Reich, who had known Clinton at Oxford, and Rodham from a meeting of student leaders on academic reform at Dartmouth College.

Hillary had her eyes cast on Bill for some time. She had first heard his jocular boasting about the size of Arkansas watermelons. She took in the sight of the tall young man, his easy manner and aggressive charm, and liked what she saw.

For his part, Bill claims to have been impressed by such a direct, forward young woman, so different from the demure and pa.s.sive girls he had pursued in Arkansas. Once Bill said he lingered around the line for cla.s.s registration to talk to her, only to have his cover blown by a registrar.

"Bill, what are you doing here? You already registered."*3 He may have been a little embarra.s.sed. Hillary had to have been more than a little flattered. They had already talked to each other for an hour.

Bill patiently went through registration with her, and then took her to the campus art museum, where he gave her his first display of his powers of persuasion by talking a custodian into opening the closed museum so he could give his newfound girlfriend a private tour.

What did he see in Hillary?

He saw an accomplished and determined woman, a campus leader, a dedicated activist. She arrived at Yale already famous for her appearances on College Bowl, the television quiz show, and for her speech denouncing Senator Brooke.

"The story of what she had done at Wellesley preceded her. We were awed by her courage," a law school friend told David Maraniss.*4 Hillary was "deliberately unattractive," a male cla.s.smate later told Vanity Fair. "I believe it came down to her self-consciousness about her own looks."*5 Michael Medved, the future conservative movie critic and a Yale Law cla.s.smate, remembered Hillary as definitely not "date bait." And perhaps, in a way, that was her attraction to the Arkansas playboy.

Bill, ever the connoisseur of women, was worldly and political enough to see beyond the southern-born underpinnings of his Arkansas upbringing. He recognized that Hillary's long unkempt hair, her sandals and frayed jeans, and her owlish frames represented her sense of how she fit into Yale and her statement of how she wanted to be perceived there. As a girl, her mother Dorothy recalled, Hillary had thought "makeup was superficial and silly. She didn't have time for it."*6 She wasn't going to compete on her looks or her charm. Her appearance was her statement, a declaration of her need to appear serious.

It was also obvious that Hillary was not a low maintenance woman.

But Bill wasn't frightened off. He enjoyed the intellectual sparring and even the arguing. He seemed to relish having a woman who was a.s.sertive and willing to challenge him. He seemed to see a challenge to his usual taste in women, and perhaps a challenge to him to overcome Hillary's somewhat icy and formidable facade.

What did Hillary see in Bill?

In most circles, a Rhodes scholar is a standout. But at a prestigious law school like Yale, such prior distinctions are canceled by a mutual sense of belonging to a select group. In fact, many of Bill's cla.s.smates mistook him for a country b.u.mpkin, seeing in him a young man whose nostalgia for his home state was cloying. A boy who spent far too much time waxing poetic about Arkansas. Tales of its pie fairs, watermelon festivals, and quaint country outings like the Toad Suck Daze Fair, the festival in Conway where the governor always entered a frog in the race. And some of Bill's colleagues resented the presumptuousness of his open ambitions for elected office.

It was a.s.sumed that once out of Yale, they would all become something--some would be elected to the Senate or governorships, some would become federal judges, some would become partners in powerhouse law firms. It just wasn't seen as proper form to talk about it. To Hillary, Bill must have seemed refreshingly honest and guileless about his dreams and desires. Bill Clinton admitted openly to everything he wanted. "Bill's desire to be in public life was much more specific than my desire to do good," she once said.*7 A friend recalled, "The fact that Bill knew he was going to run for political office was very attractive to Hillary.*8 Bill had a background that must have seemed quaintly exotic to a young woman from a midwestern suburb. Her life in Park Ridge had been quintessential suburban America, the place where the generation that had survived the Great Depression and the Second World War sought to realize the fruits of victory and prosperity in a stable and orderly environment.

The true home of William Jefferson Clinton was as different as any place could be in America. And, contrary to the carefully nurtured image, for most of his young life, that place was the brazenly tacky Hot Springs, not Hope. Long after World War II, Hot Springs still existed as an anachronism from the Prohibition era, an inland French Quarter where every bar had the seedy glamour of the speakeasy, where gambling machines and card games operated in full view of the law, and where city fathers did not dare denounce the local houses of prost.i.tution, lest they offend the madams who paid them handsomely, and who often knew way too much to risk offending.

It was almost as if Bill Clinton had been raised on a riverboat by a riverboat gambler. The mother he idealized as a sardonic observer of the human condition was seen by many as a barfly with a heart of gold. Local hearsay held that Bill was the b.a.s.t.a.r.d son of a car salesman, not Virginia's husband, Bill Blythe of Texas, a traveling salesman who was killed in a car wreck. This story is probably not true. Despite the timing of Bill's caesarian birth less than eight months after Blythe returned from active duty in Italy, young Billy Blythe seemed very much his father's son. Bill's strong jawline, which he likes to project in a bold profile for photographers, is an obvious inheritance from his mother. Otherwise, Bill Blythe could be Bill Clinton's brother. He had the same friendly lines about the eyes, a similarly open and handsome face punctuated by that same rakish, slightly bulbous nose. Like his son, Blythe was an inveterate salesman, a man with an easy gift for conversation who made his living ingratiating himself with others.

There are other similarities as well. The number of times Blythe was married, or whether he was legally a bigamist at the time of his marriage to Virginia, is unclear. What no one disputes is that he was a full-time lady's man, a familiar figure from a time in America when a salesman's car would be parked one night at a widow's home, the next night at the home of a lonely waitress he had met at a diner.

In his early years, Bill was raised by his maternal grandmother while Virginia attended nursing school. Later, he and his half-brother were raised by Roger Clinton, a Good Time Charlie who weaved in and out of their lives. Roger steadily grew more abusive, both verbally and with his fists, one time stomping Virginia on the floor and hitting her over the head with a shoe."*9 During the presidential campaign, Clinton did not have a PT-109 story to tell like his idol John F. Kennedy. In its place he related the defining moment of his young manhood: The day he marched into the middle of a fight and ordered his stepfather never to touch his mother again. The fighting did not end, although the marriage did.

A short time later, Virginia relented and took back her husband, though his presence in the house this time was on borrowed grace.

Given such a place and such a past, another child might have been molded into a Puritan. William Jefferson Clinton absorbed all that was around him and became a true product of Hot Springs--but with prodigious talents to go with his wide-open early influences. He was raised to appreciate that one could live comfortably with contradictions, that part of the art of living was to rise above, duck around, and skate through the ambiguities and embara.s.sing interuptions of life.

Virginia had told her boys that they had to brainwash themselves, to put unpleasant memories out of their mind. "Construct an airtight box," Virginia told them. "I keep inside it what I want to think about. Inside is white, outside is black .... This box is strong as steel."*10 This was the same box President Clinton told the American people that he placed all the scandal allegations.

Bill Clinton's easy way with people was augmented by a cavalier, often reckless, att.i.tude towards the truth, an approach that seems to have freed him from the restraints of a conscience or even an awareness of his own duplicitousness.

Yet, for all his sunny disposition, Clinton possessed a firey temper similar to Hillary's and a saturnine moodiness in private. "Mood swings come upon Clinton frequently," d.i.c.k Morris writes in his memoirs, Behind the Oval Office. "Far from the affable, kinetic figure he shows in public, he is most often morose in private ...."*11 Morris had an intense twenty-year relationship with the Clintons.

Though Morris is now estranged, his writings, filled with striking metaphors, carry a tone of authenticity burnished perhaps by his own embara.s.sing s.e.x scandals and concomitant public humiliation.

Morris writes of Hillary and Bill: "Warm-blooded animals carry within them the ability to adjust their body temperatures, but cold-blooded creatures need outside warmth from the sun to keep them warm inside."

Hillary is warm-blooded. She is driven, but she does not need outside sources of warmth to be comfortable in her own skin. Left to herself, she contentedly reads biographies, takes walks, or, according to Washington Post journalists, communes with Eleanor Roosevelt. Bill, on the other hand, needs living people to warm him up and craves constant rea.s.surance and approval, just to feel alive.

Left to himself, Bill Clinton can be a sullen fire lost in long bouts of self pity; a man who displays a volcanic temper toward his staff and who can barely stand to be himself, by himself.

"Bill Clinton can be elusive. He'll just disappear on you. One minute you think he's right there on your wavelength, and the next minute you're turning your head to look for him. He gets distracted, disenchanted, bored, or annoyed and stops the meetings or phone calls ...."*12.

As a love interest, it is unlikely that Hillary had an inkling at first of Clinton's many dark sides. After all, at the beginning of their relationship she was another source of outside radiance and warmth--someone whom he needed to seduce, literally and figuratively.

A commitment to political change was still the defining feature of her life--love or no love. Had Clinton been an acolyte of Judge Bork or a Nixon Republican (a handful did exist on the Yale campus), there is very little likelihood that personal attraction could have trumped ideology. As it turned out, Bill Clinton's outlook was very close to her own, at least it appeared that way to her, and despite his political ambitions, he was willing to argue that the whole American system was corrupt and beholden to corruption, and endorse the far left philosopher Herbert Marcuse's view that America's version of freedom and democracy was a fraud.

If Hillary liked the fact that he would join her on the radical ramparts, she also admired his intellect. She was a good student, but it required hard work. Clinton, by many accounts, could waste much of his time reading philosophy and murder mysteries, do a quick study of someone else's notes, and ace the exam.

"Magically, before examinations, he borrowed some good notes, mine among them, disappeared for three weeks, and performed quite well,"

one colleague remembered.*13 They were both deep in extracurricular activities, though both Bill and Hillary disdained interest in buffing their resumes with the usual apprenticeships on the law review. The law review would have required hard work--not a little of it tedious and decidedly unglamorous, and not very political. Hillary was immersed in her work with children. Bill spent his spare time working for a local Senate political campaign.

Like Hillary, Bill also had a deep grounding in religion, though in many ways it was a different religion. To say that he was a southern Baptist and she a Methodist is to gloss over the vast cultural rift between her church and the people and places Bill knew. Bill attended the Park Place Baptist Church in Hot Springs, where the Christianity he learned was closer to that of the tent than that of Hillary's studies of seminarians such as Paul Tillich. Later, when he returned home, Clinton would venture to Pentecostal revival meetings at Redfield, Arkansas, where he would join a quartet of pastors to sing "Amazing Grace," and join in their pa.s.sionate expressions of belief. At Oxford, Bill may have walked the same cobblestone streets and quads as John Wesley and his "methodical"

Bible study group. But he was more at home campaigning in Arkansas among singing, dancing, shouting Pentecostals, his own saxophone in hand.*14 Of course, with Bill, the personal is always political. He found Pentecostal pastors useful as his amba.s.sadors to the religious right.

While Hillary went to Methodist services in Little Rock, Bill joined the largest Baptist congregation in the state, the only one on statewide television every Sunday morning, where he volunteered as a member of the choir. Though Bill had no time for choir practice, he rarely missed the chance for the citizens of Arkansas to see him behind the preacher, hymnal in hand (much like the Bible he studiously displayed while walking into church during his presidency), singing to the glory of G.o.d.

Race was another factor that made him attractive to Hillary. At Wellesley, Hillary had gone out of her way to befriend African Americans, making a point of taking a black friend with her to church. Bill had a more comfortable relationship with blacks, less of an ideological need to cross racial barriers and more of an interest in them as potential future const.i.tuents. When Bill walked over to a group of black students, isolated at one end of a table at the Yale cafeteria, he did so out of an apparent interest in communicating, winning them over, and making them like him--people to be enlisted as future supporters. "I was one of ten African Americans in a cla.s.s of one hundred twenty-five students," William T.

Coleman IIi, son of a prominent figure in the Ford administration, recalled. "From the first day of law school, the African-American students gravitated toward each other and almost immediately began to form close bonds. By the second week of cla.s.s, there was a black table in the cafeteria. This selfsegregation was readily acknowledged and accepted by the majority student body, with one notable exception. A tall, robust, friendly fellow with a southern accent and a cherubic face unceremoniously violated the unspoken taboo by plopping himself down at the black table. His presence at the table at first caused discomfort. Many of the black students stared at him with expressions that suggested the question, 'Man, don't you know whose table this is?' The tall fellow with the southern accent was oblivious to the stares and engaged us in easy conversation."*15 THE WINNING FORMULA.

Bill Clinton's next roommate was to lead to something more permanent.