Hell To Pay Part 4

The Clinton-Rodham romance deepened, and they soon moved in together in a student apartment for $75 a month. At this stage in their relationship, friends remember, their arguments were mostly friendly ones, dinnertime conversation over the issues of the day. The moment of truth came in 1972, when Hillary was to have graduated. The choice she made tells of the deepening of their relationship, and her hopes for a union with Bill. For the first time in her meteoric educational career, Hillary chose to slow down, to remain at Yale taking an extra year to graduate until Bill Clinton finished in 1973.

In the years to come, they worked together as co-dependents, as campaigners, as co-governor and co-president. The first project in which they put their minds together was as student lawyers arguing before a mock trial, the coveted Prize Trial. To all appearances, the trial appeared real, with local citizens and students brought in to serve on the jury and play-act the role of witnesses.

Bill and Hillary were brought in to argue for the prosecution in a case in which a policeman had been accused of murdering "longhairs."

Bill and Hillary crammed for a month, spending every spare moment prepping and challenging each other to do their best.

One spring day, they began their argument before Abe Fortas, former justice of the U.S. Supreme Court.

"Clinton was soft and engaging, eager to charm the judge and jury and make the witnesses feel comfortable, pouting when a ruling went the other way," recounts Clinton biographer David Maraniss. "Rodham was clear and all business." One observer remembered "that Rodham was never concerned about stepping on toes whereas Clinton would ma.s.sage your toes."*16 Despite their best efforts, they lost the trial. But it was here that they hit on a winning formula that would serve them well in all the political trials to come. Bill does a great "good cop," the one who speaks more from sadness than from anger, who seeks to co-opt, not to condemn. Hillary, harder to attack behind the shield of a woman's vulnerability, is the tough prosecutor, the one to level a charge or counter an attack with one of her own.

Their next partnership was in the McGovern campaign, in the summer and fall of 1972. Bill worked as coordinator of the McGovern campaign in Texas, a campaign based in a dusty office on Sixth Street in Austin, but one that perhaps should have been based in the Alamo.

Hillary was sent to San Antonio, where she led a Democratic voter registration drive. Even in a losing campaign, there are new influential friends to be made, new additions to the rolodex. One of them was a woman who would eventually become the master of the Clinton rolodex, future Little Rock chief of staff Betsey Wright.

Wright is known to most Americans as the person who would later coin the term "bimbo eruption" and was portrayed as the rough queen of opposition research in Primary Colors.

There also were visits to each others' parents. On a trip to Park Ridge, Illinois, Bill Clinton made his customary good first impression. "I was cutting the gra.s.s," Tony Rodham says, recalling one day when he was eighteen years old. "He climbed out of the car, came right over and started helping me cut the gra.s.s. We had a nice little chat, and, of course, I had something else I wanted to do so Bill immediately volunteered to help finish the job with the gra.s.s.

I think Dad came out of the house and put a stop to it."*17 Hillary's family liked the engaging young man, but Hugh had his doubts. "My father was more concerned that he was a Democrat than [from Arkansas]," Hillary said. "Great arguments, great arguments."*18 THE CHOICE.

About that time Bill, like Hillary, was given an opportunity to work on the House Judiciary Committee impeachment investigation of Richard Nixon. Had he done so, he would have set the groundwork for what would have been the political irony of the century. Instead, Bill decided to accept a job teaching law at the University of Arkansas at Fayetteville as a stepping stone to elected office. It was Hillary who was recruited to serve as counsel on the House Judiciary Committee, working long hours on an investigation that would lead to a committee vote that would result in the resignation of President Nixon. Yet well before the fatal moment came, a full month before, she flew down to Fayetteville to interview for a professorship of her own. The interview went well, and she was accepted.

While still in Washington, Hillary spoke often of her Arkansas boyfriend, her mood often turning on whether he had called. There were signs that she worried about whether he was spending time with other women. Hillary often declared to her colleagues that her boyfriend in Arkansas was going to become president someday.

No sooner had Richard Nixon walked down the red carpet, and given his broad wave and victory sign before boarding the plane that would carry him into exile, than Hillary asked her roommate, Sara Ehrman, to drive her to Arkansas in a 1968 Buick. During the trip, Ehrman tried to talk her out of it. Two years shy of thirty, Hillary had had opportunities galore: Offers from law firms, top positions in the Democratic Party, leadership positions in major a.s.sociations--it was there for the taking.

If she stayed back East.

If she remained in Washington or moved to New York.

If she forgot about this guy from Arkansas.

"You have the world at your feet," Ehrman said. "Why are you throwing your life away for this guy?" When the two stopped in Charlottesville, Virginia at Monticello, Ehrman reminded her they were still close to the Washington Beltway, time enough to go back.

Hillary would hear none of it.*19 Enormous adjustments were necessary when she arrived in Arkansas. "I grew up in the Land of Lincoln, and spent enormous amounts of time as a child studying Illinois and American history, reading biographies of Lincoln, making field trips to Springfield and other places that had some a.s.sociation with Lincoln," Hillary reninisced.*20 "So he [Lincoln] had a very big place in my historical imagination. I mean, it was just an open-and-shut case that Abraham Lincoln was by far the greatest President, because he had saved the Union and came from Illinois. I remember clearly one time traveling with my family on a trip to Florida, when I was nine, I think," Hillary said. "We got to Vincennes, Indiana, which is very southern Indiana, and checked into a little motel that had a little tiny TV. For the first time I saw a TV series called The Gray Ghost, which was about a Confederate soldier. And I was just astonished that anybody would have a television series in which the hero was a Confederate soldier. And then as we traveled farther south, I remember being in Alabama and stopping at gas stations where they sold Confederate flags and things like that."

Bill Clinton was the first person she had ever met from Arkansas.

One time he picked her up at the airport and proceeded to make a hard sell for living in the South. What should have been a one-hour drive to Hot Springs took eight hours as he gave her a tour of state parks, scenic overlooks, favorite barbecue spots, and his favorite fried-pie place.

"My head was reeling because I didn't know what I was going to see or what I was expecting," Hillary later said.*21 "I had a lot of apprehension, partly because I didn't know anybody and did not know how I'd be received.

"The people were warm and welcoming to me. I felt very much at home," she told Newsweek. "And it was a shock to me because I had never lived in the South or in a small place before. It gave me a perspective on life and helped me understand what it was like for most people .... I think I've had a more interesting time of it than I would have if I had chickened out and not followed my heart."*22 Yet, her awareness of being a Yankee outsider grew as she looked around her prospective future home, a hybrid state between the Ozarks and the muddy flats of the Mississippi River.

The time had also come for Hillary to be judged by Bill's family.

One can imagine Virginia's inner reactions when she saw Hillary.

"virginia loathed Hillary then," Clinton friend Mary Fray recalled.

"Anything she could find to pick on about Hillary she would. Hillary did not fit her mold for Bill."*23 Even Bill knew that Hillary's "look" could be a public problem, and a.s.signed a friend the task of finding ways to mute the hippie Hillary with a few traditional southern touchups.

But Clinton's mother could never warm to this harsh, Yankee outsider.

Perhaps Virginia was the kind of mother who would always be jealous of any woman who attached herself to her beloved older son. More likely, she may have imagined Bill marrying the kind of woman who would make a great playmate, someone who would be fun to be with, someone who could cut up and carouse, someone, perhaps, like Bill's longtime occasional girlfriend Dolly Kyle Browning, an attractive blonde, who would later urge Clinton to seek treatment for his "s.e.x addiction." But if Virginia wanted a good-looking southern girl to show off as a daughter-in-law, Bill could not have disappointed her more.

To Hillary, Virginia must have appeared like a clown, with her penciled-in Joan Crawford eyebrows, and her Tammy Faye Bakker thick powder and heavy, coat of lipstick. There was a long testy period of sounding each other out.

According to friend Carolyn Staley, Bill sat his mother down, and told her in no uncertain terms that he would never "marry a beauty queen." It was to be Hillary or n.o.body.*24 And they would live in Fayetteville, the home of the University of Arkansas.

THE NARROW CENTER.

"If Arkansas is an hourgla.s.s, then Fayetteville is the narrow center," former Razorback offensive tackle Webb Hubbell recalled in his memoirs: All these young people grow up all over the state in towns like Mountain Home and Bald k.n.o.b and De Valls Bluff and El Dorado (here p.r.o.nounced El Do-ray-do), and then at a certain point the kids all leave those hamlets and go off to the University of Arkansas at Fayetteville.

There, the continuity of the statewide bond is forged. For four years these people from all corners eat together, drink (a lot) together, sleep with one another, cheer for the Razorbacks together, and in so doing they form alliances, marital and otherwise, that will affect the future of the state for years. Because, after college, having all pa.s.sed through that unifying filter, they disperse once again back into the wider (but still not very wide) geography, taking with them an expanded field of acquaintances, loyalties, and bonds.

As a result, everything in our state--including its business and politics, which you can't separate from everyday life--is intensely personal. That's why it's like Main Street. Everybody's on a first name basis. And that means that political talk is personal talk, and business deals are personal deals, and personalities are more than issues. Furthermore, they don't want this system to change.*25 Bill Clinton had made a shrewd job choice. As his students graduated, they fanned out across the state with stories about their gregarious, energetic young professor who had been a Rhodes scholar and who was sure to make a name in Arkansas politics.

One thing was clear once Hillary and Bill settled in Fayetteville, they could not continue to live together. Having a liberal firebrand of a girlfriend was a detriment enough. Living in sin with her in Arkansas during the 1970s would have been political suicide.

It was during this time, as a law professor, that Hillary made a lifelong friend in political scientist Diane Blair, whose husband, Jim, became the general counsel for Tyson Foods, the giant poultry producer. Later, as governor, Clinton presided over the wedding of Diane and Jim. Jim Blair was so much older and more distinguished looking, that when they traveled out of state he was mistaken for the governor, and Clinton as a junior member of his entourage.

"Jim and I became friends with Bill and Hillary before Bill held any office, before Jim was at Tysons, indeed, before they were the Clintons and we were the Blairs," Diane Blair recounts in The Clintons of Arkansas.*26 They had first met Bill at the 1972 Democratic National Convention. For a long time, Bill had sung Hillary's praises to Diane, promising her that they would be fast friends.

"I asked him why he didn't marry this wonderful woman and bring her back to Arkansas with him. He would love to, he said, but Hillary was so uncommonly gifted and had so many attractive options of her own that he felt selfish about bringing her to what would be his state and his political future."*27 Diane was impressed with Clinton's sensitivity. It piqued her interest in Hillary all the more. She was not disappointed. In Hillary, the new law school professor, she found a soulmate.

"As two of the few female faculty members, we were acutely aware of the suspicion with which many old-timers still regarded women in academe," she recalled. Hillary was one of the few women practicing law in northwest Arkansas, and was inevitably tagged a "lady lawyer"

by a local judge.*28 They became regular lunchmates, tennis partners, and sounding boards about life in Fayetteville.

Hillary, always with an excess of energy, devoted much of her time to establishing a legal clinic to train local law students in the legal needs of indigent people. She also secured funds from the Legal Services Corporation to operate a legal aid bureau in Northwest Arkansas.

Hillary had done her part. The time had come for Bill Clinton to make his intentions clear. Once, while driving around Fayetteville, the young couple had noticed a small brick-and-stonework house for sale. Then Hillary left for a trip to Illinois and the East Coast to explore her options.

When she returned, Bill drove her to the little house, offering a key and a ring.

They were married two months later, in October 1975, in a modest ceremony. It would have been common for an Arkansas woman to have spent a great deal of time preparing for her wedding. Hillary bought her dress at the last minute, an off-the-rack item frown Dillards department store.

They didn't plan a honeymoon. Later, Hillary's mother found a good package deal including Hillary's brothers. So the young couple honeymooned in Acapulco with Hugh, Dorothy, Hughie, and Tony in tow.*29 THE SECRET POLICE.

What explains the eventual evolution of the Clintons' marriage into a dynamic political partnership, the constant undercurrents of anger and recrimination, the shouting and the throwing of lamps and books?

How did they become so angry at each other that they would destroy the memory of Inauguration Day for one another, the day their lifelong dreams were fulfilled, with a public display worthy of James Carville's acid term, "trailer trash"?

There is another side to their early relationship. Hillary was well acquainted with Arkansas long before she moved to Fayetteville. She had lived in Arkansas for part of 1974, when Bill Clinton had decided to run against inc.u.mbent Republican Congressman John Paul Hammerschmidt. The Clintons and their boosters rarely talk about that race, and for good reason. It was during this time that Hillary learned all too well what kind of husband Bill Clinton would make.

Two legacies were created during this period. First, in the Clinton marriage, the personal fused with the political. The risks that Bill Clinton took with his relationship with Hillary were inseparable from the risks he took with his own career.

The second legacy is the need for what Clinton consultant and friend d.i.c.k Morris called "the secret police." Hillary learned about private investigators in her work on behalf of the Black Panthers and the Communist apologists Robert Treuhaft and Jessica Mitford. Now Hillary was constantly checking up on Bill, not just to learn the extent of his betrayals, but to a.s.sess the danger he posed to their joint political career.

Hillary began her surveillance of Bill during this period in simple ways, eavesdropping and checking his desk. While Hillary knew Bill was cheating, she didn't know that Mary Lee Fray--the woman charged with making Hillary more attractive--was also the shepherd who kept the doors revolving so that Hillary never b.u.mped into what she called "Bill's special friends." Clinton campaign coordinators Neal McDonald remembered that Bill "had a girlfriend in every county."

While Hillary a.s.sumed that her intellect would keep Bill at her side, Mary Lee Fray lamented that Hillary "had a weight problem and she wouldn't diet .... She didn't have a body for a dress. So I told her to at least buy some nice underclothes."*30 If it came to a choice between changing her lingerie or snooping on Bill, Hillary preferred to search for sc.r.a.ps of paper with phone numbers on them and tear them up, mutilating the paper as though it were a Black Panther informant betraying Bobby Seale to "the pigs."

'HOW'D YOU GET AWAY WITH IT?'.

Bill Clinton was only twenty-eight years old in the summer of 1974.

He looked little like the man in the Oval Office with the $500 California haircut. He was pasty, gangly in the limbs, and pudgy around the stomach and hips. In old photos, he looks every bit like the momma's boy that he was.

"I had never before met a candidate my own age with sideburns and hair as long as mine," said d.i.c.k Morris, who met Clinton three years later. "I'd also never before met a southerner who talked fast."*31 Still, there was something about Bill Clinton. Something far beyond an educational resume that made people take notice of him. He had the charisma and the presence that made plausible a run for office before he was thirty.

Taking on Representative John Paul Hammerschmidt was a bold move.

Republicans were few in Arkansas. But Hammerschmidt was well-entrenched, a popular GOP congressman who relied on a strong base in Fort Smith, which, at the western-most boundary of the state, was as close as you could get, politically and geographically, to Oklahoma. Hammerschmidt, a veteran, carefully tended to the concerns of the large community of retired military personnel in the area.

Moreover, with the power of big money, television, and the franking privilege, it had become harder than ever to dislodge an inc.u.mbent.

It is a mark of Clinton's political judgment that he foresaw that the usual rules of politics could be rewritten in 1974. Despite the statesmanlike handling of Watergate by many leading Republicans, the public was determined to vent its anger by turning a large number of them out of office. Clinton correctly predicted the political tsunami that would sweep in a whole generation of Democratic politicians, the so-called "Watergate babies."

He was determined to become one of them. And he knew just how to do it. The trick, he explained to a committee of local labor leaders, was to use every available opportunity to tie Hammerschmidt to Nixon.

Any vote, any position, any statement Hammerschmidt made could be turned into a weapon if it mirrored the Nixon position. The unions were so impressed by Bill's deft understanding of the challenge ahead that they switched their endors.e.m.e.nt from a primary challenger to the young law professor.

The Clinton campaign opened for business in an old bungalow on College Avenue. Paul Fray, and his wife Mary, in whose wedding Bill had served as best man, ran the campaign.

In many ways, this race was cla.s.sic Bill Clinton. It reflected his frenetic pace and his utterly disorganized style.

As a professor, Bill Clinton was notorious for losing blue books and exams (including one of a student who later presided over his s.e.xual hara.s.sment trial and who found he had lied under oath to her face, Judge Susan Webber Wright).

Clinton drove the backroads of Northwest Arkansas in his green AMC Gremlin, often missing events or appointments because he'd feel the need to stop at a local roadhouse to praise the local pie and flatter a local precinct woman or mayor.

Bill was diligent about collecting business cards and names, stuffing them in his pockets. Once back at campaign headquarters, he'd pile them up on his desk and forget about them.*32 Old photos from the campaign show a headquarters full of bright young people. They were hardly, however, a microcosm of the district Bill sought to represent. The men wore long hair, full sideburns, baggy shirts, and worn-out jeans. There were times when the scent of marijuana rolled out of Clinton phone banks, and the campaign symbol might as well have been a hand-rolled cigarette.

If his staff was indiscreet, Bill Clinton himself was an encyclopedia of improprieties. One was a pesky little habit of encouraging women to feel like they had a shot at a permanent relationship with him--a charm he was still practicing a quarter-of-a-century later on a young White House intern named Lewinsky.

Hillary must have already been aware of her boyfriend's far-reaching s.e.xual appet.i.tes. She had encouraged her father, rock-solid Republican that he was, to move to Arkansas and drive around in his Cadillac putting up "Clinton for Congress" signs. Hugh Rodham brought Hughie with him. (Eventually the whole family moved to Arkansas. Hughie and Tony attended the University of Arkansas. Hugh and Dorothy retired to Little Rock to be near their granddaughter, Chelsea.) Apparently, Hugh agreed to help this young man, if that is what his daughter wanted. While Hillary worked night and day for the House Judiciary Committee in Washington, D.C., she was hoping that having her father and brother nearby might help to restrain Bill's Rabelaisian appet.i.te for s.e.x.

It was, however, a hopeless enterprise. Nothing has forced Bill Clinton to walk the straight and narrow. Not threats of divorce from his wife. Not the threat of destroying a promising political career.

Not the need to appear on 60 Minutes in the midst of a presidential campaign and not the risk of a humiliating scandal by having s.e.x with a young intern in the Oval Office. Certainly having his main girlfriend's dad and little brother on the campaign would not deter him.

Vigorous pursuit of the opposite s.e.x is natural and even healthy, especially in youth. At some point, however, youthful indiscretion and s.e.xual promiscuity turns unhealthy, into obsession, and can become an unacceptable character flaw. In 1992 the campaign made much of the famous photo of Bill Clinton, then sixteen and part of a Boy's Nation delegation to the White House, in which he firmly shook the hand of President John F. Kennedy.

The president and teenager make eye contact in that photo. They seem locked on to one another. It was the perfect campaign photo for Bill Clinton. At century's end, after all that is known about these two men, it is also a moment of irony, one that is deep and poignant.

Bill Clinton had, like John F. Kennedy, become an aggressive, out-of-control womanizer, someone who aspired to be both married and enjoy his charm and s.e.xual magnetism by indulging in quickies in a backseat, a bas.e.m.e.nt, or a room off the Oval Office. Bill Clinton went beyond wildest rumors of JFK--to being credibly accused of going beyond quickies to s.e.xual hara.s.sment and forcible rape.

"His identification with JFK was particularly evident to me," d.i.c.k Morris wrote, "in 1995 when Clinton returned from a President's Day interview with the media where he was asked, 'If you could ask your idol, John Kennedy, one question and only one question, what would it be?'

"'I'd want to ask him, you know, how did you do it?' Clinton jokingly confided. 'How'd you get away with it?'"*33 Investigative reporter James B. Stewart unearthed a story from Bill's attendance at family counseling sessions for his half-brother Roger, then a cocaine addict. He told the therapist that he was born sixteen and he would always be sixteen. Bill said that Hillary was born forty, and that she'd always be forty.*34 One might think, at a minimum, that this was an awful thing to say about his wife. But it also underlined that his mother Virginia might have known her son better than he knew himself--and maybe he would have been calmer, happier, tamer if he had married a Gennifer Flowers or a self-confessed s.e.x addict like Dolly Kyle Browning.

Bill Clinton had many girlfriends stashed around the district. Some of them were willing to be casual part-timers. At least one, a woman in Fayetteville, worked at campaign headquarters and thought of herself as Bill Clinton's girlfriend, possibly his future wife. Bill did nothing to dissuade her or any of the others.

And the only thing that kept him from being even more reckless was when Hillary called from Washington saying she was going to sleep with someone else--a fairly pathetic tactic, but one that had Bill in tears begging her not to ruin their relationship. And she didn't.

Instead, she came to Arkansas to join the campaign.

Bill's "hippie girlfriend" brought a semblance of order to the campaign. Names of potential supporters and contributors were catalogued. Bill was forced to allow himself to be "advanced," to at least try to adhere to a disciplined schedule of appearances.

Hillary's steely commitment and her bossy and bickering att.i.tude alienated many staffers, and angered Bill's old friends, Paul and Mary Fray.

For the campaign staffers, the stress of managing the Bill and Hillary relationship--which was already metamorphosizing into a political partnership and a more political issue--combined with the constant challenge of getting the candidate from point A to point B, began to tell.

Still, given the strength of the Democratic vote in the hamlets of the district, and the building wave of public anger over Watergate, Fray knew that Bill Clinton did, indeed, have a shot. But given the state of the Clinton campaign, they would need a boost to win, and that boost would come from money that would buy votes.

"There's no doubt that the system is corrupt," one Clinton supporter later told the press. "I don't think it's a function of Democratic politics or of any party politics. It's really a function of no-party politics."*35 "Walking around" money was a southern tradition. It was taken for granted that the Democratic party had the right to work with labor unions and church groups to disburse large sums of cash to bribe people to vote. Bill himself had handled piles of such money for the McGovern campaign in Texas.

Now it was his turn.

Paul Fray matter-of-factly explained to the candidate that dairy interests in the state were willing to put up the cash to buy absentee ballots. All Bill had to do was say "yes."

Left to himself, there is little doubt what he would have done. But Hillary had not yet become the operator she was later to become.

From an adjoining room, she found out about it and allegedly killed the deal.

Allegedly on election night, Fray made one last desperate effort to buy the election. Hillary refused, and Mary Fray joined her.

Perhaps wiser than her husband, Mary Fray knew that if caught, Bill would hang Paul Fray out to dry. This triggered what aides called "the hen and the rooster fight."*36 The fight ignited again, when it was evident that the margin of Bill Clinton's imminent defeat was fewer than 10,000 votes--votes that Fray thought he could buy.

Presaging the battles that would later rock the White House, writer David Brock describes a raucous scene: "Telephones and books sailed across the room, smashing windows. Fray blamed Hillary, Hillary blamed Fray, and Mary Lee blamed Bill.... Hillary got an earful about Bill from Mary Lee. 'I threw all the trash on Bill,' Mary Lee said.

'The deceit started with hiding the girlfriends. This is the first time Hillary found out about a lot of things.'"*37 Many irretrievable things happened that night.

One was the utter destruction of the friendship between Bill Clinton and Paul and Mary Fray.

Also destroyed were Hillary's hopes that she could return to Washington as a congressman's wife and resume her career as a legal activist. If she wanted to marry Bill, she was doomed to life in Arkansas.

A third casualty that night was Hillary's Methodist conscience. She had learned that to win in Arkansas one had to have the stomach for bending, and breaking the law. And if she was to win with Bill, she would have to stand by a man she couldn't trust. While Hillary railed against Bill's unfaithfulness, she did, in the end, accept it.

In the years to come, Hillary defended him in election after election. When Bill Clinton finally ran for president, Hillary went to Washington, sat and told stories of her wonderful husband at the "Sperling Breakfast" for prominent Washington journalists. She sat next to her husband on 60 Minutes and shamed reporters for asking about Gennifer Flowers, by admitting they had pain in their marriage.

Hillary made it sound as if there was a period in their marriage when they grew apart, perhaps that Bill had temporarily strayed.

Hillary characterized it as a momentary bad time between them, but certainly not a pattern. In fact, of course, Hillary knew differently. She knew that for the whole of her marriage she accepted, supported, and even encouraged a compulsive philanderer in his--and her--quest for power.

There would in the course of this arrangement, be anger, tears, recrimination. After several terms as governor, Bill's humiliation of Hillary was so public and so flagrant that they almost divorced.