First In His Class (43 page)

The wedding at Sacred Heart Church reflected the crosscurrents of the era. The six ushers were Marines in dress uniform. The six groomsmen included the brothers of the bride and groom as well as the Potomac Avenue housemates from Georgetown, except for Tom Campbell, who was flying Navy planes in Japan. Ashby and many of his Marine buddies were on their way to Vietnam. The lasting memory that Amy Ashby had of the wedding reception in her parents' backyard was of Clinton, bearded and shaggy, standing face to face with a crewcut soldier, arguing one more time about the war that defined their generation.

CHAPTER THIRTEEN
 
LAW AND POLITICS AT YALE

L
UCK AND FATE
always seem to appear at the edge of the road as Bill Clinton drives along his highway of ambition, two friendly hitchhikers, thumbs out, ready to be picked up for stretches here and there when other passengers appear less attractive. Usually there are less mysterious ways to explain how he got to where he wanted to go. But in the fall of 1970, luck and fate not only went along for the ride, they crowded him out of the driver's seat and took over the steering wheel. How else to explain the combination of circumstances that awaited him when he moved to Connecticut to begin law school?

After his adventuresome and enlightening, though officially unfulfilled, academic spell at Oxford, Clinton returned to the United States anxious to launch his political career, yet reluctant to head back to Arkansas without the imprimatur of an advanced degree from an elite institution. He rejected the option of staying at University College for a third year and earning his degree there, as Oxford officials had invited him to do, largely because his political itch, his need to get on with his life, made another year at Oxford seem indulgent if not irrelevant. He had already discarded the idea of attending law school back at the University of Arkansas at Fayetteville for a number of reasons, not least his desire to remain in the company of the brightest of his generation. Yale Law School offered the answers to his every need—political, academic, social, and personal.

But if luck and fate played their crucial roles for Clinton at Yale, they had little to do with his getting in. He earned his place by distinction of his Rhodes Scholarship and by scoring high on the law boards. That said, there could not have been a better setting for him. Clinton, impatient, wanted to attend a prestigious law school and to immerse himself in American politics at the same time. Nowhere could this be done more surely than at Yale, which was not only elite and distinguished but also experimental and adaptable to the free-form culture of the era. The stereotype of an Ivy League law school's first year as a rigorous boot camp where crusty old professors did their brutal best to exhaust and demoralize students was turned on its head at Yale Law. Grades had been all but eliminated before Clinton arrived, replaced by a more egalitarian pass—fail system that freed students to devote more time to the issues of the day, or whatever diversions caught their fancy, than to grinding out four-point averages on the way toward slots on the
Yale Law Journal
and partnerships at Wall Street firms.

The prevailing sentiment at Yale Law was that you truly had to put your mind to it to flunk out. It was, as one professor said, a very tough country club to get into, but once you were in, you were in. With that surplus of academic freedom, Clinton needed only a political campaign to round out his days. As luck would have it, one was ready and waiting for him when he arrived, and not just any campaign but perhaps the nation's most compelling Senate race.
One of
the candidates, Joseph D. Duffey, a thirty-eight-year-old peace and civil rights activist and ethics professor at Hartford Seminary, had emerged as a successor of sorts to Eugene McCarthy and Robert Kennedy, leading the antiwar legions on another long march for peace two years after the crusades of 1968. Fate would reappear before the school year ended, when Clinton encountered a young woman who was to bring order and clarity to his life's ambition.

B
USLOADS
of student volunteers rumbled into Connecticut in 1970 for the “New Politics” campaign of Joe Duffey. The pilgrimage had started during the first week in May, when college political activism, which had been faltering, returned after the invasion of Cambodia and the shooting of four young protesters by National Guardsmen at Kent State University in Ohio. Suddenly the old mill towns of Connecticut were the places to be for the mobile young masses of the antiwar movement. The movement's ambitious young leaders came to Connecticut in force, too, some of them the same aspiring activists who had met on Martha's Vineyard a year earlier at the gathering that was half-jokingly dubbed “ The Executive Committee of the Future.” They were drawn by a sense that the war in Vietnam would only be ended by changing votes in Congress, one election at a time, and because they saw the Connecticut campaign as a rehearsal theater for the big show, the struggle for the future of the Democratic party that was sure to come in 1972.

Tony Podesta, a McCarthy campaign veteran who then qualified as the
living definition of a political junkie, brought Clinton into the Duffey organization.
They had
worked together that summer for several weeks at Project Pursestrings. Of all the antiwar groups and projects in Washington during that era, Pursestrings was among the most conventional. It had been funded with help from several establishment figures and several young liberal Republicans were recruited to give it a bipartisan flavor. The Pursestrings office on K Street served as a meeting place for the mainstream of the young antiwar activists, including several from the Vineyard crowd, who would organize during the day and at night gather at taverns or apartments to talk and drink and play poker and impress young women. Clinton was clean-shaven again. (The beard appeared and disappeared depending on where Clinton was and what was expected of him. His mother, who never liked the beard, believed that Clinton grew it because “
he had
a baby face and decided it would look better for him,” and that he was encouraged to keep it by people who would “come along and say he looked like Jesus—well, he thought that was wonderful!”)

By the summer of 1970, Clinton was beginning to build a reputation within this network of high-achieving peers. There was an unspoken understanding in the group that most of them were skilled organizers and strate-gists but only a few had the aptitude and ambition to run for office themselves. According to Podesta, there “were two guys at Pursestrings we all thought would someday end up in a primary running against each other. One was Jim Johnson and the other was Bill Clinton.” Johnson was several steps ahead of Clinton on the political ladder at that point. He ran Pursestrings while Clinton was among the assistants. And Johnson thought big: looking around the K Street office one day, he remarked: “This would be a great place to run a presidential campaign!” He considered running for office, but never did. He assisted other politicians instead, including Edmund Muskie and Vice President Walter Mondale, and eventually became a corporate executive.

Many from
the Pursestrings contingent ventured up to Connecticut before the three-way August 19 Democratic primary, which Duffey won. The political rush that Podesta felt after that victory—which took him by surprise; he had already sent out a press statement with Duffey's concession before the votes were counted—caused him, he said later, to lose his senses and contract his first case of Potomac fever. He agreed to coordinate the Duffey forces in the general election, which promised to be another colorful three-way contest involving Duffey, Republican Lowell P. Weicker, Jr., and the incumbent, Thomas J. Dodd, who was running as an independent after being dumped by the Democrats when the Senate censured him for misusing campaign funds. Podesta served as Duffey's number-two aide, known to the troops as “Deputy Dog,” behind Anne Wexler, a party activist
and McCarthy campaign veteran from Westport who was Duffey's campaign manager and future wife.

They had “the pick of the best young organizers around,” including Podesta's younger brother John; Steve Robbins, another Pursestrings veteran; occasional help from the moratorium leaders Sam Brown, David Mixner, and John Shattuck; Lawrence Kudlow and Michael Medved (antiwar activists who later undertook the ideological transformation to neoconservatism); a crackerjack all-women advance team consisting largely of students from Smith College; and
Bill Clinton
, who was recruited to run the Third Congressional District based in New Haven. For someone with Clinton's personality, a political explorer always searching for exotic places to discover and fresh faces to charm, Connecticut's tough old Third Congressional District presented itself like a bright new world. New Haven and the inner ring of towns around it, with their mixture of Italian and Irish ethnics, their police club and parochial school cultures, their ward captain style of old-fashioned politics, challenged Clinton's resourceful-ness. So too, in their own way, did the fashionable outer suburbs dominated by patrician Republicans, another breed virtually unknown in Arkansas. The district was Democratic in those days, but barely so, and there were enough Dodd loyalists in the ethnic neighborhoods and Republicans in the suburbs to make the antiwar theology professor from Hartford less than an easy sell.

First, Clinton had to sell himself, both to the Duffey partisans and to other Democrats who had supported either of Duffey's primary opponents, zipper manufacturer Alphonsus J. Donahue, the choice of longtime party boss John Bailey, and state senator Ed Marcus, who had positioned himself as the law-and-order candidate. “There was a little bit of reaction at first: Why are you sending this law student from Arkansas here? How could anyone who doesn't have the water of New Haven in his blood know what to do?” Podesta recalled. “Bill Clinton was an unusual choice as our ambassador to the Donahue and Marcus people, but he did very well. He won them over and brought them to our campaign. He became the guy the staff liked the most and the volunteers liked the most. He had the most friends by the end.” He was also the candidate's favorite organizer. Duffey's strongest memory of Clinton during the campaign was of the young Arkansan waiting for him at the curb in New Haven, ready to brief him on where they were going, the issues they would emphasize that day, and the various factions they would have to deal with. “Bill knew what he was doing,” Duffey said later. “He could talk to anyone.”

When Clinton first called Mickey Donenfeld, a registered nurse and the Duffey coordinator in conservative Milford along Long Island Sound, and said, in a soft, southern drawl, “Hah, Ahm Bill Clinton and ahm the third
congressional coordinator,” Donenfeld muttered to herself, “Oh,
my God!”
She conjured up an unpleasant image of what it would be like dealing with this sleepy, laid-back character. Irv Stolberg, a leader of the reform Democrats in New Haven who had been fired from his teaching position at Southern Connecticut University for his antiwar activism and was running for the state legislature that fall, found Clinton “
one of
the few Yalies who had any depth of political interest.” Clinton “spoke funny,” Stolberg thought, “but aside from that he was easygoing and bright, and it didn't take him very long to figure out the area.” It was part of Clinton's peripatetic campaign style to spend most of his time trying to master the area and its people. He would visit the storefront headquarters at the New Politics Center near the corner of Elm and Church in New Haven most mornings, but it was hard to keep him there for long. “Bill,” according to Stolberg, “was running around the district more than running the office. He spent a lot of time in the outlying towns.”

Chuca Meyer, one of the Smith College recruits, spent several days traveling the roads of the district with Clinton, who would either follow her or ride along in her Volkswagen bug. “
I was
told the new guy needed to be taken around the district to meet the local coordinators so I said I wouldn't mind showing him around,” Meyer said later. “Every day we'd hit a few new places—Milford, Stratford, Hamden, Wallingford, all the towns around New Haven. Those of us who had joined the campaign had this feeling about Joe—almost this proprietary feeling. New people kept coming in after he made it through the convention and won the primary, and they had to go through this test: ‘Do you really care about Joe or are you just along for the ride?'” Duffey's original staff members referred derisively to the talented newcomers as “Hessians.” But what struck Meyer about Clinton was that she never went through that testing phase with him. “I felt I knew him the whole time.”