First In His Class (60 page)

Unlike the Senate Watergate Committee, where different staff investigators had protected their own informational fiefdoms with safes full of documents, Doar created a research library that served as the central repository for material gathered by the inquiry staff. The computer age was dawning, but Doar felt uncomfortable with the security of computer systems, so his staff worked with original documents and transcripts catalogued by a team of researchers and librarians. They built a sophisticated chronology of the Watergate case on seven-ply index cards which were carefully typed and cross-indexed and in the end totaled more than a half million. The ever-expanding library became the symbol of the impeachment case and the representation of Doar's style. He was a documents man. He preferred the certainty of records to the fallibility of witnesses.

The library was also where most of the women on the staff worked. Rodham was among only three female lawyers, and though she was not treated as a token of her gender, there was an undercurrent of sexism in the office.
At one
point the women felt compelled to place a sign on the coffee machine that read: “The women in this office were not hired to make coffee. Make it yourself or call on one of these liberated men to do so”—followed by a list of male lawyers. Rodham was not shy about debating the roles that women should play in society. She once got into a debate with Albert Jenner, the Republican counsel for the committee, when Jenner commented that there were no famous women trial lawyers. “Hillary pointed out that the reason was because women generally did not have wives,” recalled Terry Kirkpatrick, another of the women lawyers. “She said that the reason male trial lawyers could be famous was because their wives packed their bags and ironed their clothes and were supportive of them while they were doing their work.” Jenner was “singularly unimpressed” with Rodham's argument, but Kirkpatrick never forgot it. It helped spark her own interest in the politics of gender.

With its unrelenting pressure and foxhole mentality, the impeachment staff experience was much like that of a political campaign. There was one notable difference, according to Bob Sack. “The most extraordinary thing is how little sex there was. It was so much of a fraternal experience. It had the characteristics of an intense political campaign but with much less sex.” Rodham developed strong friendships with several men on the staff, but everyone knew that she had a boyfriend teaching law and running for Congress out in Arkansas. “
I remember
that she was dating Bill Clinton and her saying to me once, ‘He wants to stay in Arkansas and get involved
in politics'—and she kind of rolled her eyes a little bit,” recalled Jeff Branchero, a staff clerk who had recently graduated from the University of California.

The Clinton and Rodham relationship during the months when they were apart was, as always, tempestuous. There were several young women clamoring for Clinton's attention, or he for theirs. Clinton's mother and younger brother thought that his bespectacled law school friend was not physically striking enough for him and tried to discourage him from getting too serious, but he would respond that in the long run it was Hillary or nobody. His physical attraction to other women would not diminish, but she was the only one he wanted to marry. Once, when he encountered a classmate from Georgetown, Melanne Verveer, who had married another Georgetown friend, Phil Verveer, Clinton blurted out—“I'
m following
Phil's example. I'm going for brains and ability rather than glamour.” Melanne Verveer could have taken it as an insult of sorts. She accepted it as a compliment.

Rodham, for her part, seemed uncharacteristically passionate when it came to her Arkansas boyfriend. “
She was
absolutely, totally crazy about Bill Clinton,” according to Kirkpatrick. “ ‘Besotted' is not a word I would normally apply to Hillary, but I think she was besotted. Bill came to visit her two or three times, and when he was coming to town her face would change. It would light up. It was very unHillaryesque.” Rodham was circumspect in most matters, but did not suppress the highs and lows of her relationship with Clinton. The lows were provoked by his occasional inattention and self-absorption and indications that he might be seeing other women. The highs came with his overpowering personality and his future. “
This is
the honest-to-God truth,” Bell later reflected. “She would come in some mornings mad because he wouldn't have called her. She would be cranky. But she would come in other mornings, hit me in the biceps, and say, ‘You know, Tom Bell, Bill Clinton is going to be president of the United States someday!'”

Bernie Nussbaum heard the same audacious prophecy one night as he drove Rodham home from work in his Oldsmobile Toronado. It was enough to make him go “
a little
crazy.” There they were, under great pressure handling a president's possible impeachment, and this young woman was boasting that her boyfriend was going to be president someday. Nussbaum, a thirty-seven-year-old New York City law partner, was only eleven years older than Rodham, but had an embracing nature that made him a father figure to her and many of the other young lawyers on the staff. He approached his impeachment assignment, like everything in life, with great intensity, what some of his colleagues called a “take-no-prisoners approach”—a style that was natural to him and had served him
well in his previous jobs as an assistant prosecutor in the U.S. Attorney's Office in Manhattan and as a private litigator.

For Nussbaum and Bob Sack, any doubt about Nixon's impeachability was removed when they put on headphones and listened to White House tapes that the inquiry staff had obtained from the Watergate grand jury in late March.
They spent
one week playing and replaying the tapes at the side of former White House counsel John Dean, who had been present at many of the meetings with Nixon where the coverup was discussed. Dean now served as an expert translator of the disjointed and sometimes barely audible conversations that had been secretly tape-recorded. Sack thought to himself, “My God, in a hundred years people are going to sit around the National Archives and listen to these tapes. And they are going to wonder what the hell we and our clients, the members of Congress, were doing. How could people sit and listen to this and not do something about it? The evidence made it clear.”

From the moment the secret tapes were delivered to the Congressional Hotel, they became the central focus of the inquiry. Doar stored them in a safe in his office and assigned Michael Conway to serve as the gatekeeper to control access to them. He brought in audio specialists to enhance the sound and held a competition to determine which staff members had the sharpest ears and could make the most sense of the conversations and accurately transcribe them. A special listening room was set up at the end of the hallway, not far from where Rodham and Bell worked. Staff members would file in, turn on the tape machine, put on headphones, turn off the lights, settle in on the couch, and listen to the president and his men. Sack felt “a sense of voyeurism—putting the earphones on and listening; like being a fly on the wall of the office of the president of the United States. We almost felt
it was
a little taboo.”

Jeff Branchero proved to have the best hearing on the staff and, in keeping with Doar's meritocracy, spent the most time transcribing. He would take as long as an hour to work on one minute of tape, stopping, rewinding, and playing again and again until he knew instinctively the verbal habits of Nixon, John Mitchell, H. R. Haldeman, and John Dean. Rodham was in the room occasionally. She spent several hours listening to what they called “The Tape of Tapes”—“It was Nixon taping himself while he listened to his tapes, inventing rationales for what he said. At one point he asked Manolo Sanchez [his valet] ‘Don't you think I meant this when I said that?'”

Rodham and Fred Altshuler, who became her closest male friend on the staff, worked together on an internal memorandum detailing the organization of Nixon's White House. By listening to the tapes and studying the presidential logs that listed the people Nixon met with each day, they
reconstructed the daily decision-making process inside the Oval Office—who had access to the president, how decisions were communicated up and down.
They developed
case histories for various events: If Nixon meets with Haldeman and Haldeman talks about that meeting to Chuck Colson, what happens? Studying how the organization functioned, Altshuler said, “was important in terms of finding out whether the president in fact made decisions or underlings made decisions. If the chain of events is, X sees the president and comes out and does Y, you can draw an inference. We found that the president really ran an awful lot of details.”

T
HE
end came quickly. In historic sessions at the end of July, the Judiciary Committee voted for three articles of impeachment. Within two weeks, the president had resigned. The inquiry staff was still at work that day, preparing documents for the full House debate on impeachment. They gathered in the library and watched Nixon's farewell speech on an old black and white television set. People sat on the floor and leaned against the walls and the sides of desks.
The room
was somber and quiet. No cheers from Rodham or any of the other lawyers who had been taught to repress their personal feelings for so many months. “It was like a game ending in overtime—sudden death,” recalled Michael Conway, who had already been recruited to work on the Senate staff for an impeachment trial that now would never be held.

As a remembrance of their unforgettable time together, Doar gave each member of his staff a framed picture of the group posed on the front steps of the Longworth House Office Building. It is, like so many snapshots of Hillary Rodham, a reflection of her will. Before the picture was taken, Doar had instructed the lawyers to stand together in the front. Rodham had defied his request, calling it elitist.
She stood
in the back with her friends on the support staff. Doar signed each picture with an inscription from the last quatrain of Tennyson's
Ulysses:
“To Strive, to Seek, to Find and not to Yield.”

M
UCH
like her boyfriend Bill Clinton, Rodham always worked on at least two levels at once. During her months in Washington, she often expressed ambivalence about what direction to take in her life. Her professional interests seemed to be on the East Coast. She could go back to serving as a counsel for the Children's Defense Fund. She could go to work for a high-powered Washington law firm and learn more about the political world of the nation's capital. She could delve into politics herself. Or she could move to Arkansas to be with Clinton. Taylor Branch had several long talks
with her about the future, continuing the confessional relationship that they shared in Texas. Branch could see that
she was
“at sea about whether she wanted to move to Arkansas.” She told him that she did not know “how hard to be, how careerist to be.” She believed in the feminist movement and in the freedom women were struggling to achieve. Would she be turning away from that by following her love to provincial Arkansas, a place that made her eyes roll when she talked about it?

And how would Arkansas receive her? That question inevitably arose in her conversations with Terry Kirkpatrick, who had grown up in Fort Smith and attended law school in Fayetteville when there were only a handful of women there. Rodham asked Kirkpatrick how the legal community would accept her in a state where women lawyers were still a rarity. It would be difficult, Kirkpatrick said. “
You have
to be three hundred percent better than any man to succeed. You have to pick your friends carefully. It's a very different culture. But the people when they accept you are loving and supportive and very willing to accept new ideas once they get past the initial shock.” And there was something else attractive about Arkansas, Kirkpatrick told Rodham: “It's easy to make an impact there. You can be a big fish in a small pond.”

Even on her final night in Washington, Rodham seemed uncertain.
She went
to dinner with Fred Altshuler and two of his friends, Marsha and Steve Berzon, who were just arriving in town as Rodham was leaving. At dinner, the others talked about the exciting legal work they were about to embark on, while Rodham reflected on the uncertain professional life that awaited her in Arkansas. “Hillary was showing personal affection for Bill, but she thought she would not face the same kinds of legal challenges,” Altshuler said later. “She was somewhat uncertain. She had some ambivalence about it.” The last thing on Rodham's radar screen, thought Altshuler, “was to head off to Arkansas.”

But while on one level Rodham seemed ambivalent, on another level she had prepared for a move to Arkansas for more than a year in a quiet, careful fashion that made her decision all but inevitable. During her first visit to Arkansas in the summer of 1973, before Clinton began teaching in Fayetteville, she had joined him in taking the Arkansas state bar exam, just in case she would ever practice in the state.
She and
Clinton had even worried about whether it would hurt them in the future in Arkansas if they put the same New Haven address on the state bar applications. Clinton, during his first months at the law school, constantly talked about Rodham to Dean Davis and everyone else there. He told Davis that he and Rodham were “more or less informally engaged” and that he hoped that she would come out and teach with him at the law school. When Rodham visited Clinton in Fayetteville in early 1974, she was introduced to Dean Davis
and other law faculty members at a reception. “
I mentioned
to her before she left that if she were ever interested in teaching here, she should give me a call,” Davis recalled. “I talked to faculty people who had chatted with her and all were favorably impressed.”

Rodham called Davis a month later to see if the offer still stood. When he said yes, she made arrangements to fly to Fayetteville to be interviewed for a teaching position. She had to leave her work on the inquiry staff for three days to make the trip, a departure that did not sit well with Doar. When she reached Fayetteville, some of the law professors she met had an odd first impression of her. “
Hillary came
in dressed as if she had been shopping in Bloomingdale's the day before,” remembered Mort Gitelman. “It looked strange in Arkansas. She was wearing one of those long skirts and black stockings and hornrimmed glasses. She did not look Arkansas.” Gitelman could not know it, but except for the glasses she did not look like Hillary Rodham, either. She paid little attention to clothes except when she thought she had to impress people. This was one of those times. Terry Kirkpatrick had taken her shopping in Georgetown to buy the khaki suit that she wore to the interview. Her clothes, in the end, made little difference, according to Gitelman. “Once she opened her mouth, it didn't matter what she was wearing. We were impressed.” Davis made her an offer, and she called him back on July 9 to accept it.