First In His Class (65 page)

The staff talked about challenging the election results, but Clinton chose not to. He realized that he had won for losing. His race was the most talked about contest in the state. He had become the darling of the Democratic party by taking on Hammerschmidt and coming within 2 percentage points of defeating him, by far the best showing any opponent ever made against him. He had been on the same stage with Dale Bumpers and David Pryor and compared favorably to them. “We accomplished a miracle out here,” Clinton told his staff. “We started with no name recognition and look what we accomplished. We scared the pants off that guy.”
He then
sent a telegram to Hammerschmidt: “Congratulations on your victory yesterday. I hope you will consider the merit of the positive positions I took during the campaign. They grew out of the long months of discussions I had with our people. I wish you well in the next two difficult years. If ever I can be of service to you in your attempts to help the people of the Third Congressional District, please call on me.”

•  •  •

O
NE
morning after the election,
Clinton drove
to the square in downtown Fayetteville and started shaking hands. “Thank you for your help,” he said to passers-by who had voted for him. To others, he expressed thanks simply for voting, or for listening to him. He stood in the square all day, talking and shaking hands. He was cooling down after nine months of nonstop campaigning, his friends thought. No, there was more to it than that. He was warming up. The next race had already begun.

CHAPTER NINETEEN
 
GOVERNOR-IN-WAITING

G
ARY
H
ART
OF Colorado arrived in the Senate. Jerry Brown became the new governor of California. Michael Dukakis took over in Massachusetts. Paul Simon of Illinois, Paul Tsongas of Massachusetts, and Tom Harkin of Iowa were elected to the House of Representatives. All of these Democrats were set on the path of presidential ambition by the elections of 1974. They were among the winners in what came to be regarded as a transformational year in modern American politics, a year when the old order started to give way to the next generation. The most dramatic change took place in the House, where ninety-two freshmen, including seventy-five Democrats, stormed Capitol Hill. They were known as the Watergate class or the Watergate babies. With equal measures of impatience and righteousness, they undertook the work of institutional reform, changing the rules of the place, upsetting the seniority system, overthrowing old committee chairmen, demanding a share of the power.

The road of ifs usually leads nowhere, but in the case of Bill Clinton and 1974 a brief journey down the path of historical speculation seems appropriate. If four thousand people in the Third Congressional District had voted for him instead of for John Paul Hammerschmidt, Clinton would have been one of the rambunctious Watergate babies. He would have moved to Washington that winter, meaning that his stay in Arkansas, the land to which he had always said he longed to return, would have lasted a mere sixteen months. Hillary Rodham, after four months in Fayetteville, certainly would have left with him, resettling in a place and a culture where they were on more equal standing and where she could pursue her interests in politics and law on a national rather than provincial stage. While the removal of geography as an issue might have made it smoother for the partnership in the short term, it is also conceivable that life in Washington eventually would have unraveled the couple's relationship by making them less dependent on each other than they would become during their long haul in Arkansas.

Everything in Clinton's history leads to the conclusion that he would have emerged as a leader of the Watergate babies in Congress, impressing his colleagues on Capitol Hill if not always his constituents back in Arkansas. In settings where he found himself among high-powered peers, whether with the Rhodes Scholars at Oxford or, much later, with the governors of other states, Clinton rose quickly to prominence, outpacing others with his ambition, affability, and appetite for ideas and dealmaking. But where would that have taken him in Washington? To a House committee chairmanship, eventually, or more likely, given his restless electoral nature, to a bid for a Senate seat, either in 1978 or in 1980, when he would have to challenge Dale Bumpers. Bumpers and Governor Pryor, who also had senatorial ambitions, were always there ahead of Clinton, two formidable vote-getters in his own party. Had he gone to Washington in 1974, at some point he would have been unable to repress an urge to try to run over one of them; instead, from back in Arkansas, he found a way around them.

Losing the congressional election did not hurt Clinton's political status in Arkansas, and enhanced his image as an emerging star of the Democratic party. He came out of the contest with what all politicians covet—an aura of inevitability. The question was not whether he would run again, but what office he would seek. By early 1975, he was weighing two options: challenging Hammerschmidt again or running for attorney general. While resuming his teaching at the law school, he maintained his political contacts around the district and solicited advice on which election path to follow. Doug Wallace, his press secretary during the congressional campaign, wrote a memo outlining the potential dangers of another race against Hammerschmidt. The attorney general's race, on the other hand, seemed “very attractive with relatively few drawbacks,” beyond its paltry annual salary. “
The office
of attorney general would allow you to work on consumer affairs, white collar crime, energy matters and other issues of interest,” Wallace wrote. “It would also provide a proving ground for the future by giving you the experience in government that some people in 1974 said you lacked.”

Long before he revealed his intentions publicly, Clinton began taking steps helpful to the waging of a statewide campaign. The Democratic State Committee, now chaired by Mack McLarty, appointed him to head its affirmative action committee, whose mission was to study the state's new presidential primary law and set guidelines for the selection of delegates for the next national convention.
This convenient
assignment allowed Clinton to travel the state at party expense to meet with Democratic activists.
He also obtained a part-time teaching post
at the
University of Arkansas-Little Rock, traveling down to Little Rock each week to teach a class on criminal justice and law enforcement in addition to his courses in Fayetteville. Many of his students in Little Rock were law enforcement personnel, a group he had also taught during his Yale Law School years when he was a part-time instructor of criminal justice at the University of New Haven. Teaching police officers strengthened the resume of a prospective attorney general, and furthered his efforts to toughen his image following his graduate school days as a long-haired war protester who had avoided military service.

H
ILLARY
Rodham was deeply immersed in the university community by 1975. She taught trial advocacy and criminal procedure at Waterman Hall, directed the legal aid clinic, and helped run a prison project in which law students assisted inmates with post-conviction problems. At the legal clinic, she was meticulous about maintaining casework files on every person who walked in the door. Van Gearhart, one of her student assistants, worried that the recordkeeping would be too burdensome, but Rodham persuaded him that “a strong statistical base could help cement the future of the clinic,” which it did. In the first year, the clinic handled three hundred clients and took fifty cases to court. For years afterward, Rodham would recall her experiences in the courthouses of northwest Arkansas with a touch of wistfulness, often retelling her favorite stories, including the time when a small-town jailer called her and said that a traveling preacher-lady was about to be committed by a judge who thought she was insane. Rodham drove to the town and in the course of interviewing the babbling preacher discovered that she had relatives in California. “
People need
the Lord in California, too,” Rodham told the woman, who left for the West Coast after the judge was sold on the argument that a one-way plane ticket was the easiest and cheapest resolution of the case.

The prison project took Rodham and her Fayetteville associates into an unfamiliar world. Once she and another supervisor drove down to the Tucker Unit for youthful offenders near Pine Bluff. As they entered the prison farm, they noticed a building near the main unit that was identified as the dog kennel. Robert Newcomb, a lawyer stationed at the prison farm on a federal grant, recalled that when the two women lawyers got out of the car, one remarked to the other that she “didn't realize that the Arkansas prison system was so progressive that it would allow inmates to have their own dogs.”
It was
left to Newcomb to break the news that the dogs were there not to serve as the inmates' best friends, but to track them down if they tried to escape.

In Fayetteville, Rodham often met Diane Kincaid for lunch:
they would
buy yogurt and walk around campus, talking about the university, their careers, feminism, and the joys and frustrations of life in their adopted small town. Kincaid, who had grown up in Washington, moved to Fayetteville a decade before Rodham and had gone through various stages—“resistance, resentment, anger, disbelief, resignation, and finally smugness about how good things were.” They played tennis on weekends, scrappy singles matches, Rodham and Kincaid both diving and scraping their knees, good athletes but lacking in classic form, each with a burning desire to win, their hair a mess by the end in the summer humidity. One day, moved by what Kincaid termed “
a burst
of patriotism,” Rodham decided to visit the local U.S. Marine Corps office to see if she could enlist. She told Kincaid that the Marines informed her she was not one of the few and the proud they were looking for: she was a woman, she was too old, and she had bad eyesight, the recruiter said, suggesting that she “oughta go try with the dogs”—the Army. If there was a political component to this odd episode, an attempt to balance Clinton's lack of service with Rodham's bold enlistment, or a test of the equal rights policies of the military, it never went any further, and the incident remained a closely held joke among friends.

Rodham's Arkansas circle widened when her two fun-loving brothers, Hughie and Tony, enrolled at the university at their sister's urging.
They shared
an apartment south of campus with Neil McDonald, the former campaign volunteer. Tony “liked to keep his stuff put up, semi-neat,” but Hughie, who had long hair and talked earnestly about Che Guevera, was another story, according to McDonald. “As far as housekeeping, forget Hughie. He was the biggest slob in the world. He made ‘The Odd Couple' seem tame.” Their father, Hugh Rodham, paid for most of their expenses and came down from Park Ridge to visit during fly-fishing season.

Although they still lived apart,
Rodham and
Clinton spent most of their free time together, playing Volleyball and charades with friends, attending Razorback basketball games, and going for steaks and chicken afterward with Coach Eddie Sutton and Don Tyson and his pals. Pressure was building on the pair to marry or separate. Should Clinton marry Rodham? He told friends that he wanted to get married and that it was Hillary or nobody: but he also realized that while their partnership was intellectually invigorating and politically complementary, their personal relationship was stormy. “
All we
ever do is argue,” he confided to Carolyn Yeldell Staley, his high school friend. Betsey Wright, who had befriended the pair during the McGovern campaign and now worked in Washington recruiting women to run for public office, was also “aware of lots of tension between them.”
She had
heard Clinton complain after a round of arguing with Rodham that he had tried to “run Hillary off, but she just wouldn't go.”

Should Rodham marry Clinton? She studied the question from every angle, asking several women friends how they balanced their own political objectives with family responsibilities. Her questions came at a time when feminism was an urgent subject for her and the professional women with whom she associated. The equal rights amendment (ERA), which had narrowly failed in the previous session of the Arkansas legislature, was up for another vote, and a central event of the House deliberations was a Valentine's Day debate between ERA opponent Phyllis Schlafly and Diane Kincaid, who was chairwoman of the governor's commission on women and had been asked at the last minute to fill in for Sarah Weddington, the feminist lawyer from Texas.
Rodham and
Clinton came over to Kincaid's house and prepped her for the confrontation. They sat in the living room and rehearsed different arguments and counterarguments, when suddenly Kincaid's six-year-old daughter Kathryn called out “Mommy!” from the floor behind them. They turned around and saw the little girl holding the plastic symbol of the prefeminist era. “Here we were fighting for feminist rights and Kathryn was there with a Barbie doll!” Kincaid later recalled. The scene, she said, provoked a long, loud, infectious belly laugh from Hillary Rodham.