American Evita: Hillary Clinton's Path to Power (5 page)

She had already begun making important contacts in the nation’s capital. While in Washington to deliver her fiery speech to the staid League of Women Voters, Hillary had met perhaps her most important mentor, noted civil rights lawyer and children’s rights pioneer Marian Wright Edelman.

A 1963 graduate of Yale Law School, Edelman was the first black woman admitted to the bar in Mississippi and headed up the NAACP legal defense fund in that state. Over the next several years, she risked her life organizing voter registration drives and demonstrations to protest segregation. By the time Hillary got to know her, Edelman, whose husband Peter was once an aide to Bobby Kennedy, had used her considerable leverage to establish the Washington Research Project in D.C. The project would soon evolve into the Children’s Defense Fund.

Hillary, motivated in part by stories of her mother’s horrendous childhood, signed on to work with Senator Walter Mondale’s subcommittee studying migrant labor. Hearkening back to her own experience babysitting the children of farmworkers in Illinois,
Hillary interviewed scores of laborers about conditions in migrant labor camps.

Even before the hearings started, Hillary was seething. Minute Maid, which had just been acquired by the Coca-Cola Company, was one of the companies targeted by the investigation. On Capitol Hill, Hillary waited patiently for the arrival of Coke president J. Paul Austin, who was scheduled to testify. As soon as she spotted him, Hillary pointed a finger at the hapless executive. “We’re going to nail your ass,” Hillary said point-blank. “Nail your ass!”

Later, Hillary would work with the staff of Yale–New Haven Hospital drafting legal guidelines for the medical treatment of battered children, and write papers on the legal rights of minors for the nonprofit Carnegie Council on Children. Years later, Hillary would be wrongly accused of advocating changes in the law that would allow children to sue their parents if they didn’t want to take out their garbage—a misconception she would attempt to correct in her folksy, upbeat, and cautiously moderate book
It Takes a Village.

But Hillary’s earlier writings may more accurately reflect her true beliefs because they are not intended to mollify a wider audience. They are crafted in the strident prose of the committed social engineer, and make an explicit argument for the state to play a more active role in child rearing. Referring to children as “political beings,” Hillary challenged the autonomy of the family. “The pretense that children’s issues are somehow above or beyond politics endures,” she complained, “and is reinforced by the belief that families are private, nonpolitical units whose interests subsume those of children.”

Hillary did, in fact, argue that children be given fundamentally the same rights in court as their parents—including, if the need arose, the right to sue them. “Ascribing rights to children,” wrote the woman who would one day bar her own teenage daughter from getting a tattoo, “will force from the judiciary and the legislature institutional support for the child’s point of view.”

During her stint in New Haven’s Legal Services office, Hillary was taken under the wing of a young legal aid lawyer named Penn Rhodeen. Hillary helped Rhodeen represent one black foster mother who wanted to adopt a two-year-old girl she had raised since birth. Connecticut had a strict policy, however, that barred adoption by foster parents. Despite their best efforts, Rhodeen and Hillary lost the case, and the little girl was taken from the only mother she had ever known.

Hillary was “passionate” on the subject of children’s rights, Rhodeen said. But no one was under the impression that she would be willing to toil in obscurity as a legal aid lawyer. Hillary already had her eye on several top law firms in Washington and New York.

In the meantime Hillary, by now a bona fide star on campus, basked in the adulation of her fellow students. “We were simply,” one said, “awed by her. She was so forceful, so self-assured that when she just took charge you accepted that it was the natural order of things.”

Hillary would meet her match in that turbulent fall of 1970 when she spotted an orange-bearded “Viking” holding forth in the student lounge. The tall, scruffy-looking character was draped over a sofa and boasting loudly that, for starters, Arkansas grew the world’s biggest watermelons.

Bill Clinton, Hillary soon learned, was a Rhodes scholar who had just returned from two years at Oxford. Clinton, in turn, asked their mutual friend Robert Reich what he knew about this serious girl with the Mr. Magoo glasses. For the next several weeks, they sized each other up—until one November evening when Hillary, slaving over books in the law library, spotted Bill talking to a fellow student in the hallway. As he listened to Jeff Gleckel try to talk him into writing for the
Yale Law Journal,
the man from Arkansas had trouble focusing. “His glance began to wander and he seemed to be looking over my shoulder,” Gleckel recalled. At Hillary, as it turned out.

Finally, Hillary pushed her chair back, got up, and walked toward the two men. “Look, if you’re going to keep staring at me,” she said, “and I’m going to keep staring back, we should at least introduce ourselves. I’m Hillary Rodham.”

Bill’s mind went blank. He paused for a moment, then stuttered his name.

It would be five months before they spoke again. Hillary and David Rupert were still a couple when she decided to accept Bill’s invitation to see a Mark Rothko exhibit at the Yale Art Gallery. The museum was closed because of a labor dispute, but Hillary watched in amazement as Bill talked his way in by promising to pick up litter in the museum courtyard. It was the first time, she would recall, that she “saw his persuasiveness in action.” That afternoon, Hillary and the persuasive Mr. Clinton had the Yale Art Gallery all to themselves.

If, as he claimed, Bill found Hillary daunting, he didn’t let on—and that alone was sufficient to impress her. The six-foot-two, 210-pound Arkansan with the Elvis drawl was, she marveled, “the one guy who wasn’t afraid of me.” After that first date, Hillary left to spend the weekend with David Rupert. When she returned with a cold, Bill showed up at her door with orange juice and chicken soup.

This act of unsolicited kindness marked another in a string of epiphanies for Hillary, who soon learned that Bill had harbored presidential aspirations since the age of seven. (When Billy Clinton’s second-grade teacher told his mother he would be President someday, Mrs. Clinton replied, “Oh, yes—that’s what I tell him every day.”) Rupert was history.

Fellow lawyer and friend Terry Kirkpatrick would use one word to describe Hillary’s feelings for Bill: “Besotted…not a word I would normally apply to Hillary, but I think she was besotted.”

Not a small part of Bill’s appeal was his unvarnished ambition, and Hillary’s growing conviction that he would realize his boyhood
dream. “He’s going to make it,” she told anyone who’d listen almost from the time they began dating. “He’s going to change the world.”

Hillary had no idea at the time that, as she put it, Bill would “cause my life to spin in directions that I could never have imagined.” Nor did she fully appreciate that, no matter how affectionate he seemed toward her, Clinton was incapable of being faithful. Had she known about his twisted family history of divorce, violence, bigamy, poverty, addiction, illegitimacy, and promiscuity, Hillary might better have understood what lay in store for her.

Bill Clinton began life as William Jefferson Blythe III on August 19, 1946, and he never knew the man listed on his birth certificate as his biological father. Hard-drinking, womanizing W. J. Blythe II had gone through three wives—including a pair of sisters—before he married Virginia Cassidy, a student nurse with a fondness for garish lipstick, stiletto heels, and tight sweaters. Blythe never bothered to tell his bride that he hadn’t taken the trouble to divorce his third wife. Therefore, the marriage that theoretically produced a future President was invalid.

Back home in Hope, Arkansas, Wife Number Four was guarding secrets of her own. After her husband shipped out for Europe with the 12th Battalion in 1943, Virginia returned to the wild life she had led before they married, dating old boyfriends and partying until the early morning hours.

Blythe returned from the war in December of 1945, and six weeks later Virginia announced that she was pregnant. But on May 17, 1946, Blythe was speeding down Route 61 when he blew a tire, causing his midnight blue Buick to roll over. Pulling himself from the wreckage, he collapsed in a drainage ditch—and drowned. William J. Blythe III was born three months later.

Bill’s mother wasted little time landing another husband—a carousing, big-spending, loud-talking Buick dealer from neighboring Hot Springs. Virginia knew Roger Clinton had a history of
violence—in court papers his previous wife described him as an unrepentant batterer—and that he was also seeing several other women. None of this mattered to fun-loving Virginia, but it did to her parents, who threatened to seek custody of their grandson if she went ahead and married Clinton. Instead they agreed to back down, in exchange for playing a major role in Billy’s upbringing.

Bill’s earliest memories would be of chaos—of drunken tirades and pitched battles between his mother and stepfather. At various times, Roger Clinton punched Bill’s mother in the face, threw her against walls, kicked her as she lay writhing on the floor, threatened her with scissors, and fired a pistol at her. To further complicate matters, Bill was filled with despair as his doting but emotionally unstable grandmother was committed to a mental institution after suffering a stroke.

Through it all, Bill—known to family and friends as “Bubba”—somehow not only survived, but flourished. He excelled in school, and when his half brother Roger arrived in 1956, Bubba relished his role as protective older sibling. Their bond would only grow stronger as they tried to cope with the emotional turmoil swirling around them.

Bubba was fourteen when he finally confronted Roger Clinton, telling him to “never…ever” touch Mom again. Virginia finally divorced Clinton, only to remarry him two months after the divorce was finalized. At fifteen Bubba, always the epicenter of his mother’s universe, was now the man of the house. While the living room was covered with the awards and framed certificates Billy had accumulated, Virginia—who shared a small second bedroom with her husband—willingly relinquished the master bedroom to her cherished elder son. Undeterred by the fact that his problematic stepfather refused to legally adopt him, Billy legally changed his surname to Clinton—a “gesture of family solidarity,” Bubba explained, aimed at reassuring his little brother.

Roger Clinton’s toxic lifestyle began to take its toll. As his
health declined, he retreated to the family room, where he drank beer and stared blankly at the television set while his wife went out on the town—not always alone. On several occasions she brought sixteen-year-old Bubba along to nightclubs as her “date.” (Following the death of Roger Clinton in 1967, Bill’s mother would land two more husbands—hairdresser Jeff Dwire, who had served jail time for fraud and died of a sudden heart attack in 1974, and retired stockbroker Dick Kelley. Virginia remained married to Kelley until her death in 1994.)

Incredibly, none of Billy’s friends or classmates knew of his hellish home life. So long as no one was aware of what was really going on behind closed doors, he could convince himself that the horrors that scarred his childhood never really happened.

Out of embarrassment, Bill Clinton was loath to share the more sordid details with Hillary. But early on, he would let her in on a secret his mother had taught him about coping. Whenever things became overwhelming, Virginia told her teenage son, “Brainwash yourself. Put the bad things out of your mind—just push them aside so they don’t interfere with the important things in your life.” When Bubba recoiled at the word
brainwashing,
she then came up with a visual image: “Construct an airtight box in your mind. Keep inside it what you don’t want to think about. The inside is white, the outside is black…. This box is strong as steel.”

“Boxing things off,” as Hillary would later refer to the process, would free young Bill Clinton from distraction. Even the most unpleasant thoughts were neatly packaged and shelved, allowing him to concentrate on those things that mattered most to him. Once she learned of the technique, boxing off would also prove to be a godsend for Hillary. She even seemed to enjoy the game; Hillary often gift-wrapped her boxes and tied them in a bow before storing them neatly in the far reaches of a deep, deep, cedar-lined closet at the back of her mind.

Where Hillary sought to win approval from her father that was
never forthcoming, Bill made up for the absence of a nurturing dad by seeking approval in the eyes of others. Toward that end, he joined every imaginable club and school organization at whites-only Hot Springs High, shamelessly sought to ingratiate himself with teachers, and ran successfully for student council. Like Hillary, Bill was congenitally clumsy and shied away from sports. Instead, he played saxophone in the marching band and, out of deference to his mother’s near-fanatical obsession with Elvis Presley, broke into an eerily dead-on rendition of “Love Me Tender” whenever the mood struck him.

While Hillary was singing Barry Goldwater’s praises up north, Clinton was angling to get himself sent to the American Legion’s Boys Nation conclave in Washington. Once there, he pushed himself to the front of the pack so that he could get his picture taken shaking JFK’s hand in the White House Rose Garden—an image that would continually reinforce the notion, in his own mind and in those of others, that he was destined for great things.

At Georgetown University, Bill Clinton’s indefatigable friendliness—he made a point of meeting virtually all the two-thousand-plus undergraduates—and his down-home Southern style would quickly make him the most popular man on campus. But after serving as president of both the freshman and sophomore classes, he suffered a stinging defeat when he ran for the top office in his junior year. Paralleling Hillary’s bitter senior class election defeat in high school, Bill’s rejection by his Georgetown peers would leave a deep and lasting wound.