First In His Class (47 page)

Clinton went
out to California for a brief gathering of the Leckford Road housemates late that spring. They gathered at Lloyd Shearer's house and at Brooke Shearer's on Arbor Road in Menlo Park: Clinton and Aller in their beards, Talbott in his fine mustache. Shearer, an English literature major who specialized in Virginia Woolf, was part of a feminist consciousness-raising group that met at her house. The boys were not invited, and in “a
show of defiance, they went bowling, their feelings hurt.” They also went to Santa Cruz, played football on the beach, walked the hills of San Francisco, and went to the movies. It was, for the boys from Leckford Road, their last fine time together.

CHAPTER FOURTEEN
 
RODHAM AND CLINTON

B
ILL
C
LINTON AND
Hillary Rodham. From the opening round of courtship, here was an evenly matched romance and a fair fight. Two strong-willed personalities—ambitious, socially conscious, and political—they were introduced to each other in the cafeteria during the first week of law school by Bob Reich, who had known Rodham since her undergraduate days when she had traveled from Wellesley up to Dartmouth to attend a meeting Reich had organized of student leaders active in the academic reform movement. “I said, ‘Bill,
this is
Hillary; Hillary, this is Bill,' but obviously it didn't take,” Reich recalled. Not then, at least. In their later remembrances of their courtship, they both replaced his prosaic account with a more melodramatic scene. In their version, seemingly accurate except for its deletion of the Reich introduction, they circled each other for weeks before exchanging their first greetings. Clinton followed Rodham out of a civil liberties class, thought about an effective approach, then backed away. Rodham spotted Clinton in the law school lounge boasting about—yes, of course—the watermelons in Hope, and in her diligent fashion, unobtrusively, she began gathering information about him.

One day Rodham was sitting at a table piled with books, journals, and notepads in the library reading room, a peaceful wood-paneled chamber with high ceilings and light-flooded Gothic-arched windows on the third floor of the law school. Clinton loitered in the middle distance with a clear line of sight down the narrow-shafted room, pretending to study. Jeff Glekel, an editor of the
Yale Law Journal
, provided cover, hovering next to Clinton and trying to persuade him to try out for the prestigious journal.
Struggling to
hold Clinton's attention, Glekel laid it on thick: the best judicial clerkships, the most powerful law firms in Manhattan, the elite law school faculties—all of these awaited the
Journal
's select editors. If he had said the State House, Congress, the White House, perhaps the sales pitch would have worked. As it was, Clinton said that he did not want to do it. His plan after law school was to go home to Arkansas and run for public office. Whether he wrote for the
Yale Law Journal
, he noted, did not matter to anyone down there. Clinton seemed inattentive in any case. He was looking across the room at Rodham. Soon enough she walked toward his table. “Look,” she said. “If you're going to keep staring at me and I'm going to keep staring back, we should at least introduce ourselves. I'm Hillary Rodham.” Clinton was knocked dumb by Rodham's bold approach, her classic pickup line, and scrambled to remember his own name.

On their
first outing, Clinton and Rodham went together to sign up for second semester classes. When they reached the front of the line, the registrar was puzzled by Clinton's presence. “Bill, what are you doing here?” came the query. “You registered yesterday!” Clinton and Rodham then went for a walk and toured the college art museum, which happened to be closed, but which Clinton charmed his way into anyway by convincing a custodian to open it up for a private tour after he and Rodham picked up some trash. Clinton “locked in on” her after that. Rodham focused on him as well. He was that rare guy, she told friends, who did not seem afraid of her. It might have been that he was more adept at concealing his fear. Rodham's intellect, her reputation, her refusal to be cowed or wowed, seemed to attract him and scare him at the same time. He prepped his housemates before each of her visits to the beach house, hoping they could help impress her.
It took
a little time, Don Pogue said later, “before she decided he was going to be up to snuff. She had to be encouraged to see that point of view. She was brought out to the beach house to engage in lively conversation. We were all recruited to participate in it.”

Rodham expressed mixed feelings about Clinton's style, especially the way he accentuated his Arkansas roots. Like so many contemporaries who had encountered him before her, she was taken by his sense of place, a rarity among students eager to shed their middle-class pasts. “
He cared
deeply about where he came from, which was unusual,” Rodham said later. “He was rooted and most of us were disconnected.” But she was not bamboozled by his down-home palaver. “
They were
funny together, very lively. Hillary would not take any of Bill's soft stories, his southern boy stuff,” according to Pogue. “She would just puncture it, even while showing a real affection. She'd say, ‘Spit it out, Clinton!' or, ‘Get to the point, will you, Bill!' ” Housemate Doug Eakeley remembered Rodham, in her sharp voice, interrupting Clinton in the middle of one of his Arkansas tales with the mocking reprimand, “
Come off
it, Bill!” Her midwestern directness, Eakeley thought, was “the perfect counterpoint to Bill's southern charm.” Her focused intellect was also a perfect counterpoint to his restless, diffuse mind, and made her the superior law student. In one class
they took together during the spring semester of 1971, Tom Emerson's Political and Civil Rights,
Emerson kept
private numerical grades even though the report cards were pass-fail. He gave Rodham a 78, one of the highest grades, and Clinton a mediocre 70.

There was, without stretching the point, a certain reversal of gender stereotypes in the Clinton-Rodham match. Steve Cohen, who was among Rodham's circle of friends from her first year at law school, concluded that “
Clinton had
the charm and the sex appeal whereas Hillary didn't so much. Hillary was straightforward, articulate, and self-possessed.” Yet within a month of meeting Clinton, Rodham was talking about his depth. Some of her friends thought Clinton was interesting but too eager to be the focus of attention. Rodham decided there was more to him than that. “There's lots of layers to him,” she told Cohen one day. “He's more complex than I thought. The more I see him, the more I discover new things about him.” She also told Cohen about her new friend's determination to do something with his life, which was very much what she was about as well.

At the time they met, Rodham, though one year younger, had developed more of a reputation as a student leader. When Clinton was in the first year of his Oxford studies, she was at Wellesley College outside Boston, where her intellect helped her school win several matches on the College Bowl television quiz show. She also got her picture in
Life
magazine for delivering a commencement speech that was seen as a statement of purpose for her generation—philosophically curious, politically committed, and passionately antiwar. She arrived at Yale Law in the fall of 1969, one year ahead of Clinton, during the height of the hippie-radical period there, with an activist reputation. “
The story
of what she had done at Wellesley preceded her. We were awed by her courage,” recalled Carolyn Ellis, one of her law school friends. “She arrived with many of us thinking of her as a leader already. We had seen her picture in the national magazine and here she was, three months later, in our class.”

Rodham quickly befriended the antiwar activists in the class, including Cohen,
Greg Craig,
and Michael Medved, three leaders of the October 15 moratorium in New Haven, one of the largest regional demonstrations that day. Craig, who had delivered a class day speech at Harvard that had also gained national recognition, thought of Rodham as a “mainstream, conscientious, politically astute person who still believed in American institutions.” In the context of Yale Law School, “that meant she was conservative.” Craig exaggerated to make a point. Rodham more accurately was in the middle of the flux at Yale Law. She was, “like ninety-five percent of her classmates, passionately convinced that the war made no sense.” She “looked like a hippie,” according to Carolyn Ellis.
She kept
her hair long and flowing and came to class in sandals and blue jeans. Nothing
about this attire made Rodham stand out from the other young women there. She wore thick glasses and was constantly changing the frames. Ellis regarded Rodham's frame-changing habit as “her whimsy—just the way she would change her hairstyle later, she changed her glasses all the time then.”

What set Rodham apart was her combination of social commitment and pragmatism. During her first year, third-year students James Blumstein, Stanley Herr, and Jack Petranker founded the
Yale Review of Law and Social Action
, a leftist alternative to the
Yale Law Journal
. In the egalitarian ethic of the time, there was no hierarchy at the review.
Rodham served
as a commentator who critiqued articles before publication. The first volume featured an article written by Blumstein and Jim Phelan entitled “Jamestown 70.” The authors, thinking that America was on the brink of insurrection, counseled against armed revolt on practical grounds, but suggested that their alienated generation should gain control of a state where they could experiment with different lifestyles, marital rules, and patterns of democracy: “What we advocate is the migration of large numbers of people to a single state for the express purpose of effecting the peaceful political takeover of that state through the elective process.” They linked their proposal to the American frontier ethic, “where alienated or ‘deviant' members of society can go to live by their new ideas; providing a living laboratory for social experiment through radical federalism.”

Rodham read an early draft and told Blumstein that it was too abstract and theoretical, not practical enough. “This is mental masturbation,” she said. “Get more specific. Get down to earth.” She was particularly tough on the piece where she thought it would alienate people and hurt the cause. Her critique arose from her pragmatic sense of doability. While Blumstein and Phelan thought they were being serious, Rodham thought that they were just playing around. She took her politics more seriously than they did and she had no patience with their grandiose ideas.

I
T
ran in the family, the impatience for fuzzy thinking. Hugh Rodham, her father, was a tobacco-chewing, no-nonsense man, gruff and sarcastic. Dorothy Howell Rodham, her mother, declared that no daughter of hers—and Hillary was the only daughter, followed by two sons—would ever be afraid to say what was on her mind. “You weren't going to go into the Rodhams' house and say anything stupid,” recalled Ernest (Rick) Ricketts, one of Hillary's closest childhood friends. “
You couldn't
get away with that with any of them. If you tried it with Hillary, she'd say, ß What? What'd you say?' ”
Dorothy Rodham
often told a story about Hillary, which, even if it was embellished into a parable, nonetheless revealed the imprint the
mother wanted to leave on the daughter. When Hillary was four, she was pushed around by a bigger girl who was the neighborhood bully. When she ran home and expressed her fear, her mother told her, “There's no room in this house for cowards.” Dorothy Rodham instructed her daughter to hit back next time. Soon Hillary popped the bully in front of a group of boys, ran home, and exclaimed, “I can play with the boys now!”

The setting for this life lesson was a sturdy Georgian house on Wisner Street in the suburb of Park Ridge to the northwest of Chicago—deep in the placid, postwar soul of America. Hillary Diane Rodham was born at Edgewater Hospital on Chicago's North Side on October 26, 1947. Her father, a manufacturer who sold drapes to hotels and movie theaters, moved the family to Park Ridge when she was three. The suburb was her world until she was eighteen and left for college. Park Ridge was the upper middle of upwardly mobile middle America. It was old enough and sufficiently well off to avoid the conformity of tract housing developments: the elm-shaded side streets offered a pleasant mix of brown brick Georgian revivals, wood and stucco bungalows, and early twentieth-century two-story wood frame homes. Yet it lacked the pretense and exclusivity of North Shore suburbs like Wilmette and Lake Forest. Most of the women of Park Ridge, including Dorothy Rodham, stayed home: Hillary's childhood friends knew of only two mothers who held outside jobs. Most of the men worked in Chicago and, like Hugh Rodham, tended to be businessmen rather than doctors or lawyers. The town arose along the tracks of the Chicago & Northwestern commuter line, which carried tribes of dark-suited men into the city and back every day. The youngsters who lived along Wisner Street heard the distant rumble and whine of trains pulling into the station and saw plumes of smoke fill the horizon at rush hour.