Living History (16 page)

I was helping Phil Carroll defend a company that sold and shipped creosote-treated logs by railroad. As a shipment was unloaded at its destination, the logs came loose from their supports on one of the flatbed cars and injured some employees of the company that had purchased the logs. The ensuing lawsuit was tried before a judge who had been accused of misconduct on the bench, mostly due to his excessive acquaintance with alcohol.

Under Arkansas law, judicial investigations were conducted by the Attorney General, namely my husband. The judge, who knew me only as “Ms. Rodham,” paid close attention to me, often making comments like, “How pretty you look today,” or, “Come up here so I can get a good look at you.”

At the end of the plaintiff’s case, Phil moved for a directed verdict in favor of our client, since there was no evidence connecting our client to the alleged negligence that had caused the accident. The judge agreed and granted the motion. Phil and I packed up and went back to Little Rock. A few days later, an attorney for one of the other defendants called to tell me what had happened while the jury was out. The judge had started ranting to the lawyers about Bill Clinton’s investigation and how mistreated he felt. Finally, one of them interrupted him and asked, “Judge, you know that lady lawyer, Hillary Rodham, who was here with Phil Carroll? That’s Bill Clinton’s wife.”

“Well, goddammit, if I’d known that,” the judge exclaimed, “they’d never have gotten that directed verdict!”

The winter after Bill’s defeat, a few of our friends and supporters came to talk to me about using “Clinton” as my last name. Ann Henry told me some people were upset when they received invitations to events at the Governor’s Mansion from “Governor Bill Clinton and Hillary Rodham.” Chelsea’s birth announcement, also featuring our two names, was apparently a hot subject of conversation around the state. People in Arkansas reacted to me much as my motherin-law had when she first met me: I was an oddity because of my dress, my Northern ways and the use of my maiden name.

Jim Blair joked about staging an elaborate scenario on the steps of the Capitol. Bill would put his foot on my throat, yank me by my hair and say something like, “Woman, you’re going to take my last name and that’s that!” Flags would wave, hymns would be sung and the name would change.

Vernon Jordan came to town to give a speech and asked me if I would make him breakfast, including grits, at our house the next morning. In our little kitchen, perched on a too small chair, he ate my instant grits and urged me to do the right thing: start using Bill’s last name. The only person who didn’t ask me or even talk to me about my name was my husband. He said my name was my business, and he didn’t think his political future depended on it one way or another.

I decided it was more important for Bill to be Governor again than for me to keep my maiden name. So when Bill announced his run for another term on Chelsea’s second birthday, I began calling myself Hillary Rodham Clinton.

The 1982 campaign was a family endeavor. We loaded Chelsea, diaper bag and all, into a big car driven by a true friend, Jimmy Red Jones, and we drove around the state.

We started in the South, where spring had snuck in under the pine trees, and ended in Fayetteville in a snowstorm. I’ve always liked campaigning and traveling through Arkansas, stopping at country stores, sale barns and barbecue joints. It’s a continuing education in human nature, including your own. I had been surprised when I had gone door-to-door for Bill in his 1978 campaign and encountered women who told me their husbands did the voting for them or met African Americans who thought there was still a poll tax to be paid.

In 1982, with Chelsea on my hip or holding my hand, I walked up and down streets meeting voters. I remember meeting some young mothers in the small town of Bald Knob. When I said I bet they were having a good time talking to their babies, one of them asked, “Why would I talk to her? She can’t talk back.” I knew from my Yale Child Study days―and from my mother―how important it was to talk and read to babies to build their vocabularies. Yet when I tried to explain this, the women were polite but dubious.

After Bill’s election in 1982, a humbler, more seasoned Governor returned to the State House, though no less determined to get as much done as possible in two years.

And there was so much to be done. Arkansas was a poor state, last or close to last by many measures, from percentage of college graduates to per capita personal income. I had helped Bill tackle health care reform in his first term, successfully setting up a network of health clinics, recruiting more doctors, nurses and midwives into rural areas―

over the opposition of the state’s medical society. When Governor White tried to make good on his 198o campaign promise to dismantle the network, people flooded into the Capitol to protest, and White had to retreat. Bill and I agreed that Arkansas would never prosper without an overhaul of its education system. Bill announced that he was forming an Education Standards Committee to recommend sweeping educational reforms, and he wanted me to be its Chair.

I had chaired the Rural Health Committee, and Bill asked me to tackle education because he wanted to send a signal about how serious he was. Nobody, including me, thought it was a good idea. But Bill wouldn’t take no for an answer. “Look on the bright side,” he said. “If you’re successful, our friends will complain that you could have done even more. And our enemies will complain that you did too much. If you accomplish nothing, our friends will say, ‘She should never have tried this.’ And our enemies will say, ‘See, she couldn’t get anything done!’ “ Bill was convinced he was right to appoint me, and eventually I relented.

Again, this was a politically risky move. Improving the schools would require an increase in taxes-never a popular idea. The fifteen-member committee also recommended that students be subjected to standardized tests, including one before they could graduate from eighth grade. But the cornerstone of the proposed reform plan was mandatory teacher testing. Though this enraged the teachers union, civil rights groups and others who were vital to the Democratic Party in Arkansas, we felt there was no way around the issue. How could we expect children to perform at national levels when their teachers sometimes fell short? The debate was so bitter that one school librarian said I was “lower than a snake’s belly.” I tried to remember that I was being called names not because of who I was but what I represented.

Getting the legislature to approve and fund the reform package turned into a knockdown-drag-out fight among interest groups. Teachers worried about their jobs. Legislators representing rural areas fretted that the plan would consolidate their small school districts.

In the midst of this contention, I stepped before a joint session of the Arkansas legislature’s House and Senate to plead our case for improving all schools, big and small.

For whatever reason―probably a combination of skill and lots of practice―public speaking has always been one of my strong suits. I laughed when Representative Lloyd George, a legislator from rural Yell County, later announced to the assembly: “Well, fellas, it looks like we might have elected the wrong Clinton!” It was another example of a phenomenon I call “the talking dog syndrome.” Some people are still amazed that any woman (this includes Governors’ wives, corporate CEOs, sports stars and rock singers) can hold her own under pressure and be articulate and knowledgeable. The dog can talk! In fact, it’s often an advantage if people you hope to persuade underestimate you at first. I would have been willing to bark my whole speech in order to guarantee education reform!

We won some votes and lost some, and we had to fight the teachers union in court.

But by the end of Bill’s term in office, Arkansas had a plan in place to raise school standards, tens of thousands of children had a better chance to realize their learning potentials and teachers got a desperately needed raise in pay. I was particularly pleased when Terrel Bell, President Reagan’s Secretary of Education, praised the Arkansas reform plan, commenting that Bill had been “a prime leader in education.”

The public success of education reform legislation was followed by a devastating personal challenge. In July 1989, I received a call in the middle of the week from Betsey Wright, who had become Bill’s Chief of Staff in 1983 after his reelection. She told me Bill was on his way to see me. I had just finished lunch with some friends, so I excused myself and stood outside the restaurant until Bill pulled up. We sat in the car while he told me that the head of the state police had just informed him that his brother, Roger, was under police surveillance. The police had videotaped him selling drugs to an informer.

The state police director then told Bill they could arrest Roger right then or continue to run up the charges and increase the pressure on him to identify his supplier, the real target. Roger was selling, he said, to finance a serious cocaine habit. The director then asked Bill what he wanted him to do. Bill replied there was no choice. The operation against Roger had to run its course. As a big brother, however, it was excruciatingly painful to know that, at best, his brother would be going to jail and, at worst, he might kill himself with drug abuse.

Bill and I berated ourselves for not seeing signs of Roger’s abuse and taking some kind of action to help him. We worried that this news, and Bill’s knowledge beforehand, would deeply hurt his mother. Finally, the wait was over. Roger was arrested and charged with possessing and selling cocaine. Bill explained to both Roger and Virginia that he had learned about the investigation but felt duty-bound not to tell his mother or warn his brother. Virginia was shocked by the accusations and the realization that Bill and I had known that Roger was headed for prison. Although I understood their pain and anger, I believed Bill had taken the only course open to him by keeping the information from his family. Roger agreed to counseling before he left to serve his prison sentence. In the course of those sessions, Roger admitted how much he hated his father, and Virginia and Bill learned for the first time how profoundly Roger had been affected by his father’s alcoholism and violence. Bill realized that living with alcoholism and the denial and secrecy that it spawned had also created consequences and problems for him that would take years to son out. This was one of many family crises we would face. Even strong marriages can be strained when trouble comes. In the years ahead we would have rough patches, but we were determined to get through them.

Starting in 1987, more than a few Democratic Party leaders were urging Bill to consider a run for the Presidency in 1988 when Ronald Reagan’s second term would end.

Both Bill and I hoped Senator Dale Bumpers would decide to run, and we thought he would. He had been a first-rate Governor and Senator and could have been a formidable national candidate. In late March, though, he decided not to run. The interest in Bill increased, and he asked me what I thought. I did not think he should run and told him so. It looked as if Vice President Bush would be nominated as the successor to President Reagan, running for Reagan’s surrogate third term. I thought that Bush would be hard to beat. But there were other reasons, too. Bill had been elected in 1986 to a fourth term as Governor and the first four-year term since Reconstruction. He had not yet served as Chairman of the Democratic Leadership Council and had just begun his chairmanship of the National Governors Association. He was only forty years old. His mother was dealing with problems in her nursing practice, and his brother was readjusting to life after prison.

If that weren’t enough, my father had just suffered a stroke and my parents were moving to Little Rock so that Bill and I could help them out. I thought it was the wrong time in our lives and told him I just was not convinced.

One day he thought he would run, the next day, he was ready to say he would not. Finally, I persuaded him to set a date by which he would make a decision. Anyone who knows Bill understands he has to have a deadline or he will continue to explore every possible pro and con. He picked July 14 and reserved a room in a hotel to make his announcement―

whatever it might be. A number of his friends from around the country came down to be with him the day before. Some were pushing him to run; others thought it was premature and he should wait. Bill analyzed every point anyone raised. I thought it was significant that he was still debating less than twentyfour hours before he had to comment publicly. That meant to me that he was leaning against running but not quite ready to slam the door.

Much has been written about the reasons for his decision not to run, but it finally came down to one word: Chelsea. Carl Wagner, a longtime Democratic activist and father of an only daughter, told Bill he would effectively be turning his daughter into an orphan. Mickey Kantor delivered the same message while he and Bill sat on the back porch of the Governor’s Mansion. Chelsea came out and asked Bill about our upcoming vacation plans. When Bill said he might not have one if he ran for President, Chelsea looked at him and said, “Then Mom and I will go without you.” That sealed the decision for Bill.

Chelsea was beginning to understand what it meant to have a father in the public eye.

When she was little and Bill was Governor, she had no idea what he did. Once when she was about four and someone asked her, she replied, “My daddy talks on the telephone, drinks coffee and makes ‘peeches.”

The 1986 Governor’s campaign was the first one she had been old enough to follow.

She could read and watch the news and be exposed to some of the meanspiritedness that politics seems to generate. One of Bill’s opponents was Orval Faubus, the infamous former Governor who defied court orders to integrate Little Rock’s Central High School in 1957. President Eisenhower sent troops to enforce the law. Because of my concerns about what Faubus and his supporters would say and do, Bill and I tried to prepare Chelsea for what she might hear about her father or, for that matter, about her mother. We sat around our dinner table in the Governor’s Mansion role-playing with her, pretending we were in debates where one of us acted like a political opponent who criticized Bill for not being a good Governor. Chelsea’s eyes grew big at the idea that anyone would say such bad things about her daddy.