American Evita: Hillary Clinton's Path to Power Read online

  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-fa
natical 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.

  Hillary would not be surprised to learn that Bill had also been traumatized and transformed by the assassinations of Martin Luther King and Bobby Kennedy. Determined to make his own contribution, Bill spent the summer after his Georgetown graduation campaigning for Arkansas Senator J. William Fulbright, chairman of the powerful Senate Foreign Relations Committee and an outspoken critic of the Vietnam War.

  As a Rhodes Scholar at Oxford, Bill also marched in several antiwar demonstrations during his time abroad, and even made a curious side trip to the Soviet Union. But one concern would overshadow all others to the point where he could not simply “box it off.” Bill spent most of his time at Oxford trying to find ways to avoid being drafted—a mission that grew all the more urgent after he received his induction notice just as the American death toll crept past the forty-thousand mark.

  With the help of his mentor Senator Fulbright, Bill managed to get the rules bent so he could join the Reserve Officer Training Corps. But once a draft lottery was instituted and it became clear his number was so high he would never be drafted, Bill wrote a letter to the head of the ROTC program at the University of Arkansas telling him that he was one of those who found themselves “loving their country but loathing the military.” Bill had conned his way into the ROTC appointment, which he now spurned, for one reason: “to maintain my political viability within the system.”

  The letter, which Clinton would take pains to keep secret, would come back to haunt him decades later when he sought the presidency. Until then, not even Hillary would be aware of its existence.

  By the time Hillary began dating Bill in the spring of 1971, she was just winding down her romance with David Rupert—her first and only serious relationship. Bill, on the other hand, had cut a wide swath through Arkansas, Georgetown, and the United Kingdom.

  Hillary, warned from the outset that Bill was already juggling a number of girlfriends at Yale, seemed not to care. She was happiest driving around New Haven with Bill in his hideously orange Opel station wagon.

  Before long, Hillary was spending weekends at the beach house in Milford, Connecticut, that he shared with three roommates. They, like nearly everyone else at Yale, were intimidated by Hillary’s intellect—and by her directness. She respected Bill, and believed without question that he would someday be President. But that didn’t stop her from delivering the coup de grâce whenever Bill was getting too full of himself. “Knock it off, Clinton,” she’d say when he’d gone on too long extolling the virtues of his home state. “Cut the crap!”

  At the beach house one night, Bill and Hillary were sitting in the kitchen, talking about their plans. Hillary was not quite sure which direction she was going in, or even where she wanted to live. She was impressed that, hokum aside, Bill loved Arkansas and knew that he wanted to hold office there.

  That summer, Hillary accepted an offer to clerk for a law firm in California, and to her surprise, Bill wanted to tag along. They shared a small apartment not far from the Berkeley campus of the University of California, and while Bill spent most of his time reading and sightseeing, Hillary did research and wrote legal motions for the Oakland firm of Treuhaft, Walker, and Burnstein.

  Hillary had first met Robert Treuhaft and his wife, Jessica Mitford, when they came to New Haven to raise money for the Black Panthers. More recently, she caught their eye when the Yale Review—Hillary was now on the Review’s editorial board—ran an article defending Black Panther defendant Lonnie McLucas. The piece was illustrated with drawings of policemen as pigs; one had been decapitated.

  Treuhaft and Mitford, who had written a bestselling exposé of the funeral industry called The American Way of Death, were avowed Stalinists. Treuhaft formally resigned from the Communist Party in 1958 because by then it had lost so many members it lacked any real clout. But he and his wife, who dismissed the heroic 1956 Hungarian uprising against Communist rule as the work of “grasping neo-Fascists,” remained staunchly committed to the cause. In addition to the Panthers, Oakland’s “Red Lawyer” represented a wide range of radicals and indigents. In later years Hillary would say nothing of her friendship with Treuhaft and Mitford, and refer to Treuhaft, Walker, and Burnstein only once in her memoirs, simply as “a small law firm in Oakland, California.”

  Hillary returned to New Haven hating the war and Richard Nixon (“He’s pure evil”) more than ever. She and Bill rented a ground-floor apartment just off campus at 21 Edgewood Avenue for seventy-five dollars a month, and Bill used his own money to set up a “McGovern for President” headquarters. Much of the time, Bill worried aloud that his new relationship was not fair to Hillary. He told her that he wasn’t sure he wanted to fall deeper in love with her because she would never be happy in Arkansas. “If you wanted to run for office, you could get elected. You could even be a senator,” he said, “but I’ve got to go home.”

  After Christmas, Bill drove up to Park Ridge to spend time with the Rodhams. While he had no difficulty winning over Dorothy and the boys, Dad was his usual implacable self. Gradually, over football and card games, Hugh Rodham began to crack. Interestingly, it was Dorothy who confronted Bill on the question of her daughter’s future—and why he felt it was fair for Hillary to relinquish her own political ambitions while he sought office back home in Arkansas.

  That summer of 1972, Hillary joined Bill in Austin, Texas, where they both worked on the McGovern campaign. She had managed to keep an eye on her boyfriend’s extracurricular activities in New Haven. But with Bill making frequent out-of-town trips to whip up support for his antiwar candidate, there was little she could do to rein him in. At numerous times in front of other campaign staffers, they quarreled bitterly about the other women he was seeing—as many as three in the span of a single week.

  Bill continued to impress everyone he met with his prodigious energy—he managed to get by on just five hours of sleep a night—and his innate political savvy. But Hillary was also attracting notice from seasoned party operatives. One of these, no-nonsense, chain-smoking Betsey Wright, was far more interested in Hillary’s future than she was in Bill’s. “I was obsessed with how far Hillary might go,” Wright said, “with her mixture of brilliance, ambition, and self-assuredness.” She would later say that Bill and Hillary’s marriage would leave her feeling “disappointed. I had images in my mind that she could be the first woman president.” None of this kept Hillary from signing on for an additional—and unnecessary—fourth year at Yale Law School simply so she could be close to Bill.

  After graduation, Bill took Hillary on her first trip to Europe. It was while strolling along the shores of Lake Ennerdale in England’s scenic Lake District that Bill first asked Hillary to marry him. With the specter of her grandparents’ divorce and the havoc it caused in her own mother’s life still looming large in Hillary’s mind, she turned him down. “No, not now,” she said. “Give me time.”

  Undaunted, Bill took her home to Arkansas—but not before using his contacts to secu
re a $25,000-a-year job teaching law at the University of Arkansas in Fayetteville. In Hot Springs, Hillary met an icy reception from Virginia and Bill’s brother, Roger. “I didn’t know what to think,” Hillary’s future mother-in-law recalled of that first meeting. “No makeup. Coke-bottle glasses. Brown hair with no apparent style.”

  And style—if not taste—was something Virginia had in abundance. Her skin dangerously dark from too much sun, Bill’s mother favored shorts, open-toed shoes, hot pink lipstick (“I always figure the brighter the better”), and Minnie Mouse eyelashes. Her own hairstyle was distinctive all right: a bouffant dyed black on two sides, with a wide white “skunk stripe” down the middle. Virginia had wanted her son to marry someone she felt was more his type—perhaps one of the tall blond beauty-pageant contestants he seemed to favor. Hillary was equally taken aback. She and Virginia seemed to be, Hillary later said, “from different planets.”

  Hillary had also made several visits over the previous year to New York, in part to investigate the living conditions of disadvantaged children for her various Marian Wright Edelman–inspired projects, but also to connect with various activist groups in the city. Through her many left-wing friends and contacts—including avowed Communists Robert Treuhaft and Jessica Mitford, Black Panther lawyer Charles Garry, and her old mentor Saul Alinsky—Hillary was introduced to dozens of like-minded radicals. Among her new friends: New York–based representatives of the Palestine Liberation Organization who were lobbying feverishly to be recognized as a diplomatic entity by the United Nations. (A year later, the PLO would be granted “permanent observer” status and, ironically, would ultimately open its mission in an Upper East Side town house one block from the homes of David Rockefeller and Richard Nixon.)

  At a time when elements of the American Left embraced the Palestinian cause and condemned Israel, Hillary was telling friends that she was “sympathetic” to the terrorist organization and admired its flamboyant leader, Yasser Arafat. When Arafat made his famous appearance before the UN General Assembly in November 1974 wearing his revolutionary uniform and his holster on his hip, Bill “was outraged like everybody else,” said a Yale Law School classmate. But not Hillary, who tried to convince Bill that Arafat was a “freedom fighter” trying to free his people from their Israeli “oppressors.”