TIME: Almanac of the 20th Century

home *** CD-ROM | disk | FTP | other *** search

/ TIME: Almanac of the 20th Century / TIME, Almanac of the 20th Century.ISO / 1990 / 93 / jan_mar / 01049927.000 < prev next >

Wrap

Text File | 1994-02-27 | 16KB | 296 lines

<text> <title> (Jan. 04, 1993) The Dynamic Duo </title> <history> TIME--The Weekly Newsmagazine--1992 Jan. 04, 1993 Man of the Year:Bill Clinton </history> <article> <source>Time Magazine</source> <hdr> MAN OF THE YEAR, Page 38 BILL CLINTON The Dynamic Duo </hdr> <body> How the Clintons turned their marriage into a political powerhouse By Margaret Carlson/Little Rock--With reporting by Michael Duffy/Little Rock She must have loved him something awful. That's what Hillary Rodham's friends concluded when she moved to Fayetteville, Arkansas, in 1974 to be with her law-school classmate Bill Clinton. There she was one moment, the hottest of young lawyers, recruited by a former Assistant Attorney General to serve as counsel on the House Judiciary Committee considering the impeachment of Richard Nixon, chased down the steps of the Capitol by reporters looking for quotes, admired by aspiring officeholders for her work at the National Women's Education Fund. The red-hot center of official Washington was asking her to stay, and gold-plated law firms in New York City and Chicago were beckoning her to come. Yet the minute Nixon resigned, Hillary asked her roommate, Sara Ehrmann, if she would drive her, along with her 20 boxes of books and a 10-speed bike, to Arkansas in a '68 Buick. Ehrmann agreed but spent the next 30 hours trying to talk her friend out of going. "You have the world at your feet," Ehrmann said. "Why are you throwing your life away for this guy?" When the two stopped at Monticello, a shrine to public service, Ehrmann tried one last time. "We haven't gone that far," she said. "You can still change your mind." But she didn't change her mind. Thus began a journey that would end in a remarkable and enduring partnership between two equals who somehow add up to more together than apart, a joint venture that would lead from the university to the Governor's mansion and finally, improbably, to the White House. The combination is so strong--their best friends acknowledge that they confide fully in no one but each other--and the personalities interlock so neatly that it may be safely said that neither one would be heading for 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue without the other. Sitting in the study of his official residence, surrounded by antique Christmas decorations, the Arkansas Governor casually points to his wife in the easy chair next to him when asked who will be the Bobby Kennedy of his Administration. The morning after the election, the Governor says, he woke up, looked at his wife and just laughed. Back in 1974, during Clinton's ill-fated race for Congress, Hillary drove straight to his campaign headquarters, a two-room wooden shack with a lone volunteer thumbing through index cards. Strains of "Sooie pig" echoed from the nearby football stadium at the University of Arkansas. "How," Ehrmann asked, "are you going to survive here?" This is the question Clinton had been asking himself for a long time. He first spotted Hillary in civil-liberties class at Yale Law School, where the intricacies of the Bill of Rights couldn't keep his mind--or eyes--from wandering over to the smart girl in the flannel shirt and thick glasses. She had already noticed him in the student lounge, bragging loudly about growing "the biggest watermelons in the world" back in his home state. Hillary had been president of the student government at Wellesley, the first student to speak at a commencement there (and pictured in Life magazine for it) and a minor celebrity for having been a multiple winner on the TV quiz show College Bowl. Women were just beginning to come into their own, and Clinton didn't see how she would ever allow herself to fall in love with a guy determined to spend the next 20 years working the pancake breakfasts in Pea Ridge and Pine Bluff. But Clinton had something the analytic, disciplined Hillary admired--an effortless success, an ease about himself that drew people to him. Hillary recalls being in a darkened classroom for a slide presentation of a brain-crunching legal problem. No one had a clue, and Bill had dozed off. But when it came time to propose a solution, he woke up, gave the answer and went back to sleep again. The superconscientious Hillary--her mother Dorothy says she had organized a neighborhood Olympics, child care for migrant workers and a voter-registration project by the time she was 16--would never wing it like that. But the mind has just so much control over matter. Says Clinton: "We just couldn't help ourselves." When Clinton's mother and brother came to watch the two in moot court, they cautioned Bill to go out with someone more like the girls back home. But longtime friend Carolyn Staley says he set his mother straight, insisting he would never "marry a beauty queen." When Hillary came to Fayetteville, she sublet a professor's house, taught law and ran the legal-aid clinic. Before making up her mind to stay, she went off to visit friends who had taken high-powered jobs in Washington, New York and Chicago "to see if I was missing something." She concluded she wasn't. They got married in 1975 in the new house that bride, groom and their families stayed up all night painting. The young couple melded his desire for a big shindig with her preference for a small one, having fewer than 20 people at their home for the ceremony and then more than 100 people in the backyard for the reception. It's hard to know who prevailed on the honeymoon plans: Hillary's two brothers found such a good package deal on a vacation in Acapulco that the whole family went together. In some ways, the Clinton marriage is a carefully calibrated compensatory mechanism in which each fills in for the other's gaps, a right brain-left brain meshing of analysis and creativity, planning and spontaneity. He has the edge in coming up with ideas and selling them; she is better at separating the weak from the strong and making arguments airtight. She is the disciplined, duty-bound Methodist, carrying her favorite Scriptures around in her briefcase and holding herself and others to a high standard; he is a more emotional Baptist who sings in the choir and gets misty-eyed when he introduces his boyhood friend Mack McLarty as his new chief of staff. Hillary needs quiet time and has been known to excuse herself from her own parties at 11; as for Bill, the more people he has around him the more energy he has. She can cut short a long-winded aide with a crisp "Where are we here?," allowing her husband to leave the impression that he would have listened all day. "She's a closer," says scheduler Susan Thomases. "She knows when a discussion should end." Hillary works tirelessly--but often fruitlessly--to counteract Bill's belief that tomorrow is at least another day away. During their four-day Thanksgiving visit to California, their first vacation in a year and a half, the frenetic President-elect played football, golf and volleyball, jogged twice, shook hands at a mall, went to a black-tie surprise party, ate at three restaurants unannounced and ordered room-service pizza at 3 a.m. A month ago, at the Democratic Leadership Council's fund-raising dinner, which ran an hour behind schedule, Hillary went backstage after dessert only to discover that her husband was still out front slapping backs. "He doesn't realize yet that they can't leave until he does," she joked, settling in for another 20 minutes. Hillary asked Thomases, a lawyer and an old friend, to become campaign scheduler in order to keep her husband "from working himself into a robotic trance." Still, at the end of a long campaign day, says press secretary Dee Dee Myers, "the Governor would rather stay up and putter instead of going to bed, channel surfing, calling friends, doing a crossword puzzle, reading a mystery." Their minds are so attuned to each other's that, among Clinton's aides, the phrase "Hillary said" is equivalent to an Executive Order. Campaign staffer Skip Rutherford says that if you call the mansion with a question and get Hillary, you can ask your question and run with her answer. "She's never wrong about what he would want," he says. When chief strategist James Carville came up with the idea of setting up a campaign war room to respond rapidly to charges from the Bush camp, he passed it by Hillary first. Aides had failed to persuade Clinton to appear on the Arsenio Hall Show until Hillary was impressed by an interview with inner-city teenagers on the program during the Los Angeles riots. Hillary recommended that the theme of the convention not be the one that was famously proclaimed by the war-room sign the economy, stupid, but rather a positive, uplifting message about the future. The secret of the Clintons' success, friends say, is that each thinks the other is the smartest person in the world. Nothing is really settled for Bill until Hillary thinks it's a good idea--and vice versa. During the campaign, at the end of a long day, they would climb back on the bus and collapse against each other in a heap. Until he got used to their affectionate ways, Democratic consultant Bob Squier says, "I felt like I should leave, except there was no place to go." If the Governor's attention is flagging, says Betsey Wright, Clinton's chief of staff for a decade, the best way to get it back is to talk about something Hillary has done. Clinton first won the governorship in 1978. It was a glorious period for the nation's youngest Governor, then 32, and his wife, who joined one of the city's most prestigious law firms. In 1980 Hillary gave birth to their daughter Chelsea in a difficult caesarean delivery. Until the campaign went into overdrive this year, one or the other, or both, has always managed to be home for dinner, take her to school, softball games and ballet performances. (One of the things that concerns the Clintons most is how to fence off a family life in the White House.) In 1980 Clinton was stunned by an unexpected defeat in his re-election bid. Wright now sees that loss as an exercise of collective parenting: "Arkansans felt a need to discipline this guy who had gone off to get a fancy education and brought home a fancy wife and had got too big for his britches." After figuratively sending the Governor to his room for two years, voters welcomed him back for 10 more. Hillary started answering to Mrs. Clinton instead of keeping her maiden name. With the '60s ethic waning, a female attorney could wear silk and argue a case at the same time. Hillary still wastes as little energy as possible on such matters; during the convention she left all decisions about her appearance to her Arkansas friend, Hollywood producer Linda Bloodworth-Thomason. The Clinton blend of yin and yang brought about what may be the couple's most lasting legacy to the state that had long ranked last in most measures of school achievement. Both believed education was the key to the good life. Clinton remembers his grandmother Edith hanging flash cards by his high chair so that he knew all his numbers and letters by the time he was three years old. His teachers later got him through troubled times in a home with an alcoholic stepfather. For a woman of Hillary's generation, education was the way of liberation. In 1983 the Governor appointed Hillary to chair an official commission on education standards. Night after night, Hillary would hold meetings in school cafeterias; her husband, meanwhile, was softening up the legislature to raise taxes to upgrade the curriculum and eventually require competency tests of teachers. Irate teachers denounced Hillary as "lower than a snake's belly." But the bill got through. The night the legislature passed their education-reform package, Arkansas' first couple celebrated the way other people ring in the New Year. Carolyn Staley stopped by the Governor's mansion to drop off a note of congratulations. Bill yelled for her to come in. "They're both well into a bottle of champagne," says Staley. "She's slumped against him there, and they're so happy. She tells him to get the other bottle." The Clintons' huge kitchen is known for its unprepossessing dinners and parlor games. Although the fiercely competitive Clintons sometimes must be reminded by friends that Pictionary is only a game, they can inadvertently forget to compete with each other. One night while playing Trivial Pursuit, Hillary hesitated before answering a question about what gift from Egypt stands in New York City's Central Park. When she said, "Obelisk," Bill let out a long "Yeeeeess" before realizing his team was losing the game. The admiration that Hillary had earned over the years--as a lawyer on the Legal Services Corp., chairman of the Children's Defense Fund, a member of numerous boards and a top-ranked litigator--made it all the harder for her to understand and deal with the harsh attacks on her during the campaign. The sight of her sitting defiantly in solidarity with her husband on 60 Minutes fueled critics looking for evidence that she was pushy, arrogant and contemptuous of more conventional wives. In that January interview, which focused on Gennifer Flowers' claims that she had had a 12-year affair with Clinton, the two steadfastly refused to reveal more than that the Governor "had caused pain in his marriage." They said they were willing to run the risk that some voters might reject him for not explaining more fully. That their marriage held together in spite of those strains is probably the best testimony to their mutual belief in the partnership. Hillary's public image improved as the year wore on. People got a fuller picture of her as a woman deeply devoted to her husband and daughter even while she pursued her political and career interests. Chelsea, who had been kept out of the public eye during the primary season, was finally introduced grasping her parents' hands on a dramatic televised walk from Macy's to the convention floor. Meanwhile, the Republicans inadvertently guaranteed Hillary more sympathy by bashing her from the podium at their Houston convention. According to polls taken since the election, the country seems to have softened on the "Hillary question." Gallup registered a 57% approval rating in late November, compared with the Washington Post's 28% in March. Perhaps a First Lady who consults lawbooks rather than astrologers doesn't look so frightening after all. And perhaps Bill Clinton, rather than seeming weak by comparison with his wife, has proved that it takes a solid, secure man to marry a strong woman. The Clintons will begin their final journey to the Inauguration at Monticello--the very place where almost two decades ago Hillary stopped on her way to Arkansas but finally chose not to turn back to Washington. Instead, she took a long detour through watermelon country. No one can ever know where the path not taken in 1974 might have led Hillary Rodham. But if her life continues to enrich his as much in the White House as it did in the Governor's mansion, then the country should be grateful that she drove on to Fayetteville, and will soon be headed up the Capitol steps once again, this time at Bill Clinton's side. </body> </article> </text>