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                                                                                MAN OF THE YEAR, Page 38

BILL CLINTON

The Dynamic Duo


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