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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 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.