So did Hillary’s boyfriend, Bill Clinton, who was at that moment back home in Arkansas campaigning for a seat in Congress. Like Hillary, Clinton had been offered a coveted job on the impeachment staff. But the Rhodes scholar and Yale Law grad had instead chosen to begin his own political career. At first, he had thought of a seat in the state legislature, but ““he felt he had to go bigger. He had his eye on a higher prize,’’ a friend, Rudy Moore, told author David Maraniss for his authoritative Clinton biography, ““First in His Class.’’ Hillary Rodham had no doubts that Clinton would aim for the highest prize. ““Bill’s going to be president,’’ she told friends on more than one occasion.
In the winter of 1974, Rodham and Clinton were deeply idealistic members of an elite vanguard of the ““New Politics.’’ Terry Kirkpatrick, one of only two graduates of a state law school on the impeachment-inquiry staff, was ““awed’’ by the self-confidence of Hillary and her Yale Law chums. ““They thought they were the best and the brightest,’’ she recalls, ““and that they were here not only to do God’s work but everyone else’s.’’ In Arkansas, 27-year-old Bill Clinton offered to restore faith in the political process. If the people ““demand more honest politics,’’ he declared in his stump speech, ““they’ll get more honest politics.’’ The Vietnam War had radicalized the children of the World War II generation. By working within the system, they would clear out the corrupt old order and change politics forever.
In fact, politics did change–though not in the way envisioned by Bill and Hillary. Nixon was driven from office, and the post-Watergate Congress enacted a raft of reforms aimed at cleaning up politics. But a quarter century later, the machinery of reform, which once seemed so noble, has produced a fevered culture of scandal. Somehow Archibald Cox and the Rule of Law have degenerated into Ken Starr’s gathering facts about Monica’s thong underwear. The crimes targeted by special prosecutors (20 so far) have dwindled from using the CIA to obstruct justice, as Nixon did in Watergate, to conspiring to conceal love notes, as Clinton is alleged to have done in the Monica matter. Nixon’s spirit lives on: the vote-your-fears ““wedge’’ politics pioneered by his presidential campaigns in 1968 and 1972 have become standard procedure on Capitol Hill. Clinton did, as Hillary predicted, ascend to the White House. But Bill and Hill’s aggressive ““war room’’ tactics often seem more Nixonian than New Age. Judging from their recent public statements, the Clintons even feel like Nixon, who always believed that he was surrounded by implacable enemies.
The progression from the cocky idealism of Yale Law in the early ’70s to the self-pitying fatalism of the Clinton White House today is an intriguing baby-boomer tale. How could the Clintons have become what they beheld? Monicagate is certainly not Watergate, but as a drama of human folly, the plot is Shakespearean. And, as in most great drama, the telling flaws are foreshadowed in the opening act. Hillary’s righteous zeal and her paranoia about a right-wing conspiracy surfaced as soon as she arrived in Arkansas to help her boyfriend’s congressional campaign in August 1974. And Bill’s skirt-chasing and chronic temporizing threatened to end his political career before it really began. As the permanent machinery of scandal was gearing up in Washington, Bill and Hillary were exhibiting the traits that would, over time, make them perfect foils.
The final irony, of course, is that Hillary Clinton played an important role in drafting the rules and procedures that may be used to impeach her husband. It is hard to remember now the sureness of purpose and sense of righteousness the East Coast liberal establishment embodied in the late ’60s and early ’70s. By joining John Doar’s impeachment staff, Hillary was entering a secular priesthood. Doar was sternly ascetic. He ordered his young minions to forget ideology and instead focus on the facts and the law. He also told them to keep their mouths shut. He would not tolerate leaks or partisanship. Nixon was to be respectfully referred to at all times as ““the president.’’ Doar was a Republican who had worked for Bobby Kennedy’s Justice Department. A hero of the civil-rights movement, he had faced down angry mobs in rural Mississippi. Doar was so far above politics in the summer of 1974 that he turned down Ethel Kennedy’s invitations to swim in her pool at Hickory Hill. It would look wrong, he explained. Too partisan an act. The members of the House Judiciary Committee grumbled that Doar was keeping them in the dark about their own probe. ““We’re so damn secretive that we’re going to impeach Nixon in secret and he’ll never know it,’’ complained Rep. Bill Hungate of Missouri.
Hillary fit right into this purer world. Though a liberal Democrat, ““she never said a bad word about President Nixon,’’ says Weld, the Republican staffer who served with her. She worked tirelessly, dawn to midnight, seven days a week. The staff was sealed off behind double locks on the second floor of the old Congressional Hotel. Obsessed with maintaining security, Doar did not believe in computers, which he thought were too easy to get into. Every fact had to be written by hand on index cards–a half million of them by the end of the inquiry. Among fellow staffers, there was little partying, almost no drinking and, by some accounts, very little sex. ““It’s not as if these people were fun,’’ recalled a staffer on the committee. ““They had the personalities of rocks.''
Hillary is remembered as determined and dutiful, grinding away in a mildewed office overlooking an alleyway. She lit up only when her boyfriend, Clinton, came by on his occasional visits from Arkansas, remembers her co-worker Kirkpatrick. Hillary confided in Kirkpatrick that she wanted to marry Clinton, but she dreaded moving to Arkansas. She worried that the good ole boys would not respect a female lawyer. ““She was the least impulsive woman I ever met,’’ said Kirkpatrick. ““But she was just crazy about Bill Clinton.’’ Over hamburgers in greasy-spoon cafes on Capitol Hill that Watergate summer, Hillary agonized over what to do.
One of the few pastimes available to the impeachment staff was to sit in a darkened room, listening to tapes of President Nixon plotting with his aides. Nixon had released transcripts of some of the White House tapes, but they were incomplete and inaccurate, and some tapes were missing altogether. The impeachment staff was listening closely to the recordings themselves, picking up the errors and omissions. While the tapes played on that summer, President Nixon brooded in the White House, listening to ““Victory at Sea’’ and, according to some reports, drunkenly talking to the portraits on the walls. The facts slowly marshaled by Doar’s staff over the spring and early summer were beginning to shape into a noose. On July 24, the Supreme Court ordered the president to turn over all the tapes, including the ““smoking gun’’ recording on which Nixon can be heard demanding that the CIA and FBI obstruct justice. On Aug. 9, Hillary and her fellow staffers quietly watched on TV as Nixon waved good-bye on the South Lawn before flying off into exile. No one cheered or gloated. Celebrating was regarded as inappropriate. A week later Hillary headed south for Arkansas and her true love. After 30 hours on the road, she arrived in a racy, raucous world that was far distant from the closed and perfect universe of John Doar’s impeachment-inquiry staff.
Down in the Third Congressional District of Arkansas, which stretched from the gambling joints of Hot Springs to the university town of Fayetteville, Bill Clinton was actually sorry to see Nixon go. Running as a Democrat, he had portrayed his opponent, incumbent Congressman John Hammerschmidt, as a Nixon crony and fellow power abuser. With Nixon gone, Clinton feared that the issue would become Bill Clinton, the long-haired liberal law professor who had somehow missed going to Vietnam. Voters, he feared, would be sick of turmoil and want to stick with the incumbent, a respected World War II veteran. Clinton tried to cover his tracks by posing as a friend of the farmer and the factory worker, although, as Maraniss notes, Clinton had spent little time on a farm or in a factory. In the populist spirit, Clinton attacked greedy corporations. But from time to time he visited the back room of a road-side honky-tonk to eat steak and crackers doused in picante sauce with Don Tyson, the head of the Arkansas-based chicken empire. Tyson helped generate campaign funds. Displaying an early knack at dialing-for-dollars, Clinton raised more than $180,000, a huge sum for a challenger in 1974. ““Bill had a huge Rolodex,’’ says Ron Addington, a campaign aide. ““The checks poured in from all over.’’ (Clinton ultimately outspent incumbent Hammerschmidt by almost 2-1.)
One day in mid-August, Clinton announced to his campaign manager, Paul Fray, that Hillary was coming down to live in Arkansas. ““What am I going to do?’’ he asked, according to Fray. He was ambivalent about her coming to Fayetteville. Hillary had been calling from Washington ““five or six times a day’’ with suggestions on how to staff, organize and advance the campaign, says Addington. Clinton was, for the most part, glad to have Hillary’s advice. ““Anything Hillary says, do it,’’ he instructed Addington. Clinton plainly loved and valued Hillary. ““She’s the smartest woman I ever met,’’ he told Fray. Even so, Clinton wasn’t particularly eager to have her hanging around headquarters.
Clinton had surrounded himself with a circle of admiring female campaign volunteers, mostly young students from the university in Fayetteville. ““Bill was real flirty with the girls, and the girls loved it,’’ said Addington. ““When Hillary showed up, all the fun stopped.’’ Clinton was reluctant to cut off a fling with one of the girls. If Clinton heard that Hillary was coming over to headquarters, he would arrange to have her slipped out the back door. ““Bill would tell my wife, Mary Lee, to take her down the road, get her out of there,’’ says Fray. ““My wife told me, “I’m a little sick of this. I don’t like the idea of hiding this woman’.''
On the campaign staff, ““morale plummeted,’’ recalls Addington. Hillary had an uneasy relationship with Fray, whom Addington describes as ““an early, unpolished James Carville. He was take-no-prisoners, go-for-the-jugular.’’ Fray acknowledges that he tangled with Hillary. ““I was shocked by her appearance. Those big round glasses and baggy dresses. I said, “My God, Clinton, what have you done? This girl is a hippie!’ ’’ But he came to grudgingly respect Hillary. ““She was hard-nosed and she could cuss,’’ says Fray. She was also, he says, ““an organizational genius.’’ Clinton badly needed someone to organize him. Friends and staffers called him ““the Boy’’ in part because he behaved like one. He would stay up all night, talking and stuffing down junk food. He persistently ran behind schedule, and then blamed his staff for his tardiness. ““We’d try to talk to Bill about it, but he’d just blow up, and I mean ballistic,’’ says Addington. ““So after a few times, we just said, “Well, we’ll be glad when this whole thing is over’.’’ Hillary, said Addington, was not able to impose much discipline on Clinton. Instead, the two fought. Hillary would push Clinton to take liberal stands on social spending. ““Clinton was more of a realist about what would fly up here in the hill country,’’ says Addington. ““But Hillary usually won.’’ He remembers one explosive fight as they drove to Eureka Springs, with Hillary banging on the back seat and demanding to be let out of the car. Clinton told Addington to stop at a stoplight. ““Let her go,’’ he said with a sigh. ““When Hillary arrived in August, the whole climate changed,’’ said Addington. ““It had been fun in the spring, but it was hardball, all business in the fall. There was no doubt that Hillary was in charge.''
Arkansas politics can be vicious, and stories soon began to be spread about Clinton–that he was a draft dodger, that he seduced college girls, that he was a homosexual. Hillary was convinced that the rumors added up to more than the usual mudslinging. According to Addington, she believed that the Republican National Committee had spotted Clinton, who was then 28 years old, as a future threat. She noted that the incumbent, Hammerschmidt, was close to George Bush, at the time the chairman of the Republican National Committee. ““Hillary was the one who educated us,’’ says Addington. ““It wasn’t just local politics. The smear campaign was being run by Washington, by the right-wingers. They knew he might be president one day, and wanted to knock him off.''
As Election Day approached, Clinton and his aides had another worry: that the election would be stolen. Fray says he was approached by a lawyer representing dairy interests offering $15,000 to ““make sure’’ ballots were not stuffed in Sebastian County. In return for saving the election, the dairy interests would presumably expect some favors in return. Hillary got wind of the shady offer and ““threw a fit. She was a high-principled woman,’’ says Fray, who insisted to NEWSWEEK that he had no intention of accepting the offer to buy votes. On election night, the campaign heard rumors of ballot stuffing and rousted the U.S. attorney out of bed to investigate voter fraud. ““He was powerless to do anything,’’ says Addington. At campaign headquarters, Fray began to swear and throw things. ““It was the goddamn money!’’ he cried, though he now claims that he was ““joking.''
Clinton lost by only 6,000 of the 190,000 votes cast. In the end, Fray blamed Clinton’s tendency to duck confrontation. Both Fray and Hillary had pressed the candidate to knock on doors in Ft. Smith, a town heavily populated by military retirees. ““You have to go where the votes are,’’ says Fray, ““but Clinton was afraid of being called a draft dodger.’’ Addington blamed the loss on Republican mudslinging. Clinton’s ““current problems are really nothing new,’’ says Addington. ““It’s been going on for 25 years. This is just the climax, the final battle.''
From time to time over the years, Clinton’s 1974 advisers would gather and reminisce, with a mix of bitterness and regret, about that tumultuous first campaign. Doug Wallace, Clinton’s campaign press secretary, shared a hamburger with Paul and Mary Lee Fray one day midway through Clinton’s first term as president. Clinton’s women troubles had threatened his ‘92 campaign and were bubbling up again in stories about Paula Jones and ““Troopergate.’’ Wallace recalled the fact that Mary Lee had hustled Clinton’s college girl out the back door to avoid a scene with Hillary. ““All the lying and deceit started with that [college] girl,’’ Wallace said, according to Mary Lee. ““We didn’t realize we were doing it. We thought we were just being nice to Hillary.’’ The old Clinton aides wondered what they might have said differently, but it was too late: the Clintons were off in Washington, at the White House.
