God and Hillary Clinton (5 page)

During their time at Yale, the religious commitment of Bill and Hillary slowed considerably. More so than any point in Hillary's life, her years at Yale Law provided a challenge to her open practice of her faith. She did not attend church on a regular basis and was not as overtly vigilant about involving faith in her life. Michael Medved, the popular film critic and talk show host, knew Hillary well during her first year at Yale Law. Medved, who is Jewish and today is an outspoken conservative, was much more liberal in 1969 when he knew Hillary. He recalls that Hillary then seemed “just as secular as the rest
of us,” though he is quick to underscore that he is no authority on the subject. “I don't recall her going to church, but that doesn't mean she never did,” he says. “I mean she wasn't in any way ostentatiously or visibly religious, at least during that first year.”
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In retrospect, there seemed to be little in her life in this period that overtly tied her to church and to God. Whereas four years earlier she had entered Wellesley and still continued to attend services, this trend appears to have lapsed while at Yale.

Indeed the very language of her faith, and the way that people associated her with God, seems to have changed in New Haven. Though this had been occurring for Bill since he left Hot Springs for Georgetown, it was something new for Hillary, who was always marked by not only her religious attendance but also her open profession of faith to those around her. The record seems to back that up, with few people (if any) describing her as someone always caught in church—a clear contrast to a decade earlier, when much of her life seemed defined by her relationship with God.

While the two continued to believe and perhaps to worship in their own way, there is little evidence or discussion about how their classroom learning at this time impacted their evolving spiritual beliefs. As politics began to pull into focus more and more for both of them, religion, it seemed, would be placed on the back burner—at least, that is, until it became necessary.

Radicals

It was no secret among those who knew Hillary that over the course of her time at Wellesley she had moved steadily to the left. Upon her arrival at Yale, this was a trend that continued, as she was further influenced by a rapidly growing antiwar movement and the radicalization of the American left that was sweeping the country.

During her time at Yale, Hillary met Marian Wright Edelman, a
Yale Law grad who was the first black woman admitted to the Mississippi bar. From 1963 to 1967, Edelman directed the NAACP Legal Defense Fund. The next year she started the Washington Research Project, which soon became the Children's Defense Fund (CDF). In the summer of 1970, Hillary interned with Edelman at the CDF, an experience that proved to be a perfect fit for her. With its broad goals and expansive ideals, the CDF was the ideal engine for remaking society. The cause of “children's defense” was an all-encompassing one that overlapped with civil rights, social justice, and the class struggle, all under the headline of protecting the welfare of children. That net became so wide that CDF would find itself involved in everything from minority kids to Greenpeace to the nuclear-freeze movement.

The CDF proved to be a solid foundation for Hillary, who came to see how the organization used this myriad of causes to push a Democratic agenda of federal welfare programs, income tax increases, and the redistribution of wealth. But while Edelman and the CDF were solidly on the left, they were not at the extreme end of the spectrum. By 1971, however, such fellow travelers were not outside Hillary's orbit.

Throughout the summer of 1971, Hillary spent her time in Oakland, California, where she was hired as an intern in the law offices of Robert Treuhaft, husband of the British-born Jessica “Decca” Mitford, the onetime muckraking journalist; they lived near Saul Alinsky. In San Francisco, as the
New York Times
put it, “Mr. Treuhaft started a radical law firm that specialized in fighting every kind of discrimination and social injustice.”
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Treuhaft and his wife were well known throughout the Bay area and around the country. Both had been members of the Communist Party USA, during which time they were frequently denied passports and investigated by government officials. (Hillary's introduction to the couple probably unfolded through a law professor with whom she was close—Yale constitutional scholar Thomas I. Emerson, known as “Tommie the Commie,” and another reported CPUSA member.) Eventually, they left the party in 1958,
two years after absorbing the “staggering blow” of Nikita Khrushchev's revelations of Stalin's massacres.
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Although Hillary's new boss had abandoned the Communist Party, he did not forsake the party's goals of social revolution. By 1971, Treuhaft welcomed Hillary Rodham with open arms to his latest causes, which at that point included the free speech movement, the Black Panther Party, and the draft-resisting Oakland Seven during the Vietnam War.
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While it's unclear to what extent Treuhaft continued to uphold Communist Party doctrine and view religion as the “opiate of the masses” when Hillary was working for him, the mere fact that Hillary found herself at his law office during that summer speaks volumes about the distance that her faith and her politics had traveled. Though Treuhaft pursued an aggressive social agenda that fit in well with Hillary's underlying Methodist ideals of economic social justice, his far-left ideals bordered on a political line more extreme than anything with which Hillary had previously associated. Whatever his religious beliefs (or lack thereof), she seemed willing to put hers on hold, or at the very least bite her tongue for a summer, in the name of the various causes on which she had begun to focus.

This became an increasingly common trend for Hillary during these years when she was finding herself politically. As the Vietnam protests escalated and the country grew more and more divided, the decline of her open spirituality that had begun at Yale seemed to continue. It was not so much that her Methodist goal of social change was different; on the contrary, her youthful ideas of helping society were now being pushed to their extreme limits. In the process, she was drifting from the religion that had helped her to arrive at those goals in the first place. This tenuous balancing act between faith and politics would tip further in favor of politics as the 1970s progressed, and more and more Hillary found herself overlooking ideas about faith in favor of ideas about politics.

This included her view on Jews and the nation of Israel. In July
1973, Bill, who was already sizing up his political prospects, called upon a politically well connected friend in Arkansas, and Hillary accompanied him. According to author Christopher Andersen, as their car approached the house, Bill and Hillary noticed that a Jewish mezuzah was affixed to the front door. The owner made clear that he was proud of the symbol, but to the astonishment of the gracious host, when Hillary saw the mezuzah, she reportedly refused to get out of the car.

In the words of the friend and another eyewitness interviewed by Andersen, Bill said, “I'm sorry, but Hillary's really tight with the people in the PLO in New York. They're friends of hers and she just doesn't feel right about the [mezuzah].”
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“Do you mean to tell me,” Bill's friend shot back, “that she is going to be part of Yasser Arafat and all those people?”

Bill, embarrassed, shrugged and said, “Hillary really backs the PLO and doesn't like what Israel is up to.”
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If accurate, rather than suggesting nascent anti-Semitism, this alleged incident more likely reflected the primacy that politics had achieved in Hillary's life. Though her faith told her that she should love all people, regardless of color or creed, this principle was colliding with her politics.

Big Ideas

In 1973, Hillary graduated from Yale Law School and went to work as an attorney for Children's Defense Fund in Cambridge, where she would stay until joining the staff of the House committee to impeach Richard Nixon in January 1974.

It was there that Hillary's radicalism was manifested. Most of those looking to impeach President Nixon fixed their gaze on Watergate and the cover-up. Hillary, however, had a bigger view. According to
Joyce Milton, she tried to add Nixon's bombing of Communist supply lines in Cambodia—a crucial conduit for the Vietcong—to the list of articles of impeachment. Nixon's resignation spared Hillary the cup of victory, though she celebrated his resigning in disgrace.

While Nixon's lifetime of elected office was ending, Bill Clinton's was just beginning. Fitting for a man who seemed born a politician, it took Bill only months after likewise graduating Yale Law in 1973 to launch his first campaign for national office, running for Congress in Arkansas's Third District, where he got help from Hillary and both of her brothers but was eventually defeated. Despite this setback Clinton was not discouraged, and instead of adopting a defeatist attitude, he stepped back from the experience, wisely reassessing and lowering his expectations.

Because of Bill's 1974 bid for Congress, he and Hillary had uprooted from New Haven for Arkansas. After the move, both he and Hillary joined the law faculty of the University of Arkansas at Fayetteville. Though Hillary felt like a fish out of water in Arkansas, the small state was ripe for the two to make a big splash. Hillary had become tenacious about her politics, and whereas Bill was more politician than ideologue, Hillary was more the type to jump off a cliff with her flag flying in the wind.

During this period, Hillary reached what would become a monumental crossroads in the relationship between her religious and political views. On January 22, 1973, a group of men on the U.S. Supreme Court legalized abortion in a case called
Roe v. Wade
, with the majority opinion written by Justice Henry Blackman, a fellow Methodist. At some point in this period, though precisely when is a subject of great speculation, Hillary became not only a supporter of this decision but one of the country's most vehement advocates for abortion rights. How, exactly, this happened is difficult to pinpoint, though one important source has insight.

In 1974, Hillary met William F. Harrison, a prominent abortion
doctor in Arkansas, who became her gynecologist and friend. In a series of interviews for this book, Harrison shed some light on the development of Hillary's pro-choice stance and how she made up her mind to support the controversial Supreme Court decision. Harrison first met Hillary and Bill in Fayetteville, after she and Bill had joined the University of Arkansas legal faculty. The first time he encountered Hillary it was as her physician; a short time later, however, he met Bill at a local restaurant, and Harrison's friendship with the couple was sealed.

Over time, he came to know them personally as well as through his practice, though Harrison is quick to point out that Hillary never saw him for an abortion. The specific reasons for their introduction have been a source of speculation around Arkansas ever since that first meeting, but Harrison says that he met Hillary simply as a result of her yearly ob-gyn exam—presumably, her first checkup since moving to Arkansas. “Hillary never saw me for an abortion. I don't know of any abortion that Hillary ever had. And I would be shocked if she had.”

This is an important point in trying to discern Hillary's dedication to the abortion issue, since it would mean that Hillary's unflagging support does not stem from a personal experience in which she had the procedure—a point of immense speculation among Hillary's political observers and critics.
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Rather, Harrison estimates that a central reason for Hillary's pro-choice stance is that she is a product of an age “where she would have had friends who had illegal abortions…. I am sure that was part of it. And, you know, her church was supportive of that opinion.”

Harrison says that when he met Hillary in 1974, she was already steadfast in her support of
Roe v. Wade
. In fact, Harrison sees Hillary's upbringing as a devout Methodist as no reason to believe she would be against abortion. “Hillary [is] a Methodist and I was raised a Methodist. The Methodist church [is] very strongly pro-choice.”

Permanent Partners

As Hillary continued to develop these lifelong positions, she also sought to create a lifelong bond with the man in her life. After almost three years of living together, Hillary and Bill set a wedding date for October 11, 1975. However, now as they prepared to take this major step together, the couple first had to deal with their religious differences.

Though both were of course Protestants, there was a big difference between a Midwest Methodist, who, by now, was really a Northeast Methodist, and a Southern Baptist. Despite the fact that in the last few years their devotion had been steadily ebbing, it did not make the matter of reconciling their faiths to each other any less difficult. “We, of course, think the most important thing is your personal relationship with God,” said Hillary later, “and the denomination you belong to is a means of expressing that and being part of a fellowship.”
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Even with this open-minded view toward each other's faith, it seemed curious that the couple did not marry in a church—even a neutral or nondenominational church.
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Instead, they were married in the living room of a house they purchased at 930 California Drive in Fayetteville, Arkansas, in a private ceremony that included academic and political friends and family. All the Rodhams were present, as were Bill's mother and brother, who served as best man. Hillary wore a Victorian lace dress, and one can only wonder what Hugh Rodham, the stern, traditional Methodist, felt as he stood there in the living room and watched his sole daughter start a new life.
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The minister who presided over the ceremony was a local Methodist pastor named Vic Nixon, whose last name compelled the political Hillary to quip, “Never thought I'd be married by a Nixon!”
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Hillary insisted that the minister be a Methodist, and so Bill had contacted Nixon two months earlier in preparation for the wedding to ask if the minister would be willing to marry the two strangers.
Nixon said he would be happy to do so, but that he would like to sit down and visit with them first.