God and Hillary Clinton (6 page)

Bill had some concerns on that score, perhaps fearing whether the fact that the two had lived together would be an issue. “[A]re you going to ask us questions?” Bill said guardedly. Nixon replied, “Well, I don't know. I may ask some.” Nixon suspected: “I think Hillary wanted to know what the questions were so she could study for the visit.”
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In the end, the visit was brief and pleasant; they met and talked, though Nixon has always kept quiet about the content of the premarital discussion. Aside from choosing the faith of the minister, Hillary insisted on another liberty: She wanted to retain her maiden name. Bill acquiesced, but in the years ahead this choice, along with the decision not to marry in a church, would lead some of the more religious and traditional folks in Arkansas to question if the two were actually married.

During their first years as husband and wife, politics was paramount—with no children and scarce churchgoing. Yet, while Hillary devoted most of her lawyerly energies to left-leaning efforts and women's causes, such as the Equal Rights Amendment, her interests varied, and on at least one occasion she involved herself in a legal case that would both surprise and please many of the Christian faith. While living in Fayetteville, Hillary got a call from a female jailer regarding a woman who had been arrested for disturbing the peace by preaching the Gospel on the streets of nearby Bentonville. The judge wanted to send the woman, a California native, to a state mental hospital, and the jailer asked Hillary to come to the prison right away, believing that the lady was not crazy but simply “possessed by the Lord's spirit.”
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When Hillary got to the Benton County prison, she encountered what she described as a “gentle-looking soul” wearing an ankle-length dress and tightly clutching a well-worn Bible. The woman explained that Jesus Christ had sent her to Bentonville to preach, and once she was released, she would continue her mission. When Hillary
learned the woman was from California, she persuaded the judge not only to let the lady go but to purchase her a bus ticket home rather than committing her to an asylum. She then convinced the woman that “California needed her more than Arkansas.”

Despite her transgressions, Hillary, it seemed, had not strayed so far from her roots that she would ignore a chance to help a sister in Christ who faced difficult and unjust circumstances. Though she had stopped attending church, there were signs that Arkansas would have the potential to reinvigorate her faith, as the very culture of the state and of the South afforded a greater opportunity and openness for worship than the other places she had lived since leaving Park Ridge.

Still, she placed a distance between the outside world of the state and her own set of interests. Hillary continued to pursue her Democratic causes, even though the state as whole was trending closer and closer to the right. As the 1970s progressed, this would factor into her young husband's political career with increasing regularity. Nevertheless, the question remained: How far was she willing to bend her own values and beliefs in the name of her husband's political career?

The year 1976 was decisive in foreshadowing the careers that Hillary and Bill would have for the remainder of that decade and the entirety of the next. For Bill, 1976 marked the first time he was elected to public office when the Arkansas voters selected him attorney general of the state. For Hillary, that year was the start of an entirely new turn in her practice of law, when she began fifteen years of work as an attorney for the Rose Law Firm in Little Rock.

Politically, 1976 was small potatoes for Bill, who recognized the need to hold the attorney general post before he could take the next step to the governorship. Bill did not waste time before making an attempt, and in 1978 he ran against Republican challenger A. Lynn Lowe for the governor's office. The election was a telling one. The thirty-two-year-old Clinton trounced Lowe in a landslide, 63 percent to 37 percent.

The young politician and his wife had just won their second election, and it would be a historically significant one. While the two had been training for the spotlight for years, now that they achieved
it they found themselves in unfamiliar territory. There was a multitude of questions about how they would react to the new life in front of them—and for Hillary in particular, there were questions about how her Democratic ideals, which were becoming increasingly secular, would fly in the religious state of Arkansas.

Social Justice with the Law

As first lady of Arkansas, Hillary retained a project close to her heart: the CDF. After leaving CDF, she had remained in touch with Marian Wright Edelman. Now, with her husband becoming governor, she was invited to serve on the board of directors of CDF, which she did eagerly, continuing this association throughout the 1980s until 1986, when she was promoted to chair of CDF. (Ultimately, she left in 1992 to pursue her husband's presidential campaign.)

Yet the group that really showed Hillary's political colors—and nearly got her into later political trouble—was the Legal Services Corporation (LSC). Hillary was appointed to the board of LSC in 1978 by President Jimmy Carter, and would remain there until 1982, at one point becoming chair of the board. From that perch, she set out to change the world by means other than elected office. In her case, the revolution would be won by the LSC through the courts. What was more, the LSC offered a convenient opportunity, since the cause could be underwritten by American taxpayers.

The LSC had origins in Lyndon Johnson's Great Society, though it was not formally created until 1974 when Richard Nixon signed it into law. The justification lay in the constitutional right of every American to have legal representation, even when unable to afford a lawyer. Of course, historically, attorneys were provided by local bar associations, legal societies, or the local government; the poor got representation through local public defenders. For Hillary and other like-minded people, however, this was not satisfactory; to them the
only way to achieve effective representation was with the involvement of the federal government. This is where the LSC stepped in—to provide attorneys from the federal system to represent the needy in a variety of cases ranging from the criminal to the civil.

Thus, the LSC became a magnet for liberals fresh out of law school and committed to changing society through the court system. What the children of the 1960s could not achieve through the ballot box, they hoped to now gain by the mighty arm of the lawsuit. Moreover, the potential to multiply the results appeared limitless. Individual criminal cases filed by plaintiffs could be taken well beyond one little courtroom in one small town; they could be pushed up through as many levels of courts as possible, and maybe all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court.

Once created, the task was to staff the LSC with similar-thinking people. The Carter administration did just that, with Hillary a key addition. By the time Hillary was appointed to the board of directors in 1978, the LSC had already ballooned into a $200-plus-million federal program to mete out social justice.

With Hillary as a member of the premier law firm in the state of Arkansas, the Rose Law Firm, it just so happened that these LSC activities were perfectly poised to expand legal services across the nation in a way that had the potential to generate a large amount of business for Rose—especially in regional cases where business and individuals would turn to them for guidance. Peter and Timothy Flaherty, who have done the best research on this subject, note that Hillary's appointment to the LSC created “a little-noticed controversy” when it was submitted to the U.S. Senate for confirmation. The Arkansas first lady's successful efforts to expand legal services in Arkansas meant an increase in litigation against individuals, businesses, and government bodies in the state. Hillary was not only poised to build legal services, add the Flahertys, she now had the potential to serve as a “rainmaker” for the Rose firm.
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This was a conflict of interest of which Hillary was obviously aware
but refused to openly acknowledge, fueled by her strong belief in the moral center of the cause. Undeterred, she and her associates did anything but fly under the radar. They pursued very bold lawsuits that placed them squarely in the spotlight of public attention and outcry. The Flahertys point to suits like suing the school board of Ann Arbor, Michigan, in an attempt to force teachers to teach “Black English” and filing suits in several states trying to force the federal government (through Medicare) to pay for sex-change operations.
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More explosive, as the Flahertys note, was the effort by LSC forces in Illinois to undermine the Hyde Amendment, the legislation by Congressman Henry Hyde (R-Ill.) to ban federal funding of abortion. Many Democrats were sympathetic to this law; President Jimmy Carter, himself a pro-life Democrat, even supported the amendment. Carter had, however, turned the LSC over to Democrats whose politics on this issue were completely contrary to his own. Committed to maintaining what they believed was a basic right for all women—including those who could not afford it—they mounted a legal challenge to the amendment.

In 1980, a major threat to the LSC emerged: Ronald Reagan. Reagan had been elected president in November 1980, and the LSC crusaders feared the game was up. By the estimation of the hard left, Reagan and his fellow Republicans were ready to sideline their vehicle for social change. In the end, it was only through a remarkable campaign of self-preservation that Hillary and her allies were able to salvage the LSC from Ronald Reagan's domestic ash heap of history. In doing so, however, the subsequent actions of certain staff were legally suspect and ethically outrageous, culminating in Senate hearings and GAO investigations into the organization. Ultimately Reagan replaced the Carter board with his own appointees in 1982, and somehow Hillary escaped unscathed.

During this time, the role of Hillary's faith was not unclear: The social justice that she was seeking through the LSC was consistent with the religious-left progressivism she had begun to learn twenty
years earlier under Don Jones. And, all along, her moral absolutism was evident in her actions; she possessed a kind of religious sureness and constancy that lent inflexibility to her cause. In short, the LSC was for Hillary a vehicle to gain that old-time social justice through legal justice.

Reelection Woes

Because of the brief two-year term of the Arkansas governorship, Bill was up for election again in 1980, and this time the election proved much more challenging.

Much of Clinton's difficulty with the campaign stemmed from rioting that took place at Fort Chaffee, Arkansas, during the summer of 1980. This was the period of the infamous Mariel boatlift, in which President Jimmy Carter welcomed any and all Cuban émigrés that Fidel Castro desired to export from his island prison. Castro took the opportunity to cleanse his country politically and socially, opening up the doors to many of his jails and asylums and shipping their contents off to the United States.

In the weeks that followed, more than one hundred thousand “Marielitos” washed upon America's shores, and Jimmy Carter, who was unprepared for the dramatic influx, did not know where he was going to temporarily place all of them. In the fray, he telephoned Governor Clinton, who said he would be willing to detain some of the escapees at Fort Chaffee, where they could be assimilated.

The detainees, some of them sporting tattoos denoting the number of people they had killed in Havana, overflowed the grounds. The Arkansas Ku Klux Klan drove to Fort Chaffee to express its disapproval of the state's newest group of tourists, and as a result, a riot ensued between shouting Cubans inside and KKK belligerents on the outside, with various projectiles tossed back and forth. Soon, law enforcement arrived to try to hose down and disperse the crowd, but
for Clinton's reelection, it was too late. The entire fiasco was captured by state news organizations for everyone to see, and Arkansans, led by Republican gubernatorial candidate Frank White, naturally asked why such a debacle had been permitted to happen in their state.

A few months later, Bill Clinton was defeated, losing to Republican Frank White in a close race, 52 percent to 48 percent. But he was far from finished; he lived for politics. And he and his wife began strategizing about how to return him to power.

The plan they came up with called for the first of innumerable Hillary makeovers in the years ahead, all with the intent of toning down her more liberal credentials and traits. During her two years as the first lady of Arkansas, she had not been embraced in Arkansas, with many constituents viewing her as a hippie from the Northeast, a “women's libber” who was not the kind of first lady to which they were accustomed. She had kept her maiden name, thereby—in the eyes of many Arkansans—calling into question the governor's manhood.

In early 1981, as Bill geared up for a campaign to return to the governor's mansion, Hillary Rodham did an about-face: She became Mrs. Clinton. Though this appeared to be a shocking turn of events, some biographers of Hillary say that her new name appeared only on her business stationery. She remained Hillary Rodham when she voted, paid taxes, or filed legal papers.
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During these years, between gubernatorial terms, the Clintons returned to church, albeit separately. Biographer David Maraniss notes how the demands of “their partnership” led religion to play “an increasingly important role” in the lives of the Clintons through the 1980s. Both found that their faiths “eased the burden” of their high-profile lives, “sometimes offering solace and escape from the contentious world of politics, at other times providing theological support for their political choices.” As success continued to follow them, their religion continued to follow right alongside.
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Skeptics saw a correlation between the Clintons seeking a church
and seeking votes in this Southern state, and few biographers have failed to raise an eyebrow about this apparently abrupt about-face in the couple's attention to religion. Whereas the two seemed to have sworn off regular church attendance for years, suddenly they were back in the pews. For many, the connection between this change in behavior and Bill's campaign loss in 1980 was too convenient to dismiss as coincidence, but in reality, the Clintons were equally likely following the common trend of young people who leave the faith temporarily in college and then return as parenting adults moving toward middle age.
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Such a return to religion could be expected for Hillary and Bill, since both had been devout as kids and teens. Moreover, on February 27, 1980, Hillary had given birth to the couple's only child, Chelsea, named for a Joni Mitchell song, “Chelsea Morning.”

But while they agreed to return to church, a split remained over denomination. Hillary was not about to abandon Hugh Rodham's Methodist roots, and Bill remained committed to the Baptist faith that had saved him from the home of Virginia and Roger Clinton.

In Little Rock, Hillary opted for First United Methodist, a wealthy congregation filled with young professionals, many of them upper class, with a special attraction to attorneys—seventy-six of its members were lawyers, including many of the top lawyers in Little Rock (the local bar association held its monthly meetings there).
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Located on 723 Center Street, First United Methodist was Hillary's kind of church, considering its rich history of involvement with civil rights and social justice in the Little Rock community. After it was founded in 1831, whites and blacks attended services together during the church's first forty-five years, except for two years during the Civil War, when the building was requisitioned as a hospital by the Federal Army. With this pedigree of progressive thought and socially conscious action, it was clear that this was going to be the right place for Hillary to worship.

It was no doubt Hillary's intention to do her part to further the
parish's long history of social dedication. While she was a member of the church during the 1980s, the congregation purchased a large building at Eighth and Spring streets to expand its day care center into what became the Gertrude Remmel Butler Child Development Center. Nevertheless, Hillary's exact role in this endeavor was difficult to ascertain, as nearly every single person who worshipped with her in Little Rock and was contacted for this book refused to be interviewed.

Regardless of her specific involvement in the center's creation, she clearly supported the center, which was consistent with her deep interest in child care. She personally donated funds to the center, which today serves more than three hundred children in full-time and after-school child care, children of working parents in downtown Little Rock.
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Known as the “CDC,” the Child Development Center is the largest state-licensed child care facility in the state of Arkansas, housing a huge staff of more than seventy.
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The facility in many ways reflects the vision for communal support that Hillary would later outline in her book
It Takes a Village
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