My life

The spring lifted my spirits as it always did. The political news was a mixed bag. The Supreme Court unanimously upheld busing to achieve racial balance. The Chinese accepted an American invitation to reciprocate the visit of the American Ping-Pong team to China by sending their team to the United States. And the war protests continued. Senator McGovern came to New Haven on May 16, plainly with the intention of running for President in 1972. I liked him and thought he had a chance to win, because of his heroic record as a bomber pilot in World War II, his leadership of the Food for Peace program in the Kennedy administration, and the new rules for delegate selection for the next Democratic convention. McGovern was heading a commission to write them, for the purpose of ensuring a more diverse convention in terms of age, race, and gender. The new rules, plus the weight of anti-war liberals in the primaries, virtually assured that the old political bosses would have less influence and the party activists more in the 1972 nominating process. Rick Stearns had been working for the commission, and I was sure he’d be tough and smart enough to devise a system favorable to McGovern. While law school and politics were going well, my personal life was a mess. I had broken up with a young woman who went home to marry her old boyfriend, then had a painful parting with a law student I liked very much but couldn’t commit to. I was just about reconciled to being alone and was determined not to get involved with anyone for a while. Then one day, when I was sitting at the back of Professor Emerson’s class in Political and Civil Rights, I spotted a woman I hadn’t seen before. Apparently she attended even less frequently than I did. She had thick dark blond hair and wore eyeglasses and no makeup, but she conveyed a sense of strength and self-possession I had rarely seen in anyone, man or woman. After class I followed her out, intending to introduce myself. When I got a couple of feet from her, I reached out my hand to touch her shoulder, then immediately pulled it back. It was almost a physical reaction. Somehow I knew that this wasn’t another tap on the shoulder, that I might be starting something I couldn’t stop.

I saw the girl several times around school over the next few days, but didn’t approach her. Then one night I was standing at one end of the long, narrow Yale Law Library talking to another student, Jeff Gleckel, about joining the Yale Law Journal. Jeff urged me to do it, saying it would assure me a good clerkship with a federal judge or a job with one of the blue-chip law firms. He made a good case, but I just wasn’t interested; I was going home to Arkansas, and in the meantime preferred politics to the law review. After a while I suddenly stopped paying attention to his earnest entreaty because I saw the girl again, standing at the other end of the room. For once, she was staring back at me. After a while she closed her book, walked the length of the library, looked me in the eye, and said, “If you’re going to keep staring at me and I’m going to keep staring back, we ought to at least know each other’s names. Mine’s Hillary Rodham. What’s yours?” Hillary, of course, remembers all this, but in slightly different words. I was impressed and so stunned I couldn’t say anything for a few seconds. Finally I blurted my name out. We exchanged a few words, and she left. I don’t know what poor Jeff Gleckel thought was going on, but he never talked to me about the law review again.

A couple of days later, I was coming down the steps to the ground floor of the law school when I saw Hillary again. She was wearing a bright flowered skirt that nearly touched the floor. I was determined to spend some time with her. She said she was going to register for next term’s classes, so I said I’d go, too. We stood in line and talked. I thought I was doing pretty well until we got to the front of the line. The registrar looked up at me and said, “Bill, what are you doing back here? You registered this morning.” I turned beet red, and Hillary laughed that big laugh of hers. My cover was blown, so I asked her to take a walk with me to the Yale Art Gallery to see the Mark Rothko exhibit. I was so eager and nervous that I forgot the university workforce was on strike and the museum was closed. Luckily, there was a guard on duty. I pleaded my case and offered to clean up the branches and other litter in the museum’s garden if he’d let me in.