My life

The guard took a look at us, figured it out, and let us in. We had the whole exhibit to ourselves. It was wonderful, and I’ve liked Rothko ever since. When we were done, we went out to the garden, and I picked up the sticks. I suppose I was being a scab for the first and only time in my life, but the union didn’t have a picket line outside the museum and, besides, politics was the last thing on my mind. After I paid my cleaning-up dues, Hillary and I stayed in the garden for another hour or so. There was a large, beautiful Henry Moore sculpture of a seated woman. Hillary sat in the woman’s lap, and I sat beside her talking. Before long, I leaned over and put my head on her shoulder. It was our first date. We spent the next several days together, just hanging around, talking about everything under the sun. The next weekend Hillary went up to Vermont on a long-planned visit to the man she had been dating. I was anxious about it. I didn’t want to lose her. When she got home late Sunday night I called her. She was sick as a dog, so I brought her some chicken soup and orange juice. From then on we were inseparable. She spent a lot of time at our house on the beach and quickly won over Doug, Don, and Bill. She didn’t do so well with my mother when she came to visit a few weeks later, partly because she tried to cut her own hair just before Mother arrived. It was a minor fiasco; she looked more like a punk rocker than someone who had just walked out of Jeff Dwire’s beauty salon. With no makeup, a work shirt and jeans, and bare feet coated with tar from walking on the beach at Milford, she might as well have been a space alien. The fact that I was obviously serious about her gave Mother heartburn. In her book, Mother called Hillary a “growth experience.” It was a girl with “no makeup, Coke-bottle glasses, and brown hair with no apparent style” versus a woman with hot-pink lipstick, painted-on eyebrows, and a silver stripe in her hair. I got a kick out of watching them try to figure each other out. Over time they did, as Mother came to care less about Hillary’s appearance and Hillary came to care more about it. Underneath their different styles, they were both smart, tough, resilient, passionate women. When they got together, I didn’t stand a chance.

By mid-May, I wanted to be with Hillary all the time. As a result, I met several of her friends, including Susan Graber, a Wellesley classmate of hers whom I later appointed to a federal judgeship in Oregon; Carolyn Ellis, a bright, funny Lebanese woman from Mississippi who could “out-southern” me and is now chancellor of the University of Mississippi; and Neil Steinman, the brightest man I met at Yale, who raised the first funds for me in Pennsylvania in 1992.

I learned about Hillary’s childhood in Park Ridge, Illinois; her four years at Wellesley, where she switched her politics from Republican to Democrat because of civil rights and the war; her postgraduation trip to Alaska, where she slimed fish for a living; and her interest in legal services for poor people and in children’s issues. I also heard about her famous commencement speech at Wellesley in which she articulated our generation’s contradictory feelings of alienation from the political system and determination to make America better. The speech got a lot of national publicity and was her first brush with fame beyond the boundaries of her immediate environment. What I liked about her politics was that, like me, she was both idealistic and practical. She wanted to change things, and she knew that doing so required persistent effort. She was as tired as I was of our side getting beat and treating defeat as evidence of moral virtue and superiority. Hillary was a formidable presence in law school, a big fish in our small but highly competitive pond. I was more of a floating presence, drifting in and out. A lot of the students we both knew talked about Hillary as if they were a little intimidated by her. Not me. I just wanted to be with her. But time was running out on us. Hillary had accepted a summer job at Treuhaft, Walker, and Burnstein, a law firm in Oakland, California, and I had been asked to take a job as coordinator of the southern states for Senator McGovern. Until I met Hillary, I was really looking forward to it. I was going to be based in Miami, and the job required traveling throughout the South putting state campaigns together. I knew I’d be good at it, and though I didn’t think McGovern could do very well in the general election in the South, I believed he could win a fair number of convention delegates during the primary season. Regardless, I’d have the political experience of a lifetime. It was a rare opportunity for a twenty-five-year-old, one I got from a combination of my friendship with Rick Stearns, who had an important post in the campaign, and affirmative action: they had to have at least one southerner in a responsible position!