Clinton learns from public pain, private crisis

It's May 1969 and graduating senior Hillary Rodham is about to become a legend at Wellesley’s commencement.

When guest speaker, Republican Senator Edward Brooke urges the students to support the establishment and back the war in Vietnam, Hillary sets aside her prepared speech to respond. 

Betsey, Sen. Clinton’s Wellesley dorm mate: Even as she began speaking, the electricity, the ripple, among classmates and then the cheers at the end reverberated. I don't think anyone was not caught up in that moment.

In a polite but firm rebuke of Senator Brooke, Hilary rallies her classmates to challenge the status quo.

Betsey: I remember the energy of it, feeling that we had found expression and it was a jubilant end to our four years there; really the right send-off. It was the feeling you ought to have at the end of graduation speech.

Marge Wanderer, mother of Wellesley student: When she finished, they rose as a body and applauded her. I will never forget it because Nancy said to me at the end of the graduation, “Take a good look at her. She will probably be president of the United States some day.”

By the early 1970s, many baby boomers, molded by the social turbulence of the 1960s, start entering the mainstream.

Sen. Hillary Clinton (D-NY): We came of age in the civil rights movement, the Vietnam War, the women's movement. A lot of us had to really find our way, to make sense of the world that we're in.

In 1972, she is one of only 30 women in a class of 140 working towards a Yale law degree.

David Maraniss, Author, 'First In His Class': She wanted to change society. She wanted the power to actually improve the lives of children and of different people in society but she didn't believe in just talking, sitting around writing treatises. She wanted to actually do something.

So did a student one year behind her, Bill Clinton.

Gail Sheehy: He was dazzled by her, the way she spoke up in class, the way everybody crowded around her in the lunch room.  And finally he got up the courage; actually he didn't get up the courage to. You've heard this story so many times, they've rehearsed it and dramatized it for the political films shown at the 1992 Democratic Convention.

Maraniss: Hillary Rodham was head over heels in love with Bill Clinton, almost from the beginning.  It was a romantic attraction. And I think that that his attraction to her was probably a little more based on how smart she was and how she shared his political ideas, hopes and dreams. He saw that he could get somewhere with her, that he couldn't get with one of the beauty queens he'd been dating.

One of her first career moves out of law school, a coup at the time, is one that will eerily come back to haunt her. She lands a job on the House Nixon Impeachment Committee in Washington.

Marannis: They were looking for the smartest young lawyers they could find who would work 24 hours a day and not need to be paid much. So there were calls made up there. Bill Clinton was asked first whether he wanted to come and he said "no but my girlfriend might," so Hillary was recruited.

Sara Ehrman: She was absolutely focused on what she needed to do and she did it with a minimum of motion. She looked very intense and very involved, and extremely efficient. We were all very impressed with the way Hillary looked on television at that time.

A Yale law degree, legal experiences of a historic nature, Hillary Rodham’s career options are considerable.  To the shock of nearly everyone, she heads for Arkansas.

Sen. Clinton: I had some apprehension. Bill was really the only person I knew in the state and I was packing up and moving.

And the woman who drove her across the country kept stopping at every scenic site saying, "Have you lost your mind?  You really want to live in Fayetteville, Arkansas?”

Ehrman: I did say to her, "Why in the name of God are you going down to that godforsaken place? You are going to probably marry a country lawyer who will never amount to anything.  He'll be just be a country lawyer and you could be anything you want be."

Sheehy: When they got to Fayetteville, which is up in north corner of Arkansas, it was a college town and it was Saturday and football culture. 

Ehrman: The downtown was full of kids wearing pig hats.

Sheehy: And they had this horrible cheer of the Razorbacks that was being shouted all over town. It's the sound of pigs in heat.

Ehrman: College kids wearing pig hats going “sooey sooey soeey pig pig pig.” I began to cry and I said "You cannot stay in this town. You cannot live here."

From the outset, they have a plan. Hillary will teach law at the University of Arkansas and help run Bill's campaign for Congress. It also marks the beginning of rumors of other women.

Maraniss: She's a very smart woman. She didn't go into it blind. She knew what he was like. There were women inside the headquarters who were assigned to shoo one of Bill Clinton's Arkansas girlfriends out the back door while Hillary was coming in the front door. So it wasn't a secret in the campaign either.

Bill loses the campaign. Whatever Hillary knows or doesn't know about other women, they marry in 1975.

Sen. Clinton: He was clearly the person that I thought would be the most fun and exciting to spend my life with. I had never consciously thought one way or another until I met the right person.

Sheehy: When she married him she was convinced he was going to be president one day, and she was going to help him get there.  But she also intended to have an independent career as an activist public service lawyer.

Before long, President Carter names her head of the legal services corporation. With her husband committed to public service, she goes into private practice when the Rose Law Firm recruits her as one of Arkansas' first female lawyers. There she meets a firm partner named Vince Foster.

Sheehy: I never found anybody who really corroborated the ongoing rumor that they had been lovers, they were extremely close. And he was Hillary's protector during many years in the 1980's when she and Bill were at odds.

By 1978, Bill and Hillary are Arkansas' ultimate power couple. He has been elected governor and they move into the official mansion in a manner befitting their generation.

Sen. Clinton: It was at that stage in our marriage where you really had nothing. You know you still had posters on the wall and you had the bricks holding up the bookcases and we literally moved our belongings that first term in the back of a pickup truck.

But it's Hillary's independent style that's making waves.

Sen. Clinton: I had kept my name because I thought that was the right decision at the time. I think as people learned a little bit they didn't know what to expect or what to think.

Philip Martin, Columnist, Arkansas Democratic-Gazette: She was not exactly what the people in Arkansas came to expect of a first lady. Other first ladies were retiring, they were shy, they were demure, certainly only in the background. They were never in the forefront. They certainly were never a Rodham while your husband was a Clinton.

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