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Text File | 1992-10-19 | 5.7 KB | 117 lines

                                                                                NATION, Page 19

COVER STORIES

Hillary Clinton: Partner as Much as Wife


By MARGARET CARLSON/NEW YORK -- Reported by Ann Blackman/
Washington


    Friends of Hillary Clinton would have you believe she is
an amalgam of Betty Crocker, Mother Teresa and Oliver Wendell
Holmes. She gets up before dawn, even on weekends, and before
her first cup of coffee discusses educational reform. She then
hops into her fuel-efficient car with her perfectly behaved
daughter for a day of good works.

    Fortunately, Hillary Clinton, the latest wife to be
challenged to fit perfectly into the ill-defined role of
political spouse, is more interesting than that. At her home,
Christmas Eve dinner for longtime friends and family was more
potluck than Bon Appetit: it consisted of chili and black beans
supplemented by leftovers from an official dinner. She plays
pinochle and Pictionary with such vigor that friends have to
remind her they're only games. She succumbs to yuppie overdoting
on her daughter, 11. "There is Chelsea standing on a chair
singing Angels We Have Heard on High at the top of her voice,
and Hillary runs for a camera," says a friend, Diane Blair, a
political science professor at the University of Arkansas.

    The former Hillary Rodham grew up in Park Ridge, a Chicago
suburb, where her father owned a textile company. She earned
every Girl Scout badge, pulled a wagonful of sports equipment
to her job at the park every summer, was elected president of
her high school class and earned so many honors that her parents
recall "being slightly uncomfortable at her graduation." She
organized circuses and amateur sports tournaments to raise money
for migrant workers. "Mothers in the neighborhood were amazed
at how they couldn't get their boys to do much, but Hillary had
them all running around," says her mother.

    After graduating from Wellesley, Hillary went on to Yale
Law School, where she first noticed Clinton holding court in
the student lounge trying to convince a group of classmates
that they didn't need shots to visit Arkansas. "I remember his
boasting that Arkansas has `the biggest watermelons in the
world,' " Hillary says. A few months later, she ran into him
again while registering for classes. "He joined me in this long
line, and we talked for an hour. When we got to the front of the
line, the registrar said, `Bill, what are you doing here? You
already registered.'"

    They started dating but were reluctant to get serious
because Hillary wanted a big-city law practice while he ached
to get back to watermelon country. But soon they were doing
everything together, arguing as lead attorneys in a mock trial
(they lost) and working in George McGovern's campaign in Texas
(they lost again). After graduation they briefly went their
separate ways -- he to Arkansas to teach and run for Congress,
she to Cambridge, Mass., to begin work at the Children's Defense
Fund (she is now chairwoman of its board) and then to Washington
to work on the Nixon impeachment inquiry.

    When that job ended in 1974, she decided to see whether
she could adjust to life in flyover country. Like Doc
Hollywood, she discovered small-town life was O.K.: "I liked
people tapping me on the shoulder at the grocery store and
saying, `Aren't you that lady professor at the law school?' "
She and Clinton got married in 1975, and Hillary kept her maiden
name. But Clinton lost a bid for a second term as Governor, in
part because voters resented a feminist living at the Governor's
mansion yet refusing to use his name. "I gave it up," she says.
"It meant more to them than it did to me."

    She hasn't given up much else, demonstrating that while
men put together careers, women put together lives. "I am
pursuing the goals I always envisioned, perhaps with more
success here," she says. Twice named one of the top 100 lawyers
in the U.S. by the National Law Journal, Hillary Clinton is now
a top-dollar litigator at the old-line Rose Law Firm in Little
Rock, earning about three times her husband's $35,000 salary.
She serves on 17 civic and corporate boards, hardly ever missing
a softball game or school play.

    While Hillary says she is glad she "followed her heart" to
Arkansas, running an official mansion that attracts 20,000
visitors a year can be wearing. Unlike her husband, who has yet
to encounter a back he doesn't want to slap, she occasionally
tires of the fishbowl. Blair notes that Hillary has enormous
patience, "but none for people who are incompetent or behave
like fools" -- which could make life in Washington an ordeal.
Already she is under a microscope, with questions about
everything from her hair (blondish) to her exercise program (a
stationary bike). Her humor could prove a land mine. Reporters
didn't start scribbling at a recent campaign stop until a fan
suggested her for co-President and she demurred, joking that she
nonetheless sometimes wished "she had the constitutional power
to declare war on a few people."

    With her marriage being held up to the light for cracks,
Hillary Clinton wonders how much of her intimate life a
political spouse has to offer up. "My marriage is solid, full
of love and friendship," she says, "but it's too profound to
talk about glibly." In recent years, political reporters have
come to think themselves as qualified to analyze a marriage as
they are to sort out the deficit. But of course a marriage is
infinitely more complicated. "Maybe this time the candidate and
the press will get it right," Hillary says. "The public can
learn enough to know whether a candidate is a decent person
without having to pick you apart so much that there is nothing
left at the end."