Should I, as a high school freshman, take Latin? Because I’d heard the teacher was outstanding and because it would help me with the SATs—yes.
Should I attend my church youth group’s retreat at Gebhard Woods State Park if it meant missing my friend Betty’s sweet sixteen party? Because the date of the retreat had been announced first and because a church event was inherently more moral than a party—yes.
Should I style my hair in a beehive? (Yes.) Should I major in history? (No.) Should I major in political science? (Yes.) Should I start taking the pill? (Yes.) After Dr. King’s assassination, should I wear a black armband? (Yes.) That my “reasons” were often simply articulations of my own preferences wasn’t lost on me. But in the privacy of my own head, who cared?
The reasons I’d ultimately chosen Yale were: (1) its commitment to public service, and (2) when I’d attended a party at Harvard Law after my acceptance there, a professor had declared that Harvard didn’t need more women. As with Yale, the number of female law students at Harvard was then at about 10 percent, and I was slightly tempted to enroll just to spite this professor. But only slightly.
* * *
—
One evening in March 1971, shortly after spring break, I was studying in the law library, which was in a striking Gothic building. The library occupied a long room filled with carrels. Above the bookshelves were large, arched stained-glass windows, and bronze chandeliers hung from the wood ceiling.
I’d been sitting at a carrel for ninety minutes, and every time I looked up, I made eye contact with Bill Clinton—the lion. He was about twenty feet away, perched on a desk and talking to a man I didn’t know. I wondered if Bill was confusing me with someone else. Then again, since only twenty-seven students my year were women, it shouldn’t have been that difficult to keep us straight.
I stood, approached him, and said, “I noticed you looking at me. Is there something you need?” I extended my hand. “I’m Hillary Rodham.”
He smiled slowly and broadly, and in his warm, husky, Southern voice, he said, “I know who you are.” (Oh, Bill Clinton’s smile! More than forty-five years have passed since that night in the library, and at times it’s crossed my mind that his smile may have ruined my life.) He added, “You’re the one who told off Professor Geaney on Ladies’ Day.”
This—Ladies’ Day—was a ritual observed by some professors who called on female students to speak just once a semester, on a designated day. But Professor Geaney, who taught Corporate Taxation, which was an upper level class Bill wasn’t in, took the tradition further than most: Every Valentine’s Day, the professor started class by announcing that it was Ladies’ Day and asking all the virgins to assemble in the front of the room. When he’d done it a few weeks before, I along with the other two women in the section stood but remained at our seats, as we’d planned to do in advance, and I spoke on our behalf. I said, “This is an offensive custom that has no place in an academic setting. The female students present should be treated as full members of the law school community, with the same rights to participation in this class as the male students.”
When I’d finished, I’d felt some of the defiant satisfaction I had at my Wellesley graduation, and the feeling hadn’t been diminished when Professor Geaney said, “Fine then, Miss Rodham. You ladies may stay where you are, but since you seem particularly keen to share your viewpoints today, I’ll let you begin our discussion by summarizing Gregory v. Helvering.”
“I’d be happy to,” I said.
In the law library, to Bill Clinton, I said, “Yes, that was me.”
Bill rose then from the desk, all six feet two of him, with his coppery hair and beard, and took my still-extended hand (I was five-five). He said, “It’s a pleasure to officially meet you. I’m Bill.”
“Are you interested in working at the legal aid clinic?” I asked. For the last eighteen months, I’d volunteered at the New Haven Legal Services office.
He seemed amused, though I didn’t see why. Our hands were no longer moving but still clasped—his hand was enormous—as he said, “I might be. Would you like to get a cup of coffee sometime and we could discuss it?”
As I extracted my hand, I said, “If you’re considering the clinic for this summer, you should apply as soon as possible. The slots will definitely fill up.”
“No, I’ll be organizing for McGovern down in Florida. But what about coffee?”
Was he asking me out? In a matter of seconds, I considered then dismissed the possibility. There were, as it happened, two reasons why. The first was that Bill Clinton had a palpably impatient and acquisitive energy, and while, at Yale Law School, this energy wasn’t unique, his was more extreme than most. He did, obviously, want something from me, but it seemed unfathomable that the something was romantic. And the reason it seemed unfathomable wasn’t that men weren’t interested in me; they sometimes were, but the men who were interested in me were never outrageously charismatic and handsome.
Therefore I wasn’t playing hard to get, I wasn’t being coy, as I said, “I’m busy until the weekend, but I have time to meet you on Saturday afternoon.”
* * *
—
The room at the legal aid clinic where we did intake contained four desks and one massive file cabinet, and when I arrived on Friday morning, another law student, named Fred, was already there and on the phone. He raised his eyebrows twice in my direction in a friendly way, even as he said into the receiver, “Unfortunately, we don’t handle criminal matters, but I can give you the name of a volunteer lawyers’ organization.” I set my tan leather satchel under a desk. About thirty of us worked at the clinic per semester—you received course credit the first semester, and after that it was both uncredited and unpaid, which we joked was good practice for a career in public-interest law—so no particular desk in this room belonged to anyone. I hadn’t yet sat when the phone on my desk rang, and I fielded intake calls for the rest of the morning, as did Fred and another student, named Mike, who arrived after I did. We couldn’t help the vast majority of callers—their incomes weren’t low enough, or they lived outside the geographic boundaries where we were authorized to work—but we weren’t supposed to hang up on them without providing the names and phone numbers of other resources.
It was a little after one o’clock when my supervisor, whose name was Harold Meyerson, said, “Hillary, at your earliest convenience, please come to my office.”
“I can come now,” I said and followed him back to his desk. Harold was in his midforties, a staff attorney and also a lecturer at Yale.
He rifled through a few manila files and passed two to me. “It’s a noise-complaint eviction in Section 236 housing, but I suspect the landlord just wants to raise the rent. See if there are any warranty-of-habitability violations.”