AND NOT TO YIELD
WHILE CLINTON DIVIDED his time between teaching law in Fayetteville and roaming the back highways of northwest Arkansas, Hillary Rodham was holed up in an office on Capitol Hill in Washington, surrounded by documents, protected by a double line of security, her movements circumscribed by the sensitivity of her mission as one of thirty-nine lawyers constructing a case for the removal of a president. More than twelve hours a day and seven days a week, Rodham worked at a desk in a mildewed suite on the second floor of the old Congressional Hotel. She rarely associated with anyone outside the closed circle of legal compatriots brought to Washington by John Doar, special counsel for the House Judiciary Committee’s impeachment inquiry staff. She did not have her own apartment, but took an extra upstairs bedroom at the house of Sara Ehrman, a liberal Democrat whom she first met during the McGovern campaign in Texas. Ehrman, whose four-bedroom, four-bath house was a virtual youth hostel, rarely saw her industrious young boarder except around midnight when they might meet at the refrigerator in search of yogurt.
Rodham was twenty-six, less than a year out of law school, untested in the legal community, yet playing a coveted if minor role in the century’s most gripping presidential drama. She did not arrive at the inquiry staff a complete stranger. She and Doar had met the previous spring, when Rodham and Clinton served on the board of directors of the Barristers Union at Yale Law and invited Doar to judge that year’s student Prize Trial. After being selected by the Judiciary Committee to direct the impeachment inquiry, Doar built a staff quickly. Along with a few seasoned attorneys, his so-called chiefs, he needed a band of young legal warriors who could come to Washington for an indefinite period to work brutal hours for little pay. Rodham fit the job description, as did her classmate Michael Conway.
Prize recruits who showed the slightest hint of interest apparently were not given much choice by Doar, at least based on the way he hired Con-way. After his luminous years as a student at Yale Law, where he had defeated Rodham and Clinton in the Prize Trial competition, Conway had joined a major Chicago law firm. He had barely settled in when he took a call in the first week of January from his former teacher and friend at Yale, Burke Marshall. They had a one-minute conversation during which Marshall asked Conway if he was interested in working for Doar on the impeachment staff and Conway responded that it was a “fascinating idea” and that he would have to think about it. An hour later Doar called. “Mike, I talked with Burke and he said you’ll be here,” Doar said. “I’ll see you Sunday.” Conway was in Washington that Sunday. Later that week he was given a tiny side office in a suite at the Congressional Hotel which he realized had once been a bathroom. Appropriate, he thought, since he was assigned to a task force looking into alleged misdeeds of the Watergate-related group known as “the plumbers.”
Rodham arrived at about the same time and took a desk next to Tom Bell, a recent graduate of the University of Wisconsin Law School who had been recruited out of Doar’s law firm in New Richmond, Wisconsin. Their windows looked out on a back alley. Rodham’s first assignment was less intriguing than investigating the plumbers. Doar had organized the staff into two sections. Most of the lawyers were assigned to task forces in a section called Factual Investigation, which was to collect and examine evidence on activities that fell under the rubric of Watergate, including the break-in itself, the alleged coverup, the use of other dirty tricks in the 1972 campaign, as well as several non-Watergate concerns, including the secret bombing of Cambodia. Rodham was placed in a smaller section known as Constitutional and Legal Research. Its first major project was to research the constitutional grounds for impeachment: an important but scholarly task that not everyone was eager to do.
Rodham’s section analyzed the constitutional intent of impeachment and its historical basis in four hundred years of English history. Virtually every word in their report delineating the grounds for impeachment carried weight. At one meeting they spent four hours arguing over whether to use the phrase “to the modern ear” in describing how high crimes and misdemeanors should be interpreted. Their report concluded that “to limit impeachable conduct to criminal offenses would be incompatible with the evidence concerning the constitutional meaning of the phrase … and would frustrate the purpose that the framers intended for impeachment.” They found that in thirteen American impeachment cases, including ten of federal judges, less than one-third of the articles of impeachment explicitly charged the violation of a criminal statute.
The thoroughness of the report impressed Doar, who believed that the precise wording of articles of impeachment would be of supreme importance. Rodham became one of his staff favorites. It did not matter that she had a partisan past, that she had worked for McGovern, for she seemed discreet in her demeanor, reverent of the process, and impartial about the expected outcome of the endeavor, at least in front of the boss.
Doar was a seemingly nonpartisan figure: a moderate Republican who had held a high-profile role in the Justice Department’s civil rights division during the 1960s and later served as president of the New York Board of Education. From his impeachment staff, he demanded objectivity and discretion. Fred Altshuler, a University of Chicago Law School graduate, was nearly fired during his first week for making a political remark that he thought was inconsequential but which Doar found injudicious. From then on, he understood Doar’s dictum: Just report the facts. Doar pounded into his staff the notion that they had to show respect for the office of the president. Even in private conversations they were to refer to Nixon as the president.
Doar was solemn and complicated, variously eliciting frustration, exhaustion, and admiration from those who worked for him. His aides joked that he was the type of person they would die for but did not want to live with. He kept the door to his office closed. His obsession with organizational detail and neatness included a clean desk policy. A clean desk, he told his troops, represented a thorough and methodical mind. Early on Sunday mornings he roamed from office to office to reassure himself that no one had taken a day off. His occasional pats on the back, known as “Doar fixes,” took on greater importance because of his belief in meritocracy. People were constantly being shifted up or down in the staff hierarchy depending on how Doar viewed their work, which gave the place a measure of egalitarianism but also increased the anxiety level in an already tense atmosphere.
The methodical approach that Doar took to the inquiry was in itself a point of tension. He was so intent on avoiding the appearance of being out to get Nixon that some partisan Democrats on the Judiciary Committee referred to him as “the Republican counsel.” They preferred the style of one of his three senior associate special counsels, Richard Gates, a trial attorney and professor from Madison, Wisconsin, who had been brought in to help Chairman Rodino decide whether and how to proceed with the impeachment inquiry before Doar arrived. Cates and Doar respected each other, and years later became close friends, but at the time they held sharply different ideas about how to conduct the investigation. Cates was willing to draw conclusions about the evidence that had already been accumulated from the Senate Watergate Committee hearings and earlier investigative work. Doar started with a blank slate. Cates was a master of the story line. He spent hours each day developing theories, placing details in their probable context. Doar, in the words of Tom Bell, “doesn’t give a whit about” the story. “He is looking for detail after detail after detail, and when he’s done, the story will take care of itself.”
BOTH styles rubbed off on Hillary Rodham. Among the inquiry staff of ninety lawyers, researchers, and clerks, she seemed “the least perturbed by tensions inherent in Doar’s meritocracy,” according to Robin Johansen, who thought of Rodham as a self-contained person immune from the occasional backbiting. This image might have been both a symptom and a cause of Doar’s regard for her. Bell, Rodham’s office mate, noticed that Doar had more confidence in her than in most of the other rookie lawyers on the staff. “On occasion he would call her in and bounce something off her.” One day Doar had Rodham stand by his side at a hallway press conference. (The way she would later tell the story, her presence inspired ABC News correspondent Sam Donaldson to yell out to her: “How does it feel to be the Jill Wine Volner of the impeachment committee?”—comparing Rodham with a young woman lawyer on the Watergate special prosecutor—s staff. Donaldson has no such memory. “I don’t mean this as a slam … but you’ve seen pictures of her in those days,” Donaldson said later. “I don’t think younger bucks like me paid any attention to her.”)
Perhaps the television reporter did not pay much attention to Rodham, but her bosses on the impeachment staff certainly did. Bernard W. Nussbaum, another of Doar’s top assistants, who came down to Washington from a Manhattan firm, drove Rodham home to Sara Ehrman’s house many nights, striking up a paternal friendship and legal interdependence that would continue for decades. And Bell noticed that just as Doar took to Rodham, so too did Cates. “There were some tensions between Cates and Doar, and both confided in her. Hillary was in the middle.” At the same time that she operated as one of Doar’s favorites, she shared some of Cates’s frustrations with the slow pace of the investigation. “This thing is going down in flames!” Tom Bell remembered Rodham fuming to him one day when one of the president’s men was acquitted of perjury charges vaguely related to Watergate. She was “devastated with the verdict,” according to Bell, fearful that things were moving so slowly that Nixon and his men might prevail in the courts and in Congress. Bell, who felt that his job was to be loyal to Doar, urged Rodham to be patient. “I said to her, ‘This is how lawyers work.’”
Bell said that he and Rodham both “saw Nixon as evil,” but in different ways. “Her opinion of him was more a result of the McGovern campaign and Vietnam and those kinds of issues. I saw him as evil because he was screwing with the Constitution. She came at it with more preconceived ideas than I did.” Their perspectives on Nixon paralleled to some extent the way in which the two young lawyers viewed their assignments in Washington. “She saw the work as absolutely the most important thing in the world,” Bell said. “I saw it as important but also as a job. To her it may have been more of a mission.”
The more Bell got to know Rodham, the more it became apparent to him that “she wasn’t as ideologically pure as the program for the players would indicate. Not that she made any false pretenses or anything. We were just two young lawyers who shared confidences.” Their conversations were blunt and open. “She wasn’t afraid to say that you were full of shit. And if you told her the same, she would take it.”
IT was natural for members of the impeachment staff to confide in each other so much because they had little time to interact with anyone outside their closed circle and were discouraged from doing so. “We’re lawyers, not historians,” Doar would tell them. “Don’t keep a diary. Don’t talk to anybody. Just do your work.” When they left the office, it was usually in self-contained groups to eat lunch or dinner at their regular Greek and Italian restaurant hangouts on Capitol Hill. “We’d go out in groups and come back and work some more,” recalled Fred Altshuler. This classic foxhole culture led to extreme familiarity and occasional explosions. Rodham was sometimes a consoling presence. Robert Sack, who had taken a leave of absence from a major New York law firm to serve on the inquiry staff, had “a small but nasty to-do” with one of the senior counsels and left the office one night feeling “very much put-down.” As he was walking to his car several blocks away, he heard some voices behind him—“and there were Hillary and Fred Altshuler.” Rodham wanted to buck him up and tell him that everything was fine.
Doar was obsessive about security. He instructed his staff never to talk in front of a window and to keep the shades drawn. He hired a retired Air Force colonel to arrange security in the office and develop methods of controlling sensitive information. Two types of wastebaskets were placed in each room, one for normal waste and the other for sensitive waste, meaning any papers or carbons related to the inquiry. Two clerks collected the sensitive waste each day, carried it to a van in the basement garage, and drove out to the District of Columbia waste-disposal site near RFK Stadium. Watergate reporters were hovering nearby at all hours of the day, especially columnist Jack Anderson’s gumshoe assistants. One Anderson aide would camp out in the lobby and toss unanswered queries at staff members as they came off the elevator. Bell, who lived in an apartment building up the street from the Congressional Hotel, found notes slipped under his door by an Anderson assistant that said, “We know who you are and it is your constitutional duty to let the country know what is going on.”
Unlike the Senate Watergate Committee, where different staff investigators had protected their own informational fiefdoms with safes full of documents, Doar created a research library that served as the central repository for material gathered by the inquiry staff. The computer age was dawning, but Doar felt uncomfortable with the security of computer systems, so his staff worked with original documents and transcripts catalogued by a team of researchers and librarians. They built a sophisticated chronology of the Watergate case on seven-ply index cards which were carefully typed and cross-indexed and in the end totaled more than a half million. The ever-expanding library became the symbol of the impeachment case and the representation of Doar’s style. He was a documents man. He preferred the certainty of records to the fallibility of witnesses.
The library was also where most of the women on the staff worked. Rodham was among only three female lawyers, and though she was not treated as a token of her gender, there was an undercurrent of sexism in the office. At one point the women felt compelled to place a sign on the coffee machine that read: “The women in this office were not hired to make coffee. Make it yourself or call on one of these liberated men to do so”—followed by a list of male lawyers. Rodham was not shy about debating the roles that women should play in society. She once got into a debate with Albert Jenner, the Republican counsel for the committee, when Jenner commented that there were no famous women trial lawyers. “Hillary pointed out that the reason was because women generally did not have wives,” recalled Terry Kirkpatrick, another of the women lawyers. “She said that the reason male trial lawyers could be famous was because their wives packed their bags and ironed their clothes and were supportive of them while they were doing their work.” Jenner was “singularly unimpressed” with Rodham’s argument, but Kirkpatrick never forgot it. It helped spark her own interest in the politics of gender.
With its unrelenting pressure and foxhole mentality, the impeachment staff experience was much like that of a political campaign. There was one notable difference, according to Bob Sack. “The most extraordinary thing is how little sex there was. It was so much of a fraternal experience. It had the characteristics of an intense political campaign but with much less sex.” Rodham developed strong friendships with several men on the staff, but everyone knew that she had a boyfriend teaching law and running for Congress out in Arkansas. “I remember that she was dating Bill Clinton and her saying to me once, ‘He wants to stay in Arkansas and get involved in politics’—and she kind of rolled her eyes a little bit,” recalled Jeff Branchero, a staff clerk who had recently graduated from the University of California.
The Clinton and Rodham relationship during the months when they were apart was, as always, tempestuous. There were several young women clamoring for Clinton’s attention, or he for theirs. Clinton’s mother and younger brother thought that his bespectacled law school friend was not physically striking enough for him and tried to discourage him from getting too serious, but he would respond that in the long run it was Hillary or nobody. His physical attraction to other women would not diminish, but she was the only one he wanted to marry. Once, when he encountered a classmate from Georgetown, Melanne Verveer, who had married another Georgetown friend, Phil Verveer, Clinton blurted out—“I’m following Phil’s example. I’m going for brains and ability rather than glamour.” Melanne Verveer could have taken it as an insult of sorts. She accepted it as a compliment.
Rodham, for her part, seemed uncharacteristically passionate when it came to her Arkansas boyfriend. “She was absolutely, totally crazy about Bill Clinton,” according to Kirkpatrick. “ ‘Besotted’ is not a word I would normally apply to Hillary, but I think she was besotted. Bill came to visit her two or three times, and when he was coming to town her face would change. It would light up. It was very unHillaryesque.” Rodham was circumspect in most matters, but did not suppress the highs and lows of her relationship with Clinton. The lows were provoked by his occasional inattention and self-absorption and indications that he might be seeing other women. The highs came with his overpowering personality and his future. “This is the honest-to-God truth,” Bell later reflected. “She would come in some mornings mad because he wouldn’t have called her. She would be cranky. But she would come in other mornings, hit me in the biceps, and say, ‘You know, Tom Bell, Bill Clinton is going to be president of the United States someday!’”
Bernie Nussbaum heard the same audacious prophecy one night as he drove Rodham home from work in his Oldsmobile Toronado. It was enough to make him go “a little crazy.” There they were, under great pressure handling a president’s possible impeachment, and this young woman was boasting that her boyfriend was going to be president someday. Nussbaum, a thirty-seven-year-old New York City law partner, was only eleven years older than Rodham, but had an embracing nature that made him a father figure to her and many of the other young lawyers on the staff. He approached his impeachment assignment, like everything in life, with great intensity, what some of his colleagues called a “take-no-prisoners approach”—a style that was natural to him and had served him well in his previous jobs as an assistant prosecutor in the U.S. Attorney’s Office in Manhattan and as a private litigator.
For Nussbaum and Bob Sack, any doubt about Nixon’s impeachability was removed when they put on headphones and listened to White House tapes that the inquiry staff had obtained from the Watergate grand jury in late March. They spent one week playing and replaying the tapes at the side of former White House counsel John Dean, who had been present at many of the meetings with Nixon where the coverup was discussed. Dean now served as an expert translator of the disjointed and sometimes barely audible conversations that had been secretly tape-recorded. Sack thought to himself, “My God, in a hundred years people are going to sit around the National Archives and listen to these tapes. And they are going to wonder what the hell we and our clients, the members of Congress, were doing. How could people sit and listen to this and not do something about it? The evidence made it clear.”
From the moment the secret tapes were delivered to the Congressional Hotel, they became the central focus of the inquiry. Doar stored them in a safe in his office and assigned Michael Conway to serve as the gatekeeper to control access to them. He brought in audio specialists to enhance the sound and held a competition to determine which staff members had the sharpest ears and could make the most sense of the conversations and accurately transcribe them. A special listening room was set up at the end of the hallway, not far from where Rodham and Bell worked. Staff members would file in, turn on the tape machine, put on headphones, turn off the lights, settle in on the couch, and listen to the president and his men. Sack felt “a sense of voyeurism—putting the earphones on and listening; like being a fly on the wall of the office of the president of the United States. We almost felt it was a little taboo.”
Jeff Branchero proved to have the best hearing on the staff and, in keeping with Doar’s meritocracy, spent the most time transcribing. He would take as long as an hour to work on one minute of tape, stopping, rewinding, and playing again and again until he knew instinctively the verbal habits of Nixon, John Mitchell, H. R. Haldeman, and John Dean. Rodham was in the room occasionally. She spent several hours listening to what they called “The Tape of Tapes”—“It was Nixon taping himself while he listened to his tapes, inventing rationales for what he said. At one point he asked Manolo Sanchez [his valet] ‘Don’t you think I meant this when I said that?’”
Rodham and Fred Altshuler, who became her closest male friend on the staff, worked together on an internal memorandum detailing the organization of Nixon’s White House. By listening to the tapes and studying the presidential logs that listed the people Nixon met with each day, they reconstructed the daily decision-making process inside the Oval Office—who had access to the president, how decisions were communicated up and down. They developed case histories for various events: If Nixon meets with Haldeman and Haldeman talks about that meeting to Chuck Colson, what happens? Studying how the organization functioned, Altshuler said, “was important in terms of finding out whether the president in fact made decisions or underlings made decisions. If the chain of events is, X sees the president and comes out and does Y, you can draw an inference. We found that the president really ran an awful lot of details.”
THE end came quickly. In historic sessions at the end of July, the Judiciary Committee voted for three articles of impeachment. Within two weeks, the president had resigned. The inquiry staff was still at work that day, preparing documents for the full House debate on impeachment. They gathered in the library and watched Nixon’s farewell speech on an old black and white television set. People sat on the floor and leaned against the walls and the sides of desks. The room was somber and quiet. No cheers from Rodham or any of the other lawyers who had been taught to repress their personal feelings for so many months. “It was like a game ending in overtime—sudden death,” recalled Michael Conway, who had already been recruited to work on the Senate staff for an impeachment trial that now would never be held.
As a remembrance of their unforgettable time together, Doar gave each member of his staff a framed picture of the group posed on the front steps of the Longworth House Office Building. It is, like so many snapshots of Hillary Rodham, a reflection of her will. Before the picture was taken, Doar had instructed the lawyers to stand together in the front. Rodham had defied his request, calling it elitist. She stood in the back with her friends on the support staff. Doar signed each picture with an inscription from the last quatrain of Tennyson’s Ulysses: “To Strive, to Seek, to Find and not to Yield.”
MUCH like her boyfriend Bill Clinton, Rodham always worked on at least two levels at once. During her months in Washington, she often expressed ambivalence about what direction to take in her life. Her professional interests seemed to be on the East Coast. She could go back to serving as a counsel for the Children’s Defense Fund. She could go to work for a high-powered Washington law firm and learn more about the political world of the nation’s capital. She could delve into politics herself. Or she could move to Arkansas to be with Clinton. Taylor Branch had several long talks with her about the future, continuing the confessional relationship that they shared in Texas. Branch could see that she was “at sea about whether she wanted to move to Arkansas.” She told him that she did not know “how hard to be, how careerist to be.” She believed in the feminist movement and in the freedom women were struggling to achieve. Would she be turning away from that by following her love to provincial Arkansas, a place that made her eyes roll when she talked about it?
And how would Arkansas receive her? That question inevitably arose in her conversations with Terry Kirkpatrick, who had grown up in Fort Smith and attended law school in Fayetteville when there were only a handful of women there. Rodham asked Kirkpatrick how the legal community would accept her in a state where women lawyers were still a rarity. It would be difficult, Kirkpatrick said. “You have to be three hundred percent better than any man to succeed. You have to pick your friends carefully. It’s a very different culture. But the people when they accept you are loving and supportive and very willing to accept new ideas once they get past the initial shock.” And there was something else attractive about Arkansas, Kirkpatrick told Rodham: “It’s easy to make an impact there. You can be a big fish in a small pond.”
Even on her final night in Washington, Rodham seemed uncertain. She went to dinner with Fred Altshuler and two of his friends, Marsha and Steve Berzon, who were just arriving in town as Rodham was leaving. At dinner, the others talked about the exciting legal work they were about to embark on, while Rodham reflected on the uncertain professional life that awaited her in Arkansas. “Hillary was showing personal affection for Bill, but she thought she would not face the same kinds of legal challenges,” Altshuler said later. “She was somewhat uncertain. She had some ambivalence about it.” The last thing on Rodham’s radar screen, thought Altshuler, “was to head off to Arkansas.”
But while on one level Rodham seemed ambivalent, on another level she had prepared for a move to Arkansas for more than a year in a quiet, careful fashion that made her decision all but inevitable. During her first visit to Arkansas in the summer of 1973, before Clinton began teaching in Fayetteville, she had joined him in taking the Arkansas state bar exam, just in case she would ever practice in the state. She and Clinton had even worried about whether it would hurt them in the future in Arkansas if they put the same New Haven address on the state bar applications. Clinton, during his first months at the law school, constantly talked about Rodham to Dean Davis and everyone else there. He told Davis that he and Rodham were “more or less informally engaged” and that he hoped that she would come out and teach with him at the law school. When Rodham visited Clinton in Fayetteville in early 1974, she was introduced to Dean Davis and other law faculty members at a reception. “I mentioned to her before she left that if she were ever interested in teaching here, she should give me a call,” Davis recalled. “I talked to faculty people who had chatted with her and all were favorably impressed.”
Rodham called Davis a month later to see if the offer still stood. When he said yes, she made arrangements to fly to Fayetteville to be interviewed for a teaching position. She had to leave her work on the inquiry staff for three days to make the trip, a departure that did not sit well with Doar. When she reached Fayetteville, some of the law professors she met had an odd first impression of her. “Hillary came in dressed as if she had been shopping in Bloomingdale’s the day before,” remembered Mort Gitelman. “It looked strange in Arkansas. She was wearing one of those long skirts and black stockings and hornrimmed glasses. She did not look Arkansas.” Gitelman could not know it, but except for the glasses she did not look like Hillary Rodham, either. She paid little attention to clothes except when she thought she had to impress people. This was one of those times. Terry Kirkpatrick had taken her shopping in Georgetown to buy the khaki suit that she wore to the interview. Her clothes, in the end, made little difference, according to Gitelman. “Once she opened her mouth, it didn’t matter what she was wearing. We were impressed.” Davis made her an offer, and she called him back on July 9 to accept it.
Why did she call on that day, before Doar had completed his summary and before it was certain when the impeachment work would be finished? Rodham knew that in essence the impeachment work was over the day she agreed to go to Arkansas. July 9 was the day that the impeachment staff released transcripts of its version of several key White House tapes. The Judiciary Committee transcripts differed dramatically from previously released and heavily sanitized White House transcripts of the same tapes. “Transcripts Link Nixon to Cover-Up” blared the headline in The Washington Post. The key quote came from a White House meeting on March 22, 1973, in which Nixon, according to the Judiciary Committee transcript, is heard to say: “I don’t give a shit what happens. I want you all to stonewall it, let them plead the Fifth Amendment, cover-up or anything else, if it’ll save it—save the plan. That’s the whole point.”
RODHAM left Washington on a humid mid-August morning in 1974. It was fitting that she was not driving herself, but being driven, yet going some-place that she wanted to go and that the owner of the car, Sara Ehrman, her friend and landlady in Washington, did not really want to take her. Ehrman was horrified at the thought of Rodham, who to her represented the promising future of the women’s movement, abandoning the most powerful city in the world for a backwater law school in the Ozarks. But if Rodham was determined to go, Ehrman would at least help her get there. She came from a generation “where one follows one’s man.” She persuaded Alan Stone, a friend who had worked on McGovern’s advance team in Texas, to come along as the driver. Rodham’s life’s belongings went with her—suitcases and a stereo in the trunk, a bicycle strapped to the roof. They drove through Virginia’s lovely countryside, past Gainesville, Warrenton, Culpeper, on down to Charlottesville, stopping at Monticello, the home of Thomas Jefferson.
“You are crazy,” Ehrman said to Rodham along the way, playing the role of surrogate mother. “What are you doing this for?” Rodham laughed. She was in a good mood. She said she loved Bill Clinton and wanted to take a chance. Stone defended her. He had been born in Arkansas and had fond memories of the state. The unspoken tension of the trip was that Rodham could not wait to get to Fayetteville and Ehrman, hoping to keep her, kept making detours to historical sites. To make up for the lost time of the side trips, Stone and Rodham drove late into the night. They passed through Nashville after midnight and encountered a surrealistic sight that kept them laughing halfway to Memphis—tipsy old men at a Shriners’ convention tooting around on small white motor scooters. Finally, exhausted, they stopped at a roadside motel and all three shared a room. (Years later Stone would remember that night and laugh: he could tell the National Enquirer that he once slept with Hillary and another woman in a motel room in Tennessee.) On the way across Arkansas, Rodham ate her first catfish dinner. When they reached Fayetteville, they found their way out to Clinton’s cottage and unloaded Rodham’s possessions.
Clinton had just returned from a long stretch of campaigning in Bentonville. He was, as Stone remembered him that day, “kind of frantic.”