Rodham Read online

  Rodham is a work of fiction. While some characters have real-life counterparts, their characterizations and the incidents in which they are depicted are products of the author’s imagination and are used fictitiously. Rodham should be read as a work of fiction, not biography or history. The characters who are not recognizable are drawn from the author’s imagination, as are the incidents and dialogue that concern them.

  Copyright © 2020 by Curtis Sittenfeld

  All rights reserved.

  Published in the United States by Random House, an imprint and division of Penguin Random House LLC, New York.

  RANDOM HOUSE and the HOUSE colophon are registered trademarks of Penguin Random House LLC.

  A few paragraphs of this novel were previously published in Esquire in the story “The Nominee.”

  Hardback ISBN 9780399590917

  International edition ISBN 9780593230527

  Ebook ISBN 9780399590924

  randomhousebooks.com

  Book design by Elizabeth A. D. Eno, adapted for ebook

  Cover design: based on a design by Jo Thomson/TW

  Cover photograph: Boston Globe/Contributor/Getty Images

  ep_prh_5.5.0_c0_r2

  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Epigraph

  Prologue

  Part I: The Catch

  Chapter 1: 1970

  Chapter 2: 1971

  Chapter 3: 1974

  Part II: The Woman

  Chapter 4: 1991

  Part III: The Front-Runner

  American Presidents and Vice Presidents Elected 1988–2012

  Chapter 5: 2015

  Chapter 6: 2015

  Chapter 7: 2015

  Dedication

  Acknowledgments

  By Curtis Sittenfeld

  About the Author

  My marriage to Bill Clinton was the most consequential decision of my life. I said no the first two times he asked me. But the third time, I said yes. And I’d do it again.

  —Hillary Rodham Clinton, What Happened

  The world has no right to my heart.

  —Lin-Manuel Miranda, Hamilton

  PROLOGUE

  May 31, 1969

  There was a feeling I got before I spoke in front of an audience and sometimes also before an event that was less public but still important, an event that could have consequences in my life—taking the LSATs, for example, which I’d done in a classroom on the campus of Harvard. The feeling was a focused kind of anticipation, it was like a weight inside my chest, but it never exactly came from being nervous. I always had prepared, and I always knew I could do it. Thus the feeling was a sense of my own competence blended with the knowledge that I was about to pull off a feat most people thought, correctly or not, they couldn’t. And this knowledge contributed to the final aspect of the feeling, which was loneliness—the loneliness of being good at something.

  My Wellesley graduation occurred on the green near the library, and I was scheduled to speak after Senator Edward Brooke, who was from Massachusetts. As I listened to him, I sat on the temporarily erected stage in my black gown and mortarboard. My father had traveled from Park Ridge, Illinois, without my mother or brothers, and was seated many rows back. I would be the first-ever student speaker at a Wellesley graduation.

  I’d slept little the night before, between finishing my speech and being gripped by nostalgia. Even though Wellesley had, during the upheavals of the last four years, come to seem an almost embarrassingly cloistered place, I’d loved being a student there, loved the green lawns and the lake; loved the wood-paneled classrooms where I’d listened to lectures on Spinoza and quantum mechanics and argued about what it meant to live in a just society; and, of course, loved my friends, who were now headed in many directions.

  Senator Brooke’s speech was winding down, and he still hadn’t explicitly mentioned recent protests or assassinations, civil rights or Vietnam. I understood then that addressing them fell to me. In a way, I’d understood this before the ceremony even started, and it had been the reason that my classmates and I had pushed for a student speaker. But the speech I’d written suddenly seemed inadequate, and I knew I needed to start with a rebuttal, a generational rebuttal, to the senator’s evasiveness. Because I was the one who’d be standing at the podium, doing so was my obligation.

  Wellesley’s president, Ruth Adams, introduced me by saying that I was a political science major, president of the college government, and—perhaps this was a warning or form of wishful thinking on her part—“good humored, good company, and a good friend to all of us.”

  Walking to the podium seemed endless and then was already finished, forever finished. So many people sat in front of me, most of them strangers and some my confidantes. I began by saying, “I am very glad that Miss Adams made it clear that what I am speaking for today is all of us, the four hundred of us. And I find myself in a familiar position, that of reacting, something that our generation has been doing for quite a while now. We’re not in the positions yet of leadership and power, but we do have that indispensable element of criticizing and constructive protest and I find myself reacting just briefly to some of the things that Senator Brooke said. This has to be quick because I do have a little speech to give.

  “Part of the problem with just empathy with professed goals is that empathy doesn’t do us anything. We’ve had lots of empathy; we’ve had lots of sympathy, but we feel that for too long our leaders have viewed politics as the art of the possible. And the challenge now is to practice politics as the art of making what appears to be impossible possible.”

  I could feel a shifting in the audience, a taking of sides: those who considered it disrespectful for a college student to chide a senator and those who, given the stakes, considered it admirable. There were also, and this may have been the majority of people, those not paying attention; there are always those people. But the division I’d created—it would be a lie to say I didn’t find it bracing.

  I knew I’d do at least a good job delivering the rest of my speech and maybe a great job; good I could control, while great was more nebulous and chancy, arising from the feedback loop of energy between me and the audience. But I didn’t know yet that my speech, probably due to the extemporaneous part, would cause my classmates to give me a standing ovation; I didn’t know that the standing ovation would offend or anger many of my classmates’ parents, remaining in some cases a point of intrafamily contention for decades to come (my father said afterward, with derision, “You sounded like a hippie up there”); and I didn’t know that my speech would attract national media attention, including from Life magazine. Yet I clearly remember that I felt the feeling: the focused anticipation, my competence, my loneliness. I understood how I appeared to other graduates and their families, a confident and idealistic young woman standing behind a podium, even as I inhabited my own body, as I was me and could hear my voice magnified across the green. The feeling was in the collapse, the simultaneity, of how I seemed to others and who I really was. In retrospect, I think what I felt in that moment—I’d felt it before, but never quite so brightly—was my own singular future.

  PART I

  The Catch

  CHAPTER 1

  1970

  THE FIRST TIME I SAW him, I thought he looked like a lion. He was six foot two, though I knew then only that he was tall. And in fact, his height seemed even greater because he was big-tall, not skinny-tall. He had broad shoulders and a large head and his hair was several inches longer than i
t would be later, which drew attention to its coppery color; his beard was the same shade. I suppose I thought he looked like a handsome lion, but even from a distance, he seemed full of himself in a way that canceled out his handsomeness. He seemed like a person who took up more than his share of oxygen.

  This sighting took place in Yale Law School’s student lounge, in the fall of 1970—my second year of law school and his first. I was with my friend Nick, and Bill was speaking in his loud, husky, Southern-accented voice to a group of five or six other students. With great enthusiasm, he declared, “And not only that, we grow the biggest watermelons in the world!”

  Nick and I looked at each other and began laughing. “Who is that?” I whispered.

  “Bill Clinton,” Nick whispered back. “He’s from Arkansas, and that’s all he ever talks about.” The next thing Nick told me was actually, at Yale Law School, less notable than being from Arkansas. “He was a Rhodes scholar.”

  * * *

  —

  After I’d been accepted at both Harvard and Yale, I’d decided where to go using a rule I’d established for myself at such an early age—probably in third or fourth grade—that I had trouble remembering a time when I hadn’t abided by it. Though I’d never discussed it with anyone, I thought of it as the Rule of Two: If I was unsure of a course of action but could think of two reasons for it, I’d do it. If I could think of two reasons against it, I wouldn’t. Situations arose, of course, where there were two or more reasons both for and against something, but they didn’t arise that frequently.

  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.”

  I held up the files. “There’s a copy of the lease in one of these?”

  “There should be.”

  “When is the defendant supposed to vacate the premises?”

  “March thirty-first.”

  This was less than two weeks away, and I said, “Oh, man. Should I try to negotiate with the landlord first or just file for a stay of execution?”

  “Do some investigating, then tell me.” Harold smiled. “I know you enjoy a challenge.”

  * * *

  —

  At noon on Saturday, I and the four other leaders of the Yale chapter of Law Students United for Change met at the student union to read and sign the final draft of an open letter—collaboratively written earlier in the week and typed that morning by me—to U.S. House Speaker Carl Albert. After much lobbying by antiwar activists, Albert was rumored to be on the brink of endorsing an amendment to lower the national voting age to eighteen. Meanwhile, that evening, I was planning to attend a potluck dinner hosted by Richard and Gwen Greenberger. Richard taught Constitutional Law as well as Political and Civil Rights, a seminar that had been my favorite class so far—perhaps not coincidentally, Richard was the only professor I called by his first name—and Gwen, who herself had graduated from Yale Law in ’63, ran the university-affiliated National Children’s Initiative, where I’d worked the previous summer. For the potluck, I’d offered to bring chocolate chip cookies, which was one of the few foods I could confidently make.