Shriver, briefing him on the Texarkana stop. If we had any doubt how low the campaign’s fortunes had sunk, this removed it. Shriver took it all in stride and asked the flight attendants to serve dinner. Soon there were two planes full of staff and a large press corps eating steak on the tarmac in McAllen. When we finally got to Texarkana, more than three hours late, the rally had disbanded, but about two hundred diehards, including Congressman Patman, came to the airport to greet Shriver. He jumped off the plane and shook hands with every one of them as if it were the first day of a close election.
McGovern lost Texas 67 to 33 percent, a slightly better showing than he made in Arkansas, where only 31 percent of the voters supported him. After the election, Taylor and I stayed around a few days to thank people and wrap things up. Then Hillary and I went back to Yale, after a brief vacation in Zihuatanejo on Mexico’s Pacific Coast. It’s built up now, but then it was still a little Mexican hamlet with bumpy unpaved streets, open bars, and tropical birds in the trees. We got through our finals in good shape, especially considering our long absence. I had to work hard to master the arcane rules of Admiralty Law, which I took only because I wanted to have a course taught by Charles Black, an eloquent, courtly Texan who was well liked and respected by the students and who was especially fond of Hillary. Much to my surprise, the jurisdiction of admiralty law extended to any waterway in the United States that had been navigable in its original condition. That included lakes built from damming once-navigable rivers around my hometown.
In the spring term of 1973, I took a full class load but was preoccupied with going home and with what was going to happen with Hillary. Both of us especially enjoyed staging that year’s Barristers Union Prize Trial. We wrote a trial based on the characters in the movie
One day after my class in Corporate Tax, Professor Chirelstein asked me what I was going to do when I graduated. I told him I was going home to Arkansas and supposed I would just hang up a shingle on my own since I had no job offers. He said there was a sudden, unexpected vacancy on the faculty of the University of Arkansas Law School at Fayetteville. He suggested that I apply for the position and volunteered to recommend me. It had never occurred to me that I could or should get a teaching job, but I was intrigued by the idea. A few days later, in late March, I drove home for Easter break. When I got to Little Rock, I pulled off the highway, went to a pay phone, called the law school dean, Wylie Davis, introduced myself, told him what I’d heard about the vacancy, and said I’d like to apply. He said I was too young and inexperienced. I laughed and told him I’d been hearing that for years, but if he was hard up, I’d be good for him, because I’d work hard and teach any courses he wanted. Besides, I wouldn’t have tenure, so he could fire me at any time. He chuckled and invited me to Fayetteville for an interview; I flew there in the first week of May. I had strong letters of recommendation from Professor Chirelstein, Burke Marshall, Steve Duke, John Baker, and Caroline Dinegar, chairman of the political science department at the University of New Haven, where I had taught Constitutional Law and Criminal Law to undergraduates. The interviews went well, and on May 12, I got a letter from Dean Davis offering me a position as an assistant professor at a salary of $14,706. Hillary was all for it, and ten days later I accepted.
It wasn’t much money, but teaching would enable me to work off my National Defense Education loan rather than pay it off. My other law school loan was unique in that it required me and my classmates to pay our loans down with a small fixed percentage of our annual incomes until the aggregate debt of our class was retired. Obviously, those who made more paid more, but we all knew that when we borrowed the money. My experience with the Yale loan program was the stimulus for my desire to change the federal student-loan program when I became President, so that students would have the option of repaying their loans over a longer period of time as a fixed percentage of their income. That way, they would be less likely to drop out of school for fear of not being able to repay their loans, and less reluctant to take jobs with high social utility but low pay. When we gave students the option of incomecontingent loans, a lot of them took it. Though I hadn’t been the most diligent student, I was pleased with my law school years. I had learned a lot from some brilliant and dedicated professors, and from my fellow students, more than twenty of whom I would later appoint to positions in the administration or the federal judiciary. I had come to a keener appreciation of the role the law plays in maintaining a sense of order and fairness in our society, and in providing a means to make social progress. Living in New Haven gave me a sense of the reality and ethnic diversity of urban America. And, of course, it was in New Haven that I met Hillary. Thanks to the Duffey and McGovern campaigns, I had made some good friends who shared my passion for politics and learned more about the mechanics of electioneering. I had also learned again that winning elections as a progressive requires great care and discipline in crafting and presenting a message and a program that gives people the confidence to change course. Our society can absorb only so much change at a time, and when we move forward we must do it in a way that reaffirms our core convictions of opportunity and responsibility, work and family, strength and compassion—the values that have been the bedrock of America’s success. Most people have their hands full raising their kids, doing their jobs, and paying the bills. They don’t think about government policy as much as liberals do, nor are they as obsessed with power as the new right conservatives. They have a lot of common sense, and a desire to understand the larger forces shaping their lives, but can’t be expected to abandon the values and social arrangements that at least enable them to survive and feel good about themselves. Since 1968, conservatives have been very good at convincing middle America that progressive candidates, ideas, and policies are alien to their values and threatening to their security. Joe Duffey was a coal miner’s son who was morphed into a weak, ultra-liberal elitist. George McGovern was a genuine war hero, sent to the Senate by the conservatives of rural South Dakota, who was turned into a spineless, wild-eyed leftist who wouldn’t stand up for America but would tax and spend it into oblivion. In both cases, the candidates and their campaigns made mistakes that reinforced the images their opponents were trying hard to create. I already knew enough about how difficult it was to push the rocks of civil rights, peace, and anti-poverty programs up the political hill to know we couldn’t expect to win all the time, but I was determined to stop helping our opponents win without a fight. Later, both as governor and as President, I made some of the same mistakes all over again, but not as many as I would have had I not been given the chance to work for those two good men, Joe Duffey and George McGovern. I was happy to be going home to the prospect of interesting work, but I still didn’t know what to do about Hillary, or what was best for her. I had always believed she had as much (or more) potential to succeed in politics as I did, and I wanted her to have her chance. Back then, I wanted it for her more than she did, and I thought coming to Arkansas with me would end the prospect of a political career for her. I didn’t want to do that, but I didn’t want to give her up, either. Hillary had already decided against working for a big firm or clerking for a judge in favor of a position with Marian Edelman’s Children’s Defense Fund in its new office in Cambridge, Massachusetts, so we were going to be a long way away from each other.
That was all we knew when we finished law school and I took Hillary on her first overseas trip. I gave her a tour of London and Oxford, then we went west to Wales, then back into England to the Lake District, which I hadn’t seen before. It’s beautiful and romantic there in the late spring. One evening at sunset, on the shore of Lake Ennerdale, I asked Hillary to marry me. I couldn’t believe I’d done it. Neither could she. She said she loved me but couldn’t say yes. I couldn’t blame her, but I didn’t want to lose her. So I asked her to come home to Arkansas with me to see how she liked it. And to take the Arkansas bar exam, just in case.
EIGHTEEN
In June, Hillary flew to Little Rock for a visit. I took her home the long way, to show her a part of the state I loved. We drove west up the Arkansas River for seventy miles to Russellville, then south down Highway 7 through the Ouachita Mountains and National Forest, stopping from time to time to look at the beautiful vistas. We spent a couple of days in Hot Springs with Mother, Jeff, and Roger, then went back to Little Rock for a prep course on the Arkansas Bar exam, which proved helpful enough that both of us passed.
After the bar, Hillary went back to Massachusetts to start her job with the Children’s Defense Fund, and I went to Fayetteville to begin my new life as a law professor. I found the perfect place to live, a beautiful little house designed by the famous Arkansas architect Fay Jones, whose stunning Thorncrown Chapel in nearby Eureka Springs won international awards and accolades. The house was on more than eighty acres of land about eight miles east
