CONNECTIONS October 2016 issue 17 The Presidency

CONNECTIONS Issue # 17
man or woman.” Still another version has
Bill following Hillary around campus. At the
time, she was still dating David Rupert. He
caught up with her on her way to
registration and joined her in the line, even
though he had already registered. Then the
two went off and talked their way into the
Yale Art Museum, which was closed, but
which had a special exhibit on Mark Rothko
that they both wanted to see. In this story,
according to Bill’s memoir, she sat down in
the lap of a Henry Moore sculpture, and he
sat beside her. “Before long,” he wrote, “I
leaned over and put my head on her
shoulder. It was our first date.”
Whatever the sequence, a spark had been
struck. Clinton phoned Hillary soon after the
museum experience and discovered she
was sick. Immediately, and unbidden, he
went to her house with orange juice and
chicken soup. Clinton’s courtship had
commenced. Electricity was in the air.
Clinton, a friend of Hillary’s said, was “the
wild card in her well-ordered cerebral
existence.” She had charted a wellorganized
campaign to achieve her ends in
her own way, and now a new and powerful
presence was scrambling her best-laid
plans.
in love with Bill Clinton” was the most exciting
thing to happen to her in the 1970s. For Bill,
Hillary was something different. Other women
had embodied some of what he now found with
Hillary. His lifelong friendship with Carolyn
Staley was always more substantive than
romantic. For three years, he combined
romance and friendship in his relationship with
Denise Hyland. But that dynamic had less of a
cutting edge, fewer direct challenges. Ann
Markusen at Georgetown was the closest he
had come to being involved with a person like
Hillary. But she was perhaps too independent,
too “in his face,” too unwilling to accommodate
his style and find a modus vivendi that would
allow them to develop as a couple. Hillary was
different. While clearly unwilling to be
submissive, she was sufficiently enchanted
that, arguably for the first time, she considered
melding her own ambitions to change the world
with those of someone else in a joint endeavor.
In his memoir, Bill declared he simply liked
being around Hillary “because I thought I’d
never be bored with her. In the beginning I used
to tell her that I would like being old with her.”
An interesting perspective. Not romantic. Not
impetuous. Rather, a vision over time—a long
time.
“He was the first man I’d met,” she told one
interviewer, “who wasn’t afraid of me.”
Nevertheless, the attraction was sufficiently
strong that from that semester forward, Bill
Clinton and Hillary Rodham were inextricably
linked. “She was in my face from the start,” Bill
Clinton recalled, “and, before I knew it, in my
heart.” Hillary, in turn, remembered that “falling
18