During Watergate probe, a 'star' on the rise

BY GLENN THRUSH | glenn.thrush@newsday.com

March 2, 2008

WASHINGTON - Twenty-four years before the phrase "high crimes and misdemeanors" would jolt Bill Clinton's presidency, Hillary Rodham was singing those very words in the back of a friend's car rolling slowly through downtown Washington.

"High crimes and misdemeanors, high crimes and misdemeanors," the 27-year-old Rodham caroled to the delight of several other lawyers working on the House Judiciary Committee's Watergate team.

"Wouldn't it make a great name for a rock band?" she said, according to her friend Terry Kirkpatrick, who was in the car.

That moment in the early summer of 1974 was a low point for the country. But it was a high point of sorts for Rodham, as she worked 18-hour days and six-day weeks, earning a reputation as an up-and-coming liberal lawyer on the verge of helping to oust her despised enemy, Richard Nixon.

In the 1990s, Hillary Clinton's encyclopedic knowledge of the procedural history of impeachment made her a valuable adviser to her husband on legal and tactical issues. But the larger legacy of Watergate in her life was complicated. On one hand, her experience gave her enormous credibility when she decried Bill Clinton's impeachment as a witch hunt that lacked the constitutional legitimacy of the Nixon probe. Yet as first lady, her attempts to block Republicans from probing the inner workings of the Clinton White House forced her to take an expansive view of executive privilege -- one that had more in common with Nixon's position in the 1970's than her own opinions as a young attorney.

Hillary Rodham played a bit part in the Watergate saga, but interviews with two dozen colleagues from that period show she was also more than just a junior researcher, as she maneuvered herself into a position of influence through hard work and deft politicking.

"She was a star," said Bernard Nussbaum, a senior lawyer for the committee who would go on to defend Bill Clinton as a White House counsel.

In an era before desktop computers, Rodham was a human microprocessor in Coke-bottle glasses and corduroy bell-bottoms. She seemed, colleagues recall, genetically engineered for the committee's work -- the sorting, prioritizing and distilling boxes of evidence collected against Nixon.

For the people who worked with her, Rodham's nine-month stint hunting President Richard Nixon provided an intriguing preview of her strengths and shortcomings.

"I'd get in at 8:30 and she'd already be there; when I left at 10 or 11 at night, she'd still be there," remembers Boston Red Sox president Larry Lucchino, then another of the committee's junior staffers. "With all the sleep deprivation, I found it remarkable how she'd control herself, unlike the rest of us. I have a reputation as a hard worker, but I was junior varsity compared to her."

Just as striking was Rodham's knack for cultivating relationships with the most powerful people in her proximity, in this case the top counsel, John Doar. She did so, in part, by projecting an unnerving -- some would say unwarranted -- sense of self-confidence.

"She acted as if she knew what she was doing even if she didn't know what she was doing," said Robert Trainor, then a 27-year-old committee lawyer. "The rest of us acted as if we didn't know what we were doing She became recognized as a bit more exceptional. I think she just seemed more self-confident. She came in seeing herself as an equal to the bosses."

When John Doar, then 52, put together his staff in late 1973, Hillary Rodham wasn't on his must-hire list. Bill Clinton, who had taken a job at the University of Arkansas Law School, was.

Rodham was standing in Clinton's kitchen in Fayetteville, Ark., on Christmas Day in 1973 when Doar rang to offer Clinton a job. Burke Marshall, Doar's close friend and former Kennedy Justice Department colleague, had recommended Clinton for a job on the panel after observing his flamboyant performance at Yale Law School's mock trial competition a year earlier.

The brash 28-year-old Clinton turned Doar down, saying he planned to run for a north Arkansas congressional seat in 1974, but recommended his girlfriend. Later, he would have second thoughts about suggesting her, canvassing his political advisers to see if Rodham's job would be a political liability for him in his conservative home state.

Rodham's opportunity came at a pivotal, emotionally fraught moment. She had more or less decided to join Clinton in Arkansas (although she had turned down his offers of marriage), according to her friend and fellow Yale Law School graduate Nancy Bekavac. But she was equally certain she would pursue a career in legal advocacy for children in Washington after spending the first part of 1973 helping her mentor, Marian Wright Edelman, create the Children's Defense Fund.

Characteristically, Rodham reconciled her contradictory goals by placing a nearly religious faith in Bill Clinton's political abilities. Her sojourn to Arkansas would be temporary, she rationalized to friends. The anti-Watergate backlash would propel Clinton to Congress, allowing her to move to Washington where she would resume her work with Edelman, she told Bekavac and others.

More than anything else, Rodham's decision to take the job was motivated by politics. She loathed Nixon.

In January 1969 Rodham hitched a ride with friends to protest Nixon's re-election at the "People's Inaugural" on the National Mall, Bekavac told Newsday. And Rodham made no secret of her anti-Nixon feelings when she was screened for the Watergate staff by 33-year-old conservative Dick Gill, a Doar aide from Alabama.

"We knew, of course, that Hillary was very, very liberal, but she made it clear she had every intention of being fair," said Gill. "We developed this running joke. I'd call her 'left-wing pinko' and she'd call me a right-wing Neanderthal."