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."
The legal team, about a third of them recent graduates of Yale like Rodham, was incarcerated, six days a week, 18 hours a day, in the dilapidated Congressional Hotel on Capitol Hill, which had been hastily converted for their use. The staff was crammed into the L-shaped seventh floor of the hotel, two desks crow-barred into each of the hastily converted guest rooms.
To make sure Nixon couldn't charge them with bias, Doar swore the staff to silence. Documents were shredded, rooms were swept for bugs, shades were drawn and conversations kept away from open windows.
Doar ordered his staff to stay away from a young TV reporter prowling the lobby named Sam Donaldson and hinted he'd fire anyone who leaked to investigative columnist Jack Anderson, whose assistants were slipping notes under staffers' doors.
On a chilly Friday in January 1974, Rodham walked into Doar's Spartan office and took a chair next to a young lawyer named Bill Weld.
"Doar told us he wanted a complete history of presidential impeachment -- and he wanted it on his desk by the following Tuesday," recalls Weld, a Smithtown native who would go on to become a two-term governor of Massachusetts. "We were a little stunned. Hillary and I just looked at each other … That was the way Doar operated."
Doar and Rodham, both earnest Midwestern workaholics, were vocational soul mates. She particularly admired his secretiveness. "There were never leaks from our investigation," Hillary Clinton wrote approvingly in her 2003 autobiography. "John Doar was allergic to publicity."
Joe Woods, Doar's right-hand man and friend from law school, arrived at the hotel on the same wet, wind-scoured day as Rodham. Feeling miserable, sopping valise in hand, the 48-year-old Woods trudged into Doar's office and found him talking with a moon-faced young woman wearing thick glasses. As he joined the conversation, Woods was struck by Rodham's earnestness and lack of frivolity, which made him think she was in her 30s.
"She was an intense and focused person and that's what you want when you're doing this kind of work," said Woods.
When she left Doar's office, Woods made a mental note: "This is someone I want to work with."
Six months earlier, the Senate held its historic Watergate hearings, chaired by Sen. Sam Ervin of North Carolina, which featured many of the televised bombshell revelations that have become the signature images of Watergate. For weeks, TV audiences were riveted by damning testimony that Nixon had orchestrated a massive cover-up of illegal spying on Democrats.
Doar saw his role as clerical and consitutional, building an airtight, document-based case against Nixon.
A few days after he arrived in Washington, Woods made good on his promise to enlist Rodham, asking Doar if he could divert Rodham to a critical, if thankless task of crafting procedures that would govern the House judiciary committee's hearings.
Woods, a native Californian who had never lived in a building with heat, found the hotel's old steam radiators unbearable. He threw open his windows in the dead of winter, against Doar's secrecy edict. An uncomplaining Rodham donned a thick turtleneck sweater and shivered through 18-hour days, working one-on-one on the rules.
Their work turned out to be controversial -- exposing Rodham to the first serious criticism of her career, even though she was acting largely at the behest of her bosses. Woods and Doar had instructed her to draft a memo restricting the number of witnesses who testified at the televised committee hearings to just a handful. More importantly, she was told to add a section barring Nixon's lawyers from cross-examining witnesses. (Two decades later, in a reversal, she would criticize independent
counsel Ken Starr for blocking Bill Clinton's lawyers from cross-examinations.)
Rodham's memo caused an immediate firestorm among the committee's Republicans and even some Democrats. Judiciary Committee Chairman Peter Rodino, a New Jersey Democrat who was acutely sensitive to charges he was conducting a witch hunt, rejected it almost immediately. Rodham and Woods defended the rules before one of Rodino's subcommittees but were instructed to re-write them.
"The committee was damn clear that the president was going to have the right to cross-examine," recalls Woods, still smarting over the slight three decades later. "They wound up giving Nixon and [his defense lawyer James] St. Clair complete access to everything we were doing."
Beyond the procedural questions loomed a far larger constitutional one: What defined an impeachable offense? The Constitution is moot on the subject, apart from its bare bones "High Crimes and Misdemeanors" standard borrowed from English law. Nixon and some of the committee's attorneys wanted to set the bar as high as possible, arguing that the committee needed to prove Nixon had personally committed a major crime.
But Rodham, according to Nussbaum, shared Doar's view that the standard should be easier to meet. Impeachment, she believed, was justified if it could be proven that a president engaged in a systematic "abuse of power," like the massive cover-up that followed the Watergate break-in. (She later argued that her husband's attempt to hide his affair with Monica Lewinsky wasn't comparable to Nixon's offenses because no one could prove Clinton coerced false testimony from subordinates.)
Doar, a former Justice Department lawyer who prosecuted the murderers of three slain civil rights workers in Mississippi in the 1960s, was so focused on proving a constitutional case against Nixon he virtually shut down his staff's investigative efforts.
That ticked off some of his more aggressive deputies, like Nussbaum. But Doar was determined to bury Nixon in an avalanche of paper, cataloguing Nixon's offenses on thousands of 3" x 5" index cards. Nixon defenders could quibble with individual entries, he reasoned, but not the mass of documentation proving the president had abused his office.
Hillary Rodham quickly became an important part of that effort. It was grinding, demanding, even mind-numbing work, as the team pored through boxes of grand jury and Senate testimony, assembling scraps of evidence and constitutional precedent into articles of impeachment of a president. She was perfect for the job.
"Nowadays, a lot of what we did would be done with a computer," says John Labovitz, who researched constitutional issues for the committee. "But back then it was all collected on white index cards … You had to be objective, not to color the facts, and her job was to reconcile all those index cards into "proposed statements for inclusion" that would be put in binders for the committee members. She had a supervisory role."
Minutiae, the reassuring drumbeat of detail, has always had a calming effect on Rodham. Even today, staffers say she gets into a Zen-like, contented state when given stacks of research to digest.
"Whatever you gave her she got it done fast and she got it done well," says Dick Gill.
"Of all the junior lawyers, she became the one key player," he added. "After Nixon had resigned we had a dinner at the [famous Capitol Hill watering hole] The Monocle and it was all the senior guys with Doar and Hillary. She became part of the inner group."
She never came off as too fawning because she wasn't afraid to stand up to her superiors, said Dick Cates, one of Doar's senior aides. When one of the committee's black lawyers complained to her that he wasn't being given meaningful work, Rodham brought the matter up with Doar and Cates.
When the lawyer -- who just happened to have been a star college lineman a few years earlier -- nearly flattened the 48-year-old Cates during a staff touch football game, Cates got little sympathy from Rodham.
"He and I were beating the hell out of each other," Cates told Newsday. "She noticed and said that, well, maybe he's taking out his frustration that he wasn't being treated as well as he would have liked … We both laughed, but she made her point."
Younger lawyers noticed there were two Hillarys: a charming woman who was a fun after-work drinking companion ("She had the most unexpected laugh," said one of the committee's few female attorneys) and an abrasive workaholic who seemed constitutionally incapable of candy-coating criticism.
"She was direct and it was a little bit jarring coming from a person your same age," recalls Robert Trainor.
Even as Rodham was making a strong impression on the committee's male-dominated leadership, peers noticed she seemed to be joining an establishment she believed was rigged to oppress women. When the Watergate attorneys assembled on the steps of a House office building for their official photograph, Rodham walked away from the lawyers and stood with the women of the clerical and support workers, staff members told Newsday.
"The first time I met her, on the Hill, she was dressed in cords, flower shirt, those kinds of things," recalls Robert Trainor. "In the halls of Congress people dressed in a certain way, in skirts and dresses -- she didn't do that."
Nixon's resignation on Aug. 8, 1974, was a bittersweet moment for Rodham and the rest of the staff. They were happy the crisis had ended but felt deprived of the opportunity to showcase their efforts, like playwrights whose production is canceled on opening night.
Nussbaum, who had grown close to Rodham, had been counseling her to ditch plans to return to Arkansas with Clinton, saying that major firms in New York, Washington or Chicago would clamor to hire her. One night, as he drove her home in his Oldsmobile Toronado, Rodham told him Bill Clinton was running for Congress and she intended to help him run.
"Don't you think that's kind of silly?" Nussbaum recalls asking her.
"He's really special," she said. "Don't you understand? He's going to run for Congress. He's going to be a senator, maybe even governor. He's going to be president of the United States."
Nussbaum, who had urged Doar to hire experienced prosecutors instead of callow law school grads like Rodham, was dumbstruck by her naivete. As the car pulled to the curb in front of her building, he exploded.
"That's the stupidest thing I ever heard!" he bellowed. "You're talking like a fool! You both need to go out and get a job!"
Her face flushed with anger.
"You don't know what the -- you're talking about -- you are a big jerk!" she said and slammed the door in his face.
They made up the next day, but many of Rodham's friends on the committee shared Nussbaum's sentiment. None knew she was harboring an embarrassing secret: In December 1973, a month before taking the committee job, she'd been informed she'd flunked the D.C. bar exam, a fact she didn't disclose before publishing her autobiography in 2003.
Bill Clinton's appearance at the committee's picnic in Virginia's Turkey Run Park that summer did little to allay her friends' fears that she was making a mistake by subordinating her Washington future to his Arkansas ambitions.
"She seemed more serious and focused; he seemed like a bit of a back-slapper," recalls Evan Davis, a young staff attorney who would later become a top advisor to former New York Gov. Mario Cuomo.
"Of the two, I always thought Hillary was by far the more impressive public figure," he said, laughing.