Living History by Unknown (the lemonade war series txt) 📗

National Conservative Political Action Committee (NCPAC), formed by the Republicans to design and run negative ads all over the country. By October, I thought the polls showing Bill ahead were wrong and that Bill might actually lose. Bill had used a young, abrasive New York pollster, Dick Morris, for his successful 1978 race, but no one on his staff or in his office could stand working with Morris, so they persuaded Bill to use a different team in 1980. I called Morris to ask what he thought was happening. He told me Bill was in real trouble and probably would lose unless he made some kind of dramatic gesture, like repealing the car tag tax or repudiating Carter. I couldn’t persuade anyone else to ignore the polls that showed Bill winning. Bill himself was uncertain. He didn’t want to break publicly with the President or call a special session to repeal the car tag hike. So he just upped his campaigning and kept on explaining himself to voters.

Right before the election, we had a disturbing conversation with an officer in the National Guard who had been in charge of some of the troops called up to quell riots at the base. He told Bill that his elderly aunt had informed him that she intended to vote for Frank White because Bill had let the Cubans riot. When this officer explained to his aunt that he had been there and knew for a fact that Governor Clinton had stopped the rioting, his aunt said that wasn’t true because she had seen what happened on television. The ads trumped not just the news, but personal witness. That 1980 campaign, where truth was turned on its head, convinced me of the piercing power of negative ads to convert voters through distortion.

Exit polls showed Bill winning by a wide margin, but he lost, 52 to 48 percent. He was devastated. The big hotel room his campaign had rented was filled with shocked friends and supporters. He decided he would wait until the next day to make any public comments and asked me to go and thank everyone for their help and invite them to come over to the Governor’s Mansion the following morning. The gathering on the back lawn was like a wake. Bill had now lost two elections―one for Congress, one as an incumbent Governor―and many wondered whether this defeat would break him.

Before the week was out we found an old home to buy in the Hillcrest section of Little Rock, near where we had lived before. On two lots, it had a converted attic that we used for Chelsea’s nursery. Bill and I are partial to older homes and traditional furniture, so we haunted thrift stores and antique shops. When Virginia visited, she asked us why we liked old things. As she explained, “I’ve spent my whole life trying to get away from old homes and furniture.” When she figured out our taste, though, she cheerfully sent over a Victorian “courting couch” she had in her garage.

Chelsea was the only bright spot in the painful months following the election. She was the first grandchild in our families, so Bill’s mother was more than happy to do a lot of babysitting, as were my parents when they came to visit. It was in our new house that Chelsea celebrated her first birthday, learned to walk and talk and taught her father a lesson in the perils of multitasking. One day Bill was holding her while watching a basketball game on television, talking on the phone and doing a crossword puzzle. When she couldn’t get his attention, she bit him on the nose!

Bill took a job at Wright, Lindsey and Jennings, a Little Rock law firm. One of his new colleagues, Bruce Lindsey, became one of Bill’s closest confidants. But before Frank White had moved into the mansion, Bill was unofficially campaigning to get his job back.

The pressures on me to conform had increased dramatically when Bill was elected Governor in 1978. I could get away with being considered a little unconventional as the wife of the Attorney General, but as First Lady of Arkansas, Iwas thrown into an unblinking spotlight. And for the first time, I came to realize how my personal choices could impact my husband’s political future.

My parents raised me to focus on the inner qualities of people, not the way they dressed or the titles they held. That sometimes made it hard for me to understand the importance of certain conventions to others. I learned the hard way that some voters in Arkansas were seriously offended by the fact that I kept my maiden name.

Because I knew Ihad my own professional interests and did not want to create any confusion or conflict of interest with my husband’s public career, it made perfect sense to me to continue using my own name. Bill didn’t mind, but our mothers did. Virginia cried when Bill told her, and my mother addressed her letters to “Mr. and Mrs. Bill Clinton.”

Brides who kept their maiden names were becoming more common in some places in the mid-1970s, but they were still rare in most of the country. And that included Arkansas. It was a personal decision, a small (I thought) gesture to acknowledge that while I was committed to our union, I was still me. I was also being practical. By the time we married, I was teaching, trying cases, publishing and speaking as Hillary Rodham. I kept my name after Bill was elected to state office partly because I thought it would help avoid the appearance of conflict of interest. And there’s one case I think I would have lost had I taken Bill’s name.

I was helping Phil Carroll defend a company that sold and shipped creosote-treated logs by railroad. As a shipment was unloaded at its destination, the logs came loose from their supports on one of the flatbed cars and injured some employees of the company that had purchased the logs. The ensuing