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Hillary Clinton in unpublished 1984 interview: Arkansas opened her world

Elected office not on radar in ’84

FAYETTEVILLE -- Living in Arkansas made Hillary Clinton a better person.

That's what she told a reporter in 1984, after she'd lived in the state for a decade.

"I am a different -- based on my values -- a better person, not just because I married Bill, but because I've lived in Arkansas," Clinton told Roy Reed, who interviewed her 32 years ago for an Esquire magazine article that was never published.

Hillary Rodham Clinton, who was then first lady of Arkansas, is now the presumptive Democratic nominee to be president of the United States.

Clinton told Reed that she was lucky -- lucky to have attended prestigious colleges and lucky to live in Arkansas, where she felt more connected than anywhere else in her life.

"I had never really been part of any place as rich or as full as this place," she said. "It's a hard thing to explain."

A native of the Chicago area, Clinton had a bachelor's degree from Wellesley College in Massachusetts and a law degree from Yale University in Connecticut.

"When you go to school at a place like Wellesley and a place like Yale where you are extremely lucky to be there, where you and everyone around you constantly tells you how lucky you are to be there, you cannot help but cut yourself off from those who are unlike you, and you can then live the rest of your life with the same circle of people, changing the faces and changing some aspects of their background, but you never venture forth again no matter where you came from to get there in the first place," she said.

This shift to an East Coast perspective can also affect native Arkansans, said Clinton.

"There are a lot of folks from Arkansas who went to places like Wellesley and Yale who for all intents and purposes have never gone back, even if they physically have gone back," she said. "They have not gone back emotionally or psychologically."

Reed, a Hogeye resident and former reporter for The New York Times, interviewed Gov. Bill Clinton and his wife, Hillary, in Little Rock for the Esquire article. Reed said Esquire wanted profiles of the country's 100 most important young couples to watch in the future. Advertising sales didn't come through as expected, so Esquire's editors cut some of the articles, including the one on the Clintons.

But hours of the audio-taped interviews that Reed did with the Clintons are housed on DVDs in the Special Collections Division of the library at the University of Arkansas at Fayetteville. The Roy Reed papers, held in 26 boxes, have been open to the public since 2014.

The interviews show a different Hillary Clinton than we see today. For one thing, the presidential candidate and policy wonk told Reed that she never thought about running for elected office.

"I think there's something about the way politics is conducted today I would find difficult -- the inability to take the time to think through issues and to be able to come forward with programs and plans that you can work on outside the scrutiny of public opinion until they were in some shape," she said. "I just like to see the results. I really believe in progress. I really believe that we can make things better. ... I don't see myself necessarily as having to fulfill any particular role in that although I want to be involved in it."

Clinton, then 36, told Reed that she was happy to support her husband, whose political ambition was concrete when they met at Yale University law school.

"He was from somewhere," she said. "He wanted to go home there. He knew what he wanted to do there. He felt a strong commitment not just to his own career but what he thought his career might be. There was never any question in my mind that his plans were both formed and also made a lot of sense, and I was excited about what he wanted to do."

By contrast, Hillary Clinton said she had never really thought about her future.

"I never had a great game plan: You know, here's where I'm going to be in five years or 10 years," she told Reed. "I never thought I would fall in love with somebody from Arkansas. I never thought that I would live in Arkansas. I never thought that he would be governor.

"The only plan I ever had was when I was going to school, I wanted to get a really good education, but I didn't have any idea what I would do with it."

Hillary Clinton moved to Fayetteville in 1974 to teach law at the University of Arkansas. Bill Clinton had taken a similar job at the same school the previous year. They married in 1975. The next year, Bill Clinton was elected attorney general, and they moved to Little Rock, where Hillary Clinton worked for the Rose Law Firm.

Bill Clinton was elected governor in 1978, and -- except for two years -- he remained in that job until he was elected president in 1992. He was president and Hillary Clinton was first lady of the United States until he left office in 2001.

Since then, Hillary Clinton has served as a U.S. senator from New York and as secretary of state.

Back in 1984, 1,000 miles from Washington, D.C., in Middle America, Hillary Clinton talked about the effect Arkansas had on her, citing the state's history and economic diversity.

"Going into the homes of people from all walks of life who are struggling hard to understand the present let alone be prepared for the future, you just can't replace that with anything else that I've ever experienced," she said.

Janine Parry, a professor of political science at UA-Fayetteville, said Reed's interview with Hillary Clinton took place right after she had her first significant experience in the political spotlight.

"She had just spent most of 1983 chairing a statewide commission on improving the state's public schools, which meant holding meetings in all 75 counties that, all told, attracted thousands of people and a lot of press coverage," said Parry.

The Clintons used information from those meetings to push through a legislative package that raised teacher salaries and instituted a more rigorous curriculum but, most importantly, included teacher competency testing and a substantial tax increase, said Parry.

Ann Henry, a former UA business law teacher, said she believed that Hillary Clinton was changed by campaigning with her husband in Arkansas. Henry and her husband, Morriss Henry, have both been politicians.

"My husband and I have talked about how fortunate we were," she said. "We campaigned and were out and about to meet people from all walks of life. It changed our lives. Working to get things done that constituents felt were important and working with people all over the state to get legislation through is hard but rewarding work. Arkansas is a very diverse small state geographically and economically. ... The variety of experiences [Hillary Clinton] had and the people in Arkansas she met made an impact on her. And she also saw the future of what working with others could accomplish."

Parry, who is from Washington state, said she understood Hillary Clinton's attachment to Arkansas.

"It's impossible for people with big, romantic visions of public service not to be moved by a place so beautiful and rich with lively people, but so long marked by the tragic combination of greater-than-average needs and lower-than-average resources," said Parry. "The desire to help, to identify what needs doing and just do it, can be overwhelming. Hillary Clinton left behind a long trail of efforts and successes in that regard."

Parry cited education changes, the UA School of Law's legal clinic, and Arkansas Advocates for Children and Families as examples of Hillary Clinton's lasting impact on Arkansas.

Clinton told Reed that her primary interest was the "public possibilities of this country."

"That is what I really care about," she said. "That is what really gets to me. Since I want to be an active player in whatever capacity, I think I can be a better player for having lived the last 10 years here than I could have been if either I had stayed on the East Coast or had moved to one of the more rootless, burgeoning, growing places without much of a history that are everywhere around us in our country."

At one point in the interview, Reed asked Clinton if she wanted her daughter Chelsea, then 4 years old, to become the "first woman president."

Hillary Clinton said her daughter had already expressed an interest in several professions -- "fire lady," ballet dancer, train driver, pilot, doctor and movie star -- but not president.

"I just want her to develop a good character, be a responsible, independent person -- to think for herself," said Hillary Clinton. "After that, I don't have any set goals about what she should do."

A Section on 07/10/2016

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