Death of American Virtue - Ken Gormley [22]
The true nature of the McDougal-Clinton relationship would ultimately be lost in the freakish portraits of Jim McDougal painted during the Whitewater scandal. In truth, McDougal and Clinton were two smart men who genuinely liked each other. Some accounts would later ascribe to Bill and Hillary Clinton a hatred or disdain for the quirky real estate investor. Some went so far as to implicate the Clintons, years later, in Jim McDougal’s mysterious death in prison. Yet these dark references were at odds with the true history. Remembered Susan, “I never saw them that Bill Clinton didn’t pick Jim up literally off his feet,” giving McDougal a bear hug. Clinton seemed to get a kick out of the balding real estate man’s irreverent wit. Susan McDougal would say of her ex-husband, smiling at the memory, “He was very in the moment, which is, you know, what Clinton enjoyed.”
There was also a shared taste for the aphrodisiac of political life. As Susan would explain, “Bill Clinton had always been a kind of a husky, little fat kid, I guess, with not just a whole lot of money and no fancy cars, no stuff, and suddenly he’s running for office, he’s got a campaign staff, women are starting to respond to him, and McDougal loved that. McDougal fed into that, you know, like ‘Who’s the flavor of the month?’ you know.”
At the same time, both men had become serious about marriage. In September of 1975, Clinton had invited McDougal to attend an engagement party at which he was introducing his fiancée from Yale Law School, Hillary Rodham. Clinton was throwing the party in Hot Springs for friends who could not make the voyage to Fayetteville. McDougal was thrilled to attend with Susan in tow. As the guests swirled around, Susan was surprised when Clinton walked up to her, slid his arm around her waist, and razzed her: “I hear you’re going to be a child bride.” To which she replied, “I don’t know anything about that.” Susan was stunned by the subtext: Jim had evidently told Clinton he was going to ask her to marry him. For Susan, it was an exciting, fast-paced time.
If Clinton was tickled that McDougal was marrying someone half his age, Susan was no less surprised at Clinton’s choice of a mate. “Hillary was very different from the Arkansas cheerleader type, you know, pretty-faced girl that Bill had always been with before,” Susan would later say. She wore “great big glasses, and, you know, the vest, frizzy hair, very plain.” By Arkansas standards, Hillary cut a “radical” appearance. Explained Susan: “She would not be everyone’s cup of tea. She wasn’t your stereotypical Southern beauty, for sure, and those were the kinds of girls that Bill had always dated. And also girls who were very sure of themselves socially, you know, girls who could carry off any situation, and certainly that took Hillary years to be able to do in Arkansas.” Yet both Susan and Jim were a bit “weird” themselves; they had no problem connecting with Hillary. Jim, in particular, seemed enthralled by Clinton’s smart, intellectual bride-to-be, who had worked on the congressional impeachment staff during the Watergate scandal. Hillary Rodham seemed like an interesting match, Jim said, for an up-and-coming Arkansas politician like his good friend Bill Clinton.
Bill and Hillary were married on October 11, 1975, in Fayetteville. Seven months later, Jim and Susan were married in a small ceremony outside Little Rock, at the couple’s new “love nest” in the country. Officiating was Bob Riley, an ordained Baptist minister, who memorized the entire ceremony to compensate for his blindness. In attendance were many of Arkansas’s political rising stars: Bill and Hillary Clinton; Jim Guy Tucker, a close friend of McDougal’s who was now running for Congress; and other luminaries. Susan wore a traditional white wedding dress and carried a single long-stemmed