Portrait of the Candidate as a Young Climber

Bill's thought process is different. He is slow to recognize the malevolence in others; he wants to assume the best about them, and he is willing to spend months trying to win their hearts and minds. Hillary means to cut off the enemy at the pass.

The first public glimpse of their political partnership -- and indications of what Morris, Greenberg and others later discerned -- came during the 1972 Prize Trial at Yale Law School. Hillary and Bill were assigned the role of prosecution team. They spent more than a month preparing their arguments, citations and tactics. They had a tough case to prosecute, as it was based on the murder trial of a Kentucky cop who disliked young people who looked like hippies. "But is that enough motivation to beat and kill someone?" read posters advertising the trial and laying out the case.

Bill and Hillary failed to win the prize. But their preparation and performance were prototypical of a methodology they would perfect over the next quarter-century, carving out complementary roles that played to the strength and character of each. Their full partnership was apparent to their peers, who watched, fascinated, as they laid out their unusual division of labor. Nancy Bekavac described the dynamic perfectly: "Hillary was very sharp and Chicago, and Bill was very 'To Kill a Mockingbird.' "

It took Hillary more than two years to make up her mind to marry Bill. She had serious doubts not only about his womanizing but about living in Arkansas, about the intensity with which he pursued his passions (including even his passion for her, which sometimes could be overwhelming). She wanted children, but she didn't want them to grow up in a strained marriage. The experience of her mother--an abandoned child and an abused wife (a term Hillary avoided)--weighed on her. Hillary's hesitant decision was reached only after dipping her toes in the Arkansas waters and calculating that she could learn to live there. She carefully positioned herself during those years to have a fallback plan in case their marriage or political journey ran aground. She knew that Bill's history of compulsive infidelity during their courtship meant the chances for a stable marriage, especially a marriage without adultery, were at best a crapshoot.

In the end, she married for love, and the shared dream of a grand political future someday in Washington. But that future would be focused on him, not her, she reluctantly conceded to friends who were urging her to pursue a more independent course and separate identity. Going to Arkansas meant forgoing a prestigious job in the capital or New York, and all but extinguishing her own flash in the season of her greatest promise.

Since her graduation from Wellesley, she had been speeding toward national prominence. But on Nov. 3, 1973, the D.C. Bar Association notified Hillary that she had failed the bar exam. For the first time in her life, she had flamed out--spectacularly, given the expectations of others for her, and even more so her own.

Still, when she settled in Arkansas, her diverse undertakings were already remarkable. She'd worked at menial jobs (washing dishes at a lodge in Mount McKinley National Park and sliming fish in Alaska, where she wore knee-high boots in bloody water while removing the guts of king salmon with a spoon); studied law as it affected the wealthiest and poorest of clients; spent a summer interning at a California law firm noted for representation of the Black Panthers and the Communist Party; and served as a summer intern for the House Republican Conference. Now she had been a lawyer in the congressional impeachment investigation of Richard Nixon.

And she could throw a football.

In Arkansas, she would not be a woman in charge--something she knew was not necessarily antithetical to being married but was antithetical to being married to Bill, on his turf. She would, by choice, inhabit the more traditional universe in which she would invest her talent, dedication and energy to brighten her man's star--as her mother's generation had done. She would be the partner, the manager, the adviser. She would follow her heart.

Carl Bernstein shared, with Bob Woodward, a Pulitzer Prize for their coverage of Watergate for The Washington Post. This article is adapted from his forthcoming book, "A Woman in Charge: The Life of Hillary Rodham Clinton."