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Clinton did fill in the areas no others taught (admiralty law, for example), and found the academic life rewarding enough to turn down other offers (for instance, to be on the House staff for impeaching Nixon). He meant to run for office, but not locally -- this was the Republican corner of Arkansas, after all. But as the 1974 race approached, the popular Congressman from that area, John Paul Hammerschmidt, strongly vouched for Nixon, who was under fire for the Watergate offenses. Clinton knew, from his close friend Hillary Rodham, how vulnerable Nixon was to impeachment -- she had accepted the offer to work on the staff that he refused. The two were visiting each other, back and forth between Washington and Fayetteville, and spending long hours on the telephone. He was kept informed of her work, of her virtual certitude that Nixon would be convicted in the Senate after the House impeached him.
Clinton became convinced that Nixon would take Hammerschmidt down with him, and he began to canvass his new friends in and around the university for a candidate to run against Hammerschmidt -- he wanted a Democrat who planned to live permanently in the district. But when no one else would do it, he announced his own candidacy. As a young law professor with '60s-style hair, a Yale and Oxford background and liberal cohorts from the university on his team, he should have been an easy loser in this enclave of the state's few Republicans. But he ran surprisingly well, thanks to Watergate, giving Hammerschmidt the one scare in his long, safe tenure of the office.
Hillary Rodham came to Arkansas to help with the campaign, and -- when the House staff disbanded after Nixon's resignation -- she took up an offer the dean had made her, to come teach and run a legal clinic at Fayetteville. From the time they met at Yale, the two had circled each other warily -- Clinton confessing that he thought, "Oh-oh, this woman is trouble -- the one I could love." She had joined him in Texas during the McGovern campaign of 1972, where he was a paid member of Gary Hart's staff, and she was a vote registrar for the Democratic National Committee.
Atkinson says the two of them were living together at the time, but maintaining separate apartments, in deference to conservative local ideas of professorial ethics. When they decided to marry, Clinton bought a house, which his army of friends descended on to paint, inside and out, against the deadline of their marriage day. Atkinson, who was there, says it was a marriage all the friends saw as a merging of high talents. "I know brighter people singly, but I do not know any married couple with their combined strengths." It was fascinating to his friends that Bill, with his reputation as a ladies' man, chose for his wife the brainy and (at that time) frumpy- looking Hillary. Her indifference to matters of appearance was evident on the night before the marriage when, amid the bustle of painters, her mother asked to see her wedding dress -- and discovered that she had not bought one. Mother and daughter went up to the quaint town square of Fayetteville and found one store open, where Hillary bought the first dress she took from the rack.