Co-oping with the
clintons
Little Rock Lawyer Bill Hulsey, a Boston Guy
By Bill Kirtz
He's a small-town lawyer at a big-city university,
but don't let the bow tie and suspenders fool you. He's trained West African
oxen for the Peace Corps, trod Pittsburgh's mean streets for VISTA, headed
American schools in Spain, strummed classic folk guitar at Vermont's Moose
Lips tavern.
So what does everybody want associate university
counsel Bill Hulsey to talk about? Co-oping with the Clintons, of course.
It was spring 1987. Hulsey was in his third year
at Northeastern law school and back in his native Little Rock-helping Arkansas's
governor implement the educational reform plan that put him on the national
map.
It was an informal place at an informal time,
Hulsey remembers. Everybody knew everybody. His father knew Clinton's mother;
his mother worked for a federal judge. The original Friends of Bill were
largely Hulsey's neighbors in the Center Street Colonial mansions. An earlier
co-op employer, a Little Rock labor law firm, steered Hulsey into the governor's
office because of his interest in education.
So, armed with a master's degree in education
from the University of Pittsburgh and five years of overseas teaching and
administration, Hulsey regularly walked down the hall to discuss with Clinton
the fairness of teacher testing and the difficulties of drafting legislation
prohibiting spanking.
"All the doors were open; you could wander
down to Bill's office, or he to yours. He's the same guy in person as he
is on TV-very charming," Hulsey says. He adds what they all do, that
the president has no peer at making contact. Clinton was "a star,
like a rock star. He had all the charisma you hear about. People go gaga
over him-men and women. He's great one-on-one, he's got whatever it is."
Whatever it is, as far as Hulsey knew then, didn't
include womanizing. There was the local character who alternated making
sweet-potato pies with putting flyers under car windshields accusing Clinton
of fathering an illegitimate child. But stories about a lounge singer named
Gennifer? About state troopers standing by while the governor caused pain
in his marriage? Hulsey says, "I never heard anything like that. There
were no rumors floating around."
What most impressed Hulsey during those three
months was Clinton's "great talent as a mediator, his attitude that
'we'll work to solve this together, but we will solve it.' He never took
broadsides personally, never fought with individuals, but kept moving on
his agenda."
In the governor's office, and later at Hillary
Clinton's Rose law firm, Hulsey helped keep the educational agenda moving
by logging many
8 a.m.-to-midnight, six-day weeks. At that time,
Mrs. Clinton was counsel to a federal judge; Hulsey helped her research
school redistricting plans. Was the toil leavened by the chance to scarf
tamales from Doe's, ribs from Shug's, and tacos from Juanita's with the
Clintons and their intimates?
No, says Hulsey, who chuckles at fellow aides'
"derivative status based on their real or perceived closeness to Clinton."
But he occasionally broke bread with the governor's key aide, Betsey Wright.
What's with Hillary? "She's sharp; they make
a good team." A people person? "No. She was very demanding-not
unlike a lot of partners at major law firms. She had a lot on her plate."
Okay, so tell all about Webb, Whitewater, Madison
Guaranty bank.
Hulsey says he would if he could but he can't.
"If intrigues were going on, they were over
my head." Once, Webster Hubbell asked what he was doing in the firm's
library, and Hulsey sometimes wondered why Madison Guaranty, the savings
and loan that later figured so prominently in Independent Counsel Kenneth
Starr's investigations, was located on the outskirts of town, with no residential
or business base and apparently nary a customer. But that was that.
Hulsey did notice that Clinton, as chairman of
the National Governors' Conference, was building an Electoral College coalition
in his favor. So why, when the governor was assembling his team for his
1992 run, didn't he hop aboard?
"I've never been interested in politics,"
Hulsey replies. "I wasn't able to think that way, with alliances shifting
so frequently." The thrill of the campaign "war room," from
which such Clintonistas as James Carville and George Stephanopoulos emerged
to fame and fortune, "is not a rush for me."
His rush is the Northeastern counsel's office,
where "I learn something every day-such exciting things. I see clients
as people. We're involved in preventing problems and shaping policies."
Hulsey spent his first co-op there, in 1984, with
longtime university counsel Vincent Lembo. When Hulsey graduated, he was
mulling an offer from a Little Rock law firm when Lembo mentioned he was
looking for an assistant. Hulsey took the post and never looked back.
He calls his "the best legal job in the world.
You have the most intelligent group of clients. You help a math professor
make a deal with Microsoft, and ten minutes later it's an entirely different
problem. It's great for someone who's a generalist. It's like being a small-town
lawyer. It fits me."
What wouldn't fit him is a corporate counsel's
slot. "Who cares if Pepsi or Coke gets a trademark? It's a sterile
exercise. At Pepsi, there's no discussion of academic freedom. Here, everything
we do is aimed at a better education for students."
And at doing better than you have to do. "The
university has a much higher expectation than legal baselines. Our standards,
for such matters as sexual harassment, can be much higher-that's very rewarding."
So is brokering a resolution. Hulsey says, "Often,
I'm a mediator available to both sides." Just like his old Little
Rock boss, he tries to build bridges, not burn them. One quarter's client
can morph into next quarter's adversary with the flip of a tenure dossier.
"The sides can change on the next issue. They're still here and you're
still here when this case is over."
And Hulsey's still here, still logging long days
before he drives back to the Wellesley home he shares with his wife, Amy
Novik, a Massachusetts Division of Insurance attorney he met in an N.U.
law school study group, and their children, Gabriella, four, and Graham,
two. On an average day, he may take a break from activities such as hammering
out an agreement over just what a memorial bequest can be used for by telling
a women's studies class the latest developments in sexual harassment statutes.
Or by teaching tax law, entertainment law, and negotiations across campus
at his alma mater. "It's fun to be able to get into a classroom from
my perspective as a practitioner."
It's also fun to encounter his old co-op boss
now and then.
Hulsey helped arrange Clinton's visit to a Boston
Chamber of Commerce dinner; the president picked him out of a crowd of
600, asking him what he was doing in Boston. Clinton singled him out again
in 1993, when the president received an honorary degree from Northeastern.
Hulsey thinks Clinton has more than the politician's
elephantine ability to match a name with a face. He rejects the widely
held theory that the president likes audiences, not friends, that he's
a one-way charm machine who devours people and discards them after they've
ceased to be of use.
"It's not the case that he eats people up.
There have been just a couple of odd things. Is Clinton narcissistic? What
president isn't narcissistic?"
And Hulsey, whose grandfathers were Southern Baptist
ministers, sees no sham in Clinton's claim that since he's settled his
Interngate problems with God, everybody else should forgive him.
"Part of Clinton is 'What's the right spin?'
but another part is 'You and God working things out.' Baptists understand
that you'll try and fail; the key is that you try again."
Hulsey believes Clinton will be treated fondly
by history. "Though maybe he shoots himself in the foot" with
such missteps as Monica, "if you step back and see what he's done,
he's done more with less-with no congressional coalition and with the threat
of impeachment over his head, he still got his budget passed. He works
and works at everything he thinks is important."
The proper penalty for Clinton? What's already
happened: humiliation. No censure, no post-acquittal punishment. "He's
been completely exposed [but] I can't imagine Thomas Jefferson thinking
what he did was a high crime and misdemeanor."
Hulsey is as unabashed a Clintonian as he is a
proud Arkansan. A Razorback bumper sticker adorns his office wall along
with Gabriella's bright watercolors. But so does an N.U. hockey booster
plaque.
His natty threads, from Jos. Bank-the bargain
hunter's Brooks Brothers-would fit in anywhere. But he gets back to Little
Rock only a couple of times a year. "I'm a Boston guy now."
Bill Kirtz is an associate professor in the
School of Journalism. His opinions appear regularly in "Talk of the
Gown."
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