Michael Kruse is a senior staff writer for Politico.

LITTLE ROCK, Ark. — Her husband, the governor, had made her the chair of a committee charged with the critical task of proposing more stringent standards for education in their state. “It is indeed an honor for me to have the opportunity to work with you,” she wrote in a letter to the 15 members of the group in late April 1983. She told them they had a chance “to make recommendations that will enable our public schools to offer improved educational opportunities for all our children.” Somebody had typed up a rough draft. The name at the bottom was Hillary Clinton — but she added a correction, in pen, inserting between the two names a third. Rodham.

If the interminable central question about the most-pulled-apart, most-argued-about, most-listened-to, most famous woman in the world has to do with who she actually, authentically is, and if her just-announced campaign needs to be the latest effort to “reintroduce” her, as insiders and advisers have said, it’s worth assessing the busy year here that in many ways introduced her in the first place.


For Hillary Rodham Clinton, the Arkansas education reform of 1983 was her first high-profile public policy initiative. It was a singular, pivotal window of time, too, between who she had been and who she hoped she would be. According to those who knew her and worked with her, it shows who she is because it shows who she was, before Whitewater, before Gennifer and Monica, before the health care crash-and-burn and the constant scandal smolder in Washington.

She was more open and more accessible. She was demanding, exacting and exhausting. And she was policy-first but politically astute, pragmatic, even calculating.

It worked.

“She can’t run for president because of what she did in Arkansas in 1983,” veteran Democratic strategist Bob Shrum said. “But what she did in Arkansas in 1983 has to be a kind of a template.”

HRC, pre-“re.”

***

The article in the Arkansas Gazette after Bill Clinton married Hillary Rodham in Fayetteville in 1975 pointed out in the second paragraph that she would be keeping her maiden name. The last two paragraphs reminded readers of his political promise.

After he was elected governor the first time, in 1978, an article in the Arkansas Democrat wondered about her last name while misspelling her first, using only one l.

“I need my own identity, too,” she said.

In November 1980, though, Clinton was ousted from office, making Rodham even more of an issue. Who she wanted to be had gotten in the way of who he wanted to be. She wanted to be Hillary Rodham. He wanted to be Governor. President.

She came reluctantly to this understanding. So in February 1982, when he announced he was running to win back the office, she made an announcement as well. She would be using his last name.

Nine months later, he was the governor again. Six months after that, he put her in charge of the Arkansas Education Standards Committee. He has said it was her idea. She has said it was his. Safe to say it was theirs. He justified it by saying, “I will have a person who is closer to me than anyone else overseeing a project that is more important to me than anything else.”

She had changed more than her name. Gone was the practically dowdy garb and the frizzy, I-don’t-care hair, and she had traded her thick, hide-behind glasses for contacts. People wanted her to be Mrs. Bill Clinton? Fine. Watch.

Hillary celebrates with her husband, as they learn of his victory in the 1982 Democratic runoff in Arkansas. | AP photo

The schools in Arkansas were dismal, by many measures the worst in the country — last or close in per-pupil expenditures, teacher salaries, the percentage of high school graduates who went on to college. The state had more illiterates than college graduates. She was forthright in her assessment. This was unacceptable. School here, she stressed, was going to get harder because it had to get harder.

Sports were fun, she said, but “I think it’s time we started getting a little fanatic about math and science, not just athletics.”

“High school activities don’t last forever,” she said, “and life goes on after age 17.”

“I would be happy if what we came out with,” she said, referring to the work of the committee, “caused absolute panic, even in my house.”

Somehow, though, she managed to say all this without coming across as a Wellesley-educated, Yale Law-educated, all-work, no-play, know-it-all outsider.

***

It was a brutal summer in the middle South. Hundred-degree days, from the capital to Hot Springs to Pine Bluff, slowed life almost to a halt. The Central Arkansas Area Agency on Aging opened a heat shelter in North Little Rock.

Hillary Rodham Clinton called her committee to a conference room at the Arkansas Department of Education on Capitol Mall for the first of many meetings and subcommittee meetings, in May, in June, in July.

They were from all over Arkansas, the 15, teachers and retired teachers, college professors and administrators, men and women, black and white. They knew of her, most of them, because she was the governor’s wife, because she was an attorney, and the only woman, at the capital’s oldest, most powerful firm, and because she had helped bring to the city’s children’s hospital the state’s first neonatal clinic.

The standards committee, said Betsey Wright, who had met her in 1972 and served as her husband’s chief of staff after she helped get him re-elected in 1982, “was an extension and continuation of her longtime commitment to providing the best opportunities to children.”

And the members of the committee knew she was a parent. Chelsea was 3. She would be attending Little Rock’s public schools.

For almost all of them, though, this was their first experience actually working with her. For her. It didn’t take long for them to understand what she expected.

As a student in Park Ridge, Ill., Wellesley, Mass., and New Haven, Conn., her intellect stood out, but not as much as her industry and stamina — those, more than her smarts, were her separating traits. Of her post-law school participation on the Nixon impeachment inquiry staff, she once said, “We would work 10, 15, 20 hours a day or all night,” calling that “wonderfully exciting.” As a law professor at the University of Arkansas, she quickly earned a reputation as a stickler, not understanding why she shouldn’t hold her students to the standards to which she held herself.

Now, starting the process of crafting new standards for the schools, she was businesslike, no-nonsense and hyper-focused, committee members thought.

“I would say she was,” Cora McHenry said the other day in her home here, pausing, laughing, searching for the right description, “… task-oriented.”

“She was well-planned, she was organized, she knew exactly what she wanted, and that’s how she worked it,” Wanda B. Banks said.

“She was very careful to make sure everybody had the time to make their points and make their case,” Bill VanZandt said. “She was very democratic about it.”

“There were times people on the committee had very different ideas, and she’d let those discussions take place,” McHenry said.

Until she wouldn’t.

“She knew when to cut it off,” she said.

Said Charlie Chaffin: “She was in control.”

Chaffin, a committee member who went on to become a state senator, remembers arguing during one meeting over tracking, the idea that children of different abilities eventually should be in different groups, separated as they progressed. She was for it. Clinton, meanwhile, was against it, Chaffin said, and ultimately she brought to an end the discussion when she stood up, put both her palms down on the table, leaned in, and told Chaffin no. “She bested me,” Chaffin said.

On July 5, Clinton and her committee had a public hearing that went all day, lasting nine hours, during which time they listened to the thoughts, opinions and desires of representatives from some 50 interest groups, ranging from the Arkansas Reading Council to the Arkansas Council for the Blind, from the Arkansas Association for Retarded Citizens to the Arkansas Association for the Gifted and Talented, from the Arkansas Association on Children Under Six to the Arkansas Association of Secondary School Principals.

They then split up and fanned out across the state, traveling that month to hold public hearings in all 75 counties, in libraries, lecture halls and “cafetoriums,” from Mena, Jasper and Pocahontas to Hardy, Hope and Mountain Home, soliciting input from the more than 7,500 citizens who cared enough to come. The Local Government Institute at the University of Arkansas at Little Rock compiled the suggestions in a typewritten spreadsheet. More electives, fewer electives. Consolidate, don’t consolidate. Yes to standardized tests, no to standardized tests. From Grant County: “Mandatory education beyond age 12 should be abolished.” From Jefferson County: “Teachers can and should be replaced by computers when and where the machine can do a better job.” From Polk County: “… too much time is spent on the long ago literature …”

“It was long and grueling, but there wasn’t a person who felt like they hadn’t been heard,” Chaffin said. “Hillary let everybody say what they wanted to say.”

“She made the tent big and the table wide,” said longtime Clinton aide Skip Rutherford, who now is the dean of the Clinton School of Public Service. “She traveled the state, listening, and helping people understand why their children who would grow up in the 21st century needed better educational opportunities, that the job market was changing, the world was changing, and we were becoming a global economy.” In sum: policy talk coupled with “retail politics, one on one, small town to small town.”

Nine years later, as the Clintons campaigned not for education reform but for the White House, media aide Lisa Caputo identified “the need for a grassroots press strategy for Hillary. That she is best when she is talking about her issues and going into the communities.”

In 1983, July turned to August, and August inched toward September. The headlines were expectant. Tougher Standards Are Getting Support Of Panel Members. Education Subcommittees Continue Meetings, Back Greater Curriculum Load. Mrs. Clinton Says She Found No One Happy With Schools.

For Clinton and her committee, the deadline loomed for the presentation of a preliminary report outlining their suggestions. They had settled for the most part on the vital components: a uniform core curriculum, standardized tests at the end of third, sixth and eighth grades, a longer school year, more, smaller and harder classes, and increased accountability — for students, for schools, for districts.

How to pay for all this? Clinton urged the members of her committee to not let that get in the way of their ideas. That was for the governor to worry about. They were doing their work. The governor was doing his. And they didn’t need to know everything.

***

“… what I really love is policy, making policies, seeing them put into practice, making things work,” she once wrote to her best friend, Diane Blair, who died in 2000. “I’d be happy in a little office somewhere thinking up policies, making things happen, refining them.”

In early September 1983, Clinton was refining, preparing to present to the public her preliminary report.

She was ready.

She had been in Arkansas for almost a decade. That wasn’t long enough for her to be considered one of them, or anything approaching that, but it was long enough to have tempered some of the differences.

“In the early days, people here reacted to her otherness, but that wasn’t true after a while,” said Susan McDougal, of Whitewater notoriety, who now is a local hospital chaplain. “She looked more like us, she acted more like us, she talked more like us. And she knew everybody by then. You don’t come off as a know-it-all when you have relationships.”

“They knew her as a person,” said Peggy Nabors, at that time the head of the Arkansas Education Association.

She understood the state’s collective inferiority complex.

“When she came to Arkansas, she saw right away that we’d been made fun of and our self-esteem wasn’t real high,” said Ann Henry, a longtime friend from Fayetteville. “Some of her students at the law school would say, ‘What do you expect from us? We’re from Arkansas.’”

Here, then, she was sufficiently shrewd to tap into that.

Standards for Accreditation of Arkansas Public Schools. Preliminary Report of the Education Standards Committee. She read in a press conference from what she had written.

“It seems to us that nothing government does is so directly connected to our idea of who and what we are, and what we want to be, as our public schools,” she said. “Our children are our hope and our future. We cannot fail them.”

“The world outside the classroom will punish the illiterate soon enough; for our schools and teachers to play an indefinite game of ‘let’s pretend’ with students who are not learning constitutes a failure of nerve we can no longer afford,” she said. Passing students who deserved to fail was tantamount to “educational fraud.”

“We Arkansans,” she said, “have to quit making excuses …”

We Arkansans.

For Hillary Rodham Clinton, the Methodist do-gooder, there has been, always, a dicey balance between earnestness and priggishness. Her work as chair of the education standards committee of 1983, and her presentation of their proposals, ably toed that fine line.

She came off less as talking to, more as talking with.

Less you should, more we can.

Lawmakers lauded her. Quipped rural Yell County legislator Lloyd George, who on occasion wore overalls to the capitol, “I think we’ve elected the wrong Clinton!” Later, in her memoir, Living History, she would call it “another example of a phenomenon I call ‘the talking dog syndrome.’ Some people are still amazed that any woman … can hold her own under pressure and be articulate and knowledgeable. The dog can talk!” Back then, though, she played along. George kept at it, joking that a line should be added to CLINTON FOR GOVERNOR bumper stickers: HILLARY, THAT IS. On the inside, she rolled her eyes. On the outside, she all but batted them. “You’re always getting me in trouble at home,” she said.

***

Her husband, the governor, took over from there. He was front and center the rest of the fall. He asked for a one-cent sales tax hike. That was expected. What wasn’t expected is that he wanted all teachers, no matter their experience, to take competency tests, a centrist, even conservative move. Pass, they could keep their jobs; fail, they couldn’t. Teachers howled. The Arkansas Education Association railed. But he talked with legislators. He sent notes of thanks to writers of supportive letters to the editor. He exercised his acknowledged political gifts.

“Everyone always wants someone else’s ox to be gored,” he said in a speech, “but this is a program for all Arkansans, and all Arkansans should pay for it.”

The standards were approved. The taxes passed — the first such increase in the state in 26 years — and the teacher tests ended up happening.

He — they — got what they wanted.

“It was the best standards we’d ever had in Arkansas,” said Walter Turnbow, the chairman of the state Board of Education at the time. “No question about it.”

The results of the reforms would be something short of drastic, Arkansas moving from the bottom of the barrel more toward the middle of the pack, but they also would be one of his primary selling points when he ran for president.

The experience would lead to his picking her to try to do the same thing with health care nationally, which didn’t go nearly as well, obviously, because Washington isn’t Arkansas, and it was a bigger, more complicated task, with bigger, more motivated opposition, and partly, too, because there was no equivalent of the dutiful public hearings in places like Craighead, Crittenden and Little River counties. The appearance of openness turned into the perception of secrecy.

But as Carl Bernstein put it in his 2007 biography, A Woman in Charge, it would nonetheless be “her greatest achievement in public life until she was elected to the U.S. Senate.”

Her former committee members say it’s the preeminent piece of her legacy in this state.

“Her reputation here in Arkansas grew out of that experience in 1983,” McHenry said the other day.

“Her fingerprint is on this state and what it’s become in terms of education,” Chaffin said.

“The foundation is still very present, the foundation of the aims and goals of our committee,” Banks said.

Policy doesn’t matter, though, unless politics makes it law. If policy is us, politics is us versus them, and the Clintons made the teachers their them. The test was the key. In the words of Hillary Rodham Clinton: “the cornerstone.”

Paul Root, an education adviser to the governor, who had taught him history in high school, remembers pushing back. “I said to him, ‘I’m a good teacher, but I might not do well on your test,’” he said. “And he said to me, ‘Then you better go study.’”

Nabors of the Arkansas Education Association remembers feeling “betrayed.” They had supported the governor up until that point. The ill will would fester for years.

It surprised nearly everybody that fall — even the 15 members of the education standards committee.

“It hit me like a ton of bricks,” McHenry said. “It was never discussed in our meetings.”

It was never discussed because their chairwoman never brought it up .

McHenry at the time was the assistant executive secretary at the Arkansas Education Association — she would retire as its executive director — and she considered the test an “insult” and “really wrong” and the decision to introduce the idea only after the standards were done “a pretty slick move.”

Still, she said, she opted to say nothing about it to the head of the committee. “I was mad as I could be. But I didn’t see any reason to risk the committee’s work, and I didn’t think it was enough to risk the relationship with Hillary that we’d built up.”

If Hillary Rodham Clinton was the face of the new standards, her husband was the face of the teacher test — that’s how it looked in public. Privately, though, they had worked together. The teacher test wasn’t just his idea.

In the correspondence that came to the governor’s office and the mansion in the summer of 1983, kept by the Bill Clinton State Government Project, owned by the Clinton Foundation but archived by the Central Arkansas Library System, there is evidence of the solicitation from other states information about teacher tests. A packet came from Georgia titled Teacher Performance Assessment Instruments. A letter arrived from Connecticut with “enclosed pertinent material we have collected for the purpose of considering competency based evaluation of teachers.” It was dated July 19, one of the days the committee was spread out around the state, listening to suggestions from citizens in nine different counties, in the thick of the work to craft the new standards.

“Dear Hillary,” it began.