Today my wife and I visited the little red house in Arkansas where Bill and Hillary Clinton got married. A volunteer at the museum (the house was turned into a museum a few years back) was kind enough to show us around and narrate the story of how the Clintons got married. Here it goes.
Bill and Hillary Clinton’s relationship started after she caught the future president staring at her, he said.
“I noticed that he kept looking over at me. He had been doing a lot of that,” he quoted Hillary Clinton from her memoir “Living History.” “So I stood up from the desk, walked over to him and said, ‘If you’re going to keep looking at me, and I’m going to keep looking back, we might as well be introduced. I’m Hillary Rodham.’ That was it.”
Bill Clinton first proposed to Hillary Rodham after the couple graduated from law school and took their first trip to Europe. According to the memoir, Bill got onto one knee on the shores of Lake Ennerdale in the Lake District National Park in Cumbria, England.
Hillary said no. In her memoir she writes that what she meant to say was “give me time.”
Bill kept proposing; Hillary continued to say no.
In early 1975, the couple was driving through Fayetteville, Arkansas, where they had settled after law school. After passing a red brick house, Hillary mentioned in passing that she liked that “little house.”
After Hillary returned from a trip to Chicago, Bill told her he had a surprise.
“Do you remember that house you liked,” Bill said, according to Hillary’s memoir. “Well, I bought it, so now you’d better marry me because I can’t live in it by myself.”
Hillary said yes and they were married in the house’s living room on October 11, 1975.
