As A Director, Clinton Moved Wal-Mart Board, But Only So Far

In 1986, Sam Walton, the founder of Wal-Mart, had a problem. He was under growing pressure from shareholders — and his wife, Helen — to appoint a woman to the companys 15-member board of directors.

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So Mr. Walton turned to a young lawyer who just happened to be married to the governor of Arkansas, where Wal-Mart is based: Hillary Rodham Clinton.

Mrs. Clintons six-year tenure as a director of Wal-Mart, the nations largest company, remains a little known chapter in her closely scrutinized career. And it is little known for a reason. Mrs. Clinton rarely, if ever, discusses it, leaving her board membership out of her speeches and off her campaign Web site.

Fellow board members and company executives, who have not spoken publicly about her role at Wal-Mart, say Mrs. Clinton used her position to champion personal causes, like the need for more women in management and a comprehensive environmental program, despite being Wal-Marts only female director, the youngest and arguably the least experienced in business. On other topics, like Wal-Marts vehement anti-unionism, for example, she was largely silent, they said.

Her years on the Wal-Mart board, from 1986 to 1992, gave her an unusual tutorial in the ways of American business — a credential that could serve as an antidote to Republican efforts to portray her as an enemy of free markets and an advocate for big government.

But that education came via a company that the Democratic Party — and its major ally, organized labor — has held up as a model of what is wrong with American business, with both groups accusing it of offering unaffordable health insurance and mistreating its workers.

So rather than promote her board membership, Mrs. Clinton is now running from it, even returning a $5,000 campaign donation from the giant discount chain in 2005, citing serious differences with its practices. But disentangling herself from the company is harder than it may seem.

Despite her criticism, Mrs. Clinton maintains close ties to Wal-Mart executives through the Democratic Party and the tightly knit Arkansas business community. Her husband, former President Bill Clinton, speaks frequently to Wal-Marts current chief executive, H. Lee Scott Jr., about issues like health care and even played host to Mr. Scott at the Clintons home in New York last July for a private dinner.

And several months ago, Mrs. Clinton helped broker a secret meeting between a top Wal-Mart executive and former Democratic operative, Leslie Dach, and leaders of the retailers longtime adversary at the United Food and Commercial Workers union, according to several people briefed on the matter, who spoke on condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to do so publicly.

The goal of the meeting was to tamp down the rancor between the company and the union, which has set up a group, WakeUpWalMart.com, that has harshly criticized the chain and leaked embarrassing internal documents to the news media, though an accord has not yet been reached.

Mrs. Clinton declined to be interviewed for this article. In a statement, her spokesman said, Wal-Mart is now one of the countrys largest employers, and Mrs. Clinton still believes it is important to try to influence the decisions they make because they can affect so many people.

In Mrs. Clintons complex relationship with Wal-Mart, there are echoes of the familiar themes that have defined much of her career: the trailblazing woman unafraid of challenging the men around her; the idealist pushing for complicated, at times expensive, reforms; and the political pragmatist, willing to accept policies she did not agree with to achieve her ends.

Did Hillary like all of Wal-Mart practices? No, said Garry Mauro, a longtime friend and supporter of the Clintons who sat on the Wal-Mart Environmental Advisory Board with Mrs. Clinton in the late 1980s and worked with her on George McGoverns 1972 presidential campaign.

But, Mr. Mauro added, was Wal-Mart a better company, with better practices, because Hillary was on the board? Yes.

Mrs. Clinton was not Mr. Waltons first choice for a woman on the board. That honor belonged to an executive at Nordstrom, the upscale department store. But Nordstrom opposed its employees sitting on a competitors board, so Wal-Mart turned instead to the 39-year-old Mrs. Clinton. They offered her about $15,000 a year for her time, generally four meetings a year.

She was a logical candidate: the wife of the governor, a Wal-Mart shareholder — with stock eventually worth nearly $100,000 — and a highly regarded lawyer at the Rose Law Firm, which had represented Wal-Mart in several cases.

But if her circumstances made her a natural choice for the board, her often liberal beliefs did not and she struggled to change the rigid, conservative culture at Wal-Mart, achieving modest results.

Early in her tenure, she pressed for information about the number of women in Wal-Marts management, worrying aloud that the companys hiring practices might be discriminatory.

The data she received would have been troubling: by 1985, there was not a single woman among the companys top 42 officers, according to In Sam We Trust, the 1998 book about Wal-Mart by Bob Ortega.

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