In 1973, Bill Clinton was nearing the end of his time as a student at Yale Law School. He had already graduated from Georgetown and attended Oxford on a Rhodes Scholarship.
The next step in Clinton's life, one which would pave the way for his entry into politics, was a return to his home state of Arkansas.
Clinton's somewhat embellished the story of his return for years, as revealed by David Maraniss in his 1995 biography of Clinton, First in His Class.
Clinton would say that his return to his home state as an assistant professor at the University of Arkansas School of Law was " a pure accident" (although Clinton's telling of the tale in his auto-biography My Life would be somewhat more true to what actually happened).
As Clinton would say, he was driving home from Connecticut at the end of his tenure at Yale, and at the advice of a professor, called the dean of the Arkansas Law School and was able to talk his way into a job interview in a spur of the moment event.
The truth, as Maraniss found, was that Clinton lobbied for the job months before he graduated through a politically-connected friend in Arkansas who served as a state legislator and knew an associate dean at the law school.
The dean of the law school, Wylie H. Davis, told Maraniss for his book that Clinton's telling was "amusingly inaccurate and somewhat melodramatic."
Clinton's hiring was fairly routine, Davis said, and Clinton's glowing resume, great letters of recommendation, and a meeting in which he impressed the school's faculty appointments committee were what would eventually lead to his hiring at the law school.
Documents related to Clinton's hiring and time at the school were obtained by BuzzFeed News through an open records request with the University of Arkansas.
Clinton's personnel file from the school details his hiring and time as a professor, including reviews of his performance from faculty, several handwritten notes, and letters to request leave for his early runs for office.
The highlights and the full file are below: