CHAPTER 18

The Name Doesn’t Matter—Fords and Clintons

Their names even sound presidential—Leslie Lynch King Jr. and William Jefferson Blythe III. However, because of divorce and death, we know them as Gerald Rudolph Ford Jr. and William Jefferson Clinton. Their fathers and stepfathers could hardly have been more different. The same could be said of their mothers, beyond a shared pride in the men their sons became.

Dorothy and Leslie King

The first time Leslie Lynch King hit his bride was on their honeymoon. In a hotel elevator a man tipped his hat to Dorothy, and she smiled back in acknowledgment. Once in their room, Leslie became enraged, accused his young wife of flirting or worse, and slapped her repeatedly. Their wedding, on Saturday, September 7, 1912, at Christ Episcopal Church in Harvard, Illinois, had been the highlight of the town’s social season. Dorothy Ayer Gardner’s father, a wealthy businessman, was a former mayor of Harvard. Her mother was descended from the old New England family that had founded the town. Dorothy, born on February 22, 1892, was bright as well as attractive. Her parents sent her to a small, select college in Illinois that King’s sister Marietta also attended. “Dot” Gardner at twenty is described by James Cannon as a “fair, buxom brunette with a quick smile, enthusiasm for life and energy.” She had been at the school for only one year when she encountered dashing Leslie King. Ten years older than Dorothy and described by Cannon as a “tall and handsome blond, with his big open face, blue eyes, strong jaw and muscular shoulders,” he all but swept her off to the altar. It was not a protracted courtship. Reared in an Omaha mansion, Leslie fascinated Dorothy with his plans for the future. He also impressed her parents.

Things went wrong almost from the start. The wedding gift of Leslie’s father, Charles King, was a leisurely, luxurious honeymoon, traveling by Pullman train throughout the West Coast and then back to Omaha. For Dorothy each stop turned into an exercise in terror, followed by an emotional reconciliation. After the couple finally got to Omaha, King not only beat his wife, he threw her out of the house. Somehow she found her way to the railroad station and back home to her horrified parents.

In a matter of weeks, Leslie appeared on their doorstep, even more contrite than before, and although she must have known better, Dorothy went back to Omaha with him. That time their home was a dingy basement apartment. By then Dorothy was pregnant. She hoped that perhaps having a child might improve their marital relationship. On July 14, 1913, Leslie Lynch King Jr. was born. It would not be his name for long. Unfortunately, Leslie only became more abusive. Dorothy wrapped her sixteen-day-old son in a blanket and fled the house. In December 1913 she obtained a divorce on the grounds of “extreme cruelty.”

Whatever the circumstances, divorce in those times in a straight-laced little town in the Midwest constituted a scandal, and the Gardners moved to Grand Rapids, Michigan. Developed by thrifty, enterprising German and Dutch immigrants, in 1915 it boasted seventy furniture factories, 134 churches, and the highest rate of home ownership in the United States. One historian described it as “America at its best.” In one of its more comfortable homes lived the relocated Levi and Adele Gardner, their daughter, and their grandson. The young man, initially simply called “Junie” for “Junior,” as Cannon writes, “came out of the crib as a healthy, tow-headed boy with a toothy grin and boundless energy.”

He would see his birth father again only twice. King remarried, moved to Wyoming, inherited some money, and ultimately became the proprietor of a large ranch. Coming to Michigan to pick up a new Lincoln, he tracked down his renamed son, then in high school and working at a diner. Announcing to the stunned sixteen-year-old, “I am your father,” he unsuccessfully offered to take the boy back west with him. Working at Yellowstone one summer, his son turned the tables and visited him at his spacious spread in Wyoming, a meeting no more relaxed or productive than the first.

Leslie Lynch King Sr. died in Tucson, Arizona, on February 13, 1941, at the age of fifty-nine. The cause of his ferocity toward the mother of his son is buried in the mysteries of psychopathology. That son had cemented his judgment at their first meeting in Michigan, concluding, “Nothing could erase the image that I gained of my father that day: a carefree, well-to-do man who didn’t really give a damn about the hopes and dreams of his firstborn son.” His true father, the man he “loved and learned from and respected,” was named Gerald Rudolph Ford.

Dorothy and Gerald Ford Sr.

At a “social” at Grace Episcopal Church, Dorothy had met this amiable young man of twenty-four and was impressed with his earnest manner. Tall and slender, he was dark and not particularly dashing, physically very little like Leslie King. That he liked Dot Gardner was obvious. Gerald Ford was a hardworking paint and varnish salesman, anxious to have his own business. Born in Grand Rapids, he had to leave school at the age of fourteen to support his mother and sisters after his father had been killed in a train accident. He was rather shy and serious, yet Cannon also cites his “ready smile” and “booming laugh.”

What Dorothy also discovered was that he was a bachelor who genuinely loved children, a major consideration. There might be nothing flashy about this suitor, but there was nothing contrived about him, either. Dorothy Gardner and Gerald Ford were married where they had met, at Grace Church, on February 1, 1916. They would have three boys together—Thomas, in 1918; Richard, in 1924; and James, in 1927. The boys would know their older brother as “Jerry.” His new name, Gerald Rudolph Ford Jr., was not made official until 1935, when he was twenty-two.

Even-tempered Gerald Ford Sr. also sought to be even-handed, but young Jerry was already at an age where they could be companions, go fishing together, and toss a football back and forth. Gerald Jr. also emerged as a protective role model to his younger brothers. Since Gerald Sr. was so often immersed in business and community projects, it fell to Dorothy to do most of the day-to-day parenting. “As a child,” Ford recalled, rather hard to believe in terms of his later image, “I had a hot temper which Mother taught me to control—most of the time.” She was a devout Episcopalian whose favorite excerpt from Proverbs was to turn away anger: “Trust in the Lord…. He shall direct thy paths.” It is due to his mother’s influence more than any other that Ford’s autobiography would be aptly named A Time for Healing. His father’s influence is reflected in his plainspoken approach to public life. “I’m a Ford, not a Lincoln,” he announced when succeeding President Nixon.

Gerald Ford paid tribute to his mother as “the most selfless woman I have ever known.” Her neighbors and friends in their oral biographies used words such as “wonderful,” “gracious,” “tireless,” and “vivacious” to describe her ceaseless activity in church and community. As for Gerald Ford Sr., he had only three rules for his four sons: work hard to make something of yourself, never under any circumstances tell a lie, and come to dinner on time. Richard Ford recalled, “It was a very frank, open kind of relationship.”

After Ford went into business for himself, his income rose, and the family moved to much larger and more spacious premises. It seemed almost a Norman Rockwellian setting, with Dorothy presiding over a bountiful dinner table and inviting everyone to take part. Ford fondly recalled, “Having the family together for major holidays … would fill her with joy and she wasn’t shy about expressing it.” In Buchen’s opinion, “Jerry’s … way with people I think he got from his mother, who was a very sociable woman … took a great interest in all Jerry’s friends … and I’m sure gave him his warm, outgoing qualities.”

If his father’s warmth lay within, his mother’s was displayed for all to see. During the prosperous years, energetic Dorothy Ford was involved in virtually every local activity. But she wasn’t merely the customary clubwoman. She had a genuine commitment to helping others. As Ford recalled, “When she wasn’t attending meetings, she was busy baking bread or sewing clothes for needy families.” She also volunteered at the Well Baby Clinic, made dolls for poor children at Christmas, and was a member of the NAACP as well as the DAR. The Fords welcomed their sons’ friends, black or white, into their home. When Jerry attended the University of Michigan, he saw nothing unusual about befriending the football team’s only African American player and rooming with him on road trips.

Dorothy’s faith motivated the involvement of every member of the household. Gerald Sr. helped form Youth Commonwealth, committed to assisting the poorest children in Grand Rapids, and was a deacon at Grace. Their sons served as acolytes and choir members and attended weekly services and Sunday school. All the boys became Eagle Scouts. As a neighbor put it, the Fords “didn’t talk religion, they just lived it.”

Although Jerry seemed almost effortlessly popular at school and became renowned for his athletic exploits, he had early difficulties in the classroom, having to overcome a stuttering problem and being left-handed, of some concern to his parents. By 1922 the senior Ford had more serious problems. A national recession following World War I was felt with great severity in the Midwest. Furniture sales plummeted, and so did his income. The mortgage on their house was foreclosed, and the family was obliged to move back to rented quarters. Not everything in Jerry Ford’s childhood was idyllic. When it came time to choose a high school, Ford Sr. suggested to his son that he attend South High, where the poorer kids tended to go. “It will help you learn about living.”

However, South High was also noted for the quality of its teaching—and its football team. Although only five-foot-eight and 130 pounds when he entered high school, gangling Jerry Ford became an all-city center on a championship team and a letter-winner in three sports. He did well enough academically but excelled in extracurricular activities. A quiet leader like his father, Ford was voted “the most popular high school senior” in Grand Rapids. The reward was an eye-opening trip to Washington, D.C. Jerry decided he wanted to be a lawyer and perhaps someday even a legislator.

The Ford Painting and Varnish Company would face its greatest challenge during the Depression of the 1930s. Ford called in his workforce of ten and told them no one would be laid off. Somehow they would get through it together. Everyone would make five dollars a week, including himself, to at least “keep in groceries.” The company survived, but it was a close thing. By a combination of grants and grit, young Ford was able to enter the University of Michigan in 1931. Jerry managed to enjoy an active if frugal social life, became an all-American center on the football team, and graduated with a B average. Declining an opportunity to play professional football, Ford pursued his original goals, helping to pay his tuition at Yale Law School by serving as assistant football coach, gaining his degree, and passing the bar. It is an enduring irony that the finest athlete to serve in the presidency would later be satirized as clumsy.

One of the senior Ford’s gifts to his oldest son was whetting his appetite for politics, a commitment they came to share. As his business gradually recovered, Gerald Ford Sr. became chairman of the Kent County Republican Committee, helping to launch the “home front” that eventually displaced a corrupt, locally dominant political machine.

Jerry Ford practiced law in Grand Rapids for only a year before joining the navy early in 1942. Requesting sea duty, he saw considerable action in the Pacific, rising to the rank of lieutenant commander. Returning to his law practice in 1945, he soon became involved in local politics. In his first race, for the House of Representatives in 1948, Ford—a moderate internationalist—won an uphill Republican primary against the incumbent isolationist and went on to win the general election. Again, he had emulated his father, opposing entrenched power. Before the election, his mother decided it was time to ask her thirty-four-year-old son, “When are you going to settle down?” On October 15, 1948, Gerald R. Ford Jr. married Elizabeth Ann “Betty” Bloomer, with whom he would have four children.

His true father, this unobtrusive but “marvelous family man,” would share the joy of these grandchildren as well as the satisfaction of witnessing at least the inception of his oldest son’s national political career. He died on January 26, 1962, at the age of seventy-two. He had slipped on the ice, receiving a concussion, but a heart attack was the immediate cause of death. It is not too much to say that Gerald Rudolph Ford Sr., memorialized by his son as “one of the truly outstanding people I ever knew in my life,” was mourned by virtually the entire community. He left a modest financial legacy sufficient to provide for his wife’s welfare, but his legacy to his community was hardly modest. To Gerald Rudolph Ford Jr., as Cannon writes, it was “incalculable … his own good name, and the example of hard work, integrity, and fair play on which Ford built his public life.”

Dorothy Ford expressed enough interest in politics to urge her son, so secure in the House, not to pursue the vice presidency. “It would be nothing but headaches,” she predicted, preferring that he retain the significant job he already held.

That she lived as long as she did was remarkable. She had many serious health problems—high blood pressure, diabetes, and cataracts in both eyes—and had endured a double mastectomy and other major surgeries. Most persistent had been heart trouble, resulting in two heart attacks. But she insisted, her spirits ever high, “I want to die with my boots on.” In 1965, Ford had been named minority leader of the House. Two years later, as her son reconstructed the scene, Dorothy was “just sitting there in her pew” at Grace, waiting for the service to start, when her heart condition finally took her life. It was September 17, 1967. She was seventy-four. On the day she died, Dorothy Ford’s appointment book was full for months to come.

In the spring of 1932, close to Mother’s Day, Jerry had sent his mother an apologetic letter from his fraternity house at Michigan: “I’d like to send you flowers or candy or something but my financial condition is dreadfully insecure. So this will have to do…. Have a fine time and maybe next year I’ll be able to do something more.” One suspects she felt that he had already done more than enough—by justifying the values she had brought into their home, derived from the structure where she had spent her final hour.

Virginia and William Jefferson Blythe III

Bill Blythe could charm anyone. How many women he married, how many children he fathered, is still not certain. When nursing student Virginia Cassidy first glimpsed Blythe that night in 1941 as he came into the emergency ward at Shreveport’s Tri-State Hospital, it was quite literally love at first sight, at least on her part. Unfortunately, the very tall, sandy-haired, ruggedly handsome Blythe had another young woman in tow. She needed an immediate appendectomy and was rushed into the operating room. When apprentice nurse Cassidy saw Blythe turn toward her “and his eyes met mine,” as she recalled a half-century later, she almost required some resuscitation of her own. She was “stunned…. He smiled and the only way I can describe it is that he had a glow about him. I was weak-kneed and also embarrassed.” Blythe’s girlfriend at the time recovered; Virginia did not. Soon she was seeing Blythe regularly, although she was already engaged and nursing students were supposed to stay single.

Virginia brought Bill home to Hope, Arkansas, some fifty miles away, where she had been born on June 6, 1923, to meet her parents. When her exacting mother, Edith Grisham Cassidy, looked into Blythe’s deep blue eyes, her initial reservations dissipated. She envisioned at least a stable future for Virginia, whom she didn’t view as a model of stability. Blythe was neither wealthy nor educated, but he seemed to have a great deal of energy, and he certainly exuded charm. As for Virginia’s father, Hope’s genial long-time iceman, James Eldridge Cassidy, he liked just about everybody.

Blythe was on his way back home to Sherman, Texas, to enlist in the army. He had a good job in Chicago selling heavy automotive equipment, and it would be waiting for him when he came back from the service. Despite his aristocratic-sounding name, William Jefferson Blythe Jr., he was the oldest son of a poor farming family in Texas. His father had died when Bill was only in his early teens, obliging him to leave school around the eighth grade and work to support his mother and his siblings. His sales job meant being on the road a good deal, but it was a life he liked, and it paid well.

At the time, Virginia Cassidy was still a fresh-faced, spontaneous girl not long out of high school, where she had been quite popular and an excellent student. To make extra money, she worked as a waitress. She had only recently begun to emulate her mother’s addiction to cosmetics and flirting. Edith Grisham Cassidy, through little more than a correspondence course, had attained a respected position as a private-duty nurse. For some reason, nothing her daughter did seemed to please her. Her mild-mannered husband, whom everyone called “Eldridge,” doted on their only child, whom he fondly called “Ginger.” Lighthearted Virginia didn’t take this domestic trauma to school. Despite Edith’s seeming disapproval, she couldn’t help admiring her mother’s steely determination to better herself. Virginia’s goal at graduation from Hope High School, in the ominous year of 1941, was to escape to somewhere more exciting and a life more promising. She got as far as Shreveport, where she was accepted to nursing school at the Tri-State Hospital, shed her small-town inhibitions with a more active social life, and ran into engaging Bill Blythe. What she didn’t know was that he had been married at least three times before, had impregnated other women, and may well have been at least technically married at the time they met. But in her smitten state, even that might not have mattered to Virginia.

The two were married by a justice of the peace in Texarkana, on the Texas-Arkansas border, on September 3, 1943. She was twenty, he twenty-five. A few weeks later, Blythe enlisted and was sent to North Africa and then to Italy, specializing in the repair of vehicles, an area he knew well. He was mustered out at the end of December 1945 as a technical sergeant, and they moved to Chicago, where he got his old job back. Virginia and Bill lived in a hotel in the Loop while they waited to take possession of a new home in suburban Forest Park. Soon she was pregnant. More than a bit lonely when Bill was on the road, she and her husband reached a difficult decision. Virginia would return to her family’s home in Hope to prepare for the birth of their child. Perhaps her mother might finally treat her as a responsible adult, and it would only be for a short time, in any case. Bill Blythe, having seen the world, had no intention of settling down in a hick town of less than ten thousand like Hope, Arkansas.

The Blythes’ home was ready in May, and Bill had returned from his sales trip. On a weekend, he drove south to pick up his wife, gunning straight through at a high rate of speed. Somewhere in Missouri, on May 17, 1946, one of his tires blew out, and he was tossed from the car and killed instantly. Ironically, Blythe would be buried in Rose Hill Cemetery, in the plot of his wife’s family, within a town he loathed and she had sought to escape.

On August 19, 1946, the boy who was technically William Jefferson Blythe III was delivered by cesarean section, a month ahead of schedule. Suspicious tongues wagged throughout Hope that perhaps Bill Blythe was not his real father. Eventually, Virginia learned more about her husband’s lurid past, but she still remained loyal to his memory, continuing to insist that she could judge Bill Blythe only by the way he had treated her. “I’ll go to my grave,” she wrote, “knowing I was the love of his life.”

Virginia and Roger Clinton

Women have been fighting over the man who became Bill Clinton since the day he was born, from his maternal grandmother to, much later, his admiring high school principal. From the first, Edith Cassidy, only forty-five, viewed herself as better qualified to raise little Bill than her inexperienced daughter. Moreover, to gain her credentials as a nurse anesthetist, Virginia had to take courses in New Orleans, leaving her boy under Edith’s care and influence. When bronchial problems had ended Eldridge’s career as Hope’s iceman, he opened a grocery store in a poor neighborhood. Hope had gone dry in 1944, and the nearest source of alcohol was Texarkana. Under the counter of Eldridge’s store was his stash of bootleg liquor, supplied by a man named Roger Clinton, who also was reputed to own the Buick dealership in town. Everyone called him “Dude,” and it was easy to see why. As Virginia wrote, “He dressed to kill, with sharp-creased trousers and fine-tailored sports coats and two-toned shoes.” He stood about five-foot-eleven, not quite as tall as Bill Blythe, and had dark curly hair. His eyes twinkled when he talked. He was the life of any party, and he loved partying. Virginia wrote, “Men adored him, women found him charming.”

But there was also a sense of danger about Roger Clinton. He drank heavily. He gambled, sometimes recklessly. Gambling was illegal in Arkansas, but law enforcement was often influenced to look the other way, particularly in the wide-open resort city of Hot Springs. Roger’s older brother, Raymond, who largely ran the lives of his four siblings, was one of the power elite in that “sin city.” His major problem was Roger, who was also a notorious womanizer—Virginia must have heard about it—and when things weren’t going his way, he could turn violent.

Things, however, weren’t exactly going Virginia’s way back home with her mother. Edith insisted that she had already discerned that young Bill possessed special gifts. It was important that he not acquire the undisciplined habits of his mother. As for Eldridge, predictably, he adored the child, just as he adored the child’s mother. When Virginia had been in New Orleans and his wife was called away, Eldridge took the lively, chubby, cheerful little boy down to sit on the counter at his store. For the first time, Bill saw desegregation with his own eyes, a rarity in Hope, since his grandfather’s store was frequented by both black and white customers.

Both sides of Virginia’s emerging duality had been brought out in the Crescent City, its attractions enticing even as she vigorously pursued her studies. Edith was so concerned that Virginia might marry someone like Roger Clinton that she threatened to seek legal custody of the exceptional four-year-old with limitless potential whom she now called “Billy.” He was the son she’d never had. But once again Virginia fell for the blandishments of a fast-talking suitor. Since they had become reacquainted, Roger had been a perfect gentleman, at least around her. She convinced herself that through her love and Roger’s money, they could provide a secure home for little Bill, beyond the influence of his excessively intrusive grandmother.

On June 19, 1950, Virginia married Roger Clinton. She was twenty-seven, he was forty. At first, all went well. Although still in Hope, the Clintons moved into a new home in a congenial neighborhood of other mostly young families. Roger managed the Buick dealership, while Virginia readily found work, although it kept her out at all hours. There was a demand for qualified anesthesiologists, even in a small town like Hope. A nanny was hired to look after Bill. He enjoyed playing with other children, as long as he was the center of attention, a likely residue of his grandmother’s spoiling.

However, the domestic idyll didn’t last long. All the rumors about Roger soon turned to reality. Worse than his continuing drinking and gambling, which ate up the paychecks Virginia dutifully gave him to help pay the mortgage, Roger became abusive. Precisely what, he wanted to know, was Virginia doing with all those doctors after their late-night labors? As his alcoholism became more acute, his accusations turned to violence. He not only hit his wife, he once fired a shot that narrowly missed her head. She had to call the police and send her son to a neighbor’s. Invariably, after Roger sobered up, he pleaded with his wife for forgiveness and promised to reform. Virginia always took him back, hoping this time it might be true, but her main concern was for Bill, now terrified as well as mystified. He was special, she told him as he grew older. She knew it, just as her mother had known it. He was intended to do great things, and nothing should get in the way. He learned early on how to compartmentalize his life to focus only on the positive and to sublimate the rest.

In 1952, ostensibly to get a new start, the family moved to Hot Springs, into a home owned by Roger’s brother. Hot Springs was nothing like Hope. Within the resort city there was an almost startling separation, not unlike that in Las Vegas today—on one side, the luxurious hotels containing every sort of action; on the other, a settled community of neat homes, schools, and churches. Vice and virtue coexisted side by side, and sometimes overlapped. The enticing attractions of Hot Springs not only brought out the worst in Roger Clinton but also embodied the inner conflicts of his wife. She was proficient in her profession and very conscientious, but she also wanted to join the perpetual party on the other side of town. She tore around at all hours in her flashy convertible and dressed in a provocative fashion, heavily made up. Hot Springs was hardly the location for reconciliation, and the arguments between Bill’s parents rarely ceased. The relationship with his grandmother had receded by this time.

Yet all this turmoil didn’t inhibit Bill’s progress, in or out of school. He did well everywhere, first in Catholic school, then in public school. At the age of ten he announced to the astonished pastor of Park Place Baptist Church that he planned to attend services regularly, with or without his parents. He learned to concentrate, whatever the disorder around him. In 1956 his parents presented him with quite a surprise. They had a child, and he had a younger brother named Roger Cassidy Clinton. Anxious to shield little Roger as much as possible from what he had witnessed, Bill became almost a substitute father, a “man-child,” as David Maraniss puts it, the one fully functioning member of an irretrievably dysfunctional family.

In high school, Bill really came into his own. He was never formally adopted by Roger Clinton, but at the age of fifteen, Bill took his surname legally, finally becoming William Jefferson Clinton. It would avoid potential confusion and embarrassment, although Bill always insisted, “The name doesn’t matter; it’s the man.” Except for sports, Bill excelled in just about everything at Hot Springs High. He was an excellent student, the acknowledged leader of his class. Although rather chunky, he was also quite popular with the girls. In 1963, representing Arkansas in Boys Nation, Clinton went to Washington and maneuvered himself into position to meet President Kennedy personally, resulting in a memorable photograph he treasured.

At high school, Bill also came under the influence of his third maternal figure, principal Johnnie Mae Mackey, a widow who came to see him as her surrogate son. The opposite of Virginia Clinton in every way, Mackey was the walking embodiment of propriety. They had both lost husbands, in Mackey’s case her sole husband. When she had to tell Clinton that, having already headed so many other activities, he could not run for student body president, she burst into tears. However, Bill was selected to deliver the final address at his high school commencement. It was more a prayer than an oration: “And Lord, once more, make us care that we will never know the misery and muddle of a life without purpose.” With that performance, Bill had done the impossible, reuniting the two other women vying for his affection. Virginia could not wait to share her joy with her one-time rival, Edith Cassidy. She wrote to her mother, “I was so proud of him I nearly died. He was truly in all his glory.”

In 1959 Bill had experienced a defining moment not unlike young Ronald Reagan’s decision to drag his drunken father into the house. After drinking tumblers of whiskey and screaming at Virginia as usual, Roger strode over to hit her, as he had done so many times before. Bill had seen enough of it. He intervened, grabbing his stepfather and telling him in even tones, “Hear me—never ever touch my mother again.” He was already stronger than a stepfather whose health was beginning to deteriorate. His action affirmed that he was now the man of the house.

Virginia divorced Roger in 1962. Yet, despite everything, within three months she took him back. He had taken to sleeping on their front porch, now more a pathetic figure than a threatening one. The largest bedroom was now Bill’s, the property his own domain, his launching pad. The first step in his rapid ascent was to attend Georgetown University.

Roger reflected on Bill and on a final opportunity for reconciliation. How could it be that such a promising young man would carry on his name? The transition in their relationship was remarkable, but little time remained. Roger was diagnosed with cancer in 1965, and although he underwent massive radiation treatments, he knew his time was running out. Bill came down every weekend he could to visit Roger at Duke Medical Center. When he couldn’t visit, he wrote compassionate, positive letters to his “Daddy.” In 1967 Roger was moved back home, with constant medical care. He died on November 8, 1967, at the age of fifty-eight. When Bill was named a Rhodes Scholar the following spring, he shed tears of sorrow that he could not share the news with the only father he had ever known.

High-spirited Virginia Dell Cassidy Blythe Clinton Dwire Kelley would marry twice after the death of Roger Clinton, but one should not be misled. William Jefferson Clinton was the man in her life. At thirty-two, only ten years after graduating from Georgetown, Bill Clinton would be elected governor of Arkansas. Fourteen years later he would be president. His mother shared it all. Yet, if her faith in him had justified her life, through her own example she also contributed to Bill Clinton in a less positive way. As Maraniss writes, “He had been reared by a mother who loved to flirt … and he left home just as the country was entering a new age of sexual freedom.” The serial infidelities of Bill Clinton, even after becoming a husband and father and after entering the White House, rivaled those of John F. Kennedy, except for a diminution in class and an emphasis on rhetorical hair-splitting.

This ambivalence in so impressive a public figure must have had its genesis in his environment growing up. Yet fortitude is the quality he most shared with his mother. When she witnessed his announcement for the presidency, no longer surprised by anything he might accomplish, she knew she was dying of breast cancer. But she would not tell her son, not yet, not before he won. She passed away a year after his inauguration, on January 6, 1994, at the age of seventy, and was finally reunited with Bill Blythe in Rose Hill Cemetery. As her son would say, “I come from a town called Hope.” In his mother’s view of his progression, hope would be replaced by certainty.