CHAPTER 4

The Bubba Boomer

Bill Clinton represented a new masculine archetype.

Not that American males ever emulated him, not consciously. But many men across the land already shared some of his propensities. Clinton was that rare public figure who encapsulated the whole brash package: the perpetually horny, ever-prevaricating, irrepressibly optimistic, in-touch-with-his-inner-Hillary, emotionally expressive (if artificially sweetened) Bubba Boomer.

As the dominant figure of ’90s America, he had a persona, a worldview—and a rash of peccadilloes—that helped shape and scar the national psyche. As such, any psychosocial assessment of the national manhood in that decade requires a deep dive into Clinton the man.

Bill Clinton, alone among American presidents, is the leader we associate, in a single breath, with sex.¹ And Clinton’s studly reputation—as archaic as that sounds today—may have worked in his favor in the ’92 election, especially in light of his opponent: incumbent president George H. W. Bush.

During the previous election cycle, Vice President Bush had been portrayed by the media and his Democratic foes as lacking a requisite manliness. Newsweek put it plainly in a low-blow cover story: “George Bush: Fighting the ‘Wimp Factor.’” Writer Margaret Garrard Warner asserted that “Bush suffers from a potentially crippling handicap—a perception that he isn’t strong enough or tough enough for the challenges of the Oval Office. That he is, in a single mean word, a wimp.”

Going after this particular candidate’s machismo was a cheap shot, and unjustifiable. Bush had been a Navy aviator, a war hero, the chief of the CIA, the head of the Republican National Committee, and an envoy to both China and the U.N. His single-term foreign policy record was sterling: removing strongman Manuel Noriega from power in Panama; coordinating the West’s measured response as the Berlin Wall fell and the Soviet Union collapsed; and rebuffing Iraq’s invasion of Kuwait. All in four years.

Even so, the slur stuck. The same month as Newsweek’s takedown, a Doonesbury cartoon strip also used the wimprimatur. (Doonesbury’s creator, Garry Trudeau, had previously accused Mr. Bush of being so deferential to Ronald Reagan that he’d agreed to place his “manhood in a blind trust.”) Half of the nation’s voters, in fact, told pollsters that Bush had an image problem. On TV, his voice came across as reedy. And as he hit the stump and the airwaves, the man who seemed to be forever shrouded in the shadow of the Great Communicator appeared “stiff or silly,” by Newsweek’s gauge, and unable to “project self-confidence, wit or warmth to television viewers.”

It was partly a function of manner. Bush was levelheaded, a centrist, an experienced diplomat. He was a politician who’d gotten into the game not for the power jag but to serve. In an age when voters were eager for ego, Bush quashed his own for the sake of the common good—or, in one infamous instance, a bipartisan tax deal.

But H.W. couldn’t shake the W. tag. Yes, he’d managed to defeat an even wimpier adversary in 1988: the diminutive Mike Dukakis, who in one campaign photo op had posed punily in the commander’s hatch of a tank. And yet the president was still perceived as that privileged son of a senator, Connecticut’s honorable Prescott Bush. As a boy, he’d been “chauffeured to the Greenwich Country Day School,” according to Time, and was occasionally “spanked by his father with a squash racquet.” He was an Episcopalian swell, as Texas governor Ann Richards once quipped, “born with a silver foot in his mouth.” He had a wife (Babs!) with such a snow-white coif that people sometimes mistook her for his mum. He had nicknames (Poppy! Gampy!) that made it sound as if he was already bound for assisted living.

And his biggest campaign gaffe of all against Bill Clinton? Bush was accused of being utterly flummoxed one day on the campaign trail when he came across a grocery barcode scanner. The implication? This pampered preppie had rarely set foot in a supermarket and therefore couldn’t grasp the everyday financial strains of the common voter.

The incident became Bush’s albatross. It wasn’t just a matter of the old boy being out of the loop. It was a reflection of the anemic economy he was overseeing. For that rough patch in the late ’80s (when Wall Street took a nosedive), to the oil-price spike-and-plummet after Iraq’s 1990 invasion of Kuwait, to the 1992 election, Bush had been the helmsman of a listing ship. The captain—who had vowed never to raise taxes and then had done exactly that—would have to be relieved of his duties and replaced by a more strapping and daring sort of sailor.

From the 1890s to the 1990s, the presidential role model had gone from the backwoodsy, gun-toting Rough Rider (TR) to the prepster from Phillips Academy and Yale (GHWB). And in the second half of the century, four mucho macho men stood out.

There was John Kennedy, who today might arguably be categorized as a sexual predator. Though JFK was praised as a family man—married to the most glamorous first lady of the twentieth century—the press corps and the public wink-winked throughout his presidency.2 (Kennedy would privately insist that he needed to have sex daily—to avoid headaches, as he put it. And in a story that might have even been true, he supposedly bragged that he wasn’t satisfied with a lover unless he’d “had her three ways.”)³ The Camelot myth, however, painted JFK as a picture of potency. He possessed the Kennedy pedigree, a combat veteran’s bravura, and the vigor of youth (age forty-three when he took office). He also projected an athleticism that masked his physical ailments (Addison’s disease, chronic back pain).

Lyndon Johnson, following suit, was a legendary philanderer in chief. Rabelaisian, proud, and occasionally vulgar, he was known to flabbergast acquaintances by whipping out his Texas longhorn of a pecker. Historian Robert Dallek has attested that on one occasion the president got so angry with newsmen who were pressing him to justify America’s role in the Vietnam War that he went full johnson. “According to [U.N. ambassador] Arthur Goldberg,” Dallek writes, “L.B.J. unzipped his fly, drew out his substantial organ and declared, ‘This is why!’”4

In 1981 came Ronald Reagan, the first divorced president—a daring social precedent. Not only did the conservative ex-governor exude Hollywood allure, as did his movie-star wife, but he was actually a product of the entertainment trade, having started out as a radio sports announcer, then a player in the studio system, then the head of the powerful Screen Actors Guild. His was not sex appeal as much as it was celebrity glam.

Ron in black tie and Nancy in sequins, dancing across a 1985 cover of Vanity Fair, did the Kennedys one better. And when the photographer for that shoot, the legendary Harry Benson, persuaded them to pose for a close-up kiss—“like a big-screen, Technicolor fade-out, just before the credits roll,” as Benson now puts it—the picture would run across two full pages in the magazine. In the accompanying text, none other than William F. Buckley Jr. would gush that “the Reagans think it altogether splendid to dance together in their own version of Camelot.” And the lines began to blur irrevocably between Washington and Hollywood, politics and marketing, power and romance.

And then up jumped Bill.

The tale of Clinton’s roots is hardly that of Moses in the bulrushes. But it has the requisite predestination of the best presidential lore.

By now the story has become familiar. William Jefferson Blythe III came into this world in 1946 in a town called Hope (population 6,000), an Arkansas hollow of watermelon patches, buttermilk churns, and phones with party lines. He was conceived, almost to the very week, on the leading edge of the Baby Boom. And ever the true Boomer, he would adopt the pop-culture fascinations of his peers: Flash Gordon movie serials, Baby Huey cartoons, TV’s Howdy Doody. He favored Hostess fried pies and Royal Crown Cola. He attended Saturday matinees for a dime, finding inspiration in High Noon’s Marshal Will Kane, played by Gary Cooper. He took up the tenor sax (attending band camp six summers running), formed a high school trio, and revered Ray Charles and Elvis Presley. (Elvis became the moniker bestowed upon the guv by his ’92 staff. The name of his campaign plane? Air Elvis.)

As destined births go, Billy’s was not without its auguries. Three months before, his father W. J. Blythe Jr., had been the victim of a freak car accident. Ejected from his vehicle during a crash, he’d crawled from the wreckage, only to drown in a waterlogged ditch. Blythe was twenty-eight years old.

When his widow, Virginia Dell Blythe, gave birth on August 19, 1946, “there had been record heat the day before,” writes David Maraniss in the Clinton biography First in His Class, “exceeding a hundred degrees, followed by a ferocious thunderstorm that cracked and boomed all night, igniting three fires in town. The local moviehouse happened to be showing a film that captured [the] twenty-three-year-old mother’s predicament: The Young Widow, starring Jane Russell.”

Virginia was a let-loose, life-of-the-party gal. And it didn’t take a slide rule for local folks to float the rumors. Nine months before his son was born, W.J. Jr., a salesman turned World War II mechanic, had not been in Hope, some said—or even in Arkansas. He’d reportedly been in war-torn Italy servicing the U.S. Army’s tanks and transport vehicles. “There were whispers in Hope about who little Billy’s father was,” Maraniss contends, “[partly] spawned by Virginia’s flirtatious nature.” And yet Maraniss’s research shows that Virginia Blythe gave birth a month ahead of schedule—by C-section—which would place the child’s conception at a time when Blythe had already returned stateside. What’s more, contemporaneous acquaintances of Bill’s have said that he bore an uncanny resemblance to W. J. Blythe.

Blythe himself had hardly been a choirboy. Unbeknownst to Virginia, he had already fathered two children over the course of three broken marriages. Clinton, in his memoir My Life, would later describe his father in terms that would suit them both: “a handsome, hardworking, fun-loving man.” Blythe’s loss left the son “with the feeling that I had to live for two people.… The knowledge that I, too, could die young drove me… to try to drain the most out of every moment.”

At age four, Billy would gain a stepdad, Roger Clinton, the owner of the local Buick dealership. The elder Clinton had been a runaround and a violent one at that, even while he was dating the boy’s mom. In court papers, Clinton’s ex-wife had claimed her husband was a batterer, and he would go on to repeat that pattern, abusing Virginia during drink-fueled outbursts.

Early on in their marriage, Roger Clinton pulled out a gun in the middle of one of his rages and fired a bullet into a nearby wall, just missing his wife and stepson; the cops were summoned. When Bill was fourteen, one altercation got so heated that when he rushed to his mother’s aid and found Roger smacking Virginia, Bill took matters into his own hands. “I grabbed a golf club out of my bag,” Clinton would recall. “I told him to stop and said that if he didn’t I was going to beat the hell out of him.… We didn’t have any more trouble for a good while.”

In 1962, Virginia sought and received a divorce. But as sometimes happens with couples mired in codependency, they reconciled and remarried. And young Bill, of his own volition, decided to legally change his last name to Clinton.

Bill Clinton, like many presidents, may have had what men’s movement activist Robert Bly has called “father hunger.” The boy had never known the male parent listed on his birth certificate. He assumed the name of a struggling alcoholic whom he called Daddy. He was forever striving to prove himself worthy of his elders. He faced absence and anguish—his mother’s, his younger brother Roger Cassidy Clinton’s, and his own. “I came to accept the secrets of our house as a normal part of my life,” Clinton would later concede, insisting that he suffered in silence, never daring to mention to a soul this cycle of addiction and abuse. “Secrets can be an awful burden to bear, especially if some sense of shame is attached to them.… I now know [my personal spiritual] struggle is at least partly the result of growing up in an alcoholic home and the mechanisms I developed to cope with it.”

With his central father figures sometimes absent or aberrant,5 Bill Clinton grew up devoted to his large-hearted, effervescent protector, a woman of Cherokee and Irish stock: Virginia Dell Cassidy Blythe Clinton Dwire Kelley. Mother, he called her—a nurse-anesthetist by trade. She had a hankering for the horses and was a regular at the Oaklawn Jockey Club. She was the daughter of an overbearing mother who had become addicted to morphine. Virginia also bore a second son, Roger Jr., who would battle his own substance issues. Over time, she would go on to compare her tumultuous life to “a country song.”

Clinton’s love for Mother was complete and altogether genuine. Transfixed by the woman’s quotidian rituals, he would recall the care with which she’d comb out her wavy black hair. “I liked watching her brush it until it was just so,” he would write dotingly in his autobiography. Then there was the “game face,” as Clinton called it, that she applied to meet the day. “When I could get up early enough I loved sitting on the floor of the bathroom and watching her put makeup on that beautiful face. It took quite a while, partly because she had no eyebrows.” She would draw them on instead, he remembers, “with a cosmetic pencil. Then she put on her makeup and her lipstick, usually a bright red shade.” (Virginia became known for her spider-leg lashes and her “skunk stripe” coif.)

By the time Bill entered fourth grade, the Clintons had resettled in Hot Springs—Arkansas’s “Sin City.” Fifty miles from Little Rock, the raucous enclave was famous for its spas and sulfur springs.⁶ The place literally bubbled with temptation. (For grins, a ten-year-old Bill Clinton and his pals would place prank calls to Maxine Harris’s whorehouse to try and tie up the telephone lines.) Hot Springs, to put it bluntly, had vaporous moral guidelines—as Gail Sheehy once observed in Vanity Fair when discussing the effect of Clinton’s upbringing on his marriage—and appealed to certain residents and visitors as “a warm bath of half-truths and hypocrisy where gamblers and bookies and fugitive mobsters from New York and Chicago found a resort just right for their tastes.” It was a town, in Sheehy’s view, “where a proliferation of Baptist churches attempted to put proper Sunday faces on the bathhouses, betting parlors, and brothels that were supported by the local government. ‘In Hot Springs, growing up here, you were living a lie,’ [said] a local prosecutor, Paul Bosson.” Indeed, by the time Clinton rose through the Arkansas political ranks, several of his detractors would contend that the governor, having spent his formative years in that seatbed of vice, had been unavoidably schooled in the art of compromising one’s conscience.

What, in fact, were Bill Clinton’s ethical underpinnings? Faced with a home life marred by addiction and codependency, he improvised. And in time, he relied on several guideposts.

First came a commitment to Christ. Arkansas, in that curious American duality of the sacred and the profane, sat along the main artery of the Bible Belt. And even though Clinton’s parents were not observant, their son made it his mission to attend Park Place Baptist Church almost every Sunday. By age nine or ten, Clinton’s faith had become such an integral part of his life that he persuaded Mother to let him get baptized. “I had absorbed enough of my church’s teachings,” Clinton would recall, “to know that I was a sinner and to want Jesus to save me.” At twelve, he sat in Little Rock’s War Memorial Stadium and found inspiration in hearing Billy Graham, the prevailing moral authority of America’s white Southern Baptists, preach to a biracial congregation. (Segregationists had urged Graham to ban African Americans from the assembly, an ultimatum he had refused.)

Next came Clinton’s embrace of the life of the mind. He excelled at school, seeking refuge and edification in books and falling under the spell of a series of authors and educators. And then Clinton had a political awakening, partly shaped by the region’s racial divide. In the summer of 1963, he was voted one of two student “senators” who would represent Arkansas at a conclave in Maryland for the Boys Nation public service program. And in his speech to the assemblage, Clinton spoke of the Little Rock Nine and the forced integration of schoolchildren that in 1957 had divided and riveted the nation. “We have grown up in a state,” he announced, “ridden with the shame of a crisis it did not ask for.” Most important and providential of all: that same week, the student delegation was invited to the White House, and Clinton positioned himself up close so he could shake hands with John Fitzgerald Kennedy—and have his picture snapped as he did.7

The Kennedy-Clinton Shake. Though the photograph would serendipitously show America’s first “New Generation” presidents meeting face-to-face, nothing about Clinton’s political trajectory had been foreordained. It would take a singularly driven individual to fulfill the promise presaged in that single frame. And William Jefferson Clinton was such a one. He’d been forced by circumstance to concoct his own survival skills. He’d stood up to the most threatening figure in his limited universe, taking the very name of that man. He’d embraced a new religion, of his own accord. His mental acuity and genuine grit would propel him to Georgetown and Oxford and Yale Law. He would fall in love with a woman of strength who was by every measure his intellectual equal. He would become one of the country’s youngest governors. And those were just acts 1 and 2.

As a president, there was something entirely fresh about Bill Clinton. Unlike his generation’s models, he was not the righteous, reliable fatherly type; not the tough-love coach; not the strong, silent war hero. Instead, he was a modern-age hybrid: the softie with a perpetual hard-on. He was a country lawyer with a wonkish precision, who telegraphed his every emotion in big, sloppy strokes. He was a cutthroat political infighter, who wore his heart on his sleeve and who desperately needed love—from both friend and foe. He was a dervish who would stop in his tracks to blabber a blue streak; a free-spirited lefty who kept to the political center; a born-again Christian who entertained a catering hall of appetites. He was a man of faith who was, in his marriage, unfaithful.

How could Bill Clinton be so brainy and yet be ruled by his sensory organs? How could he be such a people person and yet so classically self-absorbed? So inexhaustibly hyperactive and yet convinced that the perfect getaway was the Renaissance Weekend, where he and Hillary, amid old friends and several hundred others, could chill out and spend a few days trading ideas, schmoozing about policy, and sharing stories of “personal growth”? He and his wife were forever being accused of “using” people for political gain, and yet he had a profoundly generous streak, always handing out well-considered gifts, some of which he would wrap himself. (In an Oval Office interview I conducted with him at the end of his presidency, Clinton told me, “When I got here, fortuitously, I found that in the President’s Bathroom there is a closet with several shelves. It goes back kind of deep. It’s narrow. And I just started, you know, acquiring things [as presents] and squirreling them away—a few books, a few CDs, a few items of jewelry.”)

Here was someone cut from distinctly different cloth than the American macho man. Bill Clinton was, in fact, an alpha male who understood his feminine facets. He could fly off the handle in private (some insiders referred to Clinton’s passing storms as “purple fits”; adviser David Gergen would call them “morning vents”), but in public he had measured manners and a southern unction that cast a honeysuckle spell. In a period when men were torn and frayed and turning inward, his was the high-beam gleam of a more compassionate generation. He was a man whose first inclination was not to restrict or judge but to tolerate and include. He was a good boy and a good ol’ boy and a naughty, naughty boy. He was, in his way, “the sensitive guy at the dogfight.”8

Former Clinton strategist Dick Morris once identified this Sunday-morning/Saturday-night dichotomy—a sort of Bifurcated Bill. Sunday-morning Clinton “is the one we have all seen so often on television,” Morris would write in his memoir Behind the Oval Office. “Brilliant, principled, sincere, good-willed, empathetic, intellectual, learning, and caring.” Saturday-night Clinton, by comparison, “is pure id—willful, demanding, hedonistic, risk-taking, sybaritic, headstrong, unfeeling, callous, unprincipled, and undisciplined. The Sunday man adores his family. The Saturday-night counterpart risks its destruction.” In Morris’s view, “Each side of Clinton seems unaware of the other”—as if the two Bills were separated by a “wall of denial.”

Clinton was complex, postmodern, and defined by his double personality—politically and socially, emotionally and psychologically. In a period when men were flailing at maintaining their traditional patriarchal dominance of the womenfolk, he was Robert Bly’s so-called soft male, deferring to the one who wore the pants in the family, even if his were occasionally coming off.

In a time of cynicism, Clinton was the Boy from Hope. In a time of fad diets and white wine spritzers, he was snarfing down the Wendy’s. (At a Camp David team-building retreat that Clinton convened for his top aides nine days after he took office, he reportedly admitted to being “a fat kid when he was five or six and [discussed] how the other kids taunted him.”) As if defined by his childhood persona, he was, deep down, “just a guy in the [school] band,” as Gennifer Flowers once described him. “He wasn’t a big, muscular football hero who had girls falling all over him. Then all of a sudden, he became a politician and started getting the kind of attention he had only dreamed of.”

He’d started out, as we’ve seen, as something of a mama’s boy. And he went on throughout his career to surround himself with forceful women. “Clinton was just comfortable with women,” says his first White House press secretary, Dee Dee Myers. “That should be followed by a punch line, right?… [But] he liked being in the company of women. And he liked all different kinds of women. He was very comfortable around women in a way [that stood out back then]. Some, [like] Susan Thomases, were Hillary’s friends that she brought in, and a lot of them weren’t. He was very comfortable with Mandy [Grunwald], with Betsey [Wright]. She was very strong, and women were allowed to be that around him. You know”—Myers stops to laugh—“he just liked women. That was great. Washington is very much a boys’ club.… If you look back, he had a lot of women in the cabinet. He promoted women.”

The public perceived Clinton as a man who was concerned with others’ needs and who strove to project that sensitivity. He was so sensitive, in fact, that comedian Dana Carvey once portrayed him in a TV skit as a man who could actually lactate. While impersonating Clinton in 1996, Carvey announced himself to be such “a caring, nurturing president” that he’d reached the stage where he could suckle a child. “I could be both father and mother to our nation,” Carvey’s Clinton declared. “I’ve taken this a step further. With the employment of estrogen hormonal therapy, I have developed the ability to breastfeed.” And, bingo, Carvey took a doll to his chest and began nursing it. “I’d like to see Steve Forbes do this.”

Clinton, of course, could lay it on thick. And his tendency to weave over the median from suave to slick had earned him no less a nickname than Slick Willie.9 While Slick Willie’s was also the name of a popular pool-hall chain in the South, the alias was first affixed to Bill Clinton by journalist Paul Greenberg (later the editorial page editor of the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette), who had charted the candidate’s rise. In September 1980, Greenberg, then at a paper called the Pine Bluff Commercial, wrote an editorial that criticized Clinton, as Greenberg would later recall, for giving “a speech before the state Democratic convention in which he depicted himself as in the tradition of progressive governors in this state.” In the view of Greenberg and his colleagues, Clinton, who would lose his gubernatorial reelection bid, was a zigzagger who tailored his views to suit voters. He was, said Greenberg, a “classic waffle[r]” who carefully worded many policy stances in a way “that would allow him later to take whatever side looked popular”; he was a budget-cutter “who had broken this succession of reform governors [who had preceded him]. And so we used the sobriquet Slick Willy on that occasion and it caught on.”

Clinton was also the consummate charmer. My friend Jamieson Webster, a Freudian psychoanalyst, calls him the Last Charismatic. Indeed, Clinton’s early appearances on the stump, like JFK’s and RFK’s before him, had a rock-star shimmer, drawing his share of comely swooners.¹⁰ Young supporters were attracted by his populism, his pop-culture references, his small-town earthiness. They took to his unabashed directness and at the same time his preacherlike expansiveness and reassurance.

There was an unspoken thrill that issued from those rope-line bear hugs, from his laying on of hands. Clinton was uncommonly physical: touching, feeling, connecting. He had, it bears repeating, sex appeal. He could set his lapis gaze on a voter in a public session in such a way as to make that voter feel courted, special, set apart. But it was more than that. “Bill Clinton is one of those very rare people who can walk in and change the chemistry of a room,” James Carville has written. “The molecules in the room were one way and he would walk in and after he got there the molecules were arranged slightly differently.” At six foot two, the president, mano a mano, had a way of sidling up, close and conspiratorially, as Lyndon Johnson liked to do. Clinton’s voice was often hoarse and guttural, quasi-carnal, coming from somewhere deep inside. His ruddy complexion hinted of ardor—with a touch of the blush of a boy who’d just been punished. He was an adult and a man-child, presidential and intimate—a seductive combination.11

My wife, Nancy, and I were once invited to a White House dinner in 1997. Long after the meal and the speeches, Gladys Knight and the Pips were about to leave the bandstand after they’d played “Midnight Train to Georgia.” But then Clinton, as I remember, called for an encore. And later, as we departed, we stood off to one side among the other attendees, and the president moved swiftly alongside the crowd, making his exit, shaking hands and trading shout-outs. When he got to Nancy, he dallied long enough for me to snap two photographs with the point-and-shoot camera I’d brought along.

Admittedly, my wife had been known to cause passersby to pivot. Her chic demeanor, prematurely silver tresses, and smooth, glowing complexion are often an irresistible combination to men of Clinton’s age or older. But when I developed the roll of film, I was surprised to see that it was Nancy who had flushed hot pink. As the president took her hand, she had simply melted, offering an uncharacteristic attaboy wink. Even in a scrum of strangers, he’d managed to elicit a cozy little contact high. “I’ve never seen a man be so casually magnetic,” she now recalls.

In a similar vein, an L.A.-based journalist I know, who has worked on stories with dozens of major studio stars, confides that she has rarely met anyone with more charisma in all her years covering Hollywood. (She requests anonymity, given her high profile in the business.) “He takes your hand and lasers you with those baby blues,” she explains, her voice catching, “and you go so weak. In one second, [you project ahead and] you see yourself gathering up your clothes in the dark and fumbling for change in the back of the cab on the way home. I imagine Warren Beatty had it in his prime. For Clinton, it’s only compounded by the fact that he’s been the leader of the free world.”

This new masculine archetype was, in fact, several men in one.

By one measure, Clinton was the First Bro. On the campaign trail, he hung out in jogging shorts, a baseball cap, and an Arkansas Razorbacks T. He played a lot of hearts and solitaire and, in off hours, habitually wedged an unlit cigar in his mouth. The candidate’s team, meanwhile, seemed more like dorm rats than the eagle squadron. Stephanopoulos, for example, could sometimes be spotted blowing chewing-gum bubbles; Carville, munching popcorn. (Those in Clinton’s cadre of intimates and supporters—in line with the vibe—were not called donors or supporters but “FOBs”: Friends of Bill.)

Bro-ness had long been Bill Clinton’s métier. While governor, he’d inaugurated Casual Fridays and, as he would later recall, “encouraged everyone to go for a long lunch at a nearby haunt that had first-rate hamburgers, pinball machines, and a shuffleboard game.” Upon reaching Pennsylvania Avenue, he chaired meetings that had a stoner’s rhythm, starting late and running long, with every staffer allowed to pipe in with opinions. (Carville would joke to Vanity Fair’s Marjorie Williams in 1994, “If God had wanted us to be on time, He wouldn’t have made us Democrats.”) In The Agenda, a book on Clinton’s attempt to reboot the economy, journalist Bob Woodward characterizes the indiscipline of the first-term White House: “The staff was too often like a soccer league of 10-year-olds. No one stuck to his part of the field during a game. The ball—any ball—would come on the field, and everyone would go chasing it.”

But what else were we to expect? This was a guy who played sax—in shades—on The Arsenio Hall Show. He sometimes drove a Mustang convertible. He had a rack of loud ties and a fondness for loud underwear. Clinton was so at ease with the kicked-back vibe that when MTV hosted a town hall session two years into his presidency and a teenage girl in the crowd asked him, “Boxers or briefs?,” he was taken aback but fielded the question anyway. “Usually briefs,” he said. “I can’t believe she did that.” (By answering, many railed, he was demeaning his high office.)

The First Bro, lest we forget, was also the First Bubba. Though the word “bubba” had entered the vernacular in the late ’70s, Clinton would come to own it, whole hog.12 During the 1992 campaign, the Wall Street Journal focused on the vital “Bubba vote,” which stood for “conservative whites, many of them Democrats.” A bubba, however, according to David G. Cannon’s 1990 book Hey, Bubba!: A Metaphysical Guide to the Good Ol’ Boy, connoted something more socially relevant. He was not a redneck, which implied “an ignorant, mean-spirited individual,” but was instead a more temperate southern male. He was a Dixie-bred “mellow hedon[ist]” and “a plain-spoken, salt-of-the-earth sort,” often sporting a baseball or John Deere cap, wearing “Duck Head khakis [and a] possum-eating grin.” On the sexual side, writes Cannon, bubbas were romantics who “genuinely like women, an appreciation uncluttered by sexual guilt”; they “tend to be gallant lads with a touch of old-school chivalry”; and they “exude a low-key masculinity for which they don’t find it necessary to apologize, openly preferring that women not look and act like men.”

At one point in the ’92 race, in fact, Clinton defended the characterization, saying of his running mate, Al Gore, and himself, “There’s a little bubba in both of us—in the sense that we both come from small towns, where people have old-fashioned values and want their country to be the best country in the world—and I don’t think that’s all bad.” Clinton’s upbringing was southern working class, and yet this good ol’ boy was a crossover type. As Bob Woodward would later note, Clinton had kicked off his campaign in 1991 at the Old State House in Little Rock by stating that “his central goal was ‘restoring the hopes of the forgotten middle class.’ He made ten references to the middle class.”

Clinton, without apology, was also the nation’s First Boomer, quaffing generously from the trough of pop culture. One telling anecdote is worth repeating. At the end of my above-referenced Clinton interview, in 2000 (in which we talked about his personal memories of his eight years in Washington), I gave the president a copy of a new coffee-table book, Vanity Fair’s Hollywood, that the magazine’s editor, Graydon Carter, and I had just published. Though our Q&A session had ended, the president was still on a roll, and he flipped through the book, providing running commentary. “This is a famous picture,” he said, lingering over the classic Slim Aarons portrait of four of cinema’s most dashing leading men. “This is Gable, Cooper, Stewart… and Van Heflin, who was in Shane with Alan Ladd. I think this was, like, late ’50s, in Hollywood.13 I know because [Gary] Cooper didn’t live many more years and [Clark] Gable only lived a [couple more]. But they were great-lookin’ guys.” For a wonkish politico, his knowledge of cinema icons was refreshingly fanboy.

“I love this,” he continued, stopping at a photo. “[Jack] Nicholson, my golf partner… Kim Basinger, one of the all-time gorgeous women. Nice person. Alec Baldwin [her husband at the time], he’s a good friend of ours… I love this… Oh, look at this old picture of Sammy Davis… Is this [Julie Andrews in] Victor/Victoria?… Whoopi [Goldberg]… Great picture of young Harrison Ford. Look at this. This is unbelievable.”14

As a Boomer, Clinton inevitably came with Boomer baggage. His contemporaries were arguably the country’s most spoiled, self-willed, whiny, and (up until the millennials) voyeuristic generation. But hold it right there. The Boomers had been the ones who’d ushered in an era of inclusiveness, diversity, and Aquarian dreams for a more humane society. They’d exported constitutional democracy across the globe, along with mass culture, high technology, medical advances—and good vibes. The Greediest Generation they were not, or at least not completely. Clinton, to his credit, had taken JFK’s torch and run with it.¹⁵

Columnist Michael Kinsley would try to set the record straight in the Atlantic in 2010, balancing the Boomer ledger (and by extension, the Clinton legacy) against that of the Greatest Generation (those who survived the Depression, defeated fascism during World War II, and forged a prosperous postwar America): “It was the Boomers, not the [Greats], who forced the nation to address civil rights. And it was the Greats, not the Boomers, who got us addicted to debt.” By Kinsley’s count, the Greats ushered us into Vietnam too, a war from which the Boomers extracted us. The Greats may have taught us the virtues of self-sacrifice, even as the hippie-cum-yuppie Boomers “‘sold out’ and eased into middle-class life.” But Clinton’s generation—indeed, the generation of Bill and Hillary Clinton—had “changed it for the better. They made environmentalism, feminism, gay rights so deeply a part of middle-class culture that the terms themselves seem antiquated.”

There was one more aspect that made Bill Clinton a new breed of American male. He was, like many of his Boomer peers, more publicly emotive than men of previous eras. He fairly oozed empathy. He repeatedly said he could feel a voter’s pain.16

Early on, Clinton had learned how to put on his game face by watching Mother in that mirror. By adulthood he’d become the national champ at playing the choked-up, chin-quivering card. For years, going moist had been verboten in presidential politics. In 1972, Senator Edmund Muskie, many believe, had lost the Democratic nomination for president to George McGovern because of a misty incident in New Hampshire. Muskie, at a press conference in a snowstorm, had appeared to shed tears. (He would later insist the water on his cheeks was merely melted snow.) The scene registered in reporters’ and voters’ minds as an indication that Muskie was the sort of man who might crack under the strain of the office.

But no longer. Thanks in large part to Clinton, dry eyes soon meant: heartless. The power male who could take a tear to the brim, and yet hold it back, was exhibiting compassion and reserve. There were no histrionics, no bawling. (That would come later, with men like the former House Speaker John Boehner, who became known as something of a human faucet.) Instead, the politician, male or female, became comfortable exhibiting a measured mistiness.¹⁷ It allowed a public official to show a sentimental side, to show some heart, yet to safely fall just a drop shy of anything mawkish.

Being a Cry Guy,¹⁸ however, was really less a calculated effort to snag votes than an outward expression of being a man in tune with a full range of emotions. This was Naughty Billy, Slick Willie, and the Boy from Hope. This was the First Bro, the First Bubba, and the First Boomer. This was, after JFK, the first president not to have emerged from the Greatest Generation, who would come to represent bold youth and unbounded prosperity. This was the first president to eventually support his life partner, Hillary Clinton, as a worthy successor.

This was a new sort of man in a grave new world.

And what, pray tell, of the new women in that world?