PROLOGUE: WASHINGTON, D.C., 1963

THE BOYS RODE down to the White House in two airconditioned buses, fifty scrubbed faces per coach, hair clipped, shoes polished, slacks creased, young chests fairly busting from white short-sleeve knit shirts inscribed over the left breast with the seal of the American Legion. They were high school seniors-to-be, a proud collection of eager-beaver class leaders born in the first year of the postwar boom, groomed for success in the backwater redoubts of service club America, towns named Hardaway and Sylvester and Midland and Lititz and Westfield and Hot Springs. Some of these boys were so provincial that they had never before traveled by overnight train or flown by commercial airliner. Now, for five days in Washington as senators at Boys Nation, they had been playing the roles of powerful actors on the political stage, their schedules crammed with mock debates, speeches, and elections, as well as lunches in the Senate Dining Room and briefings at the Department of State. Boys Nation was an educational exercise, mostly, and partly a reward for academic achievement, but it also offered a hint of something grander. Hour after hour the boys heard older men call them the future leaders of the free world, and while some only dimly envisioned such a prospect, others accepted it as their fate. For them this week was a coming-out party and dress rehearsal.

The capital region was caught in a midsummer snare of high heat and humidity that July of 1963, particularly stifling to the one hundred teenage senators each night out at the University of Maryland campus where their closet-sized dormitory rooms lacked not only air conditioners but even electric fans. But on Wednesday the 24th as the buses rolled south from College Park toward the White House, the morning sky opened blue and gentle, graced by a soft breeze, as though the weather acknowledged its own assignment for an event that, decades later, would resurface as a national icon of political fate and ambition.

The boys were on their way to meet President John F. Kennedy in the Rose Garden. Though young, stylish, and witty, Kennedy was hardly a mythic figure two and a half years into his term. Many in the Boys Nation enclave looked upon him with ideological caution, reflecting the conservative views of their sponsors in the American Legion’s division of National Americanism. They made no secret of their admiration for Republican Senator Barry Goldwater of Arizona, an apostle of antifederalism then building a national movement that made Kennedy nervous about a second term. Still, JFK was a war hero and the leader of the free world. He represented the archetype of what Boys Nation alumni were supposed to become. The boys were excited to meet him. For most of the half-hour trip down from the Maryland campus, their buses resounded with nervous, anticipatory chatter.

Daniel J. O’Connor, a New York lawyer and director of National Americanism for the Legion, led the contingent on the first bus. He and his staff assistants, veterans of World War II or Korea, carefully briefed their charges on proper behavior in the Rose Garden: Security will be tight. If you wander off, the Secret Service will stop you. Stay together. Stay in rows. If the president comes down to greet you, do not crowd around. If you do, he’ll withdraw. O’Connor knew that his boys were well mannered. He had encountered little trouble from them in Washington beyond a few curfew violations and the time when some of them disturbed Secretary Rusk by snapping flashbulb cameras as he delivered a solemn address on world affairs at the State Department auditorium. Minor stuff. But O’Connor wanted to be certain that the Legion boys would not replay a recent Rose Garden embarrassment when foreign exchange students had mobbed the president and somehow liberated his cuff links and tie clasp, walking off with his accessories as unsolicited souvenirs.

On the bus, O’Connor chatted with several boys. He asked each one where he was from and what he thought of Washington so far. One lad lingered in his presence longer than the others, leaving an impression that O’Connor could call to mind years later. It was Bill Clinton of Hot Springs, Arkansas. He was only sixteen, but one of the bigger boys physically at six foot three and two hundred pounds, with a wave of brown hair and a good-natured manner. Clinton was curious about what lay in store for the boys that morning. His own intentions were clear. He asked O’Connor whether he could have his picture taken with President Kennedy. “Sure,” O’Connor said. “But I’m not sure what the Secret Service regulations are. We’ll have to see when we get there.” Clinton pressed the issue. It sure would be great, he said, if he could get his picture taken with the president. The boy from Arkansas, O’Connor recalled, “certainly seemed bound and determined.”

WHATEVER little encouragement Clinton needed to confront the political whirl of Washington that summer came from two strong women: his mother, Virginia, and his high school principal, Johnnie Mae Mackey. They were opposites in many respects: Virginia Clinton, a nurse anesthetist, layered her face with makeup, dyed her hair black with a bold white racing stripe, painted thick, sweeping eyebrows high above their original position, smoked two packs of Pall Mall cigarettes a day, bathed in a sunken tub, drank liquor, was an irrepressible flirt, and enjoyed the underbelly of her resort town, with its racetrack and gaming parlors and nightclubs. Johnnie Mae Mackey strode through town as a tall and imposing enforcer of moral rectitude whose interests were God, country, flag, politics, church, and Hot Springs High. Yet they were both optimists, and they saw one bright boy as the embodiment of their hopes. They had lost husbands already, each of them. Billy Clinton was their manchild.

Mackey, whose husband, a World War II veteran, had died of diabetes, belonged to the American Legion auxiliary at Warren Townsend Post No. 13 in Hot Springs. Through that club and her position at the school she became an influential force in student government programs sponsored by the Legion each summer. She had a deep interest in Arkansas politics and played a prominent role in Governor Orval Faubus’s network of women supporters around the state. She instilled in her students the conviction that the political life was noble and that there was no higher calling than public service. One of her favorite tasks during the final week of class each spring was to announce over the public address system the names of junior boys who had been selected by the faculty to attend Arkansas Boys State at Camp Robinson in North Little Rock in June. Hot Springs traditionally sent a large and powerful state delegation under Mrs. Mackey’s leadership. In the class ahead of Clinton’s, a Hot Springs student had been elected Boys State governor.

To be elected governor was the ultimate accomplishment at the state level of this political prepping ground. It was the contest that attracted the most gossip, speculation, and excitement, the one that carried heady prestige within the peer group. Many states did not even elect the two senators who attended Boys Nation; they were chosen instead by adult supervisors, who often simply rewarded the governor and lieutenant governor by sending them to Washington. Arkansas elected its senators, but the senate vote came at the end of the week, almost as an afterthought to the contest for governor. When Clinton arrived at Camp Robinson, he had little chance at the governorship. For one thing, it would be difficult for Hot Springs to grab the top post two years in a row. But even more important, the most respected and well-connected student leader in Arkansas was running for governor that year—Mack McLarty of Hope.

Mack and Billy, acquaintances since they attended kindergarten together, presented a classic small-town contrast. They had been born months apart in Hope, a modest railroad hub in southwest Arkansas. McLarty’s mother came from the landed gentry and his daddy ran the most prosperous Ford dealership in that corner of the state. Clinton’s mother was the daughter of the town iceman. His biological father was dead and his stepfather was an abusive alcoholic. In the stratified southern culture, McLarty was expected to excel; Clinton’s abilities were viewed as a freak of nature. When the Clintons left Hope for Hot Springs in 1952, when Billy was six, the wave of their departure left barely a ripple. Only his mother and grandmother harbored grand notions of what might be in store for him.

Thomas Franklin McLarty III, cocksure, snappy, and athletic, a natural leader who became student council president and all-district quarterback for a powerhouse 11-1 football team, Number 12, as quick as a hiccup on the option—Mack was Hope’s favorite son. Governor of Boys State was thought to be merely the first step in his march to prominence. As a campaigner, Mack was sweet and syrupy. In his speeches at Camp Robinson he talked mostly about how glad he was to get to know so many good people in such a fine state in such a wonderful country. His slogan was candy-coated: If You Can Remember M&Ms, Remember Mack McLarty. He built a campaign coalition drawing largely from athletic contacts and trounced his articulate but rather bookish opponent. There seemed to be a conspiracy of quarterbacks that year: the boys elected lieutenant governor and attorney general were also signal callers.

But none of the quarterbacks worked the field quite like clumsy Bill Clinton when he ran for senate at the end of the week. He studied each barracks at Camp Robinson, learning which schools were staying where, what the likes and dislikes of the students in each section might be, who they might know in common. The other boys from Hot Springs had seen Clinton switch into campaign mode before but never with this intensity. Ron Cecil was amazed by his friend’s political savvy and the urgency with which he shook the hands of strangers. Phil Jamison, another classmate, noticed that Clinton was thoroughly familiar with the camp culture before he arrived and had plotted his senate race while other boys were still finding their way around. There were hundreds of boys there, Clinton told Jamison, and if he could meet every one of them they would like him and he would win. He formed a campaign team that canvassed the cabins at night and posted himself outside the cafeteria at six-thirty each morning, working the breakfast crowd like a factory gate.

McLarty, elected governor, maintained his status as the top boy in Arkansas. But Clinton, elected senator, was the one now going somewhere. He prepared for his trip to Washington. “It’s the biggest thrill and honor of my life,” he said after winning. “I hope I can do the tremendous job required of me as a representative of the state. I hope I can live up to the task.”

ON the morning of July 19, 1963, two young senators from Arkansas met at Adams Field in Little Rock for the flight to Boys Nation, the first venture to the East Coast for either Clinton or his colleague, Larry Taunton of El Dorado. Amid the excitement and anxiety, Taunton took special note of the relationship between the other boy and his mother. He had rarely seen anything like it. Mrs. Clinton radiated such an intense interest in her son that she seemed almost to be hovering over and around him.

Every week, it seemed, her boy Billy was doing something else to make her proud, to relieve her mind of her own troubles. Virginia Clinton had convinced herself that he had a rendezvous with fame. She loved to tell the story of how a second-grade teacher had predicted that he would be president someday. Now he was flying to Washington. Maybe, she told friends, Billy would meet the handsome young president. The Clintons were Democrats in a resort town overtaken by conservative northern retirees who had come to Hot Springs for its mild climate and restorative waters. In his ninth-grade civics class, when the teacher organized a Nixon-Kennedy election debate, Clinton was the lone Kennedy supporter.

The eighteenth annual American Legion Boys Nation was meticulously regulated. Reveille at seven each morning, lights out at ten at night. The boys marched in straight lines to the dining hall and waited in lines for the buses that carried them down to the federal district each day. They were organized into four sections—Adams, Jefferson, Washington, and Madison—each section with its own counselors and living quarters. The two senators from each state shared a dormitory room, but they were placed arbitrarily in separate political parties, one a Federalist, one a Nationalist. Clinton was assigned to Adams Section, Nationalist party. The official politicking began Sunday night, after a day trip to the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier at National Cemetery, when the Nationalists and Federalists convened to draft their party platforms and the senators began considering their two major bills for the week, one that called for the creation of a department of Housing and Urban Affairs and included a public accommodations civil rights measure, and another that would institute federal funding of campaigns. There was little dispute about foreign policy. Southeast Asia, a growing trouble spot for the Kennedy administration, was not yet the preoccupation that it would soon become for these boys. The looming danger, the Federalists declared, was “the Communistic threat.” Clinton’s Nationalist party agreed, adding that the Communists must be stopped wherever they attempt to impose their will through force because “appeasement leads to aggression.”

The most contentious issue was civil rights. Voices rose as both parties debated planks in their platforms and the full Boys Nation senate deliberated over S-1. The argument was played out during one of the pivotal years in the American civil rights saga. Months earlier, Governor George Corley Wallace of Alabama, who had taken office promising “segregation now, segregation tomorrow, segregation forever,” stood in front of the school-house door as federal marshals enrolled the first black students at the University of Alabama. And one month after the boys left Washington, Martin Luther King, Jr., would stand before a massive throng at the Lincoln Memorial and deliver his “I Have a Dream” speech.

Race was still largely viewed as a North-South issue, but the lines were not so clear at Boys Nation. Three of the leading civil rights proponents were southern youths—the two boys from Louisiana, Fred Kammer of New Orleans and Alston Johnson of Shreveport, and Bill Clinton of Arkansas—all of whom were questioning their southern heritage of racial separation and inequality. Clinton could not be called a civil rights activist. He had not publicly protested the patterns of racism he grew up with in Hot Springs, where the schools, swimming pools, clubs, and motels had been segregated, where “Dixie” was the high school fight song until his junior year, and where the local Lions club recruited members of the high school choir to appear in blackface for the annual minstrel show. But long before Clinton reached Washington that summer he had rejected the legacy of racism. His mother would later remember how frustrated he seemed as a boy of eleven watching Governor Faubus defy federal orders during the integration of Little Rock Central High School in 1957.

Most of the boys were not that far along. Orson L. (Pete) Johnson of Alabama came to Washington determined to push through a resolution heralding the constitutional primacy of states’ rights, the rhetorical banner behind which southern states protected their segregated policies. It passed 48 to 46. Johnson and his Boys Nation sidekick, Tommy Lawhorne of Georgia, tried to mold the southern senators into a voting bloc. One morning at breakfast they confronted Clinton. Johnson thought he had Clinton cornered. He told the Arkansan that he “didn’t need to be voting for these civil rights resolutions.” The argument got emotional, but Clinton would not budge.

With both parties divided on the issue, civil rights advocates came out of the Boys Nation session with a modest victory. The bill establishing the urban affairs department and a public accommodations law was defeated. Both party platforms declared that education, not government enforcement, offered the surest means of eliminating racism. The Federalists, dominated by a group of northern conservatives who held segregation and government activism in equal disfavor, stated: “Ideals cannot be forced upon a person by sheer physical force. The thought of this turns many against such an ideal; prejudice and hate must be removed from the hearts and minds of people where it really exists.” Clinton’s Nationalists took a slightly more determined position. “Racial discrimination is a cancerous disease and must be eliminated,” they declared. “But legislation alone cannot change the minds and hearts of men. Education is the primary tool which we must employ … it must begin in the home, in the church and in the schools.”

On Monday morning, the boys ventured to Capitol Hill to visit the Supreme Court and the Library of Congress. Many of them were invited to lunch with the U.S. senators from their state. The Senate Dining Room was quite a sight: hordes of boys in white knit shirts hobnobbing with white men in summer suits. The Arkansas luncheon quartet consisted of Bill Clinton and Larry Taunton at the sides of Democratic senators John L. McClellan and J. William Fulbright. Taunton, with his mellifluous radio voice and self-assured style, had considered himself his roommate’s equal until that day. His mind swirled with possible questions to ask the older men. They seemed so wise and dignified. What could he say? He knew that Senator Fulbright was intensely interested in U.S. foreign policy. Taunton combed through his mind for some interesting way to catch Fulbright’s attention, but could not draw the senator from his conversation with Clinton. He noticed an “instant affinity between Senator Fulbright and Bill,” who seemed “so at ease with the situation.” Clinton had already studied Fulbright’s life and career, and considered the intellectual Arkansan his first political role model. That day, Clinton would say later, he thought he was “the cat’s meow. Fulbright I admired no end…. He had a real impact on my wanting to be a citizen of the world.”

First, though, Clinton wanted to be vice president of Boys Nation. He offered himself as a candidate that night at the Nationalist Party Convention with an odd boast, noting that he came from Arkansas, the state with the governor who now had the longest continuous string in office in the country. There he was showcasing Orval Faubus, the very symbol of old-school Arkansas racial politics that he disdained. By Clinton’s normal standards, everything about his vice-presidential campaign was a bit halfhearted. It was a race that he would refrain from mentioning later in life. John E. Mills of New York was the Nationalist Party recording secretary, who kept unofficial voting records. They show that Clinton was among seven candidates for the vice-presidential nomination at the start of the evening. He drew six votes on the first ballot, fourth highest. Jack Hanks, Jr., of Texas led the field with eleven. On the second ballot Clinton had fallen to fifth place. He worked the convention hall and picked up another vote on the third ballot, but that was all he could muster. He withdrew after the fourth ballot, throwing his votes to Hanks, who won the nomination and ultimately the vice-presidency.

Over at the Federalist Convention, Fred Kammer squirmed in his seat as his party nominated Richard Stratton, a conservative delegate from Illinois, a boy who seemed to be popping up every few minutes to utter another quote from his favorite ideological tract, A Nation of Sheep by Senator Goldwater. At one point Kammer turned to a nearby senator and muttered a Latin aphorism from Virgil: “I fear the man of one book.” A year later, Stratton would reach the same conclusion. As a youth delegate to the Republican Convention at the Cow Palace in San Francisco, he looked on with alarm as Goldwater announced that “extremism in the defense of liberty is no vice.” The scene in the Cow Palace would frighten Stratton, revealing to him the rougher side of rugged individualism. To most of his colleagues at Boys Nation, however, Stratton seemed mature. He won the nomination and trounced his opponent from Kansas in the general election.

IT got quiet inside the Boys Nation buses as they pulled through the White House gate from the south. You could hear the motors idling and the pneumatic whoosh when the driver opened the door to talk to a guard. In his seat, Richard Stratton, a bundle of nerves, whispered to himself the words he would say to President Kennedy: “… Mr. President, we’re all grateful to you for having us here.” Bill Clinton was at the front of the first bus. He wanted a prime spot in the Rose Garden. Stay in lines, the counselors reminded them. Walk directly to the lawn below the speaker’s podium. Do not throw elbows. Don’t run. You represent your states and Boys Nation and the American Legion. Do us proud.

With that the buses unloaded and a most awkward, comic sort of race began. Without running, without pushing, several of the boys moved as quickly as they could to outpace the others, speed-walking while attempting to go unnoticed. “There was a barely controlled eagerness,” according to Larry Taunton. “You don’t want to push and shove, yet move with extreme rapidity to get to the front.” With his long strides, Clinton took the lead and placed himself in the front row, just to the right of the outdoor podium, perhaps fifteen feet or so from where the president would stand. Only a few dignitaries, counselors, and protective agents would get between him and President Kennedy.

At quarter to ten, Kennedy stepped out from the back portico. Behind him were the four chiefs of staff of the uniformed services, in the middle of an Oval Office discussion with the president, who was trying to persuade them to support a nuclear test ban treaty. Kennedy strode to the podium, looked out at the boys in a semicircle below him, and introduced General Curtis LeMay of the Air Force, Admiral George Anderson of the Navy, General Earle Wheeler of the Army, and General David Shoup of the Marine Corps. (Decades later, one of the most vivid memories of many of the boys would be that of Curtis LeMay standing behind Kennedy with an unlit stogie in his mouth.)

“I read about your meeting last night,” Kennedy said—referring to an article in The Washington Post that put the boys’ treatment of the civil rights issue in the most positive light, taking note only of their statement that “racism is a cancerous disease” and must be eliminated. “It seemed to me that you showed more initiative in some ways than the Governors’ Conference down in Miami, and we are impressed by it.”

Richard Stratton was still whispering his lines to himself when the president said something that cleared his mind and put him at ease. “And I want to congratulate Mr. Stratton on his overwhelming majority,” Kennedy said, smiling. “Those of us who just skim by are properly admiring.”

The White House and its grounds, Kennedy told the boys, were constant reminders of the best in American history. Eyes turned as he pointed south. “These trees which are just behind you were planted by Andrew Jackson when he was here in the White House. The tallest tree over there was planted by the first President who came to the White House, John Adams. So all around you is the story of the United States and I think all of us have a pride in our country.” He had recently returned from a trip to Europe, the president went on, “and was impressed once again by the strong feelings most people have, even though they may on occasions be critical of our policies … that without the United States they would not be free and with the United States they are free, and it is the United States which stands guard all the way from Berlin to Saigon.” Kennedy concluded by praising the American Legion for looking to the future as well as the past, a future represented by the boys, of whom he said: “No group could be more appropriately visiting here now. We want you to feel very much at home.”

When the applause receded, Stratton approached the podium, uttered his few lines of thanks from the boys, and handed Kennedy a Boys Nation polo shirt, which the president said he would wear that weekend at Hyannis Port. Kennedy shook hands with a few Legion officials at his side and turned as though he might head back to the Oval Office, but he did not. As the president walked toward them, the boys surged forward. Clinton was the first to shake his hand. The sixteen-year-old from Hot Springs lost his breath, his face contorted in what he would later call “my arthritis of the face.” The Boys Nation photographer was nearby, snapping away. Kennedy suddenly retreated, smiling, and headed back to the White House, his cuff links and tie clasp intact.

Most of the boys were riding an adrenaline high when they left the Rose Garden. After an early lunch at American Legion headquarters, they visited the Pentagon, the Lincoln Memorial, and the Washington Monument. Visitors were still allowed to climb the stairs to the top of the monument in those days, and the boys took to the stairwell with glee—running all the way to the top in a wild, noisy race. Benny Galloway, an all-state football player from South Carolina, easily outran the field on the way up. On the ride back to the Maryland campus, the boys joked about the race and boasted about the morning at the Rose Garden. Where were you? Did you get to shake his hand? I touched his suit! He looked right at me! They spent the rest of the evening calling collect to their folks back home.

The next morning, their last in Washington, they returned from a day at the FBI and the Capitol to find a bulletin board at Harford Hall cluttered with photographs taken during the week by a Legion photographer. Each picture was numbered so that the boys could order copies. They mobbed the board, writing down their selections. Along with an overwhelming feeling that in Washington he had seen the career he longed for, Bill Clinton brought home a captured moment bonding his joyous present with his imagined future, a photograph he had been bound and determined to get—the picture that his mother wanted.