THE ROAD AHEAD
THERE WAS NO shortage of useful advice offered to freshmen entering Georgetown University’s School of Foreign Service in the fall of 1964. The head of the orientation committee enlightened the newcomers on the grading quirks of various professors and pointed out the favored pubs in a city where eighteen-year-olds were allowed to drink beer. The Jesuit fathers warned them of curfews and dress codes: in the rooms by eight-thirty, with only a half-hour break for snacks and socializing before lights out at eleven from Sunday through Thursday. Coats and ties required in class and at the dining hall. No females in the dorm. No public displays of affection, known as PDAs. A columnist for the school magazine, The Courier, placed those rules in the context of administration hypocrisy: “Remember, at Georgetown you will be addressed as ‘Gentlemen’ and treated as children.” Another writer offered a sardonic guide to conformist behav-ior: “The basic rule for survival on campus is to be tough, think tough, act tough. Wear tight chinos to prove your masculinity; wear madras shirts and shoes without socks, just like the 50 guys standing outside the 1789 to prove you can look exactly like another 50, or 500, or 5,000 Happy Hoyas.”
Georgetown in that era was divided into two distinct worlds. The college of arts and sciences, known as the Yard, was all-male and 96 percent Catholic, a homogeneous bundling of parochial school boys from the East Coast who were the quintessential Happy Hoyas. The School of Foreign Service was part of what was known as the East Campus (a few blocks east of the Yard), a consortium that also included the School of Business Administration and the Institute of Languages and Linguistics. The East Campus was a diverse melting pot compared with the Yard: there were women around, first of all, most of them in languages, but 148 in foreign service and a handful in business. The East Campus also enrolled scores of wealthy foreign students: the sons and daughters of ruling elites, including a band of polo-playing Cuban exiles who wore their coats like capes, inhaled nonfilter cigarettes, cruised the Hilltop in their convertible sports cars, and got most of the glamorous girls. The School of Foreign Service was the least Catholic part of Georgetown, almost evenly divided between parochial and public school graduates and including a few hundred Protestants and forty-one Jewish students.
Bill Clinton matched none of the Hoya profiles when he arrived at the East Campus for freshman orientation. Going sockless was a bit advanced for someone just making the transition from white socks to dark ones. He might decide to follow the crowds to the campus pubs, but once inside he would guzzle soft drinks or water, not beer: his family turmoil scared him away from alcohol, which he considered a dangerous indulgence. As diverse as the School of Foreign Service was compared to the rest of the university, a drawling Arkansan apparently was enough of an oddity that when Clinton stopped by the administration office on the first day, the freshman dean mused aloud whether Georgetown had made a mistake admitting a Southern Baptist whose only foreign language was Latin. Clinton knew it was no mistake: Georgetown was the only school he had applied to during his senior year in Hot Springs, after hearing about it from his guidance counselor, Edith Irons. He wanted to be in Washington, near the center of politics. As he walked out of the admissions office with his mother, he assured her that the dean’s sarcasm would soon be overtaken. “Don’t worry, Mother,” he told her. “By the time I leave here they’ll know why they let me in.”
Clinton’s roommate reached Room 225 Loyola Hall while Bill and his mother were out. Tom Campbell was more nearly the Hoya prototype, an Irish Catholic boy from Long Island who had attended a Jesuit military high school. He had driven to Washington with his father, a conservative judge, and when he got to the dorm and saw his roommate’s name, he worried about how his old man would react to his sharing a room with a black classmate. Campbell, who had never associated with black people or Southern Baptists, assumed that his roommate was black because of the name: William Jefferson Clinton. His father was helping him unpack when Bill and Virginia returned and overwhelmed the Long Islanders with southern charm. The moment they walked through the doorway, they immediately made the place theirs. As a pair, Campbell said later, “they just filled the room.”
Loyola Hall had once been a hospital wing, an aging brick building with a scattered assortment of single, double, and even four-bedded rooms that were assigned in alphabetical order. Most boys on the second floor had last names beginning with C, a few with B or D. John Dagnon of New Castle, Pennsylvania, had the biggest room across the hall from Clinton and Campbell, and he hosted a corridor meeting on that first night. There was inevitable posturing and politicking as the freshmen went through the ritual of establishing a pecking order. At the start of the evening, the group seemed to revolve around Dagnon and an urbane, witty midwesterner who let it be known that he was heir to a life insurance fortune. But it did not take long for Clinton to become a dominant force, sticking out his over-sized right hand, asking his classmates where they were from, what they were interested in, then working the conversation around to his roots, the giant watermelons grown in Hope, Arkansas, and inquiring, gently, as to whether they had given thought to running for any student office.
Although many of the boys tried to play it cool, Clinton showed little reserve. He was eager and friendly. There was something about him that left the more refined budding Hoyas puzzled. Here they were, ready to start anew, shedding their past lives, and there was Clinton boasting about where he came from and using his background as the setting for self-effacing jokes. Thomas Mark Caplan, a jeweler’s son from Baltimore, thought that Clinton “stood out immediately for his sense and evocation of place. He was not from homogenized, suburban America.” Only later would some friends appreciate that Clinton used Arkansas as a foil for his vulnerability.
Clinton adjusted quickly to his surroundings. While another southern freshman at Loyola Hall, Kit Ashby of Dallas, struggled with his identity, hauling out a book his mother had sent him—What Presbyterians Believe—so that he could argue with his Catholic hallmates about the Trinity and original sin, Clinton felt comfortable enough with his Baptist heritage that he could worship among the Catholics at the campus chapel. He bought stationery with the Georgetown seal and postcards depicting the Gothic spires, and sent a passel of letters and notes to old friends and relatives. To his grandmother, Edith Cassidy, in Hope, he wrote: “Dear Mammaw, I love it here. It is very beautiful…. My roommate is a very nice boy from New York. We’re going to have to study very hard. But it will be worth it. Love, Billy.”
He and roommate Campbell turned out to be a harmonious pairing. They were moderate in behavior; no all-night drinking binges in Room 225. Campbell was a straight-shooter, no hard edges, no fakery, solicitous of Clinton in all things political, yet good-naturedly alert to his ambitions and foibles. Clinton tried to assist Campbell with his classwork, and Campbell tried to teach Clinton how to march straight after they signed up for the optional Air Force ROTC program that met every Tuesday morning at quarter to eight for an hour of drilling. (Neither effort was very effective. Campbell struggled with his classes, and Clinton, in Campbell’s opinion, “just didn’t look good in a uniform, and despite having been in a band, he simply could not figure out left face from about face.”) With his military school background, Campbell was fairly neat, and Clinton obliged on his side of the room, keeping his laundry off the brown linoleum floor. They enjoyed much of the same music: Dave Brubeck, Nancy Wilson, Glen Yarborough. The southern boy’s teenage obsession with Elvis Presley was in temporary recession. Clinton brought an old pop-down phonograph with him from Hot Springs, which Campbell enjoyed, and an oversized wind-up alarm clock, which drove him crazy.
The alarm clock—“this god-awful ticking alarm clock,” Campbell called it—seemed to get louder every night. Soon it came to symbolize their differing attitudes toward time and achievement. Campbell had bent to enough discipline in his life, imposed by father and school, and was enjoying the relative freedom of the university. He worried little about apportioning his time and less about studying. Clinton’s discipline had been largely self-imposed. From his early years he had tried to fit more hours into a day, and now as his aspirations grew, so did his need to find more time to realize them. The freshman year was only a few weeks old when his Development of Civilization professor, Carroll Quigley, inspired him to make his days even longer. In a lecture on great men, Quigley noted that many of them required less sleep than other mortals. The greatest leaders, he said, often slept no more than five hours and refreshed themselves during the day with brief catnaps. Clinton returned to the dorm room after that morning lecture and immediately set his alarm clock for a twenty-minute nap. And he began sleeping five hours a night, the big clock resounding with the urgency of his mission.
CLINTON needed to walk no further than three doors down the hall to be reminded of his vision of greatness. Tommy Caplan was an ebullient fellow more interested in literature than politics, yet his connection to John F. Kennedy made Clinton’s handshake with his hero seem trivial. Clinton told his grandmother about his floormate. “One thing I really want to do is go see President Kennedy’s grave,” he wrote. “There is a boy down the hall from me who worked for Kennedy in the White House. He knows all the Kennedy family and John Kennedy Jr. is supposed to visit him at Georgetown sometime this year. He is only three years old, but this boy says he is a really smart boy and just like his daddy.”
Tommy Caplan had met Kennedy in 1960, when the Massachusetts senator was campaigning for president and Caplan was an eighth-grade reporter for his school newspaper in Baltimore. Of all the prospective presidential candidates in both parties, Kennedy had been the only one to respond affirmatively to young Caplan’s request for an interview, and they had met briefly during Kennedy’s visit to Baltimore before the Maryland primary in May. That summer, Caplan had organized the Teen Democrats of Maryland, volunteering at the Democratic party offices in the old Emerson Hotel in downtown Baltimore and occasionally running errands, by train, to the national headquarters in Washington.
After Kennedy reached the White House, Caplan, by then a sophomore at Gilman, an Episcopal prep school in Baltimore, developed the idea of creating a junior peace corps, in which teenagers from the United States would correspond with their contemporaries in developing countries. He began a lobbying campaign for his idea, telephoning and writing officials inside the White House, until eventually Ted Sorensen, Kennedy’s special assistant and speechwriter, Evelyn Lincoln, his personal secretary, and Robert Kennedy, the U.S. Attorney General, all responded. By 1963, the Youth-to-Youth pilot project was a reality and Caplan spent much of the summer commuting to Washington, recruiting young Americans to join his program and acquiring the names of foreign students through the United States Information Agency. Caplan was also a regular and welcome visitor at the White House, often loitering at Mrs. Lincoln’s desk until the president appeared.
One year after Kennedy’s assassination, Georgetown was still in the Camelot shadow. Ads in The Hoya honored JFK as the “ideal embodiment of noblest manhood of our time.” The Jesuit school announced plans to honor the nation’s first Catholic president with a posthumous honorary degree at Georgetown’s 175th anniversary program, and Robert F. Kennedy had agreed to accept it. There was a feeling too that Lyndon Johnson, as different as he was from Kennedy, was nonetheless his legitimate inheri-tor, carrying forward and even expanding Kennedy’s sense of optimism. Johnson had pushed through the Civil Rights Act of 1964, whose public accommodations provisions signaled a massive federal assault on racial segregation in America. He had also persuaded Congress, including Clinton’s home-state role model, Senate Foreign Relations Committee Chairman J. William Fulbright, to approve the Gulf of Tonkin resolution that laid the legislative groundwork for further intervention in Vietnam, but few among the students realized how the Vietnam War would cloud their futures. In that fall of 1964 there was a sense of great progress.
It was in that effervescent environment that the two Kennedy worship-ers, Caplan and Clinton, became sidekicks. One day Caplan took Clinton over to the National Archives, where Kennedy’s former secretary, Evelyn Lincoln, was cataloguing the late president’s personal effects for future display. Mrs. Lincoln showed them Kennedy’s famous rocking chair, and his desks, and in an annex behind her office, they walked down row after row of metal stacks holding the artifacts of JFK’s life. Caplan had seen some of these very items when he was padding around the Kennedy White House. Now he would become the backstage adviser to a Kennedy acolyte.
Clinton had lost two elections in a row—to Jack Hanks, Jr., of Texas for the Nationalist party vice-presidential nomination at Boys Nation, and to Carolyn Yeldell for senior class secretary at Hot Springs High. In both cases he had run for offices below his aspirations and therefore had done so halfheartedly. Now he would run as hard as he could. Within a few days of settling in Room 225 he had been off and running for president of the freshman class. Campbell helped him distribute leaflets and Caplan advised him on speeches, but Clinton ran his own show. His candidacy was non-ideological, and he developed a platform of dry moderation. He called for better communications through a campus government newsletter and referendum powers for the student body. “I believe this is a possible plat-form,” he assured potential voters. “The feasibility of every plank has been carefully examined.”
Every voting bloc in the East Campus electorate was carefully examined as well. In surveying the political landscape, Clinton learned that student politicians from Long Island tended to dominate. Another Long Island power play was taking shape, with a slate of freshman candidates that included Glen Pallen of Garden City for president, Judi Baiocchi of Manhasset for secretary, and Paul Maloy of Manhasset for treasurer. Campbell could help Clinton cut into Pallen’s Long Island vote. Clinton saw great potential support among the women at the language institute, especially after he talked one of them out of running against him. He mimeographed his platform and signed copies by hand while eating breakfast. And then he set out to meet every voter on the East Campus. John Dagnon across the hall, another non—Long Islander, was running for treasurer against Maloy, and formed an informal alliance with Clinton, accompanying him around the dorms at night, going door to door. On the way back they would pay respects to the Second Loyola prefect, a graduate student who encouraged their political efforts.
The nominations were officially posted October 23 in the Palms Lounge of the Walsh Building, where Clinton and his opponents had brought in their own cheering sections replete with guitars, a trombone, and even an English horn. Clinton and Pallen delivered back-to-back speeches. Clinton’s performance was lost to history, but Pallen’s address was unforgettable. He delivered an overwrought oration written by his hallmate, David Matter, burdened with world-is-ending rhetoric, warning that society was falling into “a bottomless abyss of perdition.” No one in the room knew what got into Pallen or what he was talking about. Matter thought he had written something profound until he noticed all the snickering. From then on, all Matter or Clinton had to do to produce a laugh was to evoke the “bottomless abyss of perdition.”
On Halloween Eve, Clinton was elected president of the freshman class. He took office with a phalanx of Long Islanders, who were somewhat surprised to find him in their midst. “Bill Clinton—who looks and sounds like an amiable farm boy, is the latest to ascend to that position of status supremacy known as freshman class president,” the next issue of The Courier proclaimed. If anyone on campus was thirsting for bold action from the new student leader, they would be disappointed. “The freshman year is not the time for crusading, but the building of a strong unit for the future,” Clinton told the student magazine. “You must know the rules before you can change them.”
Clinton copied the stories about his victory and sent them to his mother in Hot Springs and his grandmother in Hope. Virginia Clinton had followed the campaign closely, writing her son every two or three days with news from home and getting back about one letter and one phone call per week. On the evening of Saturday, November 8, he sat at his desk in Room 225 and wrote a short note to his mammaw, explaining that his birthday greeting to her was late because of the election contest:
I know I’m late, but I’ve had so much to do lately, as the article will show. I’m staying home tonight and trying to study. Next week our class has to build a float for the football homecoming and I have lots of tests. I’m making pretty good grades so far, all A’s and B’s except for English. I’ve got a C, but so does everyone else in the class. I’ll just keep working and hope to bring the grade up. Must study … love you, Billy.
SINCE its founding in 1919, the School of Foreign Service at Georgetown had maintained its own professors and courses, but in a larger sense it was shaped by the theories of education of the Jesuit founder, Ignatius Loyola, based on sequential core courses. Some of the professors were priests, some laymen, all colorful characters. Robert Irving, the English professor in whose class freshman Bill Clinton was getting a C, was a trim and caustically witty man who often lectured while seated, legs crossed beneath him, until some theme especially excited him and he would lift his body from the chair much like a gymnast working the sawhorse, then recross his legs from right over left to left over right. His students knew that he loved writing and literature, and they soon discovered that he had zero tolerance for lazy formulations. Tommy Caplan wrote an essay in which he described the emotions he felt emerging from the Capitol at night. “All these things and more go through your mind,” he wrote. The paper was returned with the phrase circled and the rejoinder—“If you are a capricious little bilge pump, that is.”
Non-Catholic students were not required to take theology classes, but instead studied comparative cultures under Father Joseph S. Sebes, a Hun-garian-born China scholar who spoke Spanish, Italian, German, French, two dialects of Chinese, and English, all in a thick Hungarian accent. Sebes was a thin, pale aesthete, cigarette drooping from his mouth, who loved nothing more than to eat, drink, and philosophize with like-minded souls. Late in the afternoon, after his teaching was done, he would trudge up the hill from the East Campus to drink scotch and smoke a half-pack of cigarettes while unwinding in the office of a Jesuit compatriot, admissions dean Joe Sweeney. As the evening wore on, he might be found deep in conversation with students treating him to dinner upstairs at the 1789. He had arrived at Georgetown in 1958 with one kidney, saying that he came there to die; he drank and smoked as though he considered death imminent, and stayed around for another generation.
The course Sebes taught freshmen non-Catholics in 1964 was known around campus by its nickname, “Buddhism for Baptists,” and it seemed especially designed for the young Baptist from Hot Springs. Sebes, according to one of his disciples, Father James Walsh, “devised the course to present world religions from within. When he taught Buddhism, he laid out the beliefs and practices as though he were a devout Buddhist. He taught Islam as a convinced Muslim. Taoism was second nature to him. He never said ‘they,’ but always ‘we’—‘we Hindus,’ ‘we Buddhists.’ It was sympathetic imagination—the ability to put yourself into the world view of other people.” To the extent that Sebes’s approach to learning took hold, Walsh believed, “students came away with the instinct to look at issues from various angles—that instinct eschews polarizing tendencies and values the ability to find common ground. This is not congenial to everybody, of course. People who tend to be literal-minded might label those who try to practice it as duplicitous, even slick.”
Otto Hentz, then a twenty-four-year-old Jesuit not yet ordained, who taught Clinton’s introductory philosophy course, picked up where Sebes left off. Hentz championed the philosophy of analogical imagination. Drawing on the work of the Jesuit theologian William Lynch, Hentz presented his students with three perspectives on the world around them: the univo-cal, where everything is clear and distinct, black and white, if you say “chair,” all it means is chair; the equivocal, where everything is differences and uncertainty; and the analogical, where clarity is found within complex-ity, not despite it. People who are analogical tend to be misunderstood by univocalists, who need to make everything absolute, Hentz would say, but the analogical thinkers more often make their way successfully through the world. He saw an analogical mind at work in the essays of eighteen-year-old Bill Clinton.
One day after class Hentz invited Clinton out for dinner, an invitation no hungry freshman would turn down, and as they sat across from each other in a booth, Hentz sipping a beer, Clinton engulfing a hamburger, the teacher began making a sales pitch for the Jesuit order. He talked about how Jesuits got an exemption from the Pope to be active in politics, retelling his favorite joke that Jesuits say the missing line in Creation is “then God created politics and saw that politics is good.”
“I think you should seriously consider becoming a Jesuit,” he said to Clinton. “I’ve been impressed with your papers.”
Clinton laughed and asked, “Don’t you think I oughta become a Catholic first?”
“You’re not?” Hentz replied.
“No, I’m not. I’m a Southern Baptist.”
Hentz had not considered that possibility. “I saw all the Jesuit traits in him—serious, political, empathetic. I just assumed he was Catholic,” he said.
If there was one subject on the East Campus that brought everyone together, it was the class on the development of Western civilization taught by Carroll Quigley, a layman. As Clinton later said, “Half the people at Georgetown thought he was a bit crazy and the other half thought he was a genius and they were both right.” But Quigley unified the campus because his course was mandatory—and legendary. Freshmen inevitably heard upperclassmen tell them strange and wonderful stories about the man—his quirks and his intimidating tests.
Quigley grew up on the edge of the Irish ghetto in Boston, went on to Harvard and, with his nasal accent and dropped r’s here and added r’s there, sounded rather like John Kennedy. He was a tall, slender man with graying hair, a bald patch in the back, a sharp nose, and dark, penetrating eyes, and when he was lecturing in his classroom in White-Gravenor, strolling back and forth, his voice rising and falling, he gave the impression of a crazed bald eagle. He seemed intimidating and arrogant offstage, yet he was master of the classroom lecture, full of drama and sweep, determined to teach his students how to think and what to think. “You’ve never met anyone else in your lives,” he would tell them, “whose mission was trying to save Western civilization.” His approach to history was broad. His life’s work, a thousand-page tome entitled Tragedy and Hope, was to be the culmination of two decades of lectures, presenting a systematic vision of history, placing events and trends into categories to find order in chaos. It was then on the verge of publication.
His exams were notorious, with questions as sweeping as his theories. Days before each exam, Quigley would write out the questions and his own preferred answers in fountain pen with a long, looping hand inside a blue book, so that his grading assistants could measure the student efforts against perfection. On exam day, students were not allowed to ask questions about his questions. Jim Moore, who was in Clinton’s class and competed with him for top grades, would never forget one question that “caused most of the class to tank.” It concerned Anatolia, although Quigley had never used that term before when talking about the area that became modern Turkey. “People were saying, holy shit, where the hell is Anatolia? Some would write about Greece, Mesopotamia, the Hittites, they had no idea what they were writing about.” Which was fine with Quigley, who regularly flunked one-fifth of the class. In Clinton’s day there were few vocal complaints. Jon R. Reynolds, who took the course a few years before Clinton, found Quigley “capricious and arbitrary—but on the other hand there were many gas-bags with facile pens who were accustomed to BS-ing their way through who were quite properly skewered.”
Clinton never had to dip too deeply into the gas bag. While most students were afraid to approach Quigley, Clinton often strolled up to the front after class and engaged the professor in conversation. He seemed to emerge from those huddles feeling a bit more confident about the next test, amazing his friends by guessing what two questions would be asked, and pleasing Quigley by framing his answers within Quigley’s well-defined system.
Quigley’s lectures were packed with students anticipating great theat-rics. The best attended lecture on campus was Quigley’s discourse on Plato. He reviled Plato as a precursor of the Nazis and dismissed The Republic as a fascist tract. He was especially repelled by Plato’s Principle of Specialization: that individuals have one and only one proper function, a function to which they are born, and can only be happy if they accept that role and do not try to change their place in society. Quigley’s contempt for Plato would reach its climax with an amazing display of classroom showmanship. He would rip pages from the book as he tore it apart ver-bally, and finally conclude by heaving it out his second-floor window. One year he gave the lecture while construction crews were at work outside. He opened his window, let the book fly, turned to the class, shouted: “Sieg Heil!”—and at that moment there was a detonation on the construction site. Even Professor Quigley was stunned.
At the very least, Quigley got his students thinking. They would go back to their dorms and debate his attack on Plato late into the night. And at the most, Quigley left some lifelong lessons with his students, none more than Clinton. As much as Clinton and his classmates enjoyed the Plato lecture, it was Quigley’s lecture on future preference that stuck with them. “The thing that got you into this classroom today is belief in the future, belief that the future can be better than the present and that people will and should sacrifice in the present to get to that better future,” Quigley would say. “That belief has taken man out of the chaos and deprivation that most human beings toiled in for most of history to the point we are at today. One thing will kill our civilization and way of life—when people no longer have the will to undergo the pain required to prefer the future to the present. That’s what got your parents to pay this expensive tuition. That’s what got us through two wars and the Depression. Future preference. Don’t ever forget that.”
Over the ensuing decades, Clinton rarely delivered a major political speech that did not include a paraphrase of that lecture from the crazy genius who taught him Western civilization.
FROM the nursing home in Hope, located in what once was Julia Chester Hospital, the place where she used to work as a nurse, in the same room where her grandson was born, Edith Cassidy marked off the days until Billy would come back to Arkansas for Christmas. She was sixty-three and lived alone in a single room. She kept a stack of envelopes at her nightstand already stamped and addressed to William J. Clinton at Box 232 Hoya Station. Next to the envelopes were his letters and postcards to her—wishing her a happy Thanksgiving and thanking her for sending a picture of Mack McLarty and his cousin Phil; telling her that he had caught his first cold and gone to the infirmary to get some pénicillin tablets (“the handkerchiefs you always taught me to carry have really come in handy”); bubbling with the news that the daughter of the president of the Philippines was in his philosophy class. Age and illness had reduced Edith’s handwriting to a nervous scrawl. She documented her life in a palm-sized blue-green address book that contained the names and addresses of patients she had treated in her nursing trips to Wisconsin and Arizona, as well as the comings and goings of her college boy. “Billy came home from Washington DC Friday Dec. 18 1964,” she wrote to herself in an open page near the back of the book. “He was here Dec. 24.”
Aside from the trip down the highway from Hot Springs to Hope to see his mammaw, Clinton spent most of the Christmas break on Scully Street, shooting baskets in the driveway, reading books, working crossword puzzles, playing with his pudgy little brother Roger, now and then going out to a party at night with his high school friends. He went to a dance near the high school and ran into Phil Jamison, who was suffering as a first-year cadet at Texas A&M and trying to transfer to the Naval Academy. Jamison was stunned to hear that Clinton had been elected president of the Georgetown freshman class. “How could the only guy from Arkansas show up there and within a few months win an election like that?” Jamison won-dered. Before that, Jamison’s feelings about Clinton’s political ambitions were “maybe yes, maybe no.” But from then on, nothing Clinton accomplished surprised him. The party near the high school lingered in Jamison’s memory for another reason. The senior class behind theirs was a bit wilder, readier to party and to challenge authority than they had been. Several of the boys in that class brought alcohol to the dance and got in trouble for it. They accused Clinton of turning them in for drinking. Jamison later vouched that they had nothing to do with it: “I can safely say that I didn’t turn them in and Bill didn’t either. But they considered us prudes and jumped to that conclusion.”
In high school at Hot Springs or in college at Georgetown, Clinton seemed oblivious of how he was perceived. He always had people who resented him, who thought he was a phony. A number of his classmates at Georgetown, including some who would later be among his best friends, were at first put off by his irrepressible glad-handing. One fellow freshman, Jim Moore, bonded quickly with Clinton’s roommate, Tom Campbell, but could barely tolerate Clinton for most of the first semester. He thought Clinton was too smooth: “Everybody else has moods, especially in college, where you have dramatic swings, study hard, party hard, you have the issues of growing up.” Clinton by contrast always seemed positive, upbeat, enthusiastic. Nobody, Moore thought, could maintain that attitude and be for real. He seemed to Moore like the career student body president, more surface than depth.
It was only after the Christmas break, when Carroll Quigley posted first semester grades for his Western civilization class, that Moore began to reconsider those early impressions. Out of 230 students in his freshman course, Quigley had given two A’s. Moore got one. Clinton the other. Moore was shocked: here this young pol from Arkansas was as smart as he was. He decided that he should get to know Clinton better.
Among his fellow student politicians, Clinton stood out as well. Some admired him, some felt a bit overwhelmed by him, and some disliked him and took pleasure in getting under his skin. As president of the junior class when Clinton led the freshmen, Phil Verveer, a liberal activist who was perhaps the most admired undergraduate on the East Campus, worked with Clinton at council meetings once a week. He found Clinton to be deferential to the upperclassmen yet already in a class by himself. All student pols thought they were special, yet knew who among them truly had the skills to go further. Clinton was the one, Verveer decided. He might have been jealous, but Clinton’s “disarming style” somehow took the tinge off envy. David Kammer, the freshman vice president, a young man from southern New Jersey with his own political ambitions, found Clinton disarming in another way. He reminded Kammer of President John-son. “Johnson would say, ‘Let us reason together,’ then surround you to the point where you were not reasoning so much as being coerced. There was that contradiction at the center of my perceptions of Bill. He had a smile and a big body and that body language of embracing and getting close and getting done what his goals were.”
To freshman treasurer Paul Maloy, mastermind of the Long Island slate that Clinton had foiled, Clinton was 90 percent bluff and 10 percent blus-ter. They were political and cultural opposites. Maloy was a leader of the campus Young Republicans, Clinton a lifelong Democrat. Maloy was a young man of a few concise words, Clinton a flowery storyteller. Maloy thought the purpose of student life was to have a good time. Clinton took it a bit more seriously. Maloy appreciated the college skill of doing nothing, wasting time, sleeping, drinking after hours at The Tombs. His friends were of the same type. One was known as “The Rack King,” not for his skills with the other sex but for his ability to sleep fifteen to twenty hours at a stretch. And there was Bill Clinton, his big alarm clock tick-ticking away, teaching himself how to live without sleep, moving on to the next thing and the next thing, talking to his buddies while writing a platform, sending notes to Arkansas friends while his college mates were watching Perry Mason, napping only so that he could get up extra early to get a jump on all the Maloys out there. They grated on each other’s nerves. Maloy could not stand the way Clinton, a superior student, would feign such deep interest in other people’s scholastic standing; it seemed, Maloy thought, that Clinton’s first words of greeting were always, “How ya doin? What’s your QPI?” (QPI was the grade point average known at Georgetown as the Quality Points Index). Since his QPI was lower than Clinton’s, Maloy took the greeting as a pointed jab.
But he knew how to rile Clinton. “We would fight all the time as student officers, and I knew how to get him to lose his temper,” Maloy later recalled. “Everyone thought he was unflappable, but I figured out how to do it. I’d accuse him of being insincere. I’d say, ‘You goddamn southern phony!’ His face would get red and he’d lose it a bit. He was a bit of a choirboy, but flim-flamming you.”
It was a contentious year for the East Campus Council. They drew up a student bill of rights which gave students an expanded role at the university, placing undergraduate members on the discipline committee and athletic board. They took a stand in support of an outspoken teacher, Francis Kearns, who claimed he was denied tenure because of his radical beliefs. In mid-March 1965 they debated an issue that extended beyond the boundaries of Georgetown: whether to provide funding for students who wanted to participate in the civil rights march from Selma to Montgomery in Alabama. The demonstrators in Selma had already been tear-gassed and beaten as they attempted to walk across the Edmund Pettus Bridge, and a young clergyman from Boston had been murdered by angry whites. Father Richard McSorley, Georgetown’s leading activist priest, organized a delegation to make the trip south as a show of support. He had a dozen or so student followers, including Phil Verveer, the junior class president, and Walter Draude, president of the senior class, who went before the council seeking a statement of support and financial backing. The council was split: some thought the southern civil rights crusade was beyond the purview of Georgetown students. Verveer and Draude called upon their fellow students to awaken to the world around them.
Their side eventually won, supported by Clinton, who first tried to take the middle ground. He agreed with the civil rights marchers in principle and endorsed their mission, though he said he also appreciated the conservatives’ argument that it should not be underwritten with student funds. Verveer accepted the fact that Clinton was more moderate than him. “He was still learning. He was trying to get the lay of the land. He was staying pretty close to the center.”
The center was precisely where Georgetown as a whole seemed situated in the spring of 1965. The sociocultural phenomenon that would come to be known as the sixties lapped at the edges of the hilltop. There were few drugs on campus. The social scene was closer to the boola-boola era, with enormous crowds lining up outside The Tombs on Wednesday nights to drink beer and listen to the old-fashioned a cappella college songs sung by the Chimes. Although Peter, Paul and Mary drew an appreciative audience at McDonough Gym, the new music was still competing with the old: Clinton would join Tommy Caplan in Caplan’s room to listen to the soundtrack from Gone With the Wind.
The student council’s Selma debate was played out in a one-dimensional context. The handful of black students at Georgetown were Africans. A letter to the editor of The Hoya asked plaintively: “Why are there not any Negro basketball players at Georgetown?” The best known black on campus was the gym custodian, Pebbles, who was patronizingly accepted by the Georgetown Gentlemen. The only other blacks made the beds and served the meals. Women were slightly more visible, but they were not immune to old-school perceptions and traditions. Since the nursing school was also in the East Campus area, most males assumed that a female student was a nurse unless she proved otherwise. The Courier offered a regular photographic display of monthly nominees for Miss Foreign Service, a tame version of Playboy’s playmate of the month. One edition in Clinton’s freshman year featured a special layout on “The Girls of Portugal.” Georgetown women also had to overcome a widespread impression that they were less fun to date than their competitors from Immaculata, Mount Vernon, Marymount, Dunbarton, Marjorie Webster, and Trinity, the local women’s colleges that virtually cleared out on weekends as their students headed over to the action on the hilltop. In Loyola Hall, the word was that Web girls, from Marjorie Webster, were the hottest.
The debate on Vietnam had only just begun at Georgetown, sparked by word that the first alumnus had been killed in the war. Prowar and antiwar voices seemed about evenly matched in the student journals. Columnist Gary Wasserman supported the war, quoting JFK’s inaugural vow to “pay any price, bear any burden, meet any hardship, support any friend, oppose any foe to assure the survival and the success of liberty.” But freshman Jim Regan countered with an article entitled “Vietnam: Let’s Get Out!” that said of the war: “It is unprincipled. It is unjustified. And it is hopelessly futile.” Claiborne Pell, the Democratic senator from Rhode Island who lived in a Georgetown townhouse visible from Clinton’s second-floor dorm window, drew a ripple of interest when he spoke on the East Campus and raised questions about U.S. bombing in North Vietnam. Clinton, who had spent a weekend that year at the Campbell house on Long Island defending Lyndon Johnson against his roommate’s father’s attacks from the right, was still supportive of the president.
DENISE Hyland left her British Literature class one day in February of that freshman year and encountered Bill Clinton waiting in the hallway. He wondered whether he could walk her to the next class. As they stepped outside, he asked her out on a date. They went to an Italian restaurant for dinner. As they were walking back along Reservoir Road toward Hyland’s dorm, St. Mary’s Hall, he asked her out again—this time for an occasion that was months away, the Diplomats Ball. “He flabbergasted me, I didn’t know what to say,” Hyland remembered. “He said he hoped I didn’t think he was too forward, and that I didn’t have to answer him right away.” He gave her a peck on the cheek, and strolled through the night back to Loyola. Taken by his earnestness, charmed by his southernness, she said yes the next day, and the first serious romance of Bill Clinton’s life began.
Hyland was one of six children in an easygoing, upper-middle-class Irish Catholic family from Upper Montclair, a leafy suburb in northern New Jersey. Her father was an orthopedic surgeon and her mother was a dieti-tian. She was only seventeen when she arrived at Georgetown to study French at the language institute, tall and poised, as reserved as Clinton was outgoing. As a schoolgirl she had studied maps, history books, and National Geographic magazines. Their mutual friends noticed that she had a grace about her that brought out the better side of Clinton’s nature. She was innocent, though not naive, and her unthreatening manner allowed Clinton to express his self-doubt and vulnerability. They went everywhere together. On warm spring nights they would often end up at the Capitol. They would sit on the west steps and look out at the Mall, out into the quiet darkness to the beacons of the Washington Monument and Lincoln Memorial, and talk about the nation and its problems. When he ran for sophomore class president near the end of the freshman year, Hyland helped pass out leaflets and type his platform. She organized the women in her dorm into a potent campaign operation that helped Clinton win again.
At the end of the semester she took him home to New Jersey to meet her family. He charmed the Hyland brood, wrestling in the living room with Denise’s two little brothers, teaching her little sister how to make peanut butter and banana sandwiches, chatting late into the night with her mother in the kitchen as she washed the dishes and he dried. It was as though he wanted to lose himself in this functional and secure family. Then Denise went to France for the summer and Clinton to Hot Springs. Every day he drove to Mount Pine to work as a counselor at Camp Yorktown Bay. At night he read books and wrote letters to his girlfriend in France, letters that revealed a sentimental young man.
“I meet some awfully cute kids at camp,” he wrote in his first letter to Hyland.
Some really make you realize how lucky you are. One flunked seventh grade last year and has always been in trouble…. One had his way paid by the Houston Boys Club and his mother, the mother of six more, didn’t give him a cent to take with him…. When they get back to Houston he has to call an aunt to find out where he lives. They were giving swimming tests tonight and one little scrapper tried even though he couldn’t swim a lick. When one of the counselors pulled him out he was so pale and shivering. Later I was walking with him to the gym and he told me he was really a lucky boy—his experience in the lake was nothing—he swallowed his tongue, he’d been poisoned, and been in a bad wreck. His father died three months ago. The little guy was so cute telling me how he was going to take care of his mother and sister—kinda hard though—cause they are all bigger than he. Camp is really good for these boys—good for this one too I guess.
Soon after Clinton arrived in Arkansas, his grandfather Alien W. Clinton took deathly ill. “My grandfather is dying tonight, Denise,” he wrote Hyland on June 10. “Mother and Daddy just left and all the family is beginning to congregate. He is a fine old gentleman of 85 and until two years ago he produced some of the best vegetables you ever saw in his acre garden. Worked at the garage until the very end. He was never much of a church-goer, but I have a hunch he is going to have a good trip.” Clinton had always admired people like this grandfather, uneducated Arkansans whose lives seemed simple and honest. They appealed to him almost as characters out of the Old Testament. After the funeral, Clinton wrote about him again: “He was really amazing to have lived so long—but I guess more amazing is he lived so well. He was really quite a man, especially for one who lived so simply, and the greatest in the world might have been a carpenter.”
In his letters, Clinton rarely mentioned the man he called “Daddy”—his stepfather Roger Clinton—but went on about his mother’s gardening and her carbohydrate diets and gave constant progress reports on his eight-year-old brother Roger. His care for Roger seemed almost maternal. Hyland would open the letters to discover what the boy looked like, how his shoulders were broadening, how “he weighs 90 pounds now.” Clinton’s preoccupation with his own weight was transferred to his little brother. They were eating too many sweets, he lamented: “Sometimes I think the whole house will sink into a heap of sugar.”
Time was another constant in his letters: he was always taking note of it and trying to find more of it. “It’s 1:30 a.m. and I have to get up at six.” When he could not sleep at night, he said, he would turn on the light and read. One night he woke up at three-thirty and read until five. “I wish I could wake up and read in the middle of every night.”
His reading interests ranged from the dense and furious southern prose of William Faulkner to the corny poetry of Edgar Guest, which he described to Hyland as “very simple, kinda southern, kinda negro, very beautiful poetry.” Guest was neither southern nor black. He was a London-born journalist whose homespun verse for the Detroit Free Press was syndicated to an adoring national audience. But when Clinton read Guest’s work he thought it was written expressly for his idealized vision of his childhood in Hope and Hot Springs, not the private torment that alcohol visited upon his family but the sheltering of his mammaw and pappaw in Hope and the free and easy days roaming the streets of Hot Springs with his adolescent friends. “David Leopoulos and I agreed today—no one ever enjoyed being kids more than we did—it would be pretty hard to crowd more living in,” he wrote.
Nothing pleased Clinton more than to show off his homeland to friends from other places. His first visitor was Tom Campbell, who came down from Long Island for a week that summer. Campbell arrived in Little Rock late at night and was struck first by its smallness. “I remember the black-ness,” he recalled. “On the East Coast, it was all lights. Out there it was blackness, lights, blackness again. The whole feeling was something I’d never experienced before. It was exotic: the heavy southern air, the warmth, the darkness. I felt like I was in another country on the drive from Little Rock to Hot Springs.” They goofed around with Leopoulos, shot baskets in the driveway, went water-skiing out at Uncle Raymond’s place on Lake Hamilton, and had a little party on Scully Street.
Carolyn Yeldell was home that summer from Ouachita Baptist University. She had read Emily Post, and “learned the whole business of entertain-ing,” preparing for a future where she might be the wife of a politician. She and Clinton went to the grocery store and bought crackers, cheese spreads, vegetables, and sodas. When she got home with the party food, her mother was upset that she had used her hard-earned money, money that was supposed to go toward a tonsils operation, for a party next door. “Who do you think you are,” she snapped at Carolyn, “Mrs. Astor?” Carolyn “cried and cried,” she later remembered. “I was making my mark as an entertainer or practice bride. I wanted to be the perfect hostess. That I would spend my money on it horrified my parents. I don’t remember Bill chipping any money in. But I remember Roger Clinton, Sr., was impressed. He said, ‘You are going to make some man so lucky.’”
When his roommate went back to Long Island, Clinton began concentrating on the year ahead. He had already been elected sophomore class president, and he drafted plans for an orientation committee that would greet every freshman at the Main Gate and help them move into their dorms. He also began plotting his future beyond that. “What feedback are you getting from the French regarding Vietnam?” he asked Hyland in an August letter. Then he added: “I’ve been meaning to ask you, does the Institute of Language and Linguistics offer a course in Vietnamese? I really want to know. If I go to summer school next summer, I can take it in my junior year. Someone has to be there after—and during—the war to speak and help the people—probably not over one or two people in our embassy can converse fluently. Let’s hope there’ll come a time when guns won’t have to win our battles for us and we can begin to win battles in the cold war again.” Hyland wrote back that she was uncertain about the language question but could tell him that there was “a real negative feeling about America” since the Johnson administration had escalated the war.
From his letters that summer it was clear that Clinton was struggling with the competing impulses of humility and ambition. He was looking wistfully at his past, seeing it only in its innocence. And of his future, he wrote: “Just searching, I guess, for a road ahead. Maybe I am beginning to realize that I am almost grown, and will soon have to choose that one final motive in life which I hope will put a little asterisk by my name in the billion pages of the book of life.”
Denise Hyland sensed what that little asterisk might denote. When she reached Nice after studying in Dijon, she met a group of college students from France and America, including some Texans. “This one tall proud Texas boy was talking on and on about his political future,” Hyland later recalled. “And I turned to him and I said, ‘Remember this name—Bill Clintonbec—ause someday he will be president.’”