HE WAS ON FIRE
FOR THE START of his sophomore year at Georgetown, Clinton made the return trip east by car, the first time that he had covered the distance on the ground. Kit Ashby, his classmate from Dallas, came up to Hot Springs and joined him for the 1,200-mile drive. Their plan was to go nonstop, four hours on, four hours off for each driver; but in those days before the completion of the East-West interstate system, the journey was an arduous succession of narrow twists and turns. Ashby was shocked and awed by “how many miles, how many hours, how much land” there was between where they grew up and where they went to school. He was at the wheel as they drove through the hills of Tennessee, and he saw, for the first time in his life, the makeshift memorials to accident victims that were becoming commonplace along American highways: seven white wooden crosses lined the embankment as he negotiated the sharpest bends in the road. Clinton understood all too well the real-life consequences of those symbolic markers: a highway in southern Missouri had taken away the father he never knew. In the middle of the night, overtaken by drowsiness, they pulled over at a rest stop in Virginia and slept for a few hours. They drove across the Potomac and up to Georgetown the next day, two college boys on top of the world, big men on campus, Clinton possessing everything he might want at nineteen: the white Buick convertible with its red interior, the affection of Denise Hyland, and the presidency of the sophomore class.
As the student officer responsible for making the incoming freshmen feel welcome, Clinton had the opportunity to make new friends and build his constituency at the same time. He seemed to be everywhere at once: at the Main Gate shaking hands with anxious parents and students as they pulled up; at Loyola Hall, hauling luggage up the stairs. No one knew how to navigate the campus more skillfully. As polished as Clinton had become at Georgetown politics, appealing to students by calling for lower cafeteria prices and to Jesuit administrators by stressing student moderation and civility, he was even more adept in the classroom, where it seemed that he studied the teachers with as much diligence as he applied to the subject matter. His coziness with professors was a source of constant razzing from his friends. Tom Campbell, once again his roommate, this time in Harbin Hall, would tease Clinton by placing his hand on his nose in an obscene gesture and saying, “Bill, you’ve got your nose up their ass all the time.” Clinton would deny it, claiming that he was “trying to clear up an inconsis-tency.” But Campbell knew better. He marveled at how Clinton could figure out what was important to a professor and pick his brain, raising points of special interest to the teacher. Clinton was doing what came naturally to him, Campbell concluded. He was working the room.
Although Campbell, Moore, and Ashby chided Clinton about his solicitous approach to teachers, they also had enough sense to try to get into classes with him and pick his brain in study groups. Clinton’s ability to anticipate test questions by studying the professors was what set him apart from the rest of them, Ashby believed. A medical student had once told Ashby that the great doctors were not those most interested in helping people but those who were most fascinated by the human body and how it works. “Bill had that same intense fascination with people and how they work. That was the thrust of his intellectual curiosity.”
That curiosity was put to full use in the most exacting course in the sophomore curriculum, U.S. Constitution and Law, taught by Walter I. Giles. The course was modeled after a law school seminar. Undergraduates formed study groups to survive, parceling out the heavy reading load. Clinton was in a study group with Moore and Ashby. When they gathered to go over law cases, the others were struck by Clinton’s clarity and sense of humor about coursework that could otherwise seem intimidating. He would tell stories to relax the others, and “better than anyone I had seen,” Moore observed, “he could absorb a lot of information and come right to the point.” He was a meticulous notetaker. John Spotila, a freshman friend, missed classes one week and borrowed Clinton’s notes. Clinton had not only outlined with Roman numerals and subheadings, but cross-referenced the material. From then on, Spotila copied Clinton’s notebook every day.
The Giles course, much like Quigley’s, was one of the shared experiences of School of Foreign Service students. Some agreed with Phil Verveer’s description of Walter Giles as a “somewhat imperious character.” He was definitely a man of traditions. All classroom exchanges were conducted formally as “Mister” and “Sir,” and students stood when answering questions. It was highly embarrassing to be called upon and not have an answer; the only way to avert that humiliation was to come to Giles before class started and plead nolo contendere. What Giles imparted to his disciples was respect for the founding documents of American law and their application in the twentieth century. He had a liberal outlook toward human rights, an expansive interpretation of the Constitution and the Bill of Rights, and what Tommy Caplan regarded as “a great sense of the genius of our founding fathers and of the majesty of their document.”
The Warren Court was in its heyday then, interpreting civil liberties and civil rights in ways that Giles generally favored. Landmark cases emerging from the Warren Court would quickly become part of Giles’s course, providing new material for his rigorous exams. Two weeks before each test, he would distribute a syllabus of cases and readings that his students should be familiar with in order to handle the essay questions. Everything that was going to be on the exam would be somewhere in that stapled syllabus, but there was so much that it was virtually impossible to read it all. Clinton, knowing how to read the professor, knew how to read the syllabus, and the study group the week before an exam would focus intently on what Clinton picked out as the essential material. Although his exams were difficult, Giles stressed that they were the least important part of his class. It was the learning process that he loved. On the first page of every syllabus, Giles would present his philosophy of learning, a quotation from Justice Benjamin Cardozo: “In the end the great truth will have been learned, that the quest is greater than what is sought, the effort finer than the prize, or rather that the effort is the prize, the victory cheap and hollow were it not for the rigor of the game.”
Giles lived near campus in a carriage house with a felicitous history: it was originally part of the estate of the Marbury who lent his name to the landmark 1803 U.S. Supreme Court decision, Marbury v. Madison, which established the judicial branch’s right to review the constitutionality of legislation. It seemed to David Kammer that Giles “was wedded to the institution” of teaching, much in the manner of an Oxford don. He socialized with students outside the classroom, especially during football season. Football Sundays were a Giles ritual. He held four tickets for Washington Redskins home games and would invite students to accompany him. Clinton was among those invited, though he was of no help downing the cooler full of martinis that the professor and his brood toted into D.C. Stadium. For away games, Giles invited a group of six or eight who gathered at his carriage house and watched the game on television while downing Heinekens, martinis, and Bloody Marys, and sharing his Triscuits topped with Cheddar cheese and bacon. It was partly a performance, and those who performed well would find a second invitation in their mailbox.
Those who stood out in class and at the carriage house were tapped for a peculiar and colorful drama. It was called the James Madison Martini Lecture. Giles would walk into class that day and open a portable bar— Tanqueray gin, Martini & Rossi, olives—and launch into a discourse on the role of olives in American constitutional history. As he spoke, he would mix a pitcher of martinis. As the lecture concluded, he would call a group of students up to the front, hand each a martini glass, and propose a toast. “Gentlemen, to the republic!” They would toss down their martinis and the glasses would be filled again, followed by a second Giles toast: “Gentle-men, may confusion reign among enemies of the republic!” Confusion certainly reigned in the heads of the classroom leaders as they stumbled out in a two-martini daze.
Clinton thrived in this environment without being a drinker or much of a Redskins fan. He was, in the football realm as most everything else, still an Arkansas chauvinist. His high school friend Phil Jamison, who had transferred from Texas A&M to the Naval Academy that year, came to Washington on October 16 to attend Navy’s contest against Pitt, and after the game he and two fellow plebes from Arkansas made their way up to the Georgetown campus to spend the afternoon and evening. Clinton took them over to the lounge in Denise Hyland’s dorm where they watched Arkansas beat Texas in a Southwest Conference showdown, 27-24. The women of Georgetown had never witnessed anything quite like that late afternoon when Clinton and his buddies filled the dorm lobby with ear-splitting howls of “Whooo-pig-sooey!” That night, Clinton and Denise got Jamison and his friends dates for the dance at McDonough Gym featuring the Four Tops.
That was Bill Clinton at Georgetown, a curious mix, calling the hogs in support of an all-white college football team one hour, singing the lyrics to the soulful Motown tunes of the Four Tops the next. He was of both worlds. The progressive Clinton would make the case for the Johnson civil rights initiatives. The traditional Clinton revered his southern roots and the people back home so much that he tried to shy away from confrontations on issues of race. When his grandmother mailed him a pouch of postcards from Hope with an overtly racist image, a Sambo-styled black boy polishing enormous watermelons, Clinton mailed one back to her with the message: “Dear Mammaw, Thought I would send you one of your cards just to prove I’m using them.”
Denise Hyland enjoyed watching her boyfriend portray himself as “a simple southern guy coming to the brave new world of the East Coast.” She knew that part of it was true: he was enough of a hokey razorback to walk around campus wearing a bright red V-neck vest hand-knitted for him by a relative. But it was also partly a ruse, a way for him to lure people into underestimating him. He would play that just-a-humble-southern-boy game, teasingly, even with Denise’s mother. He sent her a note that year after a visit thanking her for letting Denise drive him to the airport in New York—“A small price to pay,” he wrote with mock self-ridicule, “to get rid of the southern plague.” Later, when he learned that Denise would be working as an intern at an export-import firm in the financial district the next summer, he wrote Mrs. Hyland another self-effacing, pun-filled note: “Take care of Miss Financial District. Make sure she doesn’t become an ‘export’ to someone of ‘import.’ I wouldn’t have a prayer—oh yes, even Baptists have those.”
THE times were changing rapidly on college campuses by the spring of 1966, but still not at Georgetown, which remained decidedly mainstream, all beer and no drugs. War protests on campus amounted to fifteen or twenty peaceful souls holding vigils near the statue of Georgetown founder John Carroll. The editorialists in The Courier maintained their prowar position, arguing: “American withdrawal at the present time is absurd. We are a world power engaged in a world struggle and the liberal neo-isola-tionists among us should realize the need for effective use of this power if our position and their liberties are to be maintained.” Some students were starting to worry about the military draft, however, as the troop numbers in Vietnam increased. “All males harbor fears over the Armed Forces Qualification Test,” one Hoya columnist wrote. “Fear not, we have the solutions: Poke out right ear drum; kiss your Army recruiter; shave your legs during the physical; burn your best friend’s draft card; become one of George Hamilton’s buddies; get religious convictions, or for that matter criminal ones will do; finally, if all else fails, enlist. Patriots never pass physicals.”
Clinton and Tom Campbell enlisted that spring of their sophomore year in a fraternity, Alpha Phi Omega, which served as both social club and service organization and was especially valuable for a Georgetown politician in that its members were charged with overseeing student elections. There was a modest amount of hazing of pledges, although hazing was officially banned by the administration. Don Pattee, who was Clinton’s “big brother” for the initiation period, made Clinton report to him every day for six weeks and do whatever he ordered: shine his shoes, run errands, craft a fraternity paddle, and run the gauntlet. The initiation rite on Hell Night was held at Pattee’s parents’ house across the Potomac in Arlington. Clinton, Campbell, Shullaw, and the other pledges were blindfolded and herded down to the basement, where they were forced to kneel in the darkness. One by one they were brought upstairs and questioned about their fraternal worthiness. At five in the morning, when Tom Campbell’s turn arrived, he started laughing and could not stop for thirty minutes.
For Easter break, Clinton brought Tommy Caplan home to Hot Springs. Caplan had spent much of that year holed up in his dorm room in Harbin Hall reading Hemingway and Fitzgerald, and writing short stories of his own, determined that someday he would write the great American novel. They flew out to Little Rock on a garish pink Braniff jet, an appropriately colorful means of transporting the easterner to Arkansas. Caplan had long been impressed by Clinton’s novelistic sense of place, not just his ability to bring Arkansas characters to life through his storytelling, but his eagerness to be part of that story while so many of his classmates were breaking away from their pasts. From here, Clinton’s attachment seemed less odd. Caplan was overwhelmed by the embrace that he, a stranger, felt on that cool but ripe southern evening when they rolled into Hot Springs, the top down on the convertible they had driven from the airport. It was an embrace that made him understand more about his friend than anything he had witnessed at Georgetown. They were on Central Avenue in downtown Hot Springs, waiting at a stoplight, when from the crowd on the sidewalk came the call of welcome to a favorite son: “Hey, Billy Clinton’s home!” All week long, they would turn other corners and the cry would go out: “Hey, Billy Clinton’s home!” To Caplan, it seemed like a film—“the best of an almost vanished America. You had the feeling of real affection and coherent, small-town life.”
The sophomore year ended quietly for Clinton. When the election for junior class offices was held after Easter break, he decided not to run. His friend David Matter entered the race and was elected class president. In temporarily withdrawing from the student political scene, Clinton was following a well-worn political track. Most of the ablest student leaders at Georgetown had served as freshmen and sophomores and then sat out the third year as they prepared for the top job, student council president, as seniors. Furthermore, Bill Clinton was ready to take his first step into the real world of politics back home.
DURING election years in the 1960s, the center of Arkansas politics was the Marion Hotel, long since demolished, which stood on the banks of the Arkansas River just to the east of the Old State House in Little Rock. It was a musty old place, with thick carpets and painted pipes exposed in the hallways, and no air conditioning. Tradition demanded that serious candidates for state offices set up their headquarters there, an address of such prestige that competitors often found themselves on different wings of the same floor or directly above and below each other. One of the ways in which political journalists measured the strength of candidates was to count the number of rooms each had rented at the Marion. When he launched his campaign for the Democratic nomination for governor in 1966, Judge Frank Holt took six rooms on the third floor, twice as many as anyone else.
One sultry morning in early June, Lyda Holt was seated at a desk in the campaign headquarters near an open window in the corner room facing the Old State House, typing a speech she intended to give on her father’s behalf. Lyda was the older of the judge’s two charming daughters, just back from her freshman year at Mary Baldwin College in Virginia. She hated to type and was not having a very successful go of it as she worked on the speech. Then “a nice looking young man appeared in front of me, leaned against the window ledge, and said, ‘Would you like me to type that for you?’ And I said, ‘Yes.’ That was my introduction to Bill Clinton…. He just kind of waltzed through. He just showed up. He typed the speech—and it came out edited, better than what I wrote.”
In signing up with the Frank Holt campaign that summer, the first full-time campaign adventure of his life, Clinton had relied on family connec-tions. His uncle Raymond Clinton was known as a player in Garland County politics, someone to whom state Democrats would turn for votes and favors. Young Bill was first introduced to the Holt people as “Raymond Clinton’s nephew—a bright boy who goes to school up east.” Holt, the unassuming brother in a powerful political family led by Jack Holt, Sr., who had twice run for governor himself, was the favorite of the Democratic party establishment. Although he was more progressive on civil rights than Orval Faubus, the man he sought to succeed, Holt nonetheless represented the safe choice. People who thought Arkansas was in need of urgent change had a variety of other candidates from whom to choose. There was Republican Winthrop Rockefeller, who had moved to Arkansas in 1953 to repair his personal life in a place where he was unknown. By 1968, fifteen years later, he was leading a GOP resurgence in the traditionally one-party state, promising to sweep away every remnant of the Faubus machine and modernize Arkansas. There was Brooks Hays, the former congressman, who had made a courageous if politically suicidal stand in support of the federal government’s desegregation of Little Rock Central High School. And for rebels on the segregationist side, Jim Johnson, the razorback version of Alabama’s George Wallace, who attacked the Faubus machine from the populist right.
Holt was immediately put on the defensive as the machine candidate. Jim Johnson accused him of being “hand-picked by the big boys,” and in a phrase that could not be forgotten, belittled the judge as nothing more than a “pleasant vegetable.” Another conservative opponent, orthodontist Dale Alford, said Holt was a passenger on the “Faubus steamroller” driven by the retiring governor’s political enforcer, William J. Smith, who was said to wield the sort of raw power that made legislators straighten up a little when he came into view. If the supposed links to Faubus were not enough, reporters were tipped off that Holt had met privately with the state’s most powerful financier, bond broker W. R. (Witt) Stephens, only hours before entering the race, implying that he was Stephens’s puppet as well. Rumors spread that he had been promised a federal judgeship if he lost.
These broadsides against Holt were for the most part bogus. Although he arose from the party establishment, he was not beholden to Faubus or Stephens, but suffered from his own becalmed nature. He demonstrated passion once, at the start of the campaign, when he paid his filing fee, banged his fist on the desk, and bellowed, “I am completely free and unobligated.” That done, he assumed naively that the attacks against him would end.
In his own fashion, Holt thought that his campaign offered the most important symbol of change. He surrounded himself with young people, a coterie of college student leaders, and called them “the Holt Generation.” It was an adaptation of the popular television commercials heralding “the Pepsi Generation,” with a jingle and red, white, and blue buttons evoking the soft-drink imagery. Lyda Holt, president of the freshman class at Mary Baldwin, was one officer in Holt’s generational brigade, which also included Paul Fray, president of the Young Democrats at Ouachita Baptist University; Leslie Smith of Vanderbilt University, a former Arkansas Junior Miss; Dick King, president of the Arkansas State Teachers College student body; David (Mac) Glover, past president of the University of Arkansas student body; Bill Allen, a former Arkansas Boys State governor and student leader at Memphis State; and Bill Clinton, former Boys Nation senator and sophomore class president at Georgetown.
The young recruits worked sixteen-hour days, often sleeping at the Marion Hotel or on a spare couch at the Holts’ house on Reservoir Road. The college boys wore khaki pants and blue knit shirts or white shirts and ties. Clinton was the youngest member of the group, aside from the judge’s daughter. In larger gatherings of the Holt Generation crowd and in correspondence to his Georgetown friends, Clinton assumed a modest posture—“and warming the bench, me,” he wrote to Denise Hyland when describing the powerhouse lineup of student leaders. But he came off the bench at the first opportunity, offering to be the chauffeur when the campaign brain trust decided that Holt’s wife, Mary, and two daughters, Lyda and Melissa, should barnstorm the state. Holt toured the state in one car; his family, with Bill Clinton driving them, toured in another. They would head out during the week and return to Little Rock on weekends to do their laundry.
For a young man who wanted to make his name in Arkansas politics, that might have been one of the two best jobs in the Holt campaign. Bill Allen had the other: he was Holt’s travel aide. But traveling the state with the Holt women offered certain advantages. (“Bill was no dummy,” Lyda Holt would joke later.) They were more interesting company, for one thing, and they sometimes turned to their driver for advice, or even invited him now and then to be a stand-in.
They were quite a quartet, Clinton and the Holt women, driving around the state in a Ford sedan with a banner proclaiming “FRANK HOLT FAMILY” on the side door, Bill and Mrs. Holt in the front seat, talking politics or literature, Lyda and Melissa in the back, practicing the speech they might give at the next town square. “I never took orders from three women before,” Clinton wrote with mock displeasure to Denise Hyland in Manhattan. This comment was a bit disingenuous, as a triumvirate of women—his grandmother, his mother, and his high school principal—had been the only ones to order him around his entire life, and it could not mask the pleasure he was getting from the assignment. He was thrilled to tell his East Coast girlfriend of all the exotic places they had visited—“Marmaduke and Piggott (some names, huh?)”—and to send her postcards from such landmarks as Burks Café and Steakhouse in Conway—“Here I come, broke and loaded with bull.”
His letters to Denise often lavished praise on Mrs. Holt, who stayed up several hours past midnight one night in a small-town motel talking politics with him. One day they were driving along a rural highway and noticed that a house was on fire. They helped evacuate the residents, along with a batch of puppies.
As the fire engines arrived, Mrs. Holt said, “Get in the car, we’ve got to get out of here!”
“Why?” implored Clinton. “This is good press!”
But they left.
Near the end of June, the Holt Generation group gathered in Little Rock to tape a fifteen-minute campaign program. It offered Clinton a chance to shine among his peers, and to save face for his colleague, Dick King. King could not remember what he wanted to say, so he wrote his speech on his hand. But his hand started to sweat from the television lights. “The joke was when my hand started running I couldn’t remember what I believed in any more. Bill had to rescue me by whispering my lines to me,” King would later recall. Clinton wrote Denise about the show, diminishing his own role (“I looked ugly”) while boasting about the results: “Many people called in and said they thought it was the best political program they had ever seen.”
The day after the show aired, he sent a letter to his grandmother at her nursing home in Hope. “Dear Mammaw—I hope you saw me on TV last night. Mother said she called you and told you I’d be on,” he wrote. “The program was pretty good, I thought, and I sure hope it gets Judge Holt some votes. Last night I was at the little town of Alread, near Clinton, at the same time the TV program was on. I had to speak to a small group of people there. This job is great. I really feel like I’m doing something worthwhile.” Clinton closed the note by saying he would be in Hope for a rally on July 7.
Lyda Holt later remembered that she was scheduled to give the speech in downtown Hope that night, but Clinton made a special plea. “Bill came up to Mother and said, ‘I know Lyda’s supposed to speak, but my grandmother is going to be in the audience, so is it okay if I did it?’ I thought, ‘Great,’ since I didn’t like speaking that much anyway. So Bill spoke. And if we had any doubts about his future, they were erased. He had that ability to take feelings and emotions and match them to words. It was a gift from God. He gave a warm, true gutty vision of my dad. He talked about how honest Dad was. How he could bring Arkansas forward and move it out of the past. How he had a vision for young people, a vision for Arkansas. And he talked about family and roots.”
In recounting the scene to Denise in a letter the next day, Clinton presented a different account, making it seem as though he had been forced to give a speech that he was not prepared to deliver. “Last night I spoke for Judge Holt on the courthouse square,” he wrote. “His daughter Lyda was supposed to give the address but Mrs. Holt made me do it when she found out my grandmother was in the audience. You would have been proud of me. I didn’t think I did so well, but some of the prejudiced home folks were really giving me the big head—plus saying—‘Why I haven’t seen you since you were this high’ or ‘I remember your mother used to wheel you down Main Street in your baby buggy.’ It was great to be home.”
Hope was an ancestral home for Mary Holt as well. Her uncle, a former congressman, had once been the town’s leading politician. The day after the speech, she took Clinton and her daughters out to Rose Hill Cemetery to clear the family grave sites and grace them with fresh flowers. When they were done, Clinton asked Lyda Holt if she wanted to walk in the cemetery. They took a long walk around. Finally, Clinton stopped and said, “This is my dad.” He pointed to a flat marble gravestone about fifteen feet from the path on the northern edge of the cemetery. It read:
WILLIAM JEFFERSON BLYTHE
FEB. 27, 1918
MAY 17, 1946
“Oh, my Lord,” Lyda Holt gasped. She had always thought that Mr. Clinton was his dad. They stood there quietly as Clinton told them the story of how his father had been killed in a car accident before Bill was born. Blythe’s grave rested next to an identical marker for Clinton’s maternal grandfather, Eldridge Cassidy, the Hope iceman, who died at age fifty-six. The visit, he told Denise in a letter, was “a good reminder that I have a lot of living to do for two other fine fellows who never even got close to the average lifespan…. If I had to die tomorrow I guess I’d feel in a way that I’ve lived a long time—and a full time. But should I live to be old I know I’ll feel as if I just started on this journey of life and hardly be ready to leave.”
From the cemetery, Clinton took the Holts over to see Mack McLarty, who was home for the summer working at his father’s Ford dealership. Seeing Mack and his family, the symbols of success in Hope, always reassured Clinton, he later told a friend, yet served to remind him of how much work there was ahead for him to get where he wanted to go, far beyond the life of a small-town hero.
A few days later, the foursome spent an afternoon campaigning in Arkadelphia in the Fourth Congressional District where Democrat David Pryor was on his way to winning a seat in the U.S. House of Representatives. It was a scorching day, and Pryor was dripping with sweat as he walked toward the Arkadelphia fire station to start shaking hands. As he approached, a young man came strolling out and struck up an intense conver-sation. When Pryor got back to his car, his wife asked, ‘Who was that you were talking to?’ Pryor said it was young Bill Clinton from Hot Springs. “You’re gonna hear a lot about him,” Pryor said. He could tell. When Clinton asked a question, he listened to the response. He was, said Pryor, “on fire.”
Temperatures soared near the century mark as the Holt family caravan rolled east toward the Mississippi Delta. “I think the heat has burned GU out of my system,” Clinton wrote to Denise, referring to Georgetown by its initials. Hot, flat, and poor, the Delta was by any measure a long way from the hilltop, and had more of the feel of rural black poverty than Hope, Hot Springs, and Little Rock, the Arkansas towns with which he was most familiar. Clinton’s reactions to what he was seeing in the Delta alternated between awe and embarrassment.
“Boy, you meet all kinds on a trip like this,” he told Denise in a July 14 letter. “I would give anything if you could see all the tiny towns we’ve been through—Altheimer, Wabbaseka, Ulm, McGehee, Lake Village, Arkansas City. The populations are mostly Negroes and the towns are either just a square or only one street for a couple of blocks. The buildings are the same as those erected at the town’s birth.” But in another section of that same letter he described his dismay at encountering Deep South racism at its most blatant. “Now we are campaigning in the heart of cotton country, south and east Arkansas, where Negroes are still niggers’and I couldn’t believe my eyes when I saw restrooms and waiting rooms still marked in Colored and White. It made me so sick to my stomach.”
When they reached McGehee, the Holt women attracted the notice of a feature writer from the Memphis Commercial-Appeal, who wrote an article about what he considered the novelty of finding a candidate’s wife and daughters out on the trail. The story detailed the scene inside the car. One can see Clinton’s presence everywhere, though he is mentioned only at the end in an offbeat way:
The Holts travel in an airconditioned Ford in an attempt to save themselves from the unbearable heat—but it doesn’t help much. They jump in and out of the auto time and again all day.
“We’re constantly debating whether it’s better to run the air-condition-ing when we’re in the car or just roll the windows down and stay in one temperature all the time,” Mrs. Holt said.
Between towns the two girls do some reading and Mrs. Holt looks over a typical itinerary provided a week at a time by campaign headquarters in Little Rock…. In the back seat Wednesday were two paperback books, one on Kennedy and a novel—Khartoum. The car, loaned for the campaign, came equipped with a stereo tape player which Wednesday appropriately was playing a tape of the Norman Luboff choir titled “On the Country Side.”
And there’s a convenient safety device. College student Bill Clinton of Hot Springs, the Holt family driver, can lock all four car doors instantly with a flick of the switch on the dash.
Those books in the back seat did not belong to the Holt girls, but to Clinton. In his letters he faithfully reported to Denise what he was reading and suggested readings for her. “Never finished ‘1000 Days’ [Arthur Schlesinger’s account of the Kennedy presidency] but did read Khartoum, the Loved One by Evelyn Waugh and Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf,” he told her. “Have dabbled in five or six others.” In response to Denise’s latest review of a book he had recommended, he added: “I knew you would like The Making of the President ’60. White is a great writer and a perceptive politico.” He also noted that he had recently received a letter from his favorite professor, Walter Giles, “wishing good luck in the campaign, but expressing hopes it hasn’t interfered with my reading.” If anything, the campaign widened Clinton’s perspective, presenting him with characters straight out of many of the books he was reading. After encountering one provincial tycoon, Clinton described him to Denise with a literary refer-ence. “Just like a Jonas Cord of ߠThe Carpetbaggers’ or Will Long of ߠA Long Hot Summer,’ he wrote, “he hasn’t learned to gracefully exercise the power that goes with his money.”
EVERY week, Frank Holt’s opponents attacked him with unsubstantiated charges, and every week Holt chose to ignore the attacks. Clinton admired Holt’s attitude and thought that it was strategically sound. “Denise, he’s never lost an election and I see why,” he told his girlfriend. “He really lives by his religious and ethical convictions without being self-righteous or pious. He refuses to attack his opponents as they attack him. He wants to win on his own merits or not at all. He thinks he can’t build Arkansas unless he can win in this way.” Then came the shock of primary night. Holt barely survived, finishing second in a six-way race to Jim Johnson, his despised former colleague on the state Supreme Court, the self-described “Justice Jim” who appealed to people’s fears and prejudices in his backward state. Johnson finished with 25 percent of the vote to 22 percent for Holt and 15 percent for the third-place finisher, Brooks Hays. Holt’s showing was more of a surprise to his followers than it should have been. In retrospect they could see how little room to maneuver he had, with Johnson on his right, Hays on his left, and scores of Republicans taking advantage of the open primary system to vote for Johnson, the man they thought would be easiest for Rockefeller to beat.
Holt tried to shape the runoff race as New South versus Old South, but to little effect. To whatever extent Arkansans were looking to become part of a New South, those who did had now decided that Winthrop Rockefel-ler, not Holt, would be the one to take them there. And in a year when many of the state’s schools were just facing desegregation, there was plenty of sentiment around for Justice Jim’s Old South.
Three days before the runoff, Clinton wrote Denise that he thought Holt had finally taken the offensive in the campaign. “All I can do is pray for reason and real courage to come to our voters Tuesday.” On election eve: “I think I’m sure victory will come, but you can never tell. And after the shock of the 26th I’m so worried…. Cross your fingers and hold tight—he’s just got to get in there.” But the family already knew better. Lyda Holt sensed on election morning that they had lost. “We went to church that morning and let go.” That night, Clinton was assigned to accompany Lyda. She later remembered “how reassuring” he was. “He stayed sweet and nice. When you lose an election, it’s like a death. And Bill that night said to me, ‘Now remember, the outcome of an election is not the measure of a man.ߣ”
Clinton made his next important political move as Judge Holt was playing out his last one. He told Jack Holt, Jr., that he needed some money to help pay for his college tuition and wondered whether there was any way he could work for Senator Fulbright’s office in Washington. Holt called Lee Williams, Fulbright’s administrative assistant. “Lee, I’ve got one you shouldn’t overlook,” he said. “There’s a young man down here who’s just the kind the senator likes to have around him.”
Lee Williams was always looking to help aspiring young men, just as he had been helped when Fulbright called the University of Arkansas Law School a generation earlier and asked if there were any bright graduates around who could work on his staff. Clinton was at home on Scully Street a week later when he got a morning call from Williams. “You’ve been recommended to me by someone in whom I have implicit faith,” Williams said. “Tell me about yourself and what your aims are.” Clinton talked about his interest in government and politics and said he needed money to complete his education at Georgetown. He brought up the time he had come to Washington for Boys Nation and had lunch with Senator Fulbright.
“Well,” said Williams, “we’ve got two jobs up here—one part time that pays about thirty-five hundred a year and another that is full time that pays about five thousand.”
“Well, how about two part-time jobs?” asked Clinton.
Williams chuckled.
The job offer brought with it only one disappointment. All summer long Denise Hyland had been planning to visit Clinton and his family in Hot Springs. She had arranged to come near the end of August. But Clinton would be gone by then. Williams wanted him right away. Virginia Clinton wrote Denise a note of apology. “We’re all so disappointed you’re not coming. The prospect of your coming even brightened Mr. Holt’s defeat. You know my dear this door is always open to you. So this time you set the date. Bill’s Daddy and brother both feel cheated.” But Clinton would see Denise soon enough in Washington. Nothing could get him down now. On August 19, the day he turned twenty years old, he declared it “one of my happiest birthdays ever.” He had just gone up to Little Rock to pick out a new suit, a pair of shoes, and luggage. He was “okay on the clothes end,” he told Denise. “But I’m still awful nervous about going to D.C.”