THE BACK ROOM BOYS
ON THE AFTERNOON of September 26, 1966, Bill Clinton dashed off a letter to his grandmother at her nursing home in Hope extolling his new life as a Georgetown junior and clerk on Capitol Hill. “Dear Mammaw,” he wrote in his backward-tilting left-handed scrawl,
I am well settled in school and at work. I attend class in the morning and at night and work in the afternoon. It is of course exciting to be here around all the senators and already this year I’ve seen the president, the vice president and senators Fulbright, Robert and Edward Kennedy, Javits, Long of Louisiana, Smathers of Florida, Yarborough of Texas, Anderson of New Mexico, McClellan, Thurmond of South Carolina, Church of Idaho, Williams of New Jersey, Boggs of Delaware, McCarthy of Minnesota, Murphy of California, Stennis of Mississippi and others. There’s not much time to do anything but study and work, but I love being busy and hard work is good for people.
Clinton wrote the note from a desk in the documents room of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, a cramped annex on the far side of the committee’s fourth-floor public hearing chamber in the new Senate Office Building. The annex was a cross between a mailroom and a library, its walls lined with filing cabinets containing reports, newspaper articles, and committee publications. Three college students clerked there: Alabaman Charles Parks, who attended American University and got his job through the patronage of his home-state senator, John D. Sparkman; and Arkansans Phil Dozier of the University of Maryland and Bill Clinton of Georgetown, both hired by Lee Williams, the top personal aide to the committee chairman, Senator Fulbright. The fourth junior clerk was Bertie Bowman, the only black on the staff, a Washingtonian who had worked his way up from janitor. By their elders on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee staff these four were known as “the back room boys.”
They sorted the mail, filled the hundreds of requests for committee reports that came in each week, combed a half-dozen daily newspapers and clipped them for stories related to foreign affairs, and ran errands between the Senate Office Building and the main committee room in the Capitol. The back room, as with everything on Capitol Hill, had its own seniority system. Parks, the oldest of the three college boys, relegated the messenger role to Dozier, who in turn passed it along to Clinton. It was the equivalent, for Clinton, of winning a free pass to his favorite amusement park. It allowed him to roam the corridors of power and schmooze with secretaries and congressional aides, and also offered him more opportunities to study the senators he had listed in the note to his grandmother, often stopping to listen to their pronouncements at committee hearings.
Fulbright and his chief of staff generally frowned upon aides loitering in the back of the room when the committee was in session, but “they granted dispensation to the boys who were working their way through school,” according to Norvill Jones, then the staff expert on Southeast Asia. Buddy Kendricks, the documents room supervisor, made a special effort to get the boys to the hearings as part of their Capitol Hill education. The tutor for that education was not Fulbright, who was formal and usually too preoccupied for small talk, but Lee Williams, who kept close watch on the young Arkansans he had placed in the Capitol Hill patronage system. Phil Dozier regarded Williams as “a surrogate father to Bill Clinton and me—he took us under his wing and watched over us.” He also constantly reminded them how lucky they were to witness the great foreign policy debates of their time. Williams viewed the back room assignment as “the kind of thing that if you were a student you’d pray for, a once in a lifetime opportunity for someone with the ambitions of Bill Clinton. Everything in the international arena came through that committee. It had a tremendous influence on those boys.”
Clinton had long considered the committee chairman his role model. At age sixty-one, James William Fulbright, a Rhodes Scholar, former president of the University of Arkansas, and scion of a wealthy Fayetteville family, was seen as a dignified statesman of superior intellect whose presence in Washington countered the mocking stereotypes of unsophisticated Arkansas. “People dumped on our state and said we were all a bunch of back country hayseeds, and we had a guy in the Senate who doubled the IQ of any room he entered,” Clinton once said of Fulbright. “It was pretty encouraging. It made us feel pretty good, like we might amount to some-thing.”
Fulbright’s public persona had changed considerably in the three years since he and Clinton first met for lunch in the Senate Dining Room during the Boys Nation visit. Back then, he was considered an insider whose mission was to help guide the Kennedy administration’s foreign policy through Congress. When Lyndon Johnson ascended to the presidency after Kennedy’s assassination, Fulbright assumed a similar function. “You’re my secretary of state,” Johnson once said to him. He played a reluctant but essential supporting role in passage of the Gulf of Tonkin resolution, which the administration took as congressional acquiescence to its plans to send more American soldiers to fight in Vietnam. But by 1965 Fulbright had split with Johnson when the president sent troops to the Dominican Republic to quell a leftist rebellion. He thought the administration was panicking over communism for no reason.
Soon the fissure separating Johnson and Fulbright over the Dominican Republic expanded into a profound ideological divide on Vietnam. By the time Clinton arrived on Capitol Hill in 1966, his Arkansas role model had concluded that the Vietnam War was a tragic mistake waged by an administration that had deceived Congress and deluded itself with what Fulbright called “the arrogance of power.” He was becoming the administration’s most pointed critic, and the foreign relations committee which he headed was perceived as the center of dissent to Johnson and the war. Johnson boasted in private that he would destroy Fulbright and other Senate doves within six months. Fulbright wrote a letter to Johnson trying to explain the historical limits of superpower force. “Greece, Rome, Spain, England, Germany and others lost their preeminence because of failure to recognize their limitations, or, as I called it, the arrogance of their power,” he stressed, “and my hope is that this country, presently the greatest and the most powerful in the world, may learn by the mistakes of its predecessors.”
Clinton, who held a student deferment and was two years away from the threat of being drafted, at first viewed the personal and ideological conflict between his boss and President Johnson with mixed feelings. He was “for the war—or at least not against it,” when he began work that fall. It did not take long for him to change. Clinton admired Johnson for his support of civil rights, an issue where he had shown more courage than Fulbright, but in foreign relations Fulbright held sway.
It was difficult to work on the foreign relations committee staff and not be influenced by the pervasive antiwar environment. There “wasn’t anyone on that staff who felt otherwise,” according to Norvill Jones. “There was not a hawk on that staff.” Jones, who had come to Washington to work as Fulbright’s messenger boy when he was only fourteen in 1944, had become “the main Vietnam man” on the committee staff by the mid-1960s. Clinton, as he made the rounds as messenger, expressed a deep interest in the committee’s Vietnam work. Jones recalled later that Clinton “was always picking my brain—trying to learn more about it.”
When not quizzing Jones, Clinton would turn to Lee Williams for his analysis. Williams, a crafty political operative, had at first cautioned Fulbright against breaking publicly with Johnson, arguing that it would cost the senator dearly in terms of federal projects in Arkansas. But once the break was made, Williams was as blunt in his opposition to the war as anyone on Capitol Hill. He and Clinton spent hours discussing America’s role in Vietnam. He told Clinton that he was not a peacenik, but that the last good war U.S. soldiers fought in was World War II. He was ashamed that his country was involved in Vietnam, where he felt it had no busi-ness.
Clinton and Dozier, southerners who had grown up in environments where the military was revered, where most boys longed to become Ma-rines, often debated whether they could fight in a war they opposed. Dozier told Clinton that he wanted to serve his country but was against the war. Clinton said he felt the same way. On rare occasions, they received special invitations to share their concerns with Fulbright. One day Clara Buchanan, Fulbright’s secretary, came up to Room 4225, the back room, and said that the senator wanted to take Bill and Phil to lunch in the Senate Dining Room. Both boys were excited by the invitation, but Dozier was also nervous. He wanted to impress the senator that he was keeping up with events in Vietnam, so he asked him over lunch about the role the Laotian mountain tribes were playing. “What impact if any are the Montagnards having on the Vietnam War?” Dozier asked. Fulbright said, “I have no idea what impact the Montagnards are having on the war.” Dozier felt as though Fulbright thought he was “missing an oar.”
Dozier was struck by how sure of himself Clinton seemed. One day they were sitting at their desks in the back room, stuffing committee reports into envelopes, when Clinton turned to him and said, “Someday, this is going to be my office.” It was unclear whether Clinton meant it literally or simply as a way of saying he intended to be in public service, Dozier said later, but he had no doubts that the prediction would be fulfilled or exceeded in either case. Dozier had shared an apartment on E Street with a young Capitol Hill elevator operator who dated Luci Baines Johnson, the president’s younger daughter. He had visited the White House several times over the years—even after his boss and the president had their falling out—listening to records and doing the frug with the Johnson girls in the living quarters solarium. Clinton was fascinated. He would often ask Dozier, “What’s it like inside the White House?”
CLINTON and his friend Tom Campbell had planned to live in a house with several of their buddies in their junior year, but Campbell’s father killed the idea, saying his son’s grades were too precarious for the off-campus lifestyle. If Campbell carried a B average for the year, he could live in a house as a senior. Clinton decided that he could not abandon his longtime roommate, so for their third year at Georgetown they shared a dormitory suite in Copley Hall, and once again Campbell was treated to the buzz of an alarm clock waking Clinton in the dark so that he could study before breakfast, the only free time he had in an eighteen-hour day of classes and work.
The busy roommates rarely spent time together except on weekends. One Saturday morning in early October, they drove through the fall foliage of Virginia’s Shenandoah Valley to visit Lyda Holt at Mary Baldwin College in Staunton. Denise Hyland was still Clinton’s steady girlfriend at Georgetown, but he had grown close to Lyda during the summer campaign back in Arkansas, and they saw quite a bit of each other that fall. In Staunton, Lyda and one of her friends took Clinton and Campbell on a long walk around town and showed them the birthplace of Woodrow Wilson.
Frank Holt had been depressed in the months after his loss in the gubernatorial race. Lyda encouraged him to come east to cheer his spirits. “Daddy needed a boost and I thought Bill could help give it to him. So he came to Washington and we all went out to dinner at Blackie’s House of Beef and talked politics and told stories and laughed.” Holt returned to Washington several times that school year and often called Clinton when he was in town. The veteran judge and the ambitious collegian had a positive effect on each other. Holt knew important people in Washington and introduced them to Clinton, whose esteem for his political elders and enthusiastic plans for a career in Arkansas politics made Holt feel better about the future of his state. “Last week Frank Holt was in Washington and we had a fine time,” Clinton wrote to his grandmother after one visit. “We went to see Congressman Jim Trimble who was our congressman from Hot Springs before he lost the last election. He was in Congress for 22 years and really told some good stories.”
That Thanksgiving, Clinton traveled to New Jersey with Denise and spent the holiday in the warm embrace of the Hyland family. They headed back to school on Sunday with Tom Campbell and his younger sister. Clinton was driving his white Buick. Mary Lou sat in front and Tom and Denise were in the back, sleeping. As they approached Baltimore, there was a pileup and a car smashed into Clinton’s from the rear. Denise was the only one hurt—a minor whiplash injury to her neck that was later treated at Georgetown University Hospital. Clinton apparently bore no fault for the accident, but none of his friends placed much trust in his driving ability.
• • •
CLINTON’S work on Capitol Hill did not seem to harm his studies, or his beloved Quality Points Index, as he had once feared. “My grades for the first semester came out pretty good, made a 3.52, that’s about an A-average, and my name will go on the Dean’s List,” he wrote his grandmother. As planned, he entered the race for student council president in the spring of 1967. David Matter, the junior class president, filed to challenge him for the post, the pinnacle of student power on the East Campus, but soon changed his mind. Matter realized that he was elected junior class president only because Clinton had decided not to run that year. He did not feel he could beat Clinton this time, so he withdrew and instead signed on as Clinton’s campaign manager.
Matter had reason to believe this race was a sure thing. Clinton had won easily in his two previous races for freshman and sophomore class presi-dent, and by his junior year was perhaps the most prominent member of his class, better known than any sports figure at a college that did not emphasize athletics. Not only was Clinton a strong presence on campus, but his opponent, Terry Modglin, a working-class kid from St. Louis, seemed to shrink in contrast. Modglin was short, wiry, and bespectacled, and neither a stellar student nor an adept speaker. But the very characteristics that seemed to make Clinton the favorite worked against him in the council president campaign. His political skills, his ability to think on his feet, to build coalitions and networks, were unrivaled on campus; but perhaps they were a bit too much, and he was too smooth. People were wary of him. “Bill,” said Tom Campbell, “was a little too slick for some people.”
Modglin ran the campaign of his life. He had begun preparing for it a year ahead of time, late in his sophomore year, when he lined his desk with strategy cards reminding him what he had to do to build support. His obsession was so great that one day Phil Verveer, a student government leader two years ahead of Modglin and Clinton, walked into Modglin’s dormitory room, took one look at the note cards on his desk, shook his head, and muttered, “Don’t do it, Terry, it’ll ruin your grades and you’ll never get into law school.” Modglin was not to be deterred. His organization was meticulous. If someone asked him who his first one hundred supporters were, he could list them in order. He recruited the best communicators to his side, realizing that he could not compete with Clinton as an orator. He developed a Madison Avenue—style campaign theme. In imitation of the “Dodge Rebellion” commercials on television, he blanketed Georgetown with banners urging students to “Join the Modge Rebel-lion!” The campaign trademark became the white cowboy hat, and Modglin supporters played the roles of good guys in a Wild West shootout with Bill Clinton.
Clinton played into Modglin’s hand by building his campaign around a nineteen-point document whose title revealed its sober attitude: “A Realistic Approach to Student Government.” One page listed his achievements at Georgetown—president of freshman and sophomore classes, chairman of freshman orientation committee, chairman of Sports Week, chairman of the unification campaign to merge the student councils of East Campus and the Yard, listed in Who’s Who in American Colleges and Universities, Dean’s List, chairman of Interdenominational Services, editor of the first-ever collegewide student directory—a list that seemed more impressive to parents than to most college students in 1967. His specific proposals were moderate, from asking for lower parking costs and student-written course critiques to demanding less dictatorial advisers in the Institute of Languages and Linguistics and better courses in the junior year abroad program.
But Clinton not only misread the way his college résumé might be perceived by his peers, he underestimated the mood of rebellion against the school administration and its paternalistic rules. According to Jim Moore, Clinton related to the Jesuit management “in a positive way—as usual. He wanted to co-opt the management and convince them they were wrong and turn them around. Some people felt Bill wouldn’t be tough enough to get the administration to loosen up in its control of our lives and curricula. Georgetown students were just discovering that they could sometimes get authority figures to bend and change. Bill’s approach was too slow for them.”
Clinton understood what was happening to him, and Kit Ashby chided him for his reluctance to criticize Modglin, even in private. “Bill never wanted to say, ‘That guy’s an asshole!’” He would say, ‘That’s an interesting guy,’ or whatever. We used to kid him about that—‘Come on, Bill,’ we’d say, ‘Form the mouth, ass … hole’—but his basic instinct was to find, even with the most obvious asshole, something good. We wanted him to get angry in that campaign but he would not do it.” Clinton was still keeping faith with the philosophy that Judge Holt ingrained in him the previous summer: Never stoop to the level of the opposition. He told Jim Moore that he felt his approach was reasonable and that in the end the majority of students would understand his message. He would not pander, he said, to “the radical segment of the student body.”
To call Modglin and his supporters radical is a stretch. The extent of Modglin’s political activism was that he had prayed for peace during an antiwar vigil on campus and had participated, as Clinton had, in the school’s volunteer program in the inner city. In many ways he was to the right of Clinton, and showed no qualms about bargaining for votes anywhere he could find them. He struck an alliance with the conservative Delta Phi fraternity, the arch rival of Clinton’s Alpha Phi Omega, by promising them the coveted chairmanship of the Diplomats Ball. (On election day, Modglin recalled later, “guys emerged from the frat house in a drunken stupor and were led to the polls” to vote against Clinton.)
Clinton’s allies worked tirelessly for him. Denise Hyland had become so attuned to Bill’s political needs that she carefully selected a dorm room that year in Darnell Hall on the side near the busiest walking path so that she could stick Clinton signs in her window to the best effect. She and her friends made hundreds of yellow and red cardboard campaign buttons and distributed “This Is Clinton Country” signs in all the dorms. They went around on a door-to-door canvass, only to discover that their candidate was now turning people off who had once admired him. The election was painful. Kit Ashby later said he did not realize “the depth of negative feelings until near the end,” when many of his friends told him they were going with Modglin.
Whatever chance Clinton had of overcoming the perception that he was the machine candidate was wiped out in the final week when his campaign was involved in two dirty tricks. The first misdeed was a mild one—a newsletter supporting Clinton called “The Spirit of ’67” was censured by the East Campus Election Committee for claiming endorsements of seniors without their permission. The second episode involved an overreaction by campaign manager David Matter. There were campaign posters plastered all over campus, but Clinton’s seemed to be disappearing. After a week of what he took to be sign-stealing by the opposition, Matter decided to retaliate. “We stayed up all night and went through the entire campus and tore down every single Modglin poster. Bill was not involved. But I was using his car, the white Buick convertible. I piled the Modglin posters in the car and drove to an overlook over the George Washington Parkway and threw them over the hillside. And I got caught.”
The election was on a Friday. Clinton’s fraternity brothers in Alpha Phi, wearing blue and gold armbands symbolizing their impartiality, counted the votes that night in the Hall of Nations in the Walsh Building, the scene of two previous Clinton victory celebrations. Both candidates were there along with dozens of their supporters. As the vote tabulations were placed on a chalkboard, dorm by dorm, it became clear quite early that “the Modge Rebellion” had carried the day. The final vote was 717 for Modglin and 570 for Clinton. The rebels in white hats shouted: “Modglin! Modglin! Modglin!” and lifted their unlikely champion on their shoulders to carry him out of the room. “I was completely euphoric,” Modglin recalls. “And Bill looked like he was in shock.” Clinton stayed behind to deliver a concession speech in which he thanked his campaign workers and wished Modglin the best of luck. Then he and his friends went over to what was supposed to be a victory party organized by Denise Hyland at the house Jim Moore and Kit Ashby were living in on Potomac Avenue.
Lyda Holt, who had taken a deep interest in Clinton’s campaign from her long-distance perch down at Mary Baldwin College, forsook any social activities that weekend night and stood by a pay telephone booth outside her dormitory making calls every thirty minutes trying to get the results. She never got through to Clinton and he never called her back. “As the night wore on I thought, Oh, Lord, that’s not a good sign. I never heard from him, so I figured he lost.”
Matter, who took personal responsibility for his candidate’s demise, was inconsolable at the party, feeling so bad that he started crying. Clinton hugged him again. “Bill was as strong as can be, hugging me,” Matter said later. “He was concerned about my welfare that evening and thereafter. I took it far harder than he.” On the outside, perhaps; but inside, Clinton suffered a deep pain that he shared with a few close friends. Kit Ashby knew that his friend “really felt burned. He learned in later years how to take punches, but that one really hurt because it was so personal. He hurts very badly when someone says, ‘I don’t like you, you’re no damn good.’ He thought his heart was in the right place. But there were more than twelve hundred and fifty people who knew him and more than half voted against him. It hurt.”
The lesson, Clinton told Jim Moore that night, was that he had not been listening to people hard enough. “His response was, ‘If I do it again, I’ll just have to work harder. Instead of handbills under every door, I’ll have to talk to everybody in person. I’ll have to find out the people I thought would be with me who voted for the other guy and go out and talk to those people.’ It was all a matter of working harder.”
Yet life moves on quickly for the young. The very night that he cried on Clinton’s shoulder, Matter ended in bliss with a girl he met at the party. Modglin went on to a senior year of leadership that was marked more by chaos than rebellion—he flunked two courses and nearly got booted out of school. And Clinton, relieved of student politics, was free to concentrate on a competition of a different sort, a campaign for a prestigious graduate school scholarship that he might not have had a chance to win had the majority of his peers at Georgetown not considered him a shade too smooth to lead their student council.
AT same time that he struggled with political rejection, Clinton sought personal redemption of a sort, a final resolution of his relationship with his stepfather. Roger Clinton’s physical decline, obvious for years, was now taking a life-threatening turn. Two years earlier, back on Scully Street, he had been sitting at the dinette when Virginia looked over at him and said, “Roger, your neck is swollen!” One of Virginia’s close friends in the Hot Springs medical community suggested that Roger check into the Duke Medical Center in North Carolina for tests and treatment. There they discovered that he had cancer in a gland behind his ear and recommended surgery. Roger would not agree to anything that altered his appearance. He agreed to have the biopsy, but told her that he would never have a disfiguring operation. The cancer was fought with radiation instead. Roger made the long trip to Durham four times for treatment.
Bill visited Roger Clinton several times that spring of his junior year. He took Denise Hyland with him once. She remembers that she wore a navy blue suit and Bill a coat and tie, and that the weekend evoked a feeling of overwhelming sadness. But at no time during the drive down to Durham and back and never during their three-year relationship did Clinton confide in Denise about his stepfather’s drinking and abuse. She was not alone in that regard. Despite the trauma that Roger had put the family through over the years, Bill hid much of the animosity he might have felt. As confessional as Clinton was about other subjects, he never told his friends in high school or in college about his stepfather’s darker side, though they might have seen it accidentally during visits to Scully Street. Lyda Holt visited the house one summer and saw Roger stagger and throw up violently into a wastebasket. But to Clinton’s friends, he seemed like a vague figure. Clinton did not mention him often, and when he did it was with formal respect.
During his years at Georgetown, Clinton was distanced from the family turmoil but could not rid himself of the guilt he felt about Roger’s troubles and his inability to resolve them. “… I know I have never been much help to you—never had the courage to come and talk about it,” he wrote that spring in a letter to Roger in which he sought, finally, to get his stepfather to turn to him for help. “You ought to look everywhere for help, Daddy,” Clinton wrote. “You ought to write me more—people—even some of my political enemies—confide in me….” But now that Roger was weak and ill, the need was not so much for reform as for reconciliation. The same son who at age fourteen had ordered his stepfather to stand up and listen carefully as he told him never to strike his mother again, now at age twenty-one felt sympathy for a defeated man struggling to stay alive.
“Daddy has been so sick,” he wrote to Denise. “But there’s something wonderful now—he knows for sure—as much for sure as can be—that he has post-radiation sickness, which will endure for a long time but is not a recurrence of the malignancy we feared. The prospect of getting well boosts his spirit. He has fought so hard, so bravely—maybe the only battle he’s ever really faced. Surely he’ll be allowed to win.”
• • •
WHEN the school year was out, Clinton did not return home to Arkansas. He kept working in the back room at the foreign relations committee in the mornings and had signed up for two summer school courses at Georgetown for the afternoons. Before classes started, he and Tommy Caplan took a vacation up the coast. In New York City, they toured the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Frick Collection, where they saw a self-portrait of Rembrandt, a painting, Clinton told Denise later, that left him “truly entranced for the first time in my life by an artist’s work.” When they were together, this voluble duo—the writer from Baltimore and his big-handed political buddy—knew how to have a good time. That night, on Caplan’s tab, they took rooms at the Carlyle Hotel and “in a fit of gluttony had dinner at the restaurant and then ordered room service.”
The binge left Clinton wallowing in the guilt that often enveloped him when it came to food and willpower. When he returned to Washington, he told Denise that he was looking forward to the discipline that his summer schedule would impose on him, a routine that would “reintroduce me to sleep, exercise and good food.” When he started jogging that summer, his friends were surprised. He had not been much of an athlete and certainly never seemed the running type. So why did he start running now? Perhaps a hint came in a letter to Denise. “This running is a great deal,” he concluded a bit prematurely. “You can run for 30 minutes or so and then eat all you want and put on no weight.”
A more likely reason was that Clinton had been encouraged by Senator Fulbright to begin the process of seeking a Rhodes Scholarship, an honor then awarded yearly to thirty-two American men who were sent off to Oxford University in England for further academic training. Fulbright had won a Rhodes Scholarship while at the University of Arkansas and sailed for England in the fall of 1924 as an American innocent, returning as a pipe-smoking, tweeded intellectual who had enjoyed what he called the best years of his life at Oxford. The scholarship had always been associated with athleticism—Fulbright had played tennis at Arkansas, and Bill Bradley, the Princeton University basketball star, had just won one—but superior physical skills were not mandatory. Cecil Rhodes, the imperialist industrialist who founded the scholarship, said that he was looking for neither the pure intellectual nor the pure athlete, but “the best man for the world’s fight—an all-rounder, but of a special kind: an all-rounder with a bulge; some outstanding quality, be it of character, personality or ability.” Clinton had some bulges of the sort Rhodes discussed, but to be certain, he wanted to minimize any that might appear at his waist.
It was a summer of uncertainty. In his philosophy class he read the works of Kierkegaard, Camus, and Sartre. For a graduate-level class on U.S. relations in the Far East, he prepared a twenty-eight-page paper with ninety-two footnotes on the events in August 1964 that led to congressional approval of the Gulf of Tonkin resolution—“the one that gave LBJ his blank check in Vietnam,” as Clinton told Denise in a letter. The material he needed for that report was available in the back room of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, which was in the midst of historic hearings on the subject. Chairman Fulbright was by then convinced that he and other senators had been lied to by President Johnson about the events in the Gulf of Tonkin three years earlier—reports of aggression against U.S. vessels by North Vietnamese gunboats had been exaggerated. The adminis-tration, Fulbright said, “had already set its policy intentions and used the attack to implement them, while misrepresenting the actual event.” He also now believed that the congressional resolution resulting from that deception did not authorize the administration to wage full-scale war. Clinton’s paper reached the same conclusions.
For the first time, Clinton was overtaken by feelings of disillusionment. Not only did he disagree with his party’s policies in Vietnam, policies that had escalated the war to the point where thirty thousand young men were being drafted each month, but he was worried that the nation’s commitment to civil rights was diminishing. In a letter to Denise, he fretted that the status of race relations “and the good Americans who want to bomb North Vietnam into the Stone Age” made him wonder “if our nation has any shared values.”
In the middle of the Gulf of Tonkin hearings, Clinton was assigned a rather odd diversion. Sharon Ann Evans, who had just been named Miss Arkansas, came to Washington for a day on her way to the Miss America contest in Atlantic City. Fulbright’s office had been asked to provide her with an escort. Clinton got the job. He told Denise that it was because Evans was a six-footer and “I was the only one in Fulbright’s office over six feet.” It turned out that they had several things in common. Both had lived in Hope as youngsters. Evans’s roommate at Ouachita Baptist University was Linda Yeldell, the younger sister of Clinton’s friend and neighbor, Carolyn Yeldell. But they were political opposites. When Evans was asked which dignitary she would like to meet during her visit, she chose FBI director J. Edgar Hoover. Clinton cooled his heels in the lobby of the FBI building as Evans disappeared into Hoover’s inner chamber, shook the director’s hand, and chatted for five minutes, overcome, she said, by “the power, the mystique.” When she emerged, it was obvious from the look on Clinton’s face that he disapproved. She thought that he did not like her because she would rather meet Hoover than Fulbright.
In fact Clinton was infatuated with Evans, as he was with many young women that summer. He and Denise Hyland had slowly broken off the romantic side of their relationship, though not their friendship. As their college years were nearing an end, they came to a mutual understanding that neither one of them had an interest in marriage and that it was time for them to see what else was out there. Clinton saw a lot out there. He was dating several times a week, according to one friend, “like a guy getting out of prison.” He stayed that summer at the house on Potomac Avenue with Kit Ashby and Jim Moore, and constantly seemed to show up with a new date he had met on Capitol Hill. Moore thought it was “a revelation” to Clinton that “there was a whole culture of people in Washington just there for a few years to have a good time and not focused on long-term relationships. He had met women on the Hill before but never followed up on the opportunities. Then he became a free agent, and young ladies figured it out, and it was, ‘Holy shit, Bill Clinton is free and available and looking forward to having a good time!’”
Only the summer before, Clinton had said that the Arkansas heat was burning Washington out of his system. Now it seemed that the swirl of Washington was distancing him some from his Arkansas roots. He got home for a brief visit in early September before the start of his senior year. Several boys from his high school class had quit college or flunked out and joined the Marines. Duke Watts was about to leave for boot camp when Clinton arrived back in town. All summer, Watts and Joe Newman, one of Clinton’s close friends from band, had been “chasin’ girls” in bars and restaurants. One Friday night, as Watts later remembered it, “I was all set to go, duded up real nice, when the phone rang and it was Joe, and Joe said, ‘Clinton’s in town and he wants to go with us.’ I kind of winced a little but said all right and he tagged along.”
They went to Coy’s Steakhouse on the edge of Hot Springs. Watts looked at Clinton and saw an alien being. He could not imagine how this fellow, the same guy who was so coveted by young women in Washington, could ever get to first base. Clinton was wearing sandals. His hair had grown out a little. Watts thought that he and Joe “knew how to dress for the women,” whereas Clinton “wasn’t well groomed, to put it mildly; I don’t know if he had any money or even ate there at Coy’s. His demeanor wasn’t equal to ours.” Watts had joined the Marine Corps and was proud of what he had 11done. He had it in his mind that he had chosen a path of honor. He was “thinking all these noble thoughts.” And then Clinton started talking about the war and how strongly he opposed it. There were, Watts thought,“some anxious moments there. I know I was glad when the night was over.”