TEXAS DAYS
AFTER MEETING THE two state coordinators that the 1972 presidential campaign of South Dakota Senator George McGovern had dispatched to Texas for the general election, Houston political organizer Billie Carr lodged a sarcastic complaint with campaign manager Gary Hart. “You said you were sending some young men down to help us, but I didn’t know they’d be this young!” Carr huffed. “One of them looks ten and the other twelve!”
The one who looked ten was the bushy-haired law student from Yale, Bill Clinton. Passing for twelve was a mustachioed political writer from Washington, D.C., named Taylor Branch. They were not only young but utterly unknown in Texas, which was how Hart wanted it. He realized that it was problematic to send out-of-state political operatives to a contentious place like Texas, where mortal enemies might conspire against an outsider who dared to tell them what to do. Yet he found it necessary. The historically sharp disputes between liberal, moderate, and conservative Democrats in Texas, to say nothing of the personality clashes within each of the factions, had intensified with the nomination of McGovern, a certified liberal. It would be virtually impossible to find native Texans who were not linked to one of the warring factions and thus unacceptable to others. Beyond that, Hart had established a policy of placing organizers in states other than their home states “so they would not be tempted to look after their own careers instead of McGovern’s best interests.”
Although unknown in Texas, Branch, who came from Georgia, and Clinton at least were southerners who knew the language and could adapt to the culture. Despite the admonition about their youthfulness, they apparently passed the test in a brief screening session with Carr, known as the Godmother of Texas liberals; Robert Hauge, an antiwar activist at Rice University; and Sissy Farenthold, a veteran Texas firebrand who was recovering from a disheartening loss in the Democratic primary for governor. Farenthold and Hauge, seeking to measure their ideological credentials, pressed Clinton and Branch about their positions on the Vietnam War and domestic issues, while Carr wanted to know about “the organizational stuff”—whether they had a feel for politics.
Clinton could cite his experience in the Duffey campaign in Connecticut, as well as his role as an antiwar organizer in England and his earlier work in Arkansas for Fulbright and Frank Holt. And unlike other veterans of the Duffey campaign, he qualified as someone who had supported McGovern from the beginning. At a reunion of Duffey workers at Anne Wexler’s home in Westport during the summer of 1971, Wexler and other Duffey organizers had said that they were signing up to work for Maine Senator Edmund Muskie, then the frontrunner for the Democratic nomination. Clinton broke from the pack and said that he was for McGovern. His decision can be attributed to two factors. First, the intensity of his feelings about the Vietnam War: McGovern was the clearest antiwar candidate. And second, his friendship with Rick Stearns, his former Oxford classmate from California, who served as McGovern’s deputy campaign manager and had been talking to Clinton about the South Dakota senator for several years, going back to his work on the McGovern Rules Commission. During the spring and early summer, Stearns had sent Clinton to Arkansas to work on his home-state delegation, which was committed to favorite son Wilbur Mills. Clinton also had operated close to Stearns at the Democratic Convention in Miami Beach. From a post in the main trailer, he had passed along instructions to a floor whip for several states. In the week before the disastrous withdrawal of Missouri Senator Thomas Eagleton as McGovern’s runningmate because of his past use of electric shock therapy to treat depression, Clinton had polled southern delegates on the Eagleton affair. Along the way, he impressed Gary Hart, who thought he “combined a lot of southern charm with eastern sophistication.” Hart also noted Clinton’s hair. “He was one person in that period who had as much or more hair than I did.”
Taylor Branch brought his own share of organizing experience to the Texas job. As an undergraduate at the University of North Carolina, he had been influenced by Allard Lowenstein, the charismatic antiwar leader and UNC alumnus who frequently visited the campus in search of disciples. During the summer of 1966, Branch trained under Lowenstein at a leadership camp at the University of Maryland, picketing the White House and listening in amazement as Lowenstein engaged Stokely Carmichael in a debate about black nationalism. Branch was engrossed in the issue of race relations. He had grown up in segregated Atlanta, where his father owned a dry-cleaning shop in the Buckhead section. All the workers were black. The lead cleaner, a man named Peter Mitchell, was also Taylor’s father’s workday pal. They would wager on Atlanta Crackers minor league baseball games and head off to Ponce de Leon park in an old white laundry truck. Sometimes Taylor would tag along. When they entered the park, the trio would split up: Mitchell was required to sit in the blacks-only section of the bleachers.
By the end of his senior year in college, the volcanic 1968, which was also Clinton’s senior year, Branch was dividing his time between civil rights and the war. That spring he traveled to Indiana to canvass for Eugene McCarthy’s antiwar presidential campaign in the black wards of Indianapolis. On the night after the primary, which McCarthy lost to Robert Kennedy, Branch was at the Indianapolis airport. He was engaged to be married and had just received his draft notice and was flying home to take his physical. His mind was spinning with the possibilities awaiting him, one of which was jail. He had already decided that if he passed the physical, he would sooner go to prison than fight in Vietnam. Broke, dejected, and without a place to stay, he spent the night at the airport, sitting on his suitcase, waiting for a morning plane. In the middle of the night, someone tapped his shoulder. There stood Bobby Kennedy. He asked Branch and another bedraggled McCarthy volunteer if they would join him for breakfast at the cafeteria. Branch and his colleague squeezed into a booth across from Kennedy and talked politics. It struck Branch that while Kennedy should have been happy—he had just won a crucial primary, after all—he seemed as despondent as Branch, whose candidate had lost and who was facing an unwanted draft physical. It did not take Branch long to discover what was troubling Kennedy.
“I’m getting all the C students and McCarthy’s getting all the A students,” Kennedy lamented. “I don’t like it.” He asked the students why they were for McCarthy. They said that McCarthy was there first, challenging Johnson on the war, while Kennedy was holding back. But he wanted to end the war as much as McCarthy, Kennedy told them. “McCarthy can’t end this war because he can’t win,” he said. “I can win.” As the conversation went on, Branch thought to himself, “Here’s a guy who might be president of the United States arguing with two college students in the middle of the night.” After Kennedy left, Branch felt somewhat guilty. He wrote Kennedy a note explaining that he was still for McCarthy and hoped Kennedy didn’t think he was a jerk. Then he flew home and flunked his draft physical. He was married on the day that Robert Kennedy was buried.
Branch’s reputation within the movement was established that summer when he helped black activists Julian Bond and John Lewis organize the integrated Loyal National Democrats, who challenged the delegation that had been handpicked by Lester G. Maddox, Georgia’s segregationist governor, for the Democratic Convention in Chicago. Over the next four years, he supplemented his graduate studies and journalism career with political forays. He helped organize the massive antiwar protests in Washington in the fall of 1969. While working at The Washington Monthly, an iconoclastic political journal, in early 1972, he polished a few speeches for Senator McGovern and helped the campaign recruit delegates for the caucuses in Georgia and Kentucky. When Rick Stearns broached the subject of running the Texas campaign for the fall. Branch’s marriage was falling apart and he was eager for a change of scenery. The fact that he would be working with Clinton made it easier for him to accept the job. He had felt a rapport with his fellow southerner, and admired his political instincts, since their first meeting three summers earlier at the summit of young antiwar leaders on Martha’s Vineyard. If Clinton and Branch were not a subcommittee of Branch’s satirical Executive Committee of the Future, they were at least a compatible, energetic team.
THE McGovern headquarters that awaited them in Austin was located in a one-story stucco shell on West Sixth Street noted for its creaky wooden floors and peeled walls. Dust, which had settled on the floor and window-sills for months when the building stood unoccupied, filled the air when McGovern volunteers stampeded into the headquarters during that dry summer of 1972, forcing staff members to drink water or coffee constantly to wash out their throats. There is a measure of well-intentioned naivete in every grass-roots campaign, and McGovern’s Texas effort had its share. Such embarrassing questions as “You are Commissioner who?” and “You are Senator what?” echoed through the headquarters. After a few conversations with the local pols of Duval and Jim Wells County—a notorious South Texas region where LBJ supporters provided the critical votes for his first Senate election by stuffing ballot box 13—the McGovern campaign’s boiler-room operators were told by a courthouse pol: “Look, we’ll carry it for you down here if you leave us alone. We don’t need you and we don’t want you. Don’t ever call us back again!”
Across from the boiler room was the radio room, run by Mark Blumenthal, who arrived in Austin not from Yale Law School but from a hippie commune in New Mexico called Tree Frog, where he had lived for three years. Blumenthal made only minimal lifestyle changes to accommodate his new line of work. He now lived on a three-acre farm on the eastern rim of Austin with his wife, an infant daughter, dairy goats, fig trees, a beehive, and an ample supply of marijuana. He did not want to cut his hair, but neither did he wish to embarrass the campaign, so he tucked his ponytail atop his head and wore a wig on days when he might encounter the public. He was also, like the rest of them, intensely devoted to the cause. Between midnight and four in the morning, he would turn on the reel-to-reel tape machine at his house and take feeds of McGovern’s speeches from the night before sent to him over the telephone by national staff technicians. He would head into the office before dawn and start sending out McGovern actualities, or sound bites, to hundreds of radio stations around the Southwest.
Clinton and Branch entered this colorful scene in the midsummer heat just as the national campaign was struggling to recover from the Eagleton disaster. They shared a garden apartment in a complex across the Colorado River about two miles from headquarters and split their campaign duties along comfortable lines: Branch took finances, Clinton took politics. Everything seemed fresh and possible. In his first week in Austin, Branch was quoted in a San Antonio newspaper boasting, “We are going to win this thing.” The Texans viewed the newcomers with curiosity. Blumenthal, whose office was across the hall from Clinton’s, noticed that the big Arkansan was a curious mix of cultures. He kept his hair long and curly and sometimes wore cutoffs to work. Yet when he was alone in his room, leaning back in his chair with his feet up on the desk, jabbering on the telephone, occasionally chomping on an unlit cigar, Clinton looked to Blumenthal “like a real politician, a junior politician.” Lisa Rogers, then a twenty-one-year-old college dropout who worked in the boiler room, was struck by “how big he was, and how calm, and how left-handed.” Something about Clinton “belied the hippie image,” according to Carrin Patman, the daughter-in-law of the venerable East Texas congressman Wright Patman, and the most establishment-type figure at McGovern headquarters. Not everyone was impressed. Anne McAfee, an early Mc-Govern supporter whose husband ran Austin’s union-label print shop, thought Clinton was “wet behind the ears and not likely to make much of a contribution.”
Branch seemed more ideological than Clinton and was less extrovert. He occasionally flashed a temper, yet had a wonderful, high cackling laugh and was gracious in his dealings with the staff. He had “less patience treating assholes like nice people” than Clinton had, according to one former campaign worker, and because of his position as the keeper of the checkbook was more often placed in situations where he had to make tough decisions. “It was sort of a good cop—bad cop routine,” recalled Billie Carr, who dealt with Clinton and Branch regularly. “Clinton was the good cop. He always thought your idea was good. He was always sweet. Taylor would have to say, ‘No, you can’t do it, we don’t have the money for that project.ߣ” There were parts of the pop culture that apparently had eluded Branch during the years in Washington when he was writing about bureaucrats and congressmen. When Lisa Rogers excitedly announced that Linda Ronstadt might hold a concert for McGovern, Branch asked, “Who’s Linda Ronstadt?”
LESS than four years had passed since Lyndon Baines Johnson sat in the White House. In five more months he would be dead. But in the late summer of 1972, slowed by heart attacks, his rugged visage blurred by extra pounds and stringy long hair, LBJ played out his final days along the Pedernales as a phantasmagoric presence, not all there but not yet gone. At the Democratic Convention at Miami Beach, dominated by antiwar liberals to whom Johnson was anathema, it had seemed almost as though he had never existed. His portrait was absent from the floor gallery and his name unmentioned from the podium until the final night. But he remained an important symbol in Democratic politics, especially in Texas and especially during a general election. McGovern did not want to run for president without Johnson’s blessing and endorsement. One of his first acts as the Democratic nominee was to telegraph the former president inquiring about his health and asking whether a visit to the ranch would be in order. Johnson was furious about the way he had been ignored at the convention and did not want to see McGovern, but wired back that he would be delighted to receive him.
The meeting was scheduled for August 22. Clinton and Branch helped the national staff arrange logistics for the visit and passed along whatever information they could gather on Johnson’s mood. They also assisted in the advance work for several events scheduled in Austin surrounding the ranch meeting. There would be a rally at the airport when McGovern arrived with his new runningmate, Sargent Shriver, Bobby Kennedy’s brother-in-law, and before and after the ranch trip there would be meetings with antiwar liberals, Chicanos, blacks, women, and labor.
From the isolated beauty of his ranch in the Texas Hill Country, Johnson ran one of the best political intelligence-gathering operations in the nation. He had been paying close attention to McGovern for months. His daily pouch of mail and documents included the literature of the campaign, which he not only read but annotated, sometimes with disdain. In early August, when McGovern had finally settled on Shriver as his replacement runningmate and when word got out about the imminent trip to Texas, Johnson was kept informed by telephone calls and memos from his network of former aides and cronies. An August 8 memo from former White House aide Horace Busby in Washington noted that McGovern’s impending pilgrimage to the ranch “created quite a stir on Capitol Hill and downtown.” Busby then offered a cold assessment of the ticket’s chances: “Over the past ten days or so I have been traveling to different points of the compass talking with a broad assortment of organization Democrats about the campaign. While all are cautious in public statements about predicting the dimensions of McGovern’s probable defeat in November, their private figures show those dimensions to be considerable.”
Johnson requested that the meeting be closed to press and staff, a decision which greatly disappointed Clinton and Branch, who held grand notions about being in the room and serving as mediators between the nominee and the former president. Branch was “pissed that we couldn’t go to the ranch.” He thought he could mollify Johnson. Unlike many of their friends in the antiwar movement, Branch and Clinton professed no hatred for LBJ. Clinton considered him “a great man,” who tragically allowed “his own paranoid aggression to consume him.” Branch thought that even though he and Clinton “had no stature,” as fellow southerners they might have “had more rapport with LBJ” than McGovern did.
One week before the meeting, Johnson made a political move that served his purposes while frustrating the McGovern campaign. He drove to Fredericksburg and dropped off a one-page endorsement of McGovern on the desk of Art Kowert, an old newspaper friend. He asked Kowert to publish it and then pass it along to the rest of the press. Longtime Johnson-watchers in the Texas McGovern camp concluded that LBJ did it to spite them. Many of Johnson’s protégés, most notably John Connally, the former governor, and also former press secretary George Christian, had recently broken with their party and formed a national group known as “Democrats for Nixon.” The hope was that Johnson’s endorsement of McGovern at the ranch would be a strong counteraction to the Connally betrayal; but the peremptory announcement minimized that possibility.
The day after the announcement, Johnson received five pro-McGovern and fifteen anti-McGovern letters. The next day’s pouch brought five pro-McGovern and eighteen anti-McGovern letters. Johnson’s mail reflected public opinion. McGovern was trailing President Nixon in the polls by between 23 and 28 percent in mid-August.
The trip to Austin and the ranch marked the first time that McGovern and Shriver campaigned together. Waiting for them at Austin’s municipal airport late on the night of August 21 was the largest crowd either of them had yet encountered along the campaign trail—more than ten thousand supporters waving banners that read “Jobs Not Bombs” and “Twenty Thousand More Americans Have Been Killed in Vietnam Since Nixon Took Office.” The boisterous crowd reflected McGovern’s popularity in the college town, the most liberal place in Texas. In his speech at the airport, McGovern promised that his campaign would bring the fractious state party together, but there was little evidence of that possibility. Dolph Briscoe, the Democratic candidate for governor, was absent from the welcoming party. Briscoe had not endorsed McGovern and would not say who he planned to vote for in November. Also missing were Senator Lloyd Bentsen, who had declined to serve as McGovern’s state chairman; Lieutenant Governor-elect William Hobby; and Austin’s mayor, Roy Butler, another conservative Democrat and LBJ partisan, who begged off, saying he had to interview a prospective city manager. The incumbent governor, Preston Smith, was at the airport, and in his speech he described himself as “a Democrat now and a Democrat in November,” but that was not enough for some liberals in the crowd who booed him for past grievances. As the caravan carrying the campaign entourage left the airport after mid-night and rolled toward the sprawling Villa Capri Motor Hotel near the University of Texas campus, it came to a sudden stop when the engine in the lead car carrying Secret Service agents conked out.
The next morning, McGovern and Shriver were flown out to the ranch in a small plane, and were met at the private landing strip by LBJ and Lady Bird, who were seated at the wheels of separate golf carts. McGovern was startled by the sight of the former president, dressed in a flannel shirt and khaki slacks. “He had hair down to his shoulders—longer than long hair, shoulder-length hair, he looked like General Custer,” McGovern recalled. McGovern could not help thinking about the psychological implications of that shoulder-length hair. All those long-haired college kids raising hell with LBJ about the Vietnam War, and here he was with hair down to his shoulders. McGovern and Johnson bounced back to the ranch house in one golf cart and Lady Bird drove Shriver in the other. When they had settled outside under the shade trees, Johnson, according to McGovern’s recollection, said that some of his friends were “in this thing called Democrats for Nixon—but they haven’t got me. They haven’t got me and they aren’t going to get me.” The quartet moved to a table for a noontime meal of small dinner steaks. “I remember vividly when Lady Bird served the steaks,” McGovern later recalled, “Lyndon cut his into small pieces. He’d take a bite, one small little cube, then he’d light a cigarette and he’d smoke for a while. And Lady Bird would look at him. She had a faint smile. If there is such a thing as a sad smile, she had a sad smile. She watched him. She saw him reliving his campaigns. She knew about the heart attacks. She saw him smoking cigarettes. I think he smoked eight or ten cigarettes while Sarge and I were there.” Everyone at the table knew the old man was dying.
At a press conference afterwards back in Austin, McGovern said that the Vietnam War came up “in passing” only two or three times during the three-hour discussion and that Johnson advised him to reach out to the elements in the party that did not support his nomination. He said that he would take LBJ’s advice. “We are going to reach out needing all the help we can get.”
It is doubtful that McGovern meant the sort of help that he received when he returned to his suite at the Villa Capri and met with a few dozen key Texas supporters and state campaign staff leaders, including Clinton. This meeting was later charitably described by one veteran Texas political reporter as “a donnybrook of a family feud.” Although Clinton and Branch had not been in Texas long enough to deserve much blame, the message of the meeting was that McGovern’s Texas campaign was disorganized, directionless, and divided. Sissy Farenthold was vacationing in Europe with her family, but she was at the meeting in spirit, since much of the discussion was about the wide split in the party between her supporters and those of Dolph Briscoe. Briscoe’s reluctance to join the McGovern team, some argued, was directly related to the fact that Farenthold was bitter about her loss to the conservative Briscoe in the Democratic gubernatorial runoff and would not endorse him for governor.
Not that it required an ideological divide to rile this Texas crowd. Several blacks were also upset about being excluded from the meeting and went to the local paper that afternoon to express their “ill feeling.” Here was an example of the unintended consequences of political reform. George McGovern, who had chaired a commission that opened the Democratic party to groups that historically had been kept outside the system, was now constantly dealing with the frustrations of unrealized expectations. If everyone felt that they deserved a part of the action, they also were more easily aggrieved. The blacks who complained about McGovern’s visit were university students who were unknown in Austin and had no connections to the campaign.
It is clear from a series of letters McGovern wrote a week later that Clinton and the Texas staff had made several unfortunate mistakes in dealing with the varied constituencies of the campaign. In a letter to Gonzalo Barrientos, a leading Chicano politician in Austin, McGovern apologized for not speaking to Barrientos during the trip and added: “I realize that my campaign in Texas has had many shortcomings, especially among Chicanos. However I think things have improved on all fronts in the last few days.” A similar letter went to Leonel Castillo, the city comptroller in Houston. There was also an embarrassing omission involving Secretary of State Bob Bullock, who was among the handful of state officials willing to speak out for McGovern yet unable to get in to see him during the visit. “There is really no way to excuse or apologize for the mixup at the Villa Capri, but I do want you to know how sorry I am,” McGovern wrote in a note to Bullock. “Perhaps these foolish errors are bound to occur occasionally, but it’s especially painful when they involve someone like you, who has served us so long and so well.”
ONE positive result of McGovern’s trip to Austin was that he persuaded a colorful pair of Texas officials to serve as co-chairs of his Lone Star campaign and help Clinton and Branch find their way through the chaos of state politics. John C. White, the agriculture commissioner, and Bob Armstrong, the land commissioner, signed on at a time when most other elected officials in Texas were staying as far away from McGovern as possible. White had been a strong Hubert Humphrey supporter during the primaries and Armstrong had stayed neutral. But they finally decided, “Bullshit—we’re Democrats and we’ll run as Democrats,” according to Armstrong. In the end the choice did not prove politically damaging to either of them, though Armstrong would later boast that his association with McGovern helped him make Richard Nixon’s notorious enemies list “right there next to Bella Abzug,” and White got “a damn good I4RS audit out of it.”
The Texans did not delude themselves about McGovern’s chances in Texas. During the Austin visit, White told the senator, “I cannot see a win here. I think your ceiling is forty percent.” Even so, the national staff promised them that Texas would be regarded as a key battleground state, targeted for at least one million dollars in campaign funds and frequent visits from McGovern and Shriver. Why would they spend so much time and money on a state that appeared to be a lost cause? Because to ignore Texas would amount to surrender. It was one of eight states that McGovern strategists believed they had to carry to win the election. They had already written off the Deep South. They had to try to win somewhere. To survive in that period, according to Gary Hart, the campaign manager, “you had to be an optimist.” The optimists searched for signs of hope in the statistics of past campaigns. No Republican presidential candidate had carried Texas since Eisenhower in 1956. Humphrey had defeated Nixon in Texas in 1968, though by a mere 38,000 votes. The pessimists saw chilling similarities between 1972 and twenty years earlier, when Eisenhower trounced Adlai Stevenson in Texas with the help of a potent Democrats for Eisenhower organization led by a conservative governor, Allan Shivers, who assumed the role then that John Connally was playing now.
White and Armstrong lacked potent political organizations that they could lend to the McGovern effort, but they got along well with Clinton and Branch, and entertained and nourished the young coordinators. They were a generation older, but were more the good-natured uncles or big brothers than father figures. After a rough day on Sixth Street, Clinton and Branch were invited up to White’s suite in the state office building, where the convivial agriculture commissioner dipped into his stock of confiscated whiskey. “He had this bootleg cellar and he’d bring out some of the best stuff and we’d drink it and talk,” Branch recalled. Like most homegrown Texas pols, White and Armstrong loved to gossip about the characters they had dealt with over the years. Clinton was interested in stories about Lyndon Johnson, and White, a storyteller who had known Johnson since 1950, had a supply of stories as deep and potent as his whiskey cabinet. Johnson, he told the young Arkansan, was an “exciting, dangerous man-it was dangerous to be his friend and worse to be his enemy.” As he got to know Clinton, White came to think that in some respects he resembled LBJ, especially in the passion he felt for the process. In that respect White saw Clinton as a classic southern politician who viewed politics as “an art form, an entertainment, a story, a whole life.”
Clinton took quickly to Armstrong. They were both southern moderate liberals who loved to shoot the bull, stay up late, flirt with women, and enjoy life. “They were right out front with the horseplay,” recalled White. “They had a real buddy relationship.” Armstrong would arrive at work at the General Land Office at about ten each morning, drink coffee and conduct business for a few hours, then slip out in the afternoon and head down to the Sixth Street headquarters with two six-packs of beer and his guitar. “I’m taking some sick leave,” he would say on the way out the door. “I’m sick of all those Republicans.” He had one foot in establishment politics and the other foot in the youth culture. “I was there at the dawn of the Age of Aquarius, at noon and at midnight,” he said later. “It was exciting, a great time for newfound freedoms—that was what it was all about.”
Most members of the campaign staff were under thirty. They worked long hours to try to elect McGovern while still enjoying life. Late at night, they would head over to Scholz’s beer garden, the hangout for Texas liberals and unofficial McGovern headquarters, where Armstrong would be picking and strumming and holding forth. Sometimes the younger staffers would go bowling at an alley across the river on South Lamar Boulevard. The bowling crew included Clinton, Branch, and Texans Carry Mauro, Roy Spence, Judy Trabulsi, Nancy Williams, and Betsey Wright, all of whom would later become important political allies of Clinton’s. Mauro, a University of Texas law student and former Aggie Yell Leader at Texas A&M, ran the Youth for McGovern operation. He shared Clinton’s political obsession and thought he was on the fast track—working at headquarters and attending law school at the same time—until he realized that Clinton was running the state campaign while enrolled at Yale Law thousands of miles away. Mauro’s girlfriend, Trabulsi, and her business partner, Spence, were fresh out of college and had just started an advertising firm that did some work for the campaign.
Perhaps the most resolutely ideological person in the crowd was Betsey Wright, an energetic political operative from the small West Texas town of Alpine, who had worked for the state Democratic committee. Wright lived two blocks from headquarters with Poppet, her Pomeranian. Although she was not yet thirty, she was considered a mentor and role model for some of the younger women in the office. Lisa Rogers called Wright “our moral pulse.” Wright had a more difficult time with some of the men, especially Don O’Brien, an old-fashioned Kennedy-clan operative who had been sent to Texas to help Clinton and Branch deal with traditional Democrats who were leery of the long-haired McGovern crowd.
A former U.S. attorney from Sioux City, Iowa, O’Brien had worked with Bobby Kennedy, a connection that naturally impressed Clinton. Many of the women on the staff considered him a chauvinist. He called them “girls,” until one day one of them, Ruthie Fischer, snapped at him, “We’re not girls; if we’re girls, then you’re boys.” Wright later said that O’Brien screamed at her about her hormones and depressed her so much that she turned into a “raging feminist.”
Clinton and Branch led relatively moderate lives in Texas. They drank beer late into the night. There “was dope around, but not compared to beer—beer was the drug of choice,” according to Lisa Rogers. Most of Clinton’s other contemporaries, including Mauro, Trabulsi, Williams, and Spence, recalled smoking marijuana at late night parties and occasionally at the back picnic tables at Scholz’s. They said they did not see Clinton smoke pot. The sexual atmosphere was free and easy. “Stories of who slept with whom among Texas Democrats have been a source of titillation for as long as I can remember: sex was always part of the game,” recalled Bebe Champ, who worked on the campaign as an aide to Armstrong, the self-proclaimed Age of Aquarian. “All the women thought Bill was absolutely adorable and precious. I saw his attraction, the groupies around him, but he didn’t seem to take it very seriously. As far as spending time with somebody, I didn’t see him do a lot of womanizing.” Commissioner White, who had seen his share of sex-hungry politicians during his days in Texas politics, noticed that “women were very attracted to Clinton” and that “he obviously liked women”—but that most women-chasers “would rather talk about women than politics and Bill would rather talk about politics.”
Hillary Rodham, who got a job that summer and fall working in a voter registration drive in Texas for the Democratic National Committee, was in Austin with Clinton more than half the time. When she was away, usually in San Antonio, and occasionally back at Yale for her fourth year, the boiler-room women would come by Clinton’s office and ask, “Where’s Hillary? Where’s Hillary?” to the point that Clinton, in exasperation one day, complained, “Gol dang, I couldn’t do something if I wanted to!”
When she was around, Rodham sat at a desk next to Clinton’s and left a vivid impression on the campaign staff. She wore jeans or brown corduroys to work, sported big square eyeglasses, and walked around carrying pads of yellow paper. Volunteers coordinator Joyce Sampson, then a housewife married to a University of Texas law professor, was “in awe of young women like Hillary who went to law school.” Mark Blumenthal, the hippie-dippie radio man, found her to be aloof but intelligent. Bebe Champ thought Rodham was “not particularly warm but businesslike—she focused on what she was interested in and shut other things out.” Rodham treated Ruthie Fischer “like a little sister—she worried that I wasn’t going out enough and that I was putting too much into the election.”
Taylor Branch welcomed Rodham’s presence. He found it easier to talk to her than to Clinton about “more reflective things” such as the collapse of his marriage and the meaning of life. “Bill and I talked business. We laughed. We talked personalities, but we never sat down and philosophized. I was feeling rootless, unhinged, and it was easier to talk to Hillary about those things than to Bill.” Betsey Wright also felt more comfortable with Rodham. The two women would sit under the blazing Texas sun at the massive limestone pool at Barton Springs, or across town at the airport waiting for a plane to come in, and talk for hours about the need for more women in politics. “It was a nascent feminist movement then. We had both read Simone de Beauvoir and Germaine Greer. And I’d just come off the heady experience of Sissy Farenthold’s campaign in Texas,” Wright re-called later. They reinforced each other’s ambitions. Rodham thought that Wright’s political experience in Texas would be valuable to other women around the country. Wright believed “that women were the ethical and pure force that American politics needed” and considered Rodham a perfect candidate to lead the movement. “I was less interested in Bill’s political future than Hillary’s. I was obsessed with how far Hillary might go, with her mixture of brilliance, ambition, and self-assuredness. There was an assumption about all the incredible things she could do in the world.”
It was not at all certain during their Texas days that Rodham and Clinton would stay together. They did not see each other exclusively and appeared on the verge of splitting up at least once. San Antonio labor leader Franklin Garcia, a charismatic figure around McGovern headquarters, a fearless organizer and a soothing mystic, helped patch things up. “Franklin, I just want to thank you. You really saved our relationship,” Clinton said to Garcia one night at Scholz’s. The couple argued heatedly, yet they also shared a deep passion, according to Roy Spence. “They shared a passion for the dream—the dream of being in politics, of sharing the business of politics.”
THE Watergate break-in, which had entered the political stage in 1972, seemed to have negligible effect on how the public viewed the presidential race. The public lack of interest in Watergate troubled Branch and Clinton, but it did not slow them down. One night at their apartment, they talked for hours about why they could not stop working. It was, according to Branch, the only concentrated philosophical discussion he and Clinton had during the months they worked together. “I thought it odd and curious that even though the polls showed very early it was over, we worked just as hard—we were obsessive. We decided that an awful lot of it had to do with the war. We thought the war would go on four more years, particularly the bombing, if Nixon won. Playing for those stakes made it important. Plus we always had this sense that a huge scandal might break at any moment, making the election close and Texas critical, so we couldn’t relax.”
There was no prospect of relaxation in any case. The Texas campaign was in constant turmoil as it tried to deal with historic political forces that it could not control. One such force was the growing disaffection of conservative southern Democrats with the national party, as symbolized by John Connally’s embrace of Nixon. Connally’s Democrats for Nixon group, funded largely by money from the Committee to Reelect the President (CREEP), was running full-page advertisements attacking McGovern on defense, busing, taxes, and welfare. The dilemma for the McGovern forces was how to repudiate Connally and his crowd without alienating Texas Democrats who had not yet abandoned the ticket. It was a fine line.
When the Texas staff learned that Connally was planning to host a lavish fund-raiser for Nixon at his Floresville ranch, they saw it as a chance to mock the fat-cat ostentation of that event by staging a populist-style tamales-and-beans fiesta for McGovern on a nearby courthouse lawn. Branch and Clinton presented the counter-rally proposal to the Washington staff, which promptly rejected it. McGovern had absorbed too much criticism for his one-thousand-dollars-for-everyone welfare proposal, the Washington staff argued, and a scraggly tamales-and-beans affair might give the impression that they were engaging in class warfare. Gary Hart told them it was important for the campaign not to seem marginal. Clinton and Branch persisted, however, supported by their seasoned Texas advisers, White and Armstrong, who thought the tamale fiesta fell into the category of a classic Texas populist event. Since McGovern would not go, they tried Sargent Shriver. They pitched the idea to him during his next visit in the state. He “thought it was a great idea,” and put it on his schedule.
Threats and counterthreats laced with obscenities flew between the Texas coordinators and the home office in the final stages of the Floresville advance work. The hostility was real but evanescent, the sort of profane give-and-take that seeps into most such relationships, where state coordinators demand more candidate time and money while the national staff tries to keep a larger strategy in force. Branch had worked out an agreement that expenses for the rally would be shared by Texas and Washington, but Washington’s money was slow in arriving. The Texans were short of homegrown cash and often resorted to dramatic gestures to squeeze some out of the national office.
On the morning of the rally, Branch called Washington and said, “If your advance guy doesn’t have your half when I get there, you might as well not send Shriver.” Branch in fact had the necessary funds in his trunk. Steve Robbins and Tony Podesta, who had opposed the idea in the first place, exploded at the threat. “We’re gonna have your ass, Taylor, you fucking incompetent! We’re gonna get you fired for this!”
“You couldn’t fire me,” Branch screamed back. “You couldn’t find anybody else to agree to take this goddamn job!”
Washington came up with the money.
On the night of September 22, Clinton watched Sargent Shriver, the patrician Democratic nominee for vice president, his coat off and shirt-sleeves rolled up, mingle with fifteen hundred people, die-hard McGovern-Shriver supporters and hungry locals in search of a meal, who had assembled on the lawn of the Wilson County Courthouse at a people’s party where the food and drinks were free: ten thousand tamales, three thousand pounds of beans, four thousand jalapeño peppers, trash cans full of peanuts, and two hundred and forty gallons of beer.
A few miles away, guests were arriving at John and Nellie Connally’s contemporary stone frame and glass ranchhouse. Their long driveway was lined with limousines and a private airstrip hummed with helicopters and private jets. Among the wealthy Democrats for Nixon in attendance were oilmen, manufacturers, and university regents, even Johnson’s former Air Force One pilot, sporting a—Nixon Now—button. Chrysanthemums floated in Big John’s pool. On the front lawn, under an orange and yellow awning, outdoor tables shone with crystal and silver settings. President Nixon and his wife and four hundred guests dined on roast beef and black-eyed peas.
For every Texas Democrat who publicly followed Connally into the Nixon camp, there were more who remained silent. Ten members of the state Democratic executive committee refused to sign a petition endorsing the top of the ticket. In San Antonio, officials at Democratic party headquarters would not talk to local McGovern campaign officials. Clinton spent much of his time on the telephone sweet-talking reluctant party regulars or going out on the road to see them in person. He studied the politics of each county, paying careful attention to the various factions. “When he arrived there was a feeling that Texas was such a vast state that no outsider could possibly learn who was enemies of whom, but after a while, mention a name or an event and Bill knew more about it than you did,” Bebe Champ said later. “If you went to this town you had to see so-and-so. He was so easy to talk to, people would tell him stuff, and he remembered it. He was so likable, people tried to help him not stub his toe.”
Clinton got away from the Austin office whenever possible, often heading south to the Rio Grande Valley and San Antonio, where he fell in love with Tex-Mex food and became addicted to the mango ice cream at Menger’s Hotel, or east to Houston, where he studied political organizing at the side of Billie Carr. Carr wore a “Liberal and Proud of It” button and distributed “Billie Carr—Bitch” namecards. She first took sides when her parents brought her to the 1928 Democratic Convention and pinned an Al Smith button on her diaper. From the day in 1952 when Governor Allan Shivers boasted to her, “Young lady, I have this state in the palm of my hand,” Carr had looked upon conservative Democrats as her mortal enemies and fought them at every opportunity. She had loyal followers, but even among fellow liberals she had her share of enemies. Her detractors complained that she was not a team player. Some people in the McGovern campaign complained that she had the best mailing list of liberal activists in the state but was reluctant to share it. Anne McAfee, one of Carr’s liberal antagonists in Austin, accused her of using the list to wield power. The reason Clinton had to visit Houston so often, McAfee charged, was that he was “courting Billie to try to get the list.” That might have been part of it. Clinton’s dealings were usually played out on two or three levels at once. Another reason could have been that he and Carr enjoyed each other’s company. Carr, a rugged, heavyset woman eighteen years older than Clinton, reminded him of some of the independent women of Hope and Hot Springs, including his mother. She loved politics as a way to meet people, and it was that interaction as much as ideology that drove her—a lot like Clinton.
“Bill liked going out and shaking hands. He liked the meetings before meetings and the meetings after meetings. He liked to eat and drink,” Carr recalled. They would drive around in Carr’s yellow Chevrolet to organizational gatherings of only ten or twelve people, sometimes only the host and a close friend or two. It was retail politics at its extreme. On many nights as they drove back from a meeting, Clinton would tell her the life stories of everyone who had been in the room. “I swear he would get everybody’s life story before he left. You couldn’t get him away from talking to people and listening to them even then.” At larger party functions Clinton would often be approached by Carr’s enemies, who said it was unwise to place her in a visible position. “Well, I understand you have problems with Billie,” Clinton said at one such confrontation. “But Billie is working hard for us. We need you, too. What can you do for us?” Clinton never demoted her or tried to hide her.
One day while they were eating lunch at a Mexican restaurant in Houston, Clinton told Carr about his future plans. “I’m gonna tell you something and you’re gonna laugh,” Clinton said as he devoured a plate of enchiladas. “As soon as I get out of school, I’m movin’ back to Arkansas. I love Arkansas. I’m goin’ back there to live. I’m gonna run for office there. And someday I’m gonna be governor. And then one day I’ll be callin’ ya, Billie, and tellin’ ya I’m runnin’ for president and I need your help.”
“Oh you are, are you?” Carr replied.
THE longer the campaign went on, the more it became obvious to Taylor Branch that he and Clinton had different political temperaments. To Branch, the campaign began to seem like “an endless fight over who got what.” There was great sensitivity about which group or leader seemed to be getting preference. “We were always doing the wrong thing. If I did something for one group, others would complain.” The low point for Branch came one afternoon in Houston when he was attending a black political event near the airport. Black leaders, led by state Senator Barbara Jordan, who was running for Congress and had just been named vice-chair of the state party, were upset that Chicanos had been granted a meeting with McGovern while blacks had only been able to meet with Shriver. “They were furious for pure status reasons,” Branch recalled, “and told me that they would disendorse the ticket unless I diverted McGovern’s plane and brought him to Houston.” Branch told Jordan he would see what he could do. He excused himself from the gathering and called Steve Robbins and Tony Podesta, the schedulers. He explained the situation, but they told him the demand was ridiculous: there was no way they could divert the plane. Branch returned to the meeting and told Jordan that he had tried to persuade Washington to bring McGovern to Houston, but they had decided that diverting the plane was out of the question.
Jordan turned on Branch, he later recalled, and with her slow, precise, stern phrasing, she declared: “The reason that you did not get the message across with sufficient clarity so that they could understand the message is because you … young man … are a racist!”
Branch felt intimidated and upset. “I made your position as clear as possible,” he said. Then he called Washington again. McGovern could not go to Houston immediately, but it was agreed that he would visit the black group soon—“and in the end,” Branch remembered, “they had the meeting.”
But if Branch asked himself, “Is this really worth it?,” Clinton thrived. Branch concluded that “he was more interested in the game than I was, that’s the heart of the matter. He liked what we were doing. He liked those meetings. He absorbed backbiting better than I did.” Soon enough Clinton became renowned for his ability to settle factional disputes. Pat Robards, who worked at the Austin headquarters but came out of the fractious San Antonio region, saw that “every time a war broke out among ethnic groups, they would have certain demands and Bill would mediate between them all.” The key to Clinton’s success, according to Branch, was his ability to study the personalities of the people he was dealing with and determine what it took to get along with them, where their weak spots were, who was lazy, who was committed. “He was Johnsonian in that sense—knowing how to read personalities.”
In the final month, the Texas campaign turned from mere chaos and clamor to outright farce. Clinton spent more time in the Rio Grande Valley, where the ticket at least had a chance of carrying a few counties. In Shriver’s last visit to the valley, his plane could not leave·, it was trapped on the runway for three hours as a pilot flying solo got disoriented in the foggy airspace above the airport, forcing the control tower to suspend operations as they tried to talk him down. Clinton knew that Shriver’s delay could have serious consequences at his next destination, Texarkana, where Roy Spence had a television crew waiting amidst the crowd to film a final fundraising commercial that they hoped might evoke John Kennedy’s boisterous rally there at the end of his 1960 campaign. But the fiasco in the valley prevented Shriver’s plane from arriving in Texarkana until well after midnight. By that time most of the crowd had gone home. Spence shot the commercial anyway, staying up all night to edit it so that the crowd appeared large and buoyant.
The spot was a rousing appeal for East Texans to stand tall with the party of Roosevelt, Wright Patman, Sam Rayburn, and LBJ. They were urged to send donations to a post office box in Austin. A few days after the spot aired, in a heady burst of optimism, Branch and Clinton walked to the downtown post office with a troop of colleagues from the headquarters, expecting to discover a stack of envelopes filled with checks. The post office box was empty. They returned the next day, and again it was empty. After that, an embarrassed Branch went alone. The following week, he discovered one envelope. He brought it back to the office and had the staff gather around for the ceremonial opening. “With great fanfare” and high expectations, Branch opened the package. Inside was a piece of toilet paper smeared with human excrement and a note declaring that the contents reflected what East Texans thought of George McGovern.
Yet paradoxically in those final weeks, as the evidence mounted that Nixon would be reelected in a landslide, the national McGovern campaign was awash in money. The direct-mail fund-raising operation was generating an astounding 25 percent return in a field where 3 percent was considered average. “We had this huge cadre of people who were desperately committed to George McGovern and thought he was the messiah who would end the war in Vietnam,” recalled Tony Podesta. “It was like a Ponzi scheme in the end. We couldn’t count the money fast enough.” One night a McGovern adviser in the Washington office noticed thirty canvas bags in a back room amid various debris. “What’s in those bags?” he asked. Trash, he was told. He opened a bag and found it stuffed with envelopes containing checks and cash—hundreds of thousands of dollars that might have gone straight from the hearts of true believers to the incinerators of the nation’s capital. The money instead was sent out to targeted states, including Texas.
“It was unbelievable. It was not smart money, but emotional money,” according to Roy Spence, who spent as much as he could on Texas media buys. Spence’s partner, Judy Trabulsi, camped out at the Western Union office in Austin, a telephone in one hand, buying time on radio stations and simultaneously wiring them payments. Two nights before the election, Bebe Champ drove by the Sixth Street headquarters. The lights were off, but she stopped to see if anyone was inside and found the front door open. She walked past the reception area and down the hall to Clinton’s office, where a small desk lamp provided the only light. Clinton seemed startled when Champ appeared at the doorway. She asked him what he was doing. The answer was in the dimness: Stacks of money were piled on his old wooden desk, cash that had come in from Washington for get-out-the-vote efforts on election day. Clinton was sorting it: this pile for San Antonio, this for Houston, this for the Valley. “I’ve got to get all this money out of here by tomorrow morning,” he said.
It was of no use in the endcash—not the money, not the sixteen visits that McGovern and Shriver paid to the state, not the talents of Clinton and Branch. On November 7, Nixon crushed McGovern in Texas, winning 67 percent of the vote on his way to one of the most lopsided victories in American presidential history.
A few days after the election, Clinton and Branch and the rest of the Sixth Street gang drove out to Bob Armstrong’s ranch near Liberty Hill on the outskirts of Austin and spent one long last evening together. They played touch football and sat around a campfire and sang to the accompaniment of Armstrong’s guitar. Clinton crooned a few Elvis tunes and Branch sang “Rocky Raccoon.” Most of the people there, according to Mark Bsumenthal, were in “altered states of consciousness induced by the heavy disappointment that we lost so badly.” Bottles of Jack Daniel’s were passed around the campfire along with “a couple of joints.”
Each one had a different way of dealing with loss. Franklin Garcia told Branch that he seemed to be in serious emotional distress. “You need to go hunting,” Garcia told him. “Shoot a bird so that you don’t think everything is so fragile.” Branch would later head back to Washington and consider writing a book called “The Future of American Decadence,” a title which, though it related to a wholly different subject, the underworld of agents and drug dealers in Miami, nonetheless seemed a perfect reflection of his mood in the aftermath of the campaign.
Betsey Wright was hired by Creekmore Fath, the liberal benefactor, to run an office whose purpose was to keep Sissy Farenthold’s name politically alive. But soon, at Hillary Rodham’s urging, Wright headed up to Washington to work for the National Women’s Political Caucus, a point from which she dreamed of helping Rodham begin a long march to the White House.
Mark Blumenthal left for India in search of a six-year-old guru. “If America is going to buy Nixon again,” he told friends before leaving. “I don’t want anything to do with this.”
Clinton lingered in Austin for several days after the election. He seemed to be in no hurry to return to Yale Law School, where he was enrolled as a third-year student but had not yet set foot in a classroom for his third year. “Aren’t you worried about classes?” Bebe Champ asked him. “Nah, it’s okay,” he replied. One afternoon he was seen carefully going through all the mailing lists and files and letters, transferring names and telephone numbers to his growing personal file of index cards.
WHAT did his experience in Texas mean to Clinton? He certainly could have spent that summer and fall working for McGovern in Arkansas, where he was planning to begin his political career, or in Connecticut, where he was in law school. “Coming down to Texas had to be part of an agenda,” thought Pat Robards. “It helped him enlarge his base. He made contacts here that he maintained. From then on, we’d all get postcards and fundraising newsletters from him.” Even Mark Blumenthal, the hippie radioman, kept receiving postcards from Clinton after he left Texas. “When he was traveling, these postcards would come in the mail,” Blumenthal recalled. “He’d send them to me, and I was a nobody. When I got one, I said to my wife, ‘This guy’s going somewhere.ߣ”
Clinton learned an unforgettable lesson in the value of nurturing contacts, according to Roy Spence. “He learned from that race the power of a network; McGovern didn’t have one, and it hurt him.” Beyond Texas, the McGovern campaign proved invaluable to the Democratic party as an incubator for many of the party’s finest organizers, strategists, and policy theorists over the following two decades, people who served as the support staff for the two McGovern aides who later entered the national electoral realm: first Gary Hart and then Clinton. Texas also provided Clinton a training ground to sharpen his skills dealing with contentious factions within the Democratic party, where he learned how difficult and petty politics could be, and what it took to survive. He came away with a stronger commitment to becoming involved.
As George McGovern watched his young protégé evolve over the ensuing decades, he would note another lesson that Clinton learned from the campaign, a reinforcement, actually, of a political reality that had first become clear to Clinton in Joe Duffey’s campaign two years earlier. “He seemed to take away the lesson of not being caught too far out on the left on defense, welfare, crime. From then on he would take steps to make sure those were marketed in a way to appeal to conservatives and moderates.” But in Clinton’s heart of hearts, McGovern believed then and later, he would always remain “closer to where we were in ’72 than the public thinks.”
NOT long after he got back to New Haven, Clinton wrote a letter to Creekmore Fath in Austin thanking him for his help and recalling the campaign with a certain wistfulness. “I wonder what’s going on in Texas,” he closed the November 25 letter. “I must confess I miss it and that lost, bumbling battle of ours.” One night during that period he visited the house on Crown Street where Bob Reich and Nancy Bekavac lived and spent several hours delivering an emotional soliloquy on his Texas days. He sat in the living room on their soft, tattered couch, wearing his huge blue winter coat and a grungy white-knit sweater, and described how Lyndon Johnson had gotten fat and grown his hair out and almost looked like a hippie, and how the old LBJ and Roosevelt coalition was breaking up and there seemed to be a meanness in the country. Bekavac recalled that “there was this sense of identification Bill had with the passing of the Age of Titans. It wasn’t a point-by-point analysis and refutation of what had happened in Texas, but more an evocation of what was no longer out there. He translated that into how difficult it would make his own rise in a southern state. He had been part of the largest, most lopsided defeat in American politics. The meaning of this was not lost on him.”
For the second time in three years Clinton returned from a political campaign to Yale Law School, and once again he had no trouble passing his courses. The only grades came from final exams and papers, and Clinton managed to master them in a few intense weeks of cramming. His academic record at Yale was “very good but not outstanding,” according to a summary that was later sent to the University of Arkansas Law School when he applied for a job there. Many Yale Law students felt that the third year of studies was excessive in any case; they had learned all they needed to know in the first two years. For Hillary Rodham, who had extended her law school career to four years, the final year was even less demanding, allowing her to focus first on the McGovern campaign and then on her work in children’s rights.
As their law school years neared an end, the class of 1973 went through one final mood swing that spring. Now, at last, Watergate was the big story. At the end of each day the students would bunch together in the lounge and watch the unraveling of the Nixon administration on the nightly news. Bill Coleman felt “a sense of hope” just as they were leaving law school, “a harbinger of the possibility of change.” The team of Rodham and Clinton served together that spring on the board of the Barristers Union, running the Prize Trials. One day Clinton showed up at a board meeting with his hair trimmed and wearing white bucks. He was, thought Robert Alsdorf, who also served on the board, rehearsing for his journey home, back to Arkansas and a life in politics. Alsdorf took one look at Clinton and said, “Let me know when you’re running for president, Bill. I’ll help you.”