HOME AGAIN
CLINTON WENT OUT into the world as a favorite son, barely eighteen, and now, nine years later, a man of twenty-seven, he was back. He had survived the perilous journey through the sixties and come home with his mission accomplished. He had established his academic credentials at Georgetown, Oxford, and Yale. He had woven his way through the war years undamaged in body if not in soul. He had proved that he could compete with the brightest of his generation, and indeed had constructed a vast network of contemporaries who would stand by him for the rest of his career. He had discovered a wide world of women, including one who might help him get to where he wanted to go and who was, whether he always liked it or not, his match: bright, organized, ambitious, independent, sharp-tongued, unafraid of him and yet tolerant of his foibles. He had learned the ways of Capitol Hill and engaged in the rollicking and dirty business of electoral politics in Connecticut and Texas. He had visited the capitals of Europe and gazed upon Lenin’s Tomb and Shelley’s mausoleum and searched in the cold Welsh rain for the birthplace of Dylan Thomas. Now he was home in his green, green grassy place, his folk-tale Arkansas, here to begin Act Two: a political life.
The story of his return to Arkansas opens with a stretch, a peculiar exaggeration, a myth—harmless perhaps, but peculiarly Clintonian and revealing. The way Clinton would tell the story for years afterward, his hiring as an assistant professor at the University of Arkansas School of Law in the fall of 1973 was “a pure accident.” The phrasing is reminiscent of his claim that his avoidance of the draft during the Vietnam War years was “a fluke”—which it most certainly was not, no more than his arrival at the law school in Fayetteville was an accident. In the tale as Clinton would tell it, he was driving home from Connecticut at the end of his Yale days and, acting on a tip from a friendly professor, stopped at a telephone booth along Interstate 40, placed a call to the Arkansas Law School dean, and talked his way into an interview and a job—simple as that, just a spur-of-the-moment bit of roadside serendipity. Wylie H. Davis, the law school dean at the time, would encounter the Clinton version of events years later and find it “amusingly inaccurate and somewhat melodramatic.” And he would ask: “Why degrade a Horatio Alger-type story with a self-inflicted nuisance like the facts?”—to which he could only answer himself that he felt compelled by “neurotic lawyers and history buffs” to set the record straight.
Clinton began aggressively pursuing a teaching position at Arkansas several months before he got his law degree at Yale. He recruited a political friend from Fayetteville, Steve Smith, to serve as his intermediary. Smith was a liberal young state legislator who had become friendly with Clinton during the McGovern campaign, when he was the only Arkansas delegate at Miami Beach to vote for McGovern on the first ballot. He talked about Clinton to J. Steven Clark, an associate dean at the Arkansas Law School who was also part of the state’s political network. In March 1973, during his spring break from Yale, Clinton contacted Dean Wylie Davis, who would later recall that from that point on, “the entire process was as deliberate and formalized as it was—and had to be—in every new hire case.” The law school received glowing letters of recommendation for Clinton from several professors at Yale as well as a record of his grades, which Davis and his colleagues paid little attention to because they found the Yale grading system “a slightly arrogant and eccentric neo-British affectation”—a cutting but misdirected insult, since the pass-fail system was the product not of haughty academics but of rebellious students.
Clinton flew to Fayetteville in early May to appear before the Faculty Appointments Committee. David Newbern, who chaired the committee, had a curious first impression of the young applicant from Yale. On the morning of Clinton’s first day in town, Newbern stopped at the Holiday Inn where Clinton was staying to pick him up and escort him to the law school for a day of interviews. He encountered Clinton in the coffee shop talking to Steve Smith. Newbern wondered how Clinton knew Smith and why he would be engaged in such an intense political conversation on the morning when he was interviewing to become a law teacher. Later, he escorted Clinton from one faculty office to another. Finally, in an exit interview, Newbern asked the question that had been troubling him all day.
“Bill, are you coming to Arkansas to teach with us, are you coming because you want to be a law professor, or is this just a stepping stone?”
“I have no plans at this time to run for public office,” Clinton said.
It was, Newbern thought, the classic political response.
Whatever Clinton’s intentions, the Arkansas law faculty was greatly impressed. “He charmed us all right out of our mortarboards,” said Dean Davis, who thought that Clinton displayed “a wide range of interests and learning for a young person.” Clinton talked politics incessantly during the interview, but it did not bother Davis much because “in Arkansas, politics is a hobby for everybody, so it didn’t seem out of place.” Newbern, Mort Gitelman, and a few other professors raised questions about Clinton before the faculty voted on him. They were impressed by his Rhodes Scholarship and the rest of his résumé, but wondered whether he would make a good scholar. “It was very clear even back then that Clinton’s main goal was a political career,” Gitelman recalled. “The faculty debated the appointment on the theory of whether he would make a legal scholar and do the publications.” In the end they were convinced that he would excel as a classroom teacher, and was worth the gamble. The vote was unanimous. Clinton was offered the job on May 12 and accepted May 22.
He moved to Fayetteville in midsummer and rented a contemporary stone and glass one-bedroom house in the country about ten miles southeast of town along Route 16 on the road to Elkins and a route through the hills known as the Pig Trail. The mimosa-blossomed winding roads, rolling hills, lazy-looped rivers, thick pine forests, and green-gorge vistas of north-west Arkansas were hauntingly beautiful and familiar to him. He considered all of Arkansas his home, and Fayetteville in the Ozarks represented his carefree backyard, the place he had escaped to during the summers of his youth to attend band camp. But it also had another meaning that evoked profoundly different feelings in him. The university and its row of fraternity houses served as the social nexus and training ground of the Arkansas good ole boy establishment. Four years earlier, when he was contemplating attending the University of Arkansas Law School so that he could join the ROTC program there and avert the draft, the notion of returning to Fayetteville made Bill Clinton feel strange. Part of the equation that sent him back to Oxford for a second year instead of choosing the safe haven of the state university was the queasiness he felt about getting stuck in Arkansas, a place which seemed “barren” of global thinkers and intellectual stimulation, as he had written in a letter to Rick Stearns.
So his relocation in Fayetteville was not an entirely simple homecoming. His relationship with his state was shaped by a triangular internal contradiction that would stay with him from then on and is crucial to understanding Clinton’s political evolution. At one point of the triangle was myth: the way he would romanticize the Arkansas of huge watermelons and simple country folk, especially when he was away from it. At a second point of the triangle was pragmatism: the realization that Arkansas was the easiest base, the only base, for his political rise. At the third point of the triangle was ambition: a powerful desire to move beyond his provincial roots. Clinton would make it seem that he came home to Arkansas and stayed there for two decades out of pure love and obligation—but events would soon prove otherwise.
On August 23, not long after he had settled, he appeared at a watermelon party of the Washington County Democratic Central Committee in the sprawling two-acre backyard behind the grand old house of Ann and Morriss Henry along Highway 45. The party regulars at the Henry house were local figures of the sort that any aspiring politician would need to know, hardcore committed Democratic loyalists who performed the drudge work of organization and were the primary sources of inside political gossip. Clinton swept through the crowd as though he were an honored guest. “He came in … he wasn’t invited but somebody brought him … he had just got to town, he shook hands, he talked, and by the time he left he knew every single person there,” Ann Henry recalled later. “It was a perfect way for him to leave an impression.”
Clinton was eager to make an impression and quickly took on several projects outside the law school. He filed an amicus brief in support of his friend Steve Smith, who was a key figure in a voting-fraud case being heard in rural Madison County. Republicans charged that Smith had interfered in the 1972 election by helping elderly residents fill out their ballots at a nursing home. Smith said that he and two nursing-home employees merely helped distribute the ballots. Clinton, in his friend of the court brief, presented a legal argument placing Smith’s assistance within the boundaries of laws relating to ballot delivery. The court eventually disallowed the twenty-five votes that Smith had garnered at the nursing home, not enough to change the election outcome. The case attracted the interest of political reporters in northwest Arkansas. “Clinton came up and sat in the jury box with us,” recalled veteran political reporter Brenda Blagg of The Morning News in Springdale. “He was part of the crowd.”
His first challenge to the local establishment came in Springdale, a comfortable middle-class community north of Fayetteville, where he formed a friendship with Rudy Moore, Jr., a progressive state legislator whose law firm had business and political connections to Senator Fulbright. Weeks before Clinton arrived, Fulbright had met with Moore and told him that a young man who had been on his staff was moving to the area to teach at the law school, and that he and Moore “ought to know about each other.” Clinton called Moore when he got to town and they spent hours talking politics. “Right off the bat,” Moore recalled later, Clinton became absorbed in a local issue involving doctors who were rejecting Medicaid patients. Medicaid was not a popular social program then among Springdale’s doctors. Moore agreed to lend the clout of his legislative office to Clinton’s informal poll, which found only one or two doctors in town who were willing to accept Medicaid patients. In his first political encounter with the health care issue, Clinton got nowhere. The Springdale doctors “crawled all over” Moore for “sending somebody to look into” their affairs. Moore and Clinton backed away, but not before Clinton had rung up one strike against him among the doctors.
There were no strangers in Fayetteville. Everyone seemed to know everyone else, and often it seemed they were all related and they all had political connections. During the last week in August, Clinton went to lunch at Wyatt’s cafeteria with a group of professors and administrators, one of whom happened to be Rudy Moore’s brother-in-law, Carl Whillock, a university vice president. Whillock had previously served as the administrative assistant to James W. Trimble, the former Democratic congressman from northwest Arkansas who had been defeated in 1966 by Republican John Paul Hammerschmidt. The talk among the group was almost exclusively about Watergate, the scandal that had become a daily television drama starring Chairman Sam Ervin and his colleagues on the Senate Watergate Committee. In the car on the way to lunch, Whillock, a dignified man who dressed conservatively, seemed unusually quiet. Finally, when they were all seated at the cafeteria, someone asked him what he thought of the scandal. “I think Richard Nixon would cause great bodily harm to close family members if it would help him politically,” he said. Clinton was shocked. He had misjudged Whillock because of his appearance and his earlier silence. Now he wanted to know more about him, and the more they talked, the more fascinated Clinton became. If Clinton wanted to get anywhere politically up in these hills, he could not find a steadier guide.
THE University of Arkansas School of Law had never before encountered a faculty member quite like Clinton. With his boyish face and long curly hair, he looked like one of the students and he often acted like one as well. He was a student’s law professor rather than a law professor’s law professor. In part, his style reflected the contrasting philosophies of the school where he learned the law and the school where he was now teaching it. At Yale, the hard part was getting admitted: once you got in, you were part of an elite club, and it was virtually impossible to flunk out. Arkansas, the only law school in the state, was obliged to open its doors to a majority of applicants, four-fifths of whom came from within the state. The easy part was getting in. It was not unusual for 30 percent of the first-year students to receive failing grades. Several professors took pleasure in terrorizing first-year students. Clinton was the opposite.
Although Clinton wanted to teach the glamorous subjects, criminal law and constitutional law, he told the dean that he would be willing to take on whatever courses needed to be taught. In the fall of his first year that left him with agency and partnership, which he knew little about at the start, and trade regulation, an antitrust course that he had studied at Yale. He searched for ways to relate the material to the more lively world of politics. In the agency and partnership class, for instance, he often brought the class conversation around to Watergate. “We had long discussions about whether the people involved in Watergate were agents of the president,” recalled Moril Harriman, a student in Clinton’s first class.
It was difficult to distinguish Clinton’s class period from the rest of his day. Before class he could usually be found at the student lounge eating breakfast and “shooting the breeze—about anything,” according to another former student, Woody Bassett. If a subject caught his interest in the lounge and it had the vaguest relationship to the law, he might continue the discussion once class started. Clinton worked the aisle during class discussions and displayed an early variation of the town meeting or talk-show-host style he would later use with great effectiveness. Other Arkansas law professors tended to be more deliberate and sharp in their use of the Socratic method. They came in with notes and a set of concepts they wanted to cover. They asked pointed questions and called on students at random. Clinton often spoke without written notes and lectured in a conversational tone. Students were free to enter the discussion when they had something to say. In the end, this pressure-free approach led to lively discussions in which the whole class participated. “There was some grumbling by faculty members about the grades in Bill’s courses,” according to law professor Rafael Guzman. “There were always an abundance of A’s and B’s, D’s were extremely rare, and I doubt very much that Bill ever gave an F. The inside joke was, ‘Bill doesn’t give D’s and F’s because he might someday need those votes.ߣ” As the law school dean, Davis took note of Clinton’s grading pattern and considered it “on the high side,” but “not enough to take him to lunch about it—he just didn’t want to give anybody anything below a C.”
As word spread that he was an interesting teacher who gave high grades, his courses became increasingly popular. Even his admiralty class on maritime law, a subject of limited interest to most lawyers in Arkansas, bulged with seventy students. But Clinton’s casualness sometimes drove even his students to distraction. He was slow in marking exams and posting final grades. One running story at the law school during Clinton’s time there was about two law students catching sight of each other across a golf course fairway in late spring and one yelling across to the other, “Hey, I finally got my grade in Clinton’s class”—pause—“from the fall semester!” Once he accidentally left the final exam blue books in his car and they disappeared. It was never clear whether he lost them or they were stolen, though Davis found it “mind-boggling that they could have been stolen.” His students were given the option of retaking the exam or getting credit for the course without a grade—an unsatisfactory prospect for most of them since they were counting on Clinton’s generosity to raise their grade point averages. Another semester on the morning of exam day, colleagues chortled knowingly at the sight of Clinton in a frenzy because he had waited until the last minute to prepare the exam. Students were answering the first question while Clinton was still writing the next. Clinton always seemed to be juggling too many things at the same time.
Mort Gitelman, as a senior faculty member, was asked to observe Clinton’s classroom performance one semester to prepare a report for the tenure committee. Clinton was teaching constitutional law, Gitelman’s specialty. His report “wasn’t terribly kind to Bill,” Gitelman recalled. “He was very good at engaging the students in the classroom, but a lot of times he was kind of off-the-cuff. I wouldn’t say unprepared, but not terribly organized. He was not the kind of person who would prepare a class meticulously.” On the positive side, Gitelman noted that Clinton possessed “qualities that went into the making of a good teacher. He wouldn’t try to impose his views on people. He would draw people out.” Had Clinton stayed in legal education, by Gitelman’s account, “he would have been okay.”
In the constitutional law class, Clinton devoted two weeks to a discussion of the seminal Roe v. Wade decision legalizing abortion. According to Woody Bassett, Clinton told the class that he believed Roe was “the most difficult of all court decisions” during that era, and that he thought “they made the right decision.” The legal aspect of the case that he emphasized in class was how the Supreme Court devised a way to define a right of privacy not defined in the Constitution. He also spent time dealing with other women’s rights issues related to abortion. When one state legislator proposed a measure criminalizing abortion, suggesting that women who had abortions should be prosecuted for murder, Clinton asked the class to consider the possibilities. “What would you do if a woman was sleeping and rolled over and accidentally killed her unborn child—would that be manslaughter?” he asked. “It was an intense discussion about how far it would go,” recalled Jesse Kearney, a student in the class. “Bill was good at posing the questions.”
Clinton reached Fayetteville at a crucial time for black students at the law school. They were part of the first wave of African Americans, ten to fifteen students per class. Many of them were on probation, on the verge of flunking out, and looking for a mentor on the all-white faculty. L T. Simes, who came out of the Mississippi Delta town of West Helena, Arkansas, and Ouachita Baptist University, arrived at the law school in 1972, one year ahead of Clinton. “The first year we were there was the most difficult of my life,” Simes said later. “Black students in law school were not faring too well as a whole. It was sink or swim.” Among other concerns, many black students thought they were not being graded fairly.
Along came Clinton, who to the blacks seemed different from the rest of the faculty. He quickly became their friend and champion. He was young and outspoken in renouncing racism and the black students naturally gravitated to him. In the classroom, his relaxed style was a special comfort to the blacks. Outside the classroom, he became a tutor for many of the black students, holding sessions at his house or at the law school lounge. “He always had people around him, he was always holding court,” Carol Willis, a student from McGehee, another poor Delta town, recalled. “Most black lawyers my age just about owe Bill Clinton for getting them out of law school. He would take the time to make sure you understood the material.” Although his classroom style and tutoring helped the black students stay in school, so too did the grades he would give them. They could get a B in his class and a D in another and stay off academic probation.
The black law students eventually gave Clinton a nickname. They called him “Wonder Boy.” “In the South at that time, whites would say one thing, but their deeds and words were often different,” Simes said later. “So here comes a person where no matter what your relationship with him was, he was not prejudiced. He did not let race treat you different from anyone else. That’s why we called him Wonder Boy. It was a miracle the way he was. He could have shunned black students politically. Fayetteville and northwest Arkansas was a white enclave. Wonder Boy Bill did not waver in respect to his conduct with African Americans.”
YEARS later, perpetuating the myth that his life progressed in a series of accidents and uncalculated events, Clinton would insist that he embarked on his first political candidacy in Fayetteville reluctantly and only after he had failed to persuade several other people to make the race. In fact, he seemed eager, hungry—anything but reluctant. And he was especially eager for a political office that, if he won it, would take him away from Arkansas. He told Rudy Moore in the fall of 1973 that he wanted to run for office but believed that a seat in the state legislature would not satisfy him: “He felt he had to go bigger. He had his eye on a higher prize.” At age twenty-seven—twenty-eight by the time of the next round of fall elections—there would be nothing extraordinary about Clinton serving in the state legislature. In the realm of state politics, then, he was too old to be called a boy wonder. Steve Smith, after all, had been elected when he was only twenty-one, and Mack McLarty, Clinton’s childhood friend from Hope, went up to the state capitol as a representative when he was twenty-five.
The careers of Clinton and McLarty were rolling in different directions. McLarty, even more than his ambitious kindergarten mate, carried great expectations with him during his early life. People said that he was destined to be governor. They said it about him when he was the sixteen-year-old governor of Arkansas Boys State, when he was the star quarterback of Hope High, when he was the popular student body president at the University of Arkansas, and when he was elected to the legislature in 1971 as the presumed leader of an activist freshman class. Yet by the time Clinton returned to Arkansas ready to dive into electoral politics, McLarty had already climbed out of the pool. He served a single two-year term in the Arkansas House and then quit. He already had a wife and child when he entered the legislature, and there was pressure on him to go back to Hope and take control of the family’s lucrative auto business, which he seemed far more eager to do than run for reelection. He yearned for stability, he was more comfortable in the business world and was troubled by the uncertainties of elective politics. Helping out behind the scenes, as a party chairman or fundraiser, was more to his liking than being the center of attention, the target of opposition. It was hard for anyone to imagine McLarty losing an election in Hope, or in all of Arkansas—but he imagined it. “What if you don’t win?” he asked himself. Politics, he would later confess, always seemed like “a high-stakes gamble.” During his one term in the House, McLarty was uncomforable and barely noticed.
Clinton was comfortable with everything about politics except the notion of being a small fish in a small pond. There was one obvious choice for him. As far back as February 1973, when he visited Arkansas from New Haven to take the state bar exam, friends remember him pounding them with questions that indicated he wanted to come home and run for Congress in the Third Congressional District, which included Hot Springs and Fayetteville. Now he was back in the state, and the moment had arrived. In early December, he drove to the Little Rock suburb of Sherwood and spent a long night talking with Paul Fray, his friend from the Holt Generation days who had been waiting eight years for the time when Clinton would run for Congress. As Clinton devoured a salty Virginia ham prepared by Mary Lee Fray’s mother, he and Paul Fray analyzed the congressional district county by county.
They concluded that Hammerschmidt, the Republican incumbent, had a nearly unbreakable hold on the district’s largest city, Fort Smith, because of the many retired military families in that area and Hammerschmidt’s ability to satisfy their concerns through the House Veterans Affairs Committee. The key to giving Hammerschmidt a tough race was to concentrate on the other twenty counties, especially the rural ones in the hills. They had to go out into the hills, Fray said, “and hammer the hell out of them.”
Not long after the session with Fray, on a bitterly cold evening that winter, Clinton walked over to Carl Whillock’s comfortable seven-bed-room house in the shadows of Old Main near the law school in Fayetteville. He had been a regular visitor at the Whillock residence all school year. Whenever he had free time he would drop by to joke around and make peanut butter and banana sandwiches with the Whillocks’ three teenage daughters, and then stay up late talking politics with Carl and his wife Margaret. On this night they were chatting in the parlor room, warming by a fire, when Clinton said, “I’ve been thinking about running for Congress. What do you think about it?”
“Wait right here, I’ll go get my card file,” Whillock said. He came back with a box that his wife had never seen before, brimming with names and telephone numbers and key contacts all across the Third Congressional District from his days as Trimble’s aide. The two men sat in the kitchen late into the night going over the names in Whillock’s old file.
Hammerschmidt had not faced a serious challenge from a Democratic opponent since he wrested the seat from Trimble in 1966, the year that Republicans had first gained a foothold in Arkansas with the election of Governor Winthrop Rockefeller. Hammerschmidt had won with two-thirds of the vote in 1968 and 1970 and then a smothering 77 percent in 1972. Over the course of his four terms in office he had become a popular figure among voters and public officials from both parties through solid constituency work and careful nurturing of the private interests in northwest Arkansas. As the only timberman in Congress, he was considered an especially valuable ally of the heavily forested district’s significant timber industry. The odds were weighted against anyone seeking to oppose John Paul, as Hammerschmidt was known, even though it was an off-year, when the party out of power usually gained House seats and the Democrats seemed especially ready to do so as President Nixon’s popularity declined with every new Watergate revelation.
Clinton solicited advice from other experienced political observers. Most encouraged him to run while holding out little promise that he could win. “I don’t see how you can raise the money to make the race,” said attorney James Blair, a major political powerbroker in northwest Arkansas who was managing Senator Fulbright’s reelection campaign that year. McLarty, the state party chairman, considered Hammerschmidt “a wonderful man” who was “well regarded and well respected,” and not a top-priority target for the Democrats. Blair’s future wife, Diane Kincaid, a political science professor at Arkansas who had met Clinton during the 1972 presidential campaign, noted the poor showing of previous challengers to Hammerschmidt but thought that Clinton was the first “plausible candidate” to surface in eight years in that he “looked like a congressman” and “understood national issues and the dynamics of the district.”
Clinton was not easily discouraged. He told Blair that he would overcome his financial disadvantage by working harder. In Arkansas, that meant traveling to every town in the district and meeting as many voters as possible and asking them for their votes. The concept of retail politics was a sacred political belief in Arkansas. The political folk wisdom included a statistical component: it was estimated that 60 percent of the people voted for the candidate who met them first and asked them for their vote. Clinton thought he could ask that many. He also assumed that the Watergate scandal would help.
Watergate influenced Clinton’s career decision in more ways than one. In December 1973, just as he was attempting to gauge how the scandal would play in the hills of northwest Arkansas, Clinton was offered a position as a staff lawyer for the House impeachment inquiry staff. Under the direction of former Justice Department official John Doar, the inquiry staff was being formed as an adjunct to the House Judiciary Committee to sort out the Watergate evidence and make the legal case for Nixon’s impeachment. In building his staff, Doar recruited heavily from Yale Law School, where graduates were recommended to him by Burke Marshall, his former colleague injustice’s civil rights division. Clinton and Hillary Rodham were on Marshall’s list. Clinton would later say that he considered the offer “a great temptation” and “a great opportunity—one that just about any young attorney would’ve given anything for”—but there is no evidence that he spent much time debating his options. David Pryor, who was working as a lawyer in Little Rock and beginning a campaign for governor, later recalled Clinton visiting him one day and asking whether being associated with the impeachment staff would have any negative implications in Arkansas. Interestingly, according to Pryor, Clinton put the question in terms of his friend Rodham and his relationship with her. “He talked to me about Hillary going to work for the Watergate committee,” Pryor recalled. “He asked, ‘Is that a good idea?’ It was a career consideration. He knew that his career would be in politics and the question was whether Hillary’s connection with the Watergate committee might have political ramifica-tions.”
DURING his lunch hour one day in early January 1974, Clinton sat in his cramped third-floor office at Waterman Hall placing telephone calls. One call went to Ron Addington, a doctoral student and instructor in the school of education who was interested in politics and had told a mutual acquaintance that he wanted to meet Clinton. “Why don’t you come over and let’s visit,” Clinton said when he reached him. They had common bonds. They were born within a month of each other in 1946 in the same area; Addington grew up in DeQueen some thirty-five miles from Hope. He was an Army reservist, conservative in dress, bearing and haircut. Clinton was wearing blue jeans, leather moccasin boots, a checkered shirt with a tie, and a corduroy sports jacket. His hair was long and curly. His appearance did not match Addington’s expectations, which were closer to “the stereotype of a person who runs for office.” But the two clicked, and Addington agreed to help Clinton prepare for his race for Congress.
Later that week, Clinton asked Addington to travel with him for a day of political meetings in Russellville, an important city in the congressional district some three hours away on the road to Little Rock. The journey ended in embarrassment. After meeting various political officials in town all day, Clinton and Addington were taken to dinner at the local country club as the guests of a wealthy attorney and political powerbroker whom Clinton was intent on recruiting to his side. As the dinner conversation dragged on, it became clear that Clinton was getting tipsy. Never much of a drinker, he was politely downing his drinks with everyone else at the table. His sentences became less and less understandable. It was clear to Addington that Clinton could not drink and remain coherent. In the car on the way back to Fayetteville, Addington scolded Clinton for his behavior. “I don’t know whether you can drink while campaigning,” he said. “Don’t try it again.” The lesson was brought home soon enough when the attorney endorsed another candidate.
Addington was in Little Rock, spending the weekend with his girlfriend, when Clinton called him from Fayetteville on the Sunday morning of February 24.
“I’m announcing tomorrow,” Clinton said.
“Tomorrow?” Addington gasped.
“Yeah. We’re setting up some press conferences.”
“Okay, let’s do it!” Addington said.
That was Clinton, he thought: impetuous, hungry, thinking that he could conquer the world in a day. And this was not even a normal day. It was a Sunday. And Clinton wanted press conferences in four cities—Hot Springs, his home town; Little Rock, the state capital and headquarters for the state political press corps; Fort Smith, the largest city in the Third District; and Fayetteville, Clinton’s new base. Addington told Clinton that he would go to work on rounding up the press and meet Clinton in Russellville, a midpoint in the triangle between Little Rock, where Addington was staying, Fayetteville, where Clinton was, and Hot Springs, where they would both spend the night in preparation for the first press conference the next morning. They agreed to meet at the AQ Chicken House in Russellville that afternoon. First Addington called Doug Wallace, the editor of the University of Arkansas student newspaper, who was part of Clinton’s team, and who had already spent Friday and Saturday preparing press packets. Then Addington got in the car with his girlfriend and headed north. When they reached the Chicken House, Addington hopped out and said goodbye to his girlfriend, who drove on to Fayetteville alone. From a telephone outside the restaurant, Addington began tracking down reporters to let them know the plans for the next day.
Clinton arrived in his Gremlin, late, and he and Addington headed out over the mountain from Russellville to Hot Springs, one of the most perilous, twisting drives in Arkansas. Halfway through the trip, Addington turned to Clinton and said, “If we survive, you are never going to drive again when I’m in the car!” Clinton was driving as he always drove, carelessly, talking and gesturing the whole time, his eyes often off the road, every now and then swerving wildly into the oncoming lane or running his right tires onto the shoulder. The car had no passing power, but Clinton would try to pass anyway, usually when he was chugging uphill heading into a blind curve.
At eight o’clock on Monday morning in frigid twenty-two-degree weather, sixty Clinton friends and relatives gathered at the Avanelle Motor Lodge in Hot Springs for the announcement. Ten relatives from the Clinton family were there, along with the parents of his high school friends: Phil Jamison’s mother, Ronnie Cecil’s father, Jim French’s dad. Elizabeth Buck, Clinton’s old Latin teacher, stood in the back near Virgil Spurlin, his high school band director. Here, at long last, was the opening moment of Bill Clinton’s political career. He went after Hammerschmidt right away, ignoring the three other candidates for the Democratic nomination. He characterized Hammerschmidt as a close political ally of Nixon’s and tried to link him to Watergate by saying, “Of all the men in Congress, he is one of those who has allowed the President to go as far as he has.” If the people “demand more honest politics,” Clinton declared, “they’ll get more honest politics.”
His mother Virginia was nearby. “All smiles,” as Addington remembered her. “All smiles and laughing.”
CARL Whillock’s old card file was not the only valuable collection of names that Clinton turned to when he began his electoral career. He already had a file of his own, a cardboard box stuffed with alphabetized and annotated index cards listing the addresses and telephone numbers of classmates, professors, political organizers, and others he had encountered during his long apprenticeship. He spent time each night combing through the file, placing telephone calls, and writing notes to friends who might help his campaign.
Two years earlier, while working for McGovern in Texas, he had told Houston organizer Billie Carr that he was going home to Arkansas to begin a political career that would culminate with a run for president. Now he called her and said proudly, “Billie, I’m on my way!” He also called Bob Armstrong and John C. White and Taylor Branch, who was back in Washington serving as the Washington editor of Harper’s magazine. Though Branch by then had soured some on electoral politics and was hardly wealthy, he responded by contributing $250. It was, in a sense, a one-man phone bank and direct-mail operation. Most of Clinton’s friends from Georgetown, Oxford, Yale, and Texas took note of the inevitable—their irrepressible pal Clinton had finally begun his lifetime race—and chuckled as they took his call or opened his letter. For the most part, they were charmed. Clinton was the master of the soft sell. He remembered the smallest details of people’s lives, and his deftness at personalizing the notes tended to overcome whatever unseemliness might otherwise have tainted a blatantly political contact.
A letter he sent to Charlie Daniels, the plumbing contractor from Norton, Virginia, who had met Clinton four years earlier at the National Hotel in Moscow, stands as a perfect example of how Clinton would present himself: good-humored, humble, flattering, familiar: Dear Charlie,” he began.
I don’t know if you’ll remember me but this is the last day of the week we were together in Moscow four years ago now. I have been thinking of you, as I always do this time of year…. I am about to embark on a campaign for Congress against an entrenched GOP incumbent. I remember thinking when we were together what a campaigner you’d be—You’re sure welcome here. Ha! My mother has never forgotten your thoughtful phone call upon your return from Russia. All the best, Bill Clinton.
Daniels was a registered Republican, but from then on, Clinton was his man. He visited Arkansas often, and even more often sent Clinton campaign checks.
The return rate on Clinton’s personal direct-mail effort was uneven. Many of his young friends sent donations of between $10 and $50. “Sorry I couldn’t send more,” wrote Garry Mauro, who headed the Students for McGovern effort in Texas in 1972. Women friends old and new seemed to be reliable sources. Hillary Rodham wrote out two early checks for $400. Lyda Holt chipped in with $125. The Leckford Road connection was also fruitful. Strobe Talbott contributed $300, as did Brooke Shearer. The rest of the Shearer family, who served as Clinton’s hosts when he visited California, also supported his congressional bid. Brooke’s brothers, Derek and Cody, both journalists, gave a total of $450, and her mother, Marva Shearer, contributed $200. The first $10,000 of his campaign came from a source closer to home: a Hot Springs bank loan co-signed by his uncle Raymond Clinton and Gabe Crawford of the Oaklawn Pharmacy.
• • •
THE Third District was more than Fayetteville, Fort Smith, and Hot Springs. Most of the twenty-one county district lay out in the northern hills, the region that Clinton and Paul Fray had targeted as the key to the election during their meeting in early December. It was a vast rural region steeped in country folkways. To get to Washington, Clinton would have to travel deep into the backwaters of his native state. At an organizational meeting of Clinton supporters in Fayetteville a few days after the announcement, Carl Whillock unfolded a map of Arkansas and traced the two-lane roads and highways leading from one county seat to another in the Third District. He knew the distances from town to town: with twists and turns through the hills, destinations were always far longer in minutes than in miles. Each time his hand stopped at a town, Whillock had a story to tell about a friend in the courthouse or at the weekly newspaper. He proposed that he and Clinton spend a day together driving through the hills from courthouse to courthouse.
They left at dawn on Wednesday, March 6. Whillock had not prearranged any meetings for the trip. He knew the daily patterns of the people he wanted Clinton to meet. They would be where they always were, and no matter what they were doing they would have time for an old friend. The political explorers headed north and east out of Fayetteville on Highway 62 until they reached Berryville, a town that Whillock knew intimately as the home town of his former boss, the late congressman Trimble. The rural essence of the district Clinton sought to represent was brought home to him at this first stop. Berryville was a county seat of Carroll County—not the county seat but a county seat. There were two county seats, with their own separate courthouses: Eureka Springs on the western side of the Kings River and Berryville on the eastern side—a vestige of the days, not so long ago in these parts of Arkansas, when rivers were difficult to cross. At the Berryville courthouse they met Eileen Harvey, the circuit court clerk and recorder of deeds, who cherished the memory of Trimble as her “dearest friend” and had once been a member of the same church as Whillock. “Carl tells me you know how to run in these hills,” Clinton said to Harvey. He asked Harvey for her help. She gave it, not only offering to take him around the county, even across the Kings River, but also persuading her daughter to work in Clinton’s county campaign. “We hit it off,” Harvey said later. “He loved people and loved campaigning and I did too. Politics is nothing more than a selling game.”
From the courthouse, Whillock and Clinton drove out to the Methodist parsonage in Berryville, where they met a young minister, Victor Nixon, and his wife, Freddie Nixon, who were leading peace and civil rights activists. “We sat around the front porch and visited for an hour or so,” Whillock recalled. “And Freddie agreed to be Bill’s Carroll County coordinator.” That conversation on the porch began a long relationship between Clinton and the Nixons that was marked by deeply emotional moments. Victor Nixon would later serve as the minister at Clinton’s wedding. Freddie Nixon would become one of Clinton’s aides, and their friendship would bend but not break in a profound disagreement over the use of the death penalty.
The next stop was in the little town of Alpena on the border separating Carroll and Boone counties at a drive-in restaurant run by the wife of an old cattle farmer, Bo Forney, who served on the Democratic central committee. Forney was a rough-faced, gruff-talking, overweight character in bib overalls, seemingly a world apart from the young Rhodes Scholar with the curly hair and long sideburns. But again, Clinton knew how to talk Forney’s language and won him over. The cattle farmer contributed $405 to Clinton’s campaign before the year was through.
Driving east on Highway 65, Whillock and Clinton reached Harrison, the county seat of Boone County and the heart of enemy territory, Hammerschmidt’s home. Harrison was a major hub in northwest Arkansas, large enough to have its own daily newspaper, the Harrison Daily Times, and Whillock knew the editor, J. E. Dunlap. Whillock realized that Dunlap, who wrote a column under his initials, J.E.D., was an ally of the incumbent congressman, JPH, but he took Clinton in to see him anyway, hoping to “soften J.E.D. up.” It was a surprisingly productive visit. In that afternoon’s paper, across page 2 from JPH’s “Capitol Report” column opposing congressional pay increases, J.E.D. took note of his visitors from Fayetteville. “One candidate has already hit the ground running. He’s running on the Democratic ticket for Congress in the 3rd District,” J.E.D. wrote. “Bill Clinton, native of Hope, graduate of Hot Springs high school, a Rhodes Scholar and a graduate of Yale Law School, now a teacher in the U of A Law School, was in town this morning with a former aide of the late Cong. Jim Trimble, Carl Whillock. Clinton was shaking hands on a tour through the Harrison area.”
Highway 62 took the travelers east out of Harrison and along the White River through Yellville and Flippin. It was Clinton’s first glimpse of a scenic region where he would later, much to his eventual regret, invest in a vacation home development enterprise known as Whitewater. They reached the northeastern terminus of their trip in Mountain Home, where they met with Baxter County treasurer Vada Sheid at her family furniture shop. “These two men walk in,” Sheid recalled later. “I knew Whillock from his days with Trimble. He introduced me to young Bill Clinton, a very personable young man. We found a place in the store to sit down and visit.” Clinton cast his spell on another older woman. He was “the kind of person,” Sheid thought, “who makes you want to be friendly with him.” It quickly became clear that she and Clinton had much in common. They both loved politics—and more: “He said his birthday was August 19 when I asked him his age. I said, “That’s my birthday, too. That makes us both Leos!“I felt Leos had the same ideas about people. I agreed wholeheartedly to support him.”
As Clinton rose to leave, Sheid noticed that a button had fallen off his shirt. “Now, Bill,” she said, “you need a button sewn on your shirt if you’re going to run for congressman.” She had him sit still for a minute as she found a needle and thread and made him presentable again. It was the first of many times over the years when the friendly furniture store merchant would come to the aid of her ambitious young astrologically aligned friend. Two years after that first meeting in Mountain Home, she was elected to the Arkansas legislature, and a decade later she would cast a decisive vote that saved Clinton’s reputation at the same time that it may have cost Sheid her career.
When they left Sheid Furniture, Whillock and Clinton temporarily split up. Clinton said he wanted to visit the newspaper office. “You do that,” Whillock said, “and I’ll go find Hugh and we’ll meet at the drugstore at four.” Hugh was Hugh Hackler, an old friend who had served in the Arkansas legislature with Whillock in the 1950s. At that point in the afternoon, Whillock guessed correctly that he would find the retired Hackler in the pool hall playing dominoes with his friends. Whillock took Hackler aside after the game.
“Hugh, I’m traveling with Bill Clinton, a fine young man running for Congress. I’d like you to meet him,” Whillock said.
Hackler responded coolly. He said he had already promised people that he would support a candidate from Fort Smith, Gene Rainwater, in the Democratic primary.
“Well, I’m sorry you’ve done that, but Bill Clinton is going to be around a long time,” Whillock responded. “One of these days he’s gonna be governor or senator and you’ll need to know him.” That was enough to persuade Hackler to accompany Whillock over to the drugstore.
Whillock and Hackler found a spot in a red and tan booth with a black Formica table. They ordered coffee. Hackler was in his sixties and conservatively dressed. Clinton came in at four, sat down, and ordered a Coke. Whillock was not sure how his old friend would get along with his new one, but he need not have worried. The conversation began with a coincidence and only improved from there.
“Where’d you grow up?” Hackler asked.
“Hot Springs,” Clinton said.
“I’ve got a good friend in Hot Springs. But I don’t imagine you’d know him.”
“Who is it?”
“Gabe Crawford. He runs some drugstores there.”
Gabe Crawford was one of the closest friends of Clinton’s mother and late stepfather. This was the same Gabe Crawford who had joined Raymond Clinton in co-signing the loan that gave Clinton the first $10,000 of his campaign. “We practically live at the Crawfords,” Clinton said. “We’re over at their house all the time.”
After fifteen minutes of easy conversation, Hackler turned to Whillock and proclaimed: “Carl, I’m gonna call my friends and change this. I want to support Bill.”
The last stops on the trip were in Marshall, the county seat of Searcy County, where they met with newspaper editors, and then the little town of St. Joe, where they visited Will Goggins, chairman of the county Democratic party. It was after nine when they reached St. Joe and Goggins was already in bed, with the lights out, but he answered the door, invited Whillock and Clinton in, and talked with them for an hour. Goggins was a Clinton man for the rest of his life. From St. Joe they retraced their path up and across Highway 65, weaving through the woods and river valleys in the darkness of an early Arkansas spring. It was after midnight when they got back to Fayetteville. Whillock was shocked to see that his wife and children were still up. “You really missed it!” one of his kids yelled excitedly. What had they missed? It seems that the latest campus fad had reached Fayetteville that night. For several hours, naked young men and women had been streaking up and down Maple Street past the Whillocks’ house.
A few days later, candidate Clinton was asked to take a position on streaking. “It’s a little extreme for my taste,” he told an Associated Press reporter. “I find it offensive, but I think it’s just a passing fad. Something quite similar went around when I was in high school. You may remember it. They called it “Mooning“where you drop your drawers and stick your fat out the window in a passing car.” The story was printed in the Hope Star, where Mack McLarty read it. He clipped the article and sent it to Clinton with a scrawled note: “Bill—Excellent press. Appears you handled yourself in your usual style. Trust you rec’d my $—Holler if additional help is needed. Mack McL.”
IN the small world of Democratic politics in northwest Arkansas, the center of the action was Billie Schneider’s little restaurant at Hillbilly Hollow on the road between Fayetteville and Springdale. At a long picnic table in her back room, Schneider’s friends gathered several nights a week to drink beer and chew on large juicy steaks and even juicier politics. It was an eclectic crowd ranging from long-haired college students who called Billie “Momma” to wealthy lawyers who looked to her for the latest town gossip. One of the regulars was Don Tyson, the bantam rooster of the chicken-processing field, whose lucrative family enterprise was expanding into one of the state’s most powerful companies. Momma was the Godmother of Washington County politics, a yellow dog Democrat who sometimes refused to serve diners whom she considered too Republican. She looked like a saloon owner from the Old West: her voice deep and raspy from too many cigarettes, her face craggy and shaped by the ups and downs of her life. She drank and swore and was not afraid to tell people what she thought about them. She had the outgoing personality of Clinton’s mother, Virginia, and was not shy about offering the young law professor political advice.
One of the first press releases the campaign issued referred to William J. Clinton, which is how his name was printed in a local newspaper. Schneider saw it and called headquarters. “Ron,” she screamed at Addington, who answered the phone. “You and Bill get your butts up here and I mean just as soon as you can!” Addington explained that Clinton was out campaigning and would not be back until later that night. “Well, when he gets in, get your butts up here!” Schneider said. Addington and Clinton walked into the restaurant just before closing. Schneider had some heated advice about what she had seen in the paper that day. The sight of Clinton’s formal first name and middle initial sickened her populist soul. She wanted to make sure Clinton understood that he was back in Arkansas. This was not Georgetown, Oxford, or Yale.
“What is this William J. Clinton?” she asked. “You’re not gonna run as William J. Clinton. You’re Bill Clinton. And you’re gonna run as Bill Clinton!”
CLINTON was a candidate now, but he still had to make it official. He had to travel from Fayetteville back to Little Rock to file. It was a four-hour drive each way, too long for him to make it down on the day he wanted to go and return in time for a big rally scheduled for that night on the University of Arkansas campus. A local nightclub owner offered the use of his airplane, a four-seat Cessna, but Addington had to recruit a pilot, which was a harder task than he expected. At the last hour, someone told him about a student at the university who had his pilot’s license and could make the trip. They left on the morning of March 22. On the flight down to Little Rock, Addington told the pilot that he was taking flying lessons. The pilot said he had just earned his license a month earlier. It was a clear day and the trip down was free and easy.
They spent more time than planned in Little Rock—Clinton always found one more person to talk to. It was dark by the time they took off over the mountains on their way back to Fayetteville. Twenty minutes into the flight, Addington realized something was wrong. “I knew we weren’t flying right, I could feel it in my bones. It was dark and this guy starts pulling out maps. Clinton was sitting up front with the pilot. He turned around and looked at me like, “Where did we get this guy?“I said it would be all right.” Addington noticed that they were flying over a town and told the pilot to dip lower so they could get a look at the water tower. It was the tower for Harrison. They were off course to the east. Addington told the pilot to set his compass due west for a flight path that would take them directly to Fayetteville. They arrived safely, though late, and with a furious, red-faced candidate on board.
On the drive from the airport to the campus rally, Clinton, sitting in the front seat, exploded. “God damn it!” he yelled, pounding his fist on the dashboard. “Don’t you ever line up somebody like that again, Ron! I could have been killed up there. My political career would have been over before it began! I can’t believe you jeopardized our lives like that!”
Addington wanted to point out that it was not easy for him to find a pilot, that Clinton had endangered them by being so late and making them fly at night, that Addington was as scared as Clinton and that they might still be flying somewhere toward Missouri if he hadn’t had the sense to find the water tower and that Clinton, the worst car driver in the world, had little room to talk about endangering lives. But he could not get a word in. Clinton was fuming and would not stop for breath. Addington had never seen this side of Clinton before. It was a fierce, sudden temper tantrum. Pounding away on the dashboard. Madder than hell. The first eruption of his political life. For Addington and dozens of aides who worked at Clinton’s side over the ensuing years, it would become a familiar sight.