RUNNING WITH THE BOY
HILLARY RODHAM WAS not the first member of her family to reach Fayetteville. One morning during the spring primary season, a fin-tailed Cadillac with Illinois license plates had pulled into the parking lot of the Clinton for Congress headquarters on College Avenue in Fayetteville. A short, burly man in his sixties emerged from the driver’s side, limping as he walked toward the door, accompanied by a young fellow. “I’m Hugh Rodham, Hillary’s dad,” the older man said to Ron Addington. At his side was Tony Rodham, the younger of Hillary’s two brothers. The names were, of course, familiar. Clinton had boasted to his campaign staff about Hillary Rodham: how smart she was; how she was a counsel for the House Judiciary Committee staff; how he hoped that she would be warmly welcomed if she came to Arkansas. Once, at headquarters, he had read aloud from a letter she had written to him about her impeachment work.
Addington felt that he already knew Hillary. In the early stages of the campaign, he was constantly taking telephone calls from her. She would check on Clinton’s schedule, then offer practical political suggestions. Even then, at the dawn of Clinton’s electoral career, from halfway across the country, at a time when she and Clinton were uncertain about their relationship and while she was working long days and nights on the impeachment inquiry, Rodham was pushing Clinton’s political interests. “She started calling from day one, several times a day at first,” Addington recalled. “She was telling me, you need to get this done, you need to get that done. What positions we had to fill.”
But apparently Hillary never mentioned that her father and brother were driving down from Illinois. “Well, how long are you going to be here to visit?” Addington asked.
“Hell, I don’t know,” Hugh Rodham said. “Hillary told me I ought to come down here and help you out.”
The Rodham men had met Clinton a few times during his Yale Law School days, when Hillary brought him home to Park Ridge. Although Hugh was conservative and had never voted for a Democrat, his family was leaning to the liberal side, not just Hillary but also the boys, and he was, above all, a Rodham loyalist. If Hillary urged him to work for Clinton, that was what he would do. It was a matter of family, not politics. Doug Wallace, the campaign press secretary, thought it seemed irrelevant to Rodham “why he was down there, besides the fact that his daughter told him to do it.”
The Rodhams reported for work the next morning. What should they do? The office was overcrowded; there were not enough telephones and desks for the staff and volunteers. But there were stacks of “Clinton for Congress” signs that needed to be put up along the roadsides in the rural counties. And so the Rodham sign detail was born. Day after day, they would load signs into the trunk and roam the back roads in search of prime locations for cheap political advertising. Sometimes the campaign staff got inquiries from the field about the Yankees in the Cadillac. The calls prompted a discussion about whether they should smear the license plates with mud to obscure the fact that the car and its occupants were not from Arkansas. But the Rodhams were quickly embraced by the campaign staff and most of the people they encountered on the road. The old man seemed “rougher than a corn cob, as gruff as could be,” in Addington’s words, but he was a straight talker and a hard worker. In some respects, as a handyman who loved fly-fishing, he was more of a natural in the Ozarks than Clinton, whose main backwoods talent was storytelling. And young Tony seemed to be having the time of his life.
There was another aspect to the presence of Hillary’s father and brother in Fayetteville while she was still in Washington. One of the worst-kept secrets at headquarters was that Clinton had become involved in an intense relationship with a young woman volunteer who was a student at the university. According to Doug Wallace, “the staff tried to ignore it as long as it didn’t interfere with the campaign.” Aside from the Fayetteville woman, the staff also knew that Clinton had girlfriends in several towns around the district and in Little Rock. Perhaps they could disregard his rambunctious private life, but could Hillary? There was some suspicion that one of the reasons she sent the men in her family to Arkansas was to put a check on her boyfriend’s activities.
Paul Fray arrived in Fayetteville with his wife Mary Lee to work on the campaign shortly after the Rodhams appeared on the scene. He quickly surmised that “Hillary had put the hammer on her daddy to go down there and make sure everything was hunky-dory. It was her little spying mission.” One afternoon Fray was at Clinton’s house in the country, going over the schedule for the next few weeks. “The phone rings and it’s Hillary and she’s raising hell” about Clinton’s behavior, Fray recalled from what he heard of the conversation and from what Clinton told him after hanging up. Hillary, according to Fray, tried to make Clinton jealous by informing him that she was going to sleep with someone in Washington. Clinton “about broke down and cried” at that point, but rather than getting mad he launched into a long emotional appeal, saying that Hillary should not “go and do something that would make life miserable” for both of them.
IN the May primary against three opponents and again in the June 11 runoff against Gene Rainwater, a state senator from Fort Smith, Clinton was a political whirlwind. He began with 12 percent name recognition and little money, and ended up easily prevailing in both races. The other candidates had regional power bases, but they were overmatched by Clinton’s organizational skills and energy. The state AFL-CIO was ready to endorse Rainwater until Clinton appeared before the labor board’s Committee on Political Education in Hot Springs. “Bill’s knowledge and facility with words made our people fall in love with him,” recalled J. Bill Becker, head of the state labor federation. “He just took it right away from Rainwater.” Like so many of the people who were drawn into Clinton’s orbit, the workers in his congressional campaign were alternately inspired and exhausted. College students accustomed to staying up late, but also sleeping late, had a hard time keeping pace with him.
He was always on the move from town to town, staying in the homes of old friends or newfound political allies, or at his mother’s place if they ended the night near Hot Springs. His schedule was invariably on the remake, thrown off by his compulsion to stop and chat. He was, according to Jim Daugherty, a law student who was one of his drivers, “more interested in finishing the conversation than in finishing the schedule.” Sometimes the Fayetteville staff lost touch with him. If he was working the southern stretch of the district, they would leave messages at the “Y” City Café, certain that he would stop at that tiny crossroads eatery on his way between Hot Springs and Fort Smith, lured by the gossip awaiting him there and the seductive coconut cream pie. A legion of law students served as his drivers and travel aides. On the road between stops, Clinton would take his Professor Quigley—inspired fifteen-minute catnaps, and scribble the outlines of his next speech. Chomping on a sandwich and talking at the same time, he would launch into a soliloquy about the ravages of inflation or of black lung disease, an issue in the mining towns of the Arkansas River valley.
For many politicians, the incessant demands of a campaign are the most enervating aspects of public life. One face after another, one more plea for money, one more speech where the words blur in dull repetition—at some point it can become too much. Morriss Henry, a state legislator from Fayetteville who along with his wife, Ann, befriended Clinton in 1974, realized one night that he lacked the characteristic that he saw in Clinton, the energy required to go the distance in politics. Henry, an eye doctor, had worked all day performing cataract surgery and came home “totally beat,” but corraled the kids and his wife into the Dodge van to attend a pie supper outside Fayetteville. On the way down, he suddenly blurted out, “Do we really have to go?” Two-thirds of the way there, he answered himself. “No! We don’t.” He had hit his political wall, and he turned around.
Clinton would never turn around. To him, the prospect of attending a pie supper in “Y” City or Mount Ida seemed invigorating. Pie suppers rank among the most cherished political folk rituals in western Arkansas. On any Saturday night during an election season, communities gather for an evening of entertainment as pies and cakes baked by local women are sold at auction, with the money going to volunteer fire departments or other civic institutions. One savory pecan pie can sell for three figures, especially if the politicians in attendance try to buy some goodwill and end up in a bidding war, as frequently happens. The candidates vie for microphone time between pie sales and announcements. Homemade desserts, picnic tables lined with voters, plenty of talking and raucous storytelling, usually some barbecue at the rear counter—Clinton was never more in his element. He also realized that every pie supper he attended helped him transform his image from the long-haired Rhodes Scholar and law professor into a young man of the people.
Before his eyes he saw what could happen to a politician who failed to connect with ordinary people during that first spring of his electoral career when the state’s Democratic primary voters denied J. William Fulbright the nomination, unsentimentally ending his thirty-year career in the Senate. Fulbright had raised and spent more money than any previous candidate in Arkansas and barely received one-third of the vote as he was over-whelmed by Dale Bumpers, the popular governor. Bumpers had an 85 percent approval rating while Fulbright’s was in the low 30s. The polls showed that voters no longer accepted Fulbright’s stature in international affairs as a sufficient trade-off for his indifference to local concerns. The unease about Fulbright’s distance from his constituents had increased year by year. Now, finally, all efforts by his staff to make him seem like a regular guy were futile. They presented him as plain old Bill and outfitted him in flannel shirts, but the people had already decided that Fulbright was no longer one of them.
Clinton intended to assist Fulbright during the primary, according to James Blair, the senator’s campaign manager, but became so involved in his own campaign that he never got around to helping his old boss. On the campaign trail, he more often found himself associating with Pryor and Bumpers when they stumped in the Third Congressional District. Arkansas political observers taking their first look at Clinton saw elements of Pryor and Bumpers in his style. He had Pryor’s ability to work a room, and Bumpers’s power to sway a crowd as an extemporaneous speaker. As the campaign wore on, the resemblances became more apparent: Clinton would study the two men, borrow a colloquialism from one, a hand gesture from the other, and incorporate them in his routine. It is not a contradiction to say that he was both a natural politician and an artful imitator, for those two types may in fact be one and the same; natural politicians are skilled actors, recreating reality, adjusting and ad-libbing, synthesizing the words, ideas, and feelings of others, slipping into different roles in different scenes, saying the same thing over and over again and making it seem like they are saying it for the first time. It can be at once a creative art yet wholly derivative, which is the best way to understand Bill Clinton’s political persona as he reached the public stage.
In early July, after he had secured the Democratic nomination, Clinton went to Hot Springs for his ten-year high school reunion, the first time that the class of 1964 had reconvened. The theme of the reunion at the Velda Rose Hotel was “The Way We Were,” the title song of that year’s nostalgic film starring Barbra Streisand and Robert Redford. Photographs from the Old Gold yearbook lined the banquetroom walls. The Hot Springs Sentinel-Record described Clinton as “the most prominent graduate”—a Rhodes Scholar, University of Arkansas law professor, and Democratic candidate for Congress. He was seated at the front table along with his friend Phil Jamison, the class president, a naval lieutenant at Pensacola who had flown helicopters in Vietnam. The article noted that Carolyn Yeldell had now married and was teaching music in Indiana, and that Jim French, the quarterback, was in New Orleans training to be a doctor. David Leopoulos, Clinton’s closest childhood friend, had begun a job at a community college in Florida. Of those present, there were twenty-one housewives, two lawyers, nine engineers, four secretaries, one minister, four bankers, and four doctors. “Lots of them,” Clinton was quoted as saying of his classmates, “are doing impressive things I haven’t done.”
Clinton delivered a brief speech, but the crowd seemed to have little interest in politics. At the ten-year point, Jamison found that his classmates did not seem particularly interested in looking backward or forward, but were “caught in the here and now, trying to make their way.” After the dinner, Clinton spent most of the night on the dance floor, enjoying himself with a string of old girlfriends. But not everyone was lost in the moment. Jamison was cornered in the hallway by Rodney Wilson, a former Marine and Vietnam veteran. At first they traded war stories as though they were recalling old memories from high school, but the more Wilson talked, the more intense he became. He seemed depressed, and said he felt out of place and mistreated since his return from Vietnam.
Clinton, too, was still haunted by Vietnam that summer. The manner in which he had avoided military service in 1969 might be raised by John Paul Hammerschmidt’s campaign. Hammerschmidt was a World War II Air Force pilot who strongly supported the war and had close ties to veterans“ groups in the district. The documentary record of Clinton’s actions after he received his draft notice at Oxford five years earlier, including the letter to Colonel Holmes in which he thanked Holmes for eventually saving him from the draft, rested in a file inside a fireproof half-ton vault at the University of Arkansas ROTC building a few blocks down the hill from the law school. Clinton’s usual response to anyone who asked him about his military record was that he had received a high draft number in the lottery and was never called. He discussed the more complicated details of his draft history, and the letter to Holmes, with only a few friends. One was Paul Fray. “He told me what he said in the letter about the war,” Fray said later. “I told him that he could get into a pickle if the Republicans got the letter and that he should try to get the original back.”
Colonel Holmes had retired, and was living in northwest Arkansas. How Clinton contacted him and persuaded him to return the letter is unclear. Some members of the ROTC staff believe that Clinton relied on intermediaries from the university administration, where he had several friends and political supporters. Decades later, the colonel would label Clinton a draft dodger and claim that he had been deceived by the young man, but the evidence indicates that in 1974 he was still willing to help Clinton. ROTC drill instructor Ed Howard later recalled that Colonel Holmes called him one morning that summer and “said he wanted the Clinton letter out of the files.” Howard, a noncommissioned officer, was alone in the office; most of the staff was at summer training at Fort Riley, Kansas. He called the unit commander, Colonel Guy Tutwiler, at Fort Riley and informed him of Holmes’s request. Tutwiler instructed Howard to make a copy of the Clinton letter and give it to Holmes, but to keep the original. A member of Holmes’s family stopped by the ROTC headquarters and picked up the letter.
Later that afternoon, Tutwiler called Howard again and told him to take the original letter and everything else in that file, which was among the records the ROTC had maintained on Vietnam War-era dissidents, and to send it to him at Fort Riley by certified mail. According to Howard, Tutwiler later explained that he had “destroyed the file, burned the file,” because the military no longer maintained dissident files and he did not feel that Clinton’s letter should ever “be used against him for political reasons.” According to Fray, Clinton ended up with a copy of his letter to Holmes, and assumed that “the situation was done with.” He did not know that Holmes’s top aide, Lieutenant Colonel Clinton Jones, had already made a copy of the letter.
ON Friday, August 9, the day that President Nixon resigned, Clinton was campaigning in the northeastern end of the congressional district. He arrived in Mountain Home that evening for the third day of his stay with Mike and Suzanne Lee, who had made their home his regional headquarters. The Lees were old friends who had been in the class behind his at Hot Springs High. Mike had attended the Naval Academy with Phil Jamison, and he and Jamison had stayed at Clinton’s Georgetown room whenever they could escape Annapolis for the weekend.
It was all part of the easy reciprocity of Clinton’s world. He never had any money, he was always living off the grace of friends, yet his give-and-take spirit made it possible for him to sleep at other people’s houses and clean out their refrigerators because he was bound to repay them with some act of generosity down the line. Now he was at the Lees’ house in Mountain Home and the American political world was turning upside down. He sat in the living room and watched as Nixon announced that he was leaving the White House. Well after midnight, a reporter for the Arkansas Gazette called the house. Suzanne answered and went to the guest bedroom, awakening Clinton. He went to the kitchen to take the call, leaning against the wall, still half-asleep. It was, Suzanne said later, “amazing to listen to him. It was just like a rehearsed speech that he had been waiting to give. I couldn’t believe he could do it right out of a deep sleep.” But Clinton would not say publicly what he thought about Nixon’s resignation: that it was good for the country but bad for him. “This is going to cost me the race,” he confided to Mike Lee. The convulsions of Nixon’s resignation, he said, would make the voters of northwest Arkansas less inclined to throw Hammerschmidt out.
Throughout that summer of the Watergate inquiry, Clinton had emphasized Hammerschmidt’s friendship and support of Nixon. The Republican congressman tried to argue that “the people are tired of Watergate,” but most evidence was to the contrary. Watergate filled up so much space in the political world that there was little room left for other questions, such as whether Clinton was too young and too liberal for the electorate. The more the public turned against Nixon, the more Clinton gained momentum. When Nixon resigned, as Clinton predicted, his campaign “went into a stall,” according to press secretary Doug Wallace. “The voters stopped to catch their breath. Suddenly there was no Nixon to rail against.”
Nixon’s resignation was one of three major transitions for Clinton and his campaign late that summer. One afternoon, Clinton’s mother came home from her hospital work with a carry-out dinner for her husband, Jeff Dwire, to discover him dead of heart failure brought on by diabetes. Dwire had been a soothing influence on Virginia during their five-year marriage. He was a charming dandy who enjoyed life and had had his own scrapes with the law, but he was kind to Virginia and her boys, and he made her happy in a way that no other man had since Bill Blythe. During his year in prison, he had become a jailhouse lawyer of sorts, acquiring enough knowledge to discuss legal subjects with Clinton and Rodham when they were at Yale. Dwire had been the one member of the family to accept Hillary warmly, a gesture that was reciprocated by Bill Clinton, who wrote a letter of support when Dwire unsuccessfully sought a pardon.
Everyone at campaign headquarters knew Dwire. Shortly before he died, he had spent several days in Fayetteville answering the telephones and offering advice. Paul Fray noticed the flashy rings on Dwire’s fingers and worried about what the Hammerschmidt forces would do if they learned that he was assisting the campaign. “The last thing we needed was for word to get out about Clinton’s stepfather with a prison record.”
Dwire’s death and Nixon’s resignation were matters of consequence, yet in terms of their sustained effect on Clinton, they could not compare with the third event of late summer, the arrival of Hillary Rodham, who provoked a complicated set of reactions in her boyfriend and the people around him. On one level, Clinton feared that Rodham was too much of a potential political star to make the sacrifice of living in Arkansas. Once, earlier, when Clinton told Diane Kincaid, the political science professor at Arkansas, how much she reminded him of Rodham and made him miss her, the professor asked him why he did not just marry Rodham and bring her to Arkansas. “Because she’s so good at what she does, she could have an amazing political career on her own,” Clinton said. “If she comes to Arkansas it’s going to be my state, my future. She could be president someday. She could go to any state and be elected to the Senate. If she comes to Arkansas, she’ll be on my turf.”
That turf, Clinton realized, could appear inhospitable to his Yankee girlfriend. His mother and younger brother made little effort to hide their distaste for her. Whenever the Frays visited Hot Springs during the campaign, Virginia would complain to them about Hillary. “Virginia loathed Hillary then,” Mary Lee Fray recalled. “Anything she could find to pick on about Hillary she would pick on. Hillary did not fit her mold for Bill.” But even if it was not a natural fit, Clinton seemed determined to lure her to stay in Arkansas. He encouraged his friends and political aides to make her feel welcome. “She was someone you had great expectations for and wanted to know because Bill kept talking about her,” recalled Rudy Moore.
Yet at the same time that Clinton was earnestly recruiting Rodham to his state, he was still involved with the student volunteer, a relationship that had been going on for several months. The tension at campaign headquarters increased considerably when Rodham arrived as people there tried to deal with the situation. Both women seemed on edge. The Arkansas girlfriend would ask people about Hillary: what she was like, and whether Clinton was going to marry her. When she was at headquarters, someone would sneak her out the back door if Rodham was spotted pulling into the driveway. Mary Lee Fray, who liked both women, felt trapped in the middle of the triangle. She remembers times when Clinton wanted her to chaperone the Arkansas girlfriend and make sure that there were no confrontations with Hillary. “Bill would say, ‘Go take her somewhere. Get lost,’” Fray recalled later. “It would put me in a funny position. He’d say, ‘Go do something. Move it. Scoot it.’ He’d get us out of there.” If Clinton had made it clear that Rodham was his only romantic interest, Fray thought, the other woman would have disappeared. But Clinton would not say anything so direct.
Fayetteville, a university town, was the most culturally liberal enclave in Arkansas, but the mores of the wider Third Congressional District made it politically impractical for Clinton to live with a woman outside of marriage. Rodham took her own place when she arrived. She rented a three-bedroom house, an architectural showpiece replicating a Frank Lloyd Wright design, bow-shaped and glassy, full of odd-shaped rooms, with a large swimming pool in the backyard. The house belonged to Rafael Guzman, who was on temporary leave from the law school to teach in Iowa, where he was soon joined by his wife, Terry Kirkpatrick, who had served with Rodham on the impeachment inquiry staff. The place quickly looked like campaign headquarters, with Clinton signs everywhere.
To some Arkansans, Rodham seemed too aggressive at first, especially in contrast to Clinton, who was soft and ambiguous. On the opening day of school, when Rodham first walked into the criminal law classroom, Woody Bassett, who was then a first-year student, thought she “looked out of place. She dressed like a throwback to the sixties. There were not many women in the law school. It took a while to adjust to someone with a different accent who was as aggressive as she was.” Some students were intimidated by Rodham’s brilliance, and others, according to Bassett, “downright resented it. People were never indifferent about her. Some of the guys were not used to being taught and led by a strong woman. And there was no question she was a role model for some of the female students.”
Anyone who entered her classroom expecting her to follow Clinton’s pedagogical style was mistaken. Clinton was diffuse and easygoing. Rodham was precise and demanding. Clinton was amenable to a filibuster, Rodham was less willing to waste time. Clinton rarely confronted students, preferring to engage them in freewheeling conversations. Rodham would come straight at her students with difficult questions. She was more likely than Clinton to offer clear opinions on legal issues and not leave the class hanging, and she had what Bassett thought was an “unusual ability to absorb a huge amount of facts and boil them down to the bottom line.” And unlike Clinton, notorious as the friendliest grader on the faculty, Rodham wrote rigorous exams and was a tough grader. Most members of the law school faculty regarded her as a better professor than Clinton, if not as animated in the lecture hall, more committed to the craft, as demonstrated by her writings in law journals about the rights of children.
Rodham was approachable but serious, Mort Gitelman thought. “She would not sit for idle chitchat. She was not a chew-the-fat type of person. She was always working on something and wanted to bring the conversation around to what she was working on. She was all business.” During that first semester, along with teaching criminal law, Rodham also became the first director of the University of Arkansas Legal Clinic, in which law students took on needy clients under the supervision of licensed attorneys. Before Rodham arrived, preliminary work on the clinic had left several faculty members frustrated by resistance from the legal establishment and the paperwork demanded by the federal bureaucracy. Gitelman handed Rodham a ten-inch file that needed to be processed to get federal money for the program. He was impressed by how quickly Rodham sorted through the forms and got the money. Burdened as an outsider and a woman in what was then still a clubby male domain, she persuaded local judges and lawyers to endorse the program. She went to the county bar and negotiated approval for indigence guidelines on who could qualify for clinic assistance, in return agreeing that the clinic would take unprofitable criminal case appointments from the local courts. David Newbern, who helped Rodham with the idiosyncrasies of the legal world in Fayetteville, regarded her, above all, as “a prodigious worker.”
“IF you are looking for a battleground, go outside onto the streets where I grew up. Lift your eyes to the hills of north and west Arkansas! There is a fight in this Third Congressional District which is a clear and unmistakable struggle between what we are for and what we are against. For, in the words of Harry Truman, when you strip away the ‘small talk and double talk, the combination of crafty silence and resounding misrepresentation,’ you find this seat in Congress occupied by one of the strongest supporters of, and apologists for, the abuse of presidential power and policies which have wrecked the economy. Today we must deliberate. Tomorrow we must take out of this hall the will to set things straight. Let us begin!”
It was at the Democratic state convention in Hot Springs on September 13 that Clinton delivered that fiery oration. He had been building a name for himself for months, and now, as the stretch run of the general election campaign began, party regulars who had considered him a long shot thought it possible that he had a chance of winning. His challenge was the hot race, the only tightly contested match in what was still a one-party state everywhere but in northwest Arkansas. Clinton packed the fall convention, bringing carloads of supporters from Fayetteville and supplementing them with a boisterous hometown contingent. Although he still privately feared that Nixon’s resignation had cut short his chances, he regained some measure of hope the week before the convention when Gerald Ford pardoned Nixon. Hammerschmidt had swiftly tried to reposition himself as more of a Ford man than a Nixon man in the days after the resignation, bringing out newspaper ads that depicted him working closely with Ford during their days together in the House. But no sooner had the ads appeared than Ford’s popularity sank when he pardoned his predecessor.
Clinton portrayed the pardon as the final dishonorable act of the Watergate scandal. “We have come together in the midst of one of our country’s most difficult periods,” he said. “After two years of turmoil, a president of the United States has resigned his office. His chosen successor, in whom Democrats and Republicans alike had at first placed such hope, has granted a ‘full, free and absolute’ pardon to the fallen president in advance of any charges being filed against him. This pardon has again opened the wounds of Watergate. It has undermined respect for law and order. It has prejudiced pending trials. It has tormented the families of those already in prison for the administration’s political crimes. It is yet another blow to that vast body of law-abiding Americans, whose faith in equal justice under law has been shaken, then repaired, and is now shaken again.”
The rest of Clinton’s keynote speech was devoted to the economy, his rhetoric more strident and class-conscious than it would later become. He came across as a defender of the middle class and the working class against rapacious corporations and Republican policies. He deplored the “record deficits and recession” brought on by “six long years” of Republican control of the White House. He accused Republicans of keeping “prices high and profits high for the biggest corporations, while trying to hold down minimum wages and telling working people to tighten their belts.” He spoke of a member of a road crew in Scott County, his apocryphal everyman, who told him that working people “want a hand up, not a hand out.” If President Ford “wants to pardon somebody,” he concluded, “he ought to pardon the administration’s economic advisers.”
Clinton’s principal issues adviser for the fall campaign was Steve Smith, the young turk of the Arkansas legislature who had spent the summer in graduate school at Northwestern University. His return to Fayetteville came shortly before Rodham’s arrival, at once lending the campaign more intellectual weight and making it more chaotic. Smith was a voracious reader who could match Rodham and Clinton’s brainpower, and week by week he grabbed more of the candidate’s time and interest as they developed issues together. “It was wonderful to work issues for the guy,” Smith said later. “Every week I’d spend eighty hours doing research. I’d set up an issue of the week. We’d open Monday with a press conference, lay out our position and a handful of Hammerschmidt votes. I’d brief him on Sunday for the press conference on Monday. He would absorb everything I said, every detail, and draw conclusions and connections that I had missed.”
The weekly news conferences began the Monday after the state convention and continued through November. At one in Van Buren, Clinton attacked the administration’s agricultural trade policies, saying that wheat exports to the Soviet Union should be restricted and tighter limits should be placed on beef imports. “If we do not reverse these suicidal trends,” he said, “the small, independent farmer will be forced from his land, and large multinational corporate farms will dominate Arkansas and the nation, manipulating the price of food much the same as the giant oil companies do the price of gasoline.” Clinton called on Earl Butz, the Secretary of Agriculture, to “resign and return to the board of directors of Ralston-Purina.”
Although Clinton was mechanically inept and had no real experience on the farm or in the factory, he now offered himself to the farmers and workers of his district as one of them. His childhood friends from Hot Springs might have snickered at this transformation. Clinton’s potential as a skilled laborer was revealed to them in seventh-grade shop class. The teacher would not let students proceed to more complicated tasks until they had squared a block to his satisfaction. While most of the boys went on to craft breadboards and tables, Clinton spent the entire year trying to square his block. “Bill planed more blocks than any kid in the history of junior high,” according to his classmate Ronnie Cecil. As to his aptitude on the farm, his formative experience there came at age seven when he was bruised and battered by an angry ram that had pinned him to the ground.
Now, as a candidate, he was the son of soil and toil. It was part of a strategy that had been outlined to Clinton by Jody Powell, an aide to Jimmy Carter, the former governor of Georgia who was heading the Democratic National Committee’s 1974 campaign team. Powell came to Fayetteville to advise the Clinton campaign for a few days in the early fall. Clinton’s aides remember that Powell looked disheveled and “more hippieish” than he would two years later when his boss was running for president. He left behind a seventeen-point memo. Point number seven read: “Find a dramatic way to identify with agricultural interests before [Hammerschmidt] can label you as some sort of ‘pseudo-intellectual liberal professor’ who doesn’t know or care about agriculture.”
At the same time that Clinton plowed the populist turf, and attacked the corporate mentality of Republicans, he relied heavily on support from the Tyson family, owners of Tyson Foods Inc. Don Tyson, the chairman, was an eccentric, hardworking, hard-playing character who would later redesign his corporate suite in the shape of the White House’s Oval Office. He wore the khaki work uniform he required of all his employees, including the top executives. He had shiny doorknobs in the corporate suite made in the shape of eggs. He was also a yellow dog Democrat who had long ties to the recently defeated Fulbright and most other leading politicians in the state. His chief outside legal counsel was Jim Blair, who had been Fulbright’s campaign manager and counsel to the state Democratic party and was one of Clinton’s friends and advisers.
Tyson Foods was aggressively buying out competitors in the early 1970s on its way to becoming the leading poultry firm in the nation. But 1974 was a difficult year, the only one in its history when the company lost money, going back to 1936 when John Tyson loaded five hundred spring chickens into crates and trucked them up to Chicago where he sold them for a $235 profit. Don Tyson, the founder’s son, placed much of the blame for the slump on the Republican administration in Washington, charging that huge grain sales to the Soviet Union had caused feed prices to rise sharply, destroying the poultry market. The Third Congressional District was home to Tyson’s corporate headquarters, based in Springdale, as well as to hundreds of small farmers who raised chickens for the company. The growers were largely dependent on Tyson Foods and suffered when the company suffered. Clinton emphasized their plight, rather than the Tyson operation’s annual loss, in his speeches and commercials. One of his radio spots featured an announcer who sounded like Johnny Cash, inquiring, “Pay too much for greens ’n beans? Forget what pork ’n beefsteak means? Push Earl Butz away from the trough!”
Don Tyson stayed in the shadows of the campaign, but would be called in occasionally by Blair when fund-raising problems arose. Clinton would meet Tyson and other major financial patrons in the back room of an old stone house up the road from headquarters, an unmarked restaurant that specialized in thick steaks and saltine crackers with picante sauce. Don Tyson’s stepbrother, Randal Tyson, spent much of his time at Clinton headquarters during the final months. “He busted his butt,” recalled Paul Fray. “Randal wanted Clinton to win that race something fierce.” The Tysons also donated a campaign telephone bank which operated out of an apartment near the university.
ONE way to catch fish, according to an old Arkansas folk tale, is for people to wade into a stream and kick their feet around the bottom until the water becomes so disturbed and muddy that the fish rise to the top. The story serves as an allegory for politics, which in Arkansas is both a popular sport and a muddy one. Bill Clinton was a fish swimming in muddy water from the beginning of his political career. Even then, in his first Arkansas campaign, rumors swirled furiously around him.
One rumor, which came to be known as “The Boy in the Tree,” or “The Man in the Tree,” was the easiest to disprove and yet the most persistent. In the fall of 1969, President Nixon, an inveterate sports fan, had traveled to Fayetteville to attend a football game between the Arkansas Razorbacks and Texas Longhorns, two of the nation’s best college teams. The lasting photographic symbol of that Saturday afternoon in Fayetteville was a picture of a protester sitting in a tree holding a sign urging Nixon to go home, which was later reprinted in the college yearbook. The young man’s face was not clearly identifiable. He resembled the Bill Clinton of 1969 only in that he had long curly hair and a beard. Brenda Blagg, who covered Nixon’s visit for the student newspaper, was standing under the tree that day and knew the protester, a familiar campus character who was “certainly not Bill Clinton.” At the time of Nixon’s visit, Clinton was against the war and no fan of Nixon’s, but it was impossible for him to have been in a tree in Fayetteville. He was at Oxford, beginning his second year as a Rhodes Scholar.
Yet five years later, during the congressional campaign, the word went out that Clinton was the boy in the tree. A woman called several newspapers in the district and, without identifying herself, said, “We’re trying to get a copy of that picture when Bill Clinton was sitting in the tree. Do you happen to have that picture in your files?” At political rallies, unmarked handbills were distributed showing the tree picture and no explicit mention of Clinton, simply the inference in a question: “Do You Want This to Be Your Congressman?” The rumor was accompanied by whispers that Clinton had been a draft dodger, though his letter to Colonel Holmes and other ROTC records had not surfaced, and no one made the draftdodging charges in public. Many of Clinton’s aides noticed a level of vitriol in the attacks on Clinton that exceeded even the rough norms of Arkansas poli-tics. “This was his first race, he had no political history to speak of, yet the level of feeling for and against him was so intense,” recalled Doug Wallace. “It was amazing to me. There was something in his personality and style that engendered that kind of passion on the part of people who wanted to keep him from being elected.”
The boy-in-the-tree story hovered around Clinton for several years, until finally it was transformed into a joke by the journalists who covered him in later campaigns. One year, the press association in northwest Arkansas presented a satirical Gridiron show that included a skit in which Clinton was on trial as the boy in the tree and was found innocent based on “butt prints.”
Rumors about Clinton’s sexual behavior also began in that first campaign. As a bachelor, he was immune from charges of marital infidelity, but little else. John Baran, who had taught Clinton art in junior high school, heard rumors at his church, Grand Avenue Methodist of Hot Springs, during the final months of the congressional campaign that “Bill was a homosexual.” Some of the same churchgoers spreading that story would later attack Clinton for living with a woman before he was married. Mary Lee Fray attended a Baptist church in Fayetteville where Clinton was criticized from the pulpit. She quickly learned that “some conservative preachers were crusading against him. They were constantly talking about drugs and women in the Clinton campaign.” Nearly every week, Paul Fray would field a call from a labor organizer in Fort Smith who would utter the same lament. “We’re catching hell down here about all you leftwing dope smokers up there at that damn yoo-nah-ver-sity, Paul. We’re just catchin’ hell down here!” Neil McDonald, a Clinton volunteer, was frequently confronted by hostile questioners who wanted to know about women and the campaign. “They were trying to pin Bill down on the women issue or anything else they could find. They would ask if Clinton was dating women out of the campaign. Most of us knew better than to answer that one.”
Several office affairs bloomed at the College Avenue headquarters, but they seemed more a reflection of the sexually combustible nature of political campaigns than of any loosening of sexual mores among the under-thirty generation. There was a discussion once among Clinton advisers about taking the offensive and resurrecting a slogan that cropped up during Hammerschmidt’s first campaign: “Send John Paul to Washington, the wife you save may be your own.” That idea was proposed by Paul Fray, but vetoed by Rodham, according to Doug Wallace. “Paul wanted to play hardball, cut and slash. Hillary did not like it.”
The campaign was not a haven for the drug culture, but neither was it a marijuana-free zone. Randy White, a college freshman who joined the campaign as a volunteer, was sent to work at a phone bank one night at an apartment in Fayetteville. When he entered the apartment, he saw “seven or eight people in there smoking pot.” He felt “terrified that the place would be busted” while he worked through his list of calls in another room. Whenever eighteen-year-old Roger Clinton, the candidate’s younger brother, came up to Fayetteville, the scent of marijuana trailed him. “It was no secret Roger was blowing smoke,” recalled Neil McDonald. “It ain’t too hard to tell when you go into a room that Roger had just been in, and it smells like burnt rope. He and his buddies would be in the basement stenciling signs, and actually smoking joints.” McDonald thought that Clinton knew that Roger was smoking pot in 1974. “Bill… tried to lecture him in a big-brotherly way.”
INSIDE the Clinton campaign, Addington was known as “Ronnie Paul,” Wallace was “Dougie,” Fray was “P.D.,” and they all called Clinton “the Boy.” “The Boy’s on a roll today,” they would say. Or, “The Boy’s in a pisser of a mood.”
The nickname was in part complimentary: it evoked Clinton’s youth, friendliness, and achievement. But it also had a subtext that addressed the immature aspects of his personality. The Boy never wanted to go to bed. The Boy had no concept of money. Once, early in the campaign, he called Addington and announced that he had to come over to Addington’s apartment to take a shower and shave because he had forgotten to pay his utility bills and his water and power had been turned off.
The Boy had a tendency to talk too much and could not always be trusted to keep campaign matters in confidence. One day he told reporters about internal poll results, prompting Doug Wallace and David Ivey, the two aides in charge of press matters, to issue a blistering memo that was labeled “To all Distrist Headquarters Staff,” but was directed primarily at Clinton. “The damage done by the release of the last poll without the accompanying previous poll can only be judged after some time, but it is obvious that it has hurt,” they wrote. “From now until the time Bill Clinton finishes this campaign, NO ONE will talk, or even breathe in the direction of a news reporter, without first clearing it with David Ivey or Doug Wallace. THIS ALSO MEANS THE CANDIDATE.” If Clinton ignored this edict, they declared, “All hell will break loose.”
The Boy was sentimental and easily touched. He was near tears one day when he received a fifty-dollar contribution from two friends from Yale Law School who had little money. “It’s like the widow’s mite,” Clinton said, comparing the contribution to the biblical story of the widow who gave more than she could afford at the temple, the smallest denomination of coin, a mite, which prompted Jesus to say that her contribution was worth more than all the riches donated by the wealthy.
The Boy could throw a fit when he felt frustrated. His temper was an accepted part of the campaign. There were testy notes if he thought the follow-through on something was not quick enough. He would explode in a flash, then act as though it had never happened. Neil McDonald witnessed some of Clinton’s explosions: “There was a minor snafu and he blew off at us for no reason. But most of us knew better than to take it personally. He was under a great deal of stress.” Harry Truman Moore, a law student who often traveled with Clinton and served as his photographer, remembered that Clinton would often snap at his travel aides when they tried to pull him away from a crowd to keep him closer to his schedule. “He’d say, ‘Don’t ever pull me away from a crowd like that again!’ Then, ten minutes later, he’d say, ‘Why are we late?’ We’d all get used to it, the Clinton temper.”
His most memorable eruptions came in arguments with Rodham, who seemed not the least bit timid about snapping back when he erupted. “They’d have the biggest damn fights, shouting and swearing,” Addington recalled. “They had two or three battle royals.” One day Addington, Clinton, and Rodham were starting out on their way to an event in Eureka Springs. Clinton and Rodham were debating how to handle a campaign issue. “Bill wanted to do one thing, she wanted to do another. They started shouting at each other. I was driving. Bill was in the front seat, Hillary in the back. He was hitting the dashboard. She was hitting the seat. They were really going at it. We drove up a street near the headquarters and stopped at a light. Hillary said, ‘I’m getting out!’ She got out and slammed the door. And Bill said, ‘Go on.’ We got out on the highway and I was going fast because we were late. Bill started venting his anger on me. It was one of the most uncomfortable times I’ve ever spent with him. Then he took a short nap. When he woke up, everything was fine.”
Rodham was a central figure during the final weeks of the campaign. She was, thought Mary Lee Fray, “fighting for her man” romantically and politically. After sending Clinton’s University of Arkansas girlfriend into exile (the young woman was not seen around the campaign from October through election day), Rodham took on several aides whose style she disapproved of, especially Addington and Paul Fray. Addington, who was sent to the Fort Smith office, came to think of Rodham as a negative force. “Our organization went to shit. We lost the spirit because of her. Everybody started bickering with everybody else,” he said later. In a memo to Clinton, Doug Wallace noted that though he thought Rodham’s “intentions were the best,” her presence was more negative than positive. “She… rubs people the wrong way, and boy, did she ever,” Wallace wrote. “She managed to antagonize almost the entire staff.…”
Most of Rodham’s bickering was with Paul Fray, a strongwilled political operator accustomed to playing a dominant role. It is an understatement to say that their styles clashed. “Paul was rough around the edges in how he dealt with people, real colorful and country, and that style didn’t mesh too well when Hillary was around,” Wallace recalled. The power struggle between Rodham and Fray reached a critical stage near the end when they got into several arguments over money. The campaign needed more funds to compete with Hammerschmidt on television and to ensure a strong get-out-the-vote effort, but Rodham advised against borrowing too much or taking it from questionable sources. In one instance, according to the accounts of Fray and several other campaign aides, Rodham took the ethical high ground, Clinton vacillated, and Fray was willing to do whatever it took to win. Fray says that he was contacted by a lawyer representing dairy interests who had $15,000 ready for the campaign that could be used in Sebastian County “to ensure that you are able to win the election.” The implication was that the money was dirty coming and going: it would come from the dairy industry with expectations that if Clinton became congressman he would serve their interests, and it would go to election boxes in Fort Smith where votes could still be bought. In several parts of Arkansas in those days, voters still cast paper ballots that went into cardboard boxes. There were frequent allegations that different boxes were stuffed and that payoffs were required to prevent stuffing. “The attorney already had the money,” Fray said later. “It was a question of me picking it up and delivering it. I knew there were places where we could spend a little money and it would turn out right.”
At a late night meeting at headquarters, Fray discussed the deal with Clinton and Rodham. Clinton did not have much to say. Rodham flatly rejected the proposal. “She nixed it,” according to Fray. “She got adamant. She said to Bill, ‘No! You don’t want to be a party to this!’ I said, ‘Look, you want to win or you want to lose?’ She said, ‘Well, I don’t want to win this way.’ If we can’t earn it, we can’t go [to Washington].ߣ”
ON November 5, election night, the mood was buoyant at Clinton headquarters. Any disputes within the campaign seemed inconsequential compared with the energy and enthusiasm that Clinton had put into his candidacy, and now it was as though that energy was all that mattered. Reports from the field indicated that the race was close and that Clinton had the momentum. He had been out there traveling the back roads for eight months, while Hammerschmidt, slow to realize the seriousness of the challenge, had been back in the district only for the final three weeks. The campaign had election teams stationed in the courthouses in all twenty-one counties, calling in reports box by box. Fray and Clinton had determined the minimum number of votes they figured they needed in each rural county to overtake what they expected to be a significant Hammerschmidt edge in Fort Smith. They tallied the results on a large tracking board. Hammerschmidt’s totals were on the left side of the board, Clinton’s on the right. The early results were encouraging. Rodham sat at a desk working a calculator. Fray stood by the tally board analyzing the numbers as Harry Truman Moore wrote them down. Clinton worked the phone, taking and making calls to the counties. He started getting concerned when the calls came from Garland County, which included his home town of Hot Springs. They knew that Garland County was conservative, but assumed that the favorite son could at least break even there. “What the hell’s going on down there?” Clinton asked. Somehow, he had lost Garland County.
By midnight, every county had reported except the largest and most conservative one, Sebastian County, home to Fort Smith. Clinton was still leading by several thousand votes. Steve Smith was thinking about finding an apartment in Georgetown. But what was happening down in Fort Smith? Clinton supporters at the Sebastian County courthouse were picking up reports of vote tampering. “Let me call the sheriff,” Clinton said. “He’s a friend of mine.” The sheriff told Clinton he was looking into it. Steve Smith and several other aides piled into a car and drove to Fort Smith. Ron Addington met them at the courthouse, and they milled around for a while, grumbling, but determined that there was nothing they could do and drove back to Fayetteville. Fort Smith finally came in with an enormous swing in Hammerschmidt’s direction. The board showed that Clinton had lost by 6,000 votes. Fray started swearing and throwing things out the window. “It was the goddamn money?” he said.
The staff talked about challenging the election results, but Clinton chose not to. He realized that he had won for losing. His race was the most talked about contest in the state. He had become the darling of the Democratic party by taking on Hammerschmidt and coming within 2 percentage points of defeating him, by far the best showing any opponent ever made against him. He had been on the same stage with Dale Bumpers and David Pryor and compared favorably to them. “We accomplished a miracle out here,” Clinton told his staff. “We started with no name recognition and look what we accomplished. We scared the pants off that guy.” He then sent a telegram to Hammerschmidt: “Congratulations on your victory yesterday. I hope you will consider the merit of the positive positions I took during the campaign. They grew out of the long months of discussions I had with our people. I wish you well in the next two difficult years. If ever I can be of service to you in your attempts to help the people of the Third Congressional District, please call on me.”
• • •
ONE morning after the election, Clinton drove to the square in downtown Fayetteville and started shaking hands. “Thank you for your help,” he said to passers-by who had voted for him. To others, he expressed thanks simply for voting, or for listening to him. He stood in the square all day, talking and shaking hands. He was cooling down after nine months of nonstop campaigning, his friends thought. No, there was more to it than that. He was warming up. The next race had already begun.