GOVERNOR-IN-WAITING
GARY HART OF Colorado arrived in the Senate. Jerry Brown became the new governor of California. Michael Dukakis took over in Massachusetts. Paul Simon of Illinois, Paul Tsongas of Massachusetts, and Tom Harkin of Iowa were elected to the House of Representatives. All of these Democrats were set on the path of presidential ambition by the elections of 1974. They were among the winners in what came to be regarded as a transformational year in modern American politics, a year when the old order started to give way to the next generation. The most dramatic change took place in the House, where ninety-two freshmen, including seventy-five Democrats, stormed Capitol Hill. They were known as the Watergate class or the Watergate babies. With equal measures of impatience and righteousness, they undertook the work of institutional reform, changing the rules of the place, upsetting the seniority system, overthrowing old committee chairmen, demanding a share of the power.
The road of ifs usually leads nowhere, but in the case of Bill Clinton and 1974 a brief journey down the path of historical speculation seems appropriate. If four thousand people in the Third Congressional District had voted for him instead of for John Paul Hammerschmidt, Clinton would have been one of the rambunctious Watergate babies. He would have moved to Washington that winter, meaning that his stay in Arkansas, the land to which he had always said he longed to return, would have lasted a mere sixteen months. Hillary Rodham, after four months in Fayetteville, certainly would have left with him, resettling in a place and a culture where they were on more equal standing and where she could pursue her interests in politics and law on a national rather than provincial stage. While the removal of geography as an issue might have made it smoother for the partnership in the short term, it is also conceivable that life in Washington eventually would have unraveled the couple’s relationship by making them less dependent on each other than they would become during their long haul in Arkansas.
Everything in Clinton’s history leads to the conclusion that he would have emerged as a leader of the Watergate babies in Congress, impressing his colleagues on Capitol Hill if not always his constituents back in Arkansas. In settings where he found himself among high-powered peers, whether with the Rhodes Scholars at Oxford or, much later, with the governors of other states, Clinton rose quickly to prominence, outpacing others with his ambition, affability, and appetite for ideas and dealmaking. But where would that have taken him in Washington? To a House committee chairmanship, eventually, or more likely, given his restless electoral nature, to a bid for a Senate seat, either in 1978 or in 1980, when he would have to challenge Dale Bumpers. Bumpers and Governor Pryor, who also had senatorial ambitions, were always there ahead of Clinton, two formidable vote-getters in his own party. Had he gone to Washington in 1974, at some point he would have been unable to repress an urge to try to run over one of them; instead, from back in Arkansas, he found a way around them.
Losing the congressional election did not hurt Clinton’s political status in Arkansas, and enhanced his image as an emerging star of the Democratic party. He came out of the contest with what all politicians covet—an aura of inevitability. The question was not whether he would run again, but what office he would seek. By early 1975, he was weighing two options: challenging Hammerschmidt again or running for attorney general. While resuming his teaching at the law school, he maintained his political contacts around the district and solicited advice on which election path to follow. Doug Wallace, his press secretary during the congressional campaign, wrote a memo outlining the potential dangers of another race against Hammerschmidt. The attorney general’s race, on the other hand, seemed “very attractive with relatively few drawbacks,” beyond its paltry annual salary. “The office of attorney general would allow you to work on consumer affairs, white collar crime, energy matters and other issues of interest,” Wallace wrote. “It would also provide a proving ground for the future by giving you the experience in government that some people in 1974 said you lacked.”
Long before he revealed his intentions publicly, Clinton began taking steps helpful to the waging of a statewide campaign. The Democratic State Committee, now chaired by Mack McLarty, appointed him to head its affirmative action committee, whose mission was to study the state’s new presidential primary law and set guidelines for the selection of delegates for the next national convention. This convenient assignment allowed Clinton to travel the state at party expense to meet with Democratic activists. He also obtained a part-time teaching post at the University of Arkansas-Little Rock, traveling down to Little Rock each week to teach a class on criminal justice and law enforcement in addition to his courses in Fayetteville. Many of his students in Little Rock were law enforcement personnel, a group he had also taught during his Yale Law School years when he was a part-time instructor of criminal justice at the University of New Haven. Teaching police officers strengthened the resume of a prospective attorney general, and furthered his efforts to toughen his image following his graduate school days as a long-haired war protester who had avoided military service.
HILLARY Rodham was deeply immersed in the university community by 1975. She taught trial advocacy and criminal procedure at Waterman Hall, directed the legal aid clinic, and helped run a prison project in which law students assisted inmates with post-conviction problems. At the legal clinic, she was meticulous about maintaining casework files on every person who walked in the door. Van Gearhart, one of her student assistants, worried that the recordkeeping would be too burdensome, but Rodham persuaded him that “a strong statistical base could help cement the future of the clinic,” which it did. In the first year, the clinic handled three hundred clients and took fifty cases to court. For years afterward, Rodham would recall her experiences in the courthouses of northwest Arkansas with a touch of wistfulness, often retelling her favorite stories, including the time when a small-town jailer called her and said that a traveling preacher-lady was about to be committed by a judge who thought she was insane. Rodham drove to the town and in the course of interviewing the babbling preacher discovered that she had relatives in California. “People need the Lord in California, too,” Rodham told the woman, who left for the West Coast after the judge was sold on the argument that a one-way plane ticket was the easiest and cheapest resolution of the case.
The prison project took Rodham and her Fayetteville associates into an unfamiliar world. Once she and another supervisor drove down to the Tucker Unit for youthful offenders near Pine Bluff. As they entered the prison farm, they noticed a building near the main unit that was identified as the dog kennel. Robert Newcomb, a lawyer stationed at the prison farm on a federal grant, recalled that when the two women lawyers got out of the car, one remarked to the other that she “didn’t realize that the Arkansas prison system was so progressive that it would allow inmates to have their own dogs.” It was left to Newcomb to break the news that the dogs were there not to serve as the inmates’ best friends, but to track them down if they tried to escape.
In Fayetteville, Rodham often met Diane Kincaid for lunch: they would buy yogurt and walk around campus, talking about the university, their careers, feminism, and the joys and frustrations of life in their adopted small town. Kincaid, who had grown up in Washington, moved to Fayetteville a decade before Rodham and had gone through various stages—“resistance, resentment, anger, disbelief, resignation, and finally smugness about how good things were.” They played tennis on weekends, scrappy singles matches, Rodham and Kincaid both diving and scraping their knees, good athletes but lacking in classic form, each with a burning desire to win, their hair a mess by the end in the summer humidity. One day, moved by what Kincaid termed “a burst of patriotism,” Rodham decided to visit the local U.S. Marine Corps office to see if she could enlist. She told Kincaid that the Marines informed her she was not one of the few and the proud they were looking for: she was a woman, she was too old, and she had bad eyesight, the recruiter said, suggesting that she “oughta go try with the dogs”—the Army. If there was a political component to this odd episode, an attempt to balance Clinton’s lack of service with Rodham’s bold enlistment, or a test of the equal rights policies of the military, it never went any further, and the incident remained a closely held joke among friends.
Rodham’s Arkansas circle widened when her two fun-loving brothers, Hughie and Tony, enrolled at the university at their sister’s urging. They shared an apartment south of campus with Neil McDonald, the former campaign volunteer. Tony “liked to keep his stuff put up, semi-neat,” but Hughie, who had long hair and talked earnestly about Che Guevera, was another story, according to McDonald. “As far as housekeeping, forget Hughie. He was the biggest slob in the world. He made ‘The Odd Couple’ seem tame.” Their father, Hugh Rodham, paid for most of their expenses and came down from Park Ridge to visit during fly-fishing season.
Although they still lived apart, Rodham and Clinton spent most of their free time together, playing Volleyball and charades with friends, attending Razorback basketball games, and going for steaks and chicken afterward with Coach Eddie Sutton and Don Tyson and his pals. Pressure was building on the pair to marry or separate. Should Clinton marry Rodham? He told friends that he wanted to get married and that it was Hillary or nobody: but he also realized that while their partnership was intellectually invigorating and politically complementary, their personal relationship was stormy. “All we ever do is argue,” he confided to Carolyn Yeldell Staley, his high school friend. Betsey Wright, who had befriended the pair during the McGovern campaign and now worked in Washington recruiting women to run for public office, was also “aware of lots of tension between them.” She had heard Clinton complain after a round of arguing with Rodham that he had tried to “run Hillary off, but she just wouldn’t go.”
Should Rodham marry Clinton? She studied the question from every angle, asking several women friends how they balanced their own political objectives with family responsibilities. Her questions came at a time when feminism was an urgent subject for her and the professional women with whom she associated. The equal rights amendment (ERA), which had narrowly failed in the previous session of the Arkansas legislature, was up for another vote, and a central event of the House deliberations was a Valentine’s Day debate between ERA opponent Phyllis Schlafly and Diane Kincaid, who was chairwoman of the governor’s commission on women and had been asked at the last minute to fill in for Sarah Weddington, the feminist lawyer from Texas. Rodham and Clinton came over to Kincaid’s house and prepped her for the confrontation. They sat in the living room and rehearsed different arguments and counterarguments, when suddenly Kincaid’s six-year-old daughter Kathryn called out “Mommy!” from the floor behind them. They turned around and saw the little girl holding the plastic symbol of the prefeminist era. “Here we were fighting for feminist rights and Kathryn was there with a Barbie doll!” Kincaid later recalled. The scene, she said, provoked a long, loud, infectious belly laugh from Hillary Rodham.
Among the feminists, there were differences of opinion over how best to resolve the conflicting demands of wife and sisterhood. Ann Henry, who was married to a state senator and toiled as a Democratic party activist while rearing three young children, argued with Rodham about the role that a political wife could play. Rodham thought that Henry should be more independent. “Hillary was very curious to see how women integrate family and politics. She knew politics is where she wanted to be. She had a sense of what she wanted to do. She would say, why don’t you do certain things?” Henry later recalled. “And I would say that I felt certain limits as a wife. She thought she could do as much. I didn’t agree with that. There’s a gap between what you think you can do and what the reality is. I was not willing to push my own [career] at the risk of jeopardizing what my husband wanted to do. She didn’t agree with me. I said, ‘Well, that’s my opinion.’” It was clear to Henry that Rodham was on her way to marriage and looking for the role she could play in a partnership where her husband would be the candidate.
Rodham told Henry that Eleanor Roosevelt was her role model. “She said, ‘Look at Eleanor Roosevelt!’ Well, I had just finished reading Joseph Lash on that subject, so I said, ‘That’s right, but Eleanor never found her voice until after that marriage was over—until she didn’t care about the marriage!’”
Before the start of her second year in Fayetteville, Rodham returned to the East Coast and talked with several friends about her future. Should she make Bill Clinton and Arkansas the center of her life? Many of her friends worried that she was selling short her own ambitions. They saw that it was hard for her. It was obvious to them that she was not fooling herself about what she would be getting into with Clinton. She understood his talents and his flaws. He might not be faithful, but together they could be faithful to their larger mission in life and achieve things beyond their individual reach. And there was, at the same time, an old-fashioned infatuation that went beyond shared goals. When Rodham visited Carolyn Ellis, her Yale Law School classmate, who was now living in New York, Ellis encouraged her not to let Arkansas be a factor in the decision. Ellis had grown up in Mississippi and felt a southern kinship with Clinton and Arkansas. “I was one of the big believers,” she said. “I told her to go back. I said that Arkansas wasn’t Mars. I told her that to love somebody and not marry them because of where they were living was the height of foolishness.”
When Rodham arrived back in Fayetteville, Clinton was waiting for her with a present and a proposal. The present was a house he had bought, a little red-brown brick cottage at 930 California Street on the southwest side of town. The proposal was that she live there with him as his wife. Rodham accepted. In the days before the ceremony, she showed little interest in the details, according to Ann Henry, and “was looking more at life to come than at the wedding itself. What happened that day she didn’t want to worry about.” In fact, she and her mother, who had come down from Illinois, spent most of their time painting the cottage and putting in bookshelves. They were quite willing to leave most of the wedding plans to Henry, who was giving the reception at her house. The one concession Rodham made was to go downtown and register a Danish modern pottery style that guests could buy as wedding presents.
The wedding took place on October 11, 1975, in the living room of the little cottage on California Street. Victor Nixon, the Methodist minister Clinton had met during his first foray into the Ozarks with Carl Whillock, performed the ceremony. It was a traditional Methodist service, using the King James Version—“I, Hillary Rodham, take thee, Bill….” Rodham wore a Victorian dress with a high collar and long sleeves that she had selected off the rack. The couple exchanged heirloom rings in the company of a few family members and friends. Betsy Johnson Ebeling, Hillary’s close friend from Park Ridge, got to the wedding midway through the service after relying on Hughie Rodham’s vast underestimation of how long it would take her and her husband to drive from Chicago to Fayetteville. Roger Clinton, now a nineteen-year-old college student, stood as his big brother’s best man. Even though Bill and Roger were growing apart in those days, not as close as the Rodham brothers, the choice of Roger as best man signaled Clinton’s yearning for a family bond. It also reflected a characteristic of his adult life: he was a man with hundreds of close friends but no best friend. Virginia Dwire, widowed for a third time the year before and between husbands, listened to the wedding vows with a mixture of pride and dismay. That morning at the Fayetteville Holiday Inn, as Virginia was having breakfast in the coffee shop with her friend Marge Mitchell, Bill had dropped by to say hello and give her an early warning. “Hillary’s keeping her own name,” he had said, a pronouncement that brought tears to Virginia’s eyes. It would take time for her to accept this assertive Yankee daughter-in-law.
After the private ceremony, the wedding party adjourned to the Henry house for a reception that more obviously represented “the gregariousness of Bill,” as Ann Henry later described it. Hundreds of friends from all eras of Rodham and Clinton’s lives mingled on the spacious back lawn on that gentle autumn Saturday night, drinking champagne and talking about Clinton’s political future. “Everybody, even at the wedding, was talking about the next campaign,” Henry recalled. “Everybody knew that he was going to run.”
If Rodham and Clinton felt an urge to get out of town, they had made no honeymoon preparations. It was only because Dorothy Rodham noticed a special vacation package to Acapulco that they made a getaway later that year. For a politician whose idol was John F. Kennedy, there was a poetic touch to the trip. A generation earlier. Kennedy and his bride Jacqueline Bouvier had also gone to Acapulco after their marriage. It is safe to assume that he did not have anything resembling Clinton’s peculiar entourage: at the hotel it was Bill and Hillary and Hugh and Dorothy and Hughie and Tony. Clinton took along a copy of the cultural anthropologist Ernest Becker’s The Denial of Death, a book that regards the idea of death as “the mainspring of human activity—activity designed largely to avoid the fatality of death, to overcome it by denying in some way that it is the final destiny for man.” Clinton also wrote thank-you notes to wedding guests.
THE old boys were not what they used to be, according to that year’s progress report by Bob Reich, secretary of the Rhodes class of 1968. Approaching their thirtieth birthdays, they seemed anxious and compromised, looking inward for fulfillment, viewing the outside world with disillusionment or confusion.
Mike Shea was now a lawyer in Honolulu, “fighting the losing battle against middle age” by running marathons, but discouraged that he “could not find a political candidate to support at any level of government.” Tom Reinecke, a scientist at the Naval Research Laboratory near Washington, D.C., lamented “the dullness and blandness of the Washington scene— especially the great Washington suburbia.” Bob McCallum, a lawyer in Atlanta, had learned to ski and was “trying to figure out more ways to avoid getting older.” According to Reich, who occasionally interjected his own sensibilities into the reports of others, McCallum was “concerned about losing sight of the forest for the trees as his career progresses.” Rick Stearns was dabbling in presidential politics again, “doing some consulting” for Arizona congressman Morris Udall. Strobe Talbott was married to Brooke Shearer and working in the Washington bureau of Time, where on occasion “he chases around after President Ford, in pursuit of further proof that the Peter Principle applies even—yea especially—at the highest levels of leadership in the Free World.” Reich, married to Claire Dalton, the girl he had met at a Univ College audition, was also in Washington, working for the Justice Department, where he was “still filing indefensible briefs before the Supreme Court on behalf of our government.”
And of his friend from Arkansas, Reich wrote: “From the political heartland of America comes news of Bill Clinton, who is now married to Hillary Rodham and living in a comfortable suburban bungalow…. He is at this moment spending most of his time running for Attorney General of the state, and he expects to be spending most of his time a year from now being Attorney General of his state.” Although Clinton’s ambitions seemed clearer than most, he, too, expressed a sense of uncertainty. “He says he is concerned that, in spite of his intense political involvements of late, he does not really have a good grasp of what is happening in this country, where we are going and what we can do to make it better. So like most other people he lives and works as best he can.”
CLINTON took an unpaid leave of absence from the law school for the 1976 spring semester to begin his campaign for attorney general. In fundraising letters to out-of-state supporters, he revealed the practical politics dictating his choice: “My opponent in the last election—with an eye over his shoulder—has changed his vote on a number of critical issues, including public jobs and the oil price rollback, and, therefore, is less vulnerable than he was.” He made his formal campaign announcement on March 17 in the rotunda of the state Capitol, with Hillary Rodham at his side, calling the attorney general “the principal protector of the people” and promising to expand the consumer protection office and push for stronger antitrust laws.
Although Clinton thrived on the electoral process, he wanted an easier ride this time. He had lost an election, and it was always possible that he could lose again, which would greatly damage both his ego and his nascent career. He was relieved when one potentially difficult opponent, Beryl Anthony, decided not to enter the Democratic primary, but no sooner had Anthony declined than George Jernigan, the secretary of state, entered the race. Clinton turned to Governor Pryor, who was Jernigan’s political benefactor, and pleaded with him to change Jernigan’s mind, but Pryor was unwilling to play that slate-making role. On filing day there were three candidates: Clinton, Jernigan, and Deputy Attorney General Clarence Cash. That might have been two more candidates than Clinton wanted, but on the positive side, all he had to do was to win the primary and he had the job—the Republican ticket lacked a candidate for attorney general.
The primary turned out to be a mismatch. Jernigan and Cash could claim experience in state government that Clinton lacked, but they had none of his abilities as a political networker. Clinton had found a way to reach virtually every courthouse in the state, and in those areas where he was less well known, the word was spread by former law students—another advantage of teaching at a public university that took scholars from every corner of the state who tended to return home to practice law. Newspaper ads listed the scores of former law students who declared that they could ease any doubts voters had about Clinton. Jernigan later acknowledged that when he was on the road, he would retire to his motel room at an early hour, turn on the television, and order room service. It is hard to imagine Clinton following a similar routine. He was too overloaded with energy and ambition to keep to himself for long. He was alert to danger and opportunity, plotting the next move, studying the landscape, looking for allies. Political campaigns tend to imitate the rhetoric of military campaigns, with battles and skirmishes and armies and war rooms, but in Clinton’s case the war metaphor runs on a deeper psychological level. The campaign became the equivalent of the war that he never fought. It was a means of pardoning his past and making himself feel worthy. His speech at the party’s kickoff rally in Russellville was like something out of the Civil War era: one can hear the strains of first Whitman and then Lincoln as Clinton strove to create the aura of a veteran in a noble cause.
“This morning as I drove up Highway 7 from Hot Springs in the breath-taking beauty of our Arkansas spring,” Clinton said, “I thought of all the long roads so many of us have walked together, up and down this river valley—not just through the main towns, but also to the hamlets of which so many others are dimly aware—to Houston, Casa and Adona; Havana, Briggsville and Chickalah; Coal Hill, Hartman and Lamar; Hector, Appleton and Dover and more. I know them all because they are home to me, because of you. I believe there is an unbreakable bond between us and I have tried to keep faith with it…. Now I need you once more to fight another battle. If you will do it, it will be an exhilarating reaffirmation of the work to which I have given the fullest measure of my time and strength and spirit.”
Some bonds were less unbreakable than others. When Clinton appeared before the state AFL-CIO convention in Hot Springs in April, the convention hall rustled with rumors that he considered organized labor support a mixed blessing and wanted to shed his image as a tool of the trade unions. In 1974, at that same convention, Clinton had received rousing standing ovations and an endorsement that helped him get through the congressional primary, and in his general election campaign against Hammerschmidt trade union contributions accounted for 25 percent of his treasury. But now, only two years later, he lost the endorsement by rejecting labor’s litmus test: he refused to sign a petition to place an amendment on the November ballot calling for repeal of the state’s right-to-work law. State labor leaders considered Clinton’s action a gratuitous political ploy in which he used labor to revise his public image in a southern, agrarian state that lacked a strong union tradition. It was a characterization which Doug Wallace, who once again served as Clinton’s press secretary, did not dispute. “There was a sense that labor was not that critical to the attorney general’s race,” Wallace said later. “And we had to move away from the 1974 image.”
Clinton’s strategic straight-arming of labor at the 1976 convention is important to an understanding of his political evolution. First, it shows that he was adjusting to what he perceived as the temper of the time. In one labor questionnaire in which Clinton explained his refusal to support repeal of the right-to-work law, he argued that “this is a bad time because our people generally are in a conservative mood.” Second, it set a precedent that Clinton would follow throughout his career: to demonstrate independence, he would rebuke traditional allies, from labor leaders who wanted union shops to schoolteachers who opposed teacher testing to African American leaders who would not repudiate a rap singer’s militant remarks. There was a certain fail-safe method to Clinton’s rebukes: they were directed at groups who had fallen out of public favor.
That is not to say that Clinton’s political positioning was one-dimensional. If he reacted to the public sentiment in 1976, he also studied it with intensity. Sensing a prevailing mood of disillusionment, he began writing out his thoughts on yellow legal pads, and eventually put them together in a series of speeches. At the graduation ceremonies for political science majors at Arkansas State University in Jonesboro on April 27, he defended the profession of politics and noted that he had “devoted twelve years to becoming well educated, well disciplined and well motivated in politics,” only to arrive on the political scene at a time when “most people believe that politicians are either corruptible, weak or ineffective.” He still believed that politics could be “honorable and important work,” he said, but worried that the public was losing faith and interest because of the disconnected nature of modern American culture.
In one speech at a bicentennial celebration in Ashdown, he identified television as a villain. “More and more, especially in our cities, people withdraw in their nonwork hours, to the isolation of their TV rooms, where for hours on end they can pass the time without having to feel, without having to take the initiative to be creative and to improve their lives,” Clinton said. The resentment that people expressed against their government, he reasoned, was “a reflection of the bitterness they felt about themselves and their inability to change.” How to change things? Clinton offered regular town meetings as one solution. “Although they would almost surely be sparsely attended at first, they can be the beginnings of a new involvement.”
On primary day, May 26, Clinton avoided a runoff by amassing 55.6 percent of the vote against Jernigan and Cash. He carried all but four Arkansas counties and trounced his opponents in the Third Congressional District. He thought he might take every ballot in Newton County, one of his favorite pockets along the Buffalo River in the Ozarks, where he had talked to almost every voter, but settled for nine out of ten, vowing that next time he would win over the seventy-three people who chose Jernigan and the eighty-one who preferred Cash.
As his thirtieth birthday approached, Clinton traveled to Hope and walked the paths of Rose Hill Cemetery to the grave of William Jefferson Blythe, the father he never knew. He thought to himself, he said later, about how he had passed another milestone that his father, killed at twenty-eight, never reached. That Blythe died at such an early age haunted Clinton and made him anxious, despite all that he had accomplished. He had his first elected post locked up, he was mixing with the richest and most powerful people in Arkansas, he was the golden boy of the state Democratic party, and yet he still felt “an urgent sense to do everything” he could in life as quickly as possible. He had grown up, subconsciously, on his father’s timetable and felt that in some ways he was living for both of them. If he was not obsessed with death, mortality was never too far from his mind. He was “acutely aware that you never really know how much time you have.”
Clinton paused at one point on his birthday to write a note to Betsey Wright in Washington. “All is madness here,” he exclaimed to his friend from the Texas McGovern campaign. Without a general election of his own to worry about, he signed up to work for the presidential campaign of fellow southerner Jimmy Carter. He indicated to Wright that he could not arouse much animosity toward Gerald Ford, but felt freer to attack the Republicans “now that the biggest prick in Congress is on the ticket”—a reference, presumably, to Ford’s runningmate, Senator Bob Dole of Kansas.
At a meeting in Atlanta with Tim Kraft, Carter’s national coordinator, Clinton was invited to run the Texas operation again. But it made no sense for him to work outside Arkansas in the months before he would take over as attorney general. He declined the offer and stayed home, where as Carter’s state chairman he could prepare for his new job and build more contacts for his political rise. Hillary Rodham felt no similar compunction to stay on in Arkansas. After a vacation with Clinton in Spain, she took a leave from the law school and left for Indianapolis, where she served as Carter’s state field director through the November election.
The effort in Arkansas could not have been more different from what Clinton had gone through for McGovern in Texas four years earlier. Whereas in Texas, Clinton was constantly on the defensive, mediating factional disputes, trying to interpret a northern liberal to a southern conservative electorate, facing a hostile rebellion from the business establishment, this time he had a candidate who was from the same southern culture and who was on intimate terms with the key financial players in the state. Georgia, like Arkansas, was a major poultry center, which led to a strong connection between Carter and Don Tyson. Tyson raised tens of thousands of dollars for Carter within the poultry industry. Even more valuable were Carter’s personal ties to Jackson Stephens, head of Stephens Inc., the largest investment bond firm outside Wall Street and the most politically potent financial enterprise in the state. Stephens, a conservative who often supported Republicans on the national level, had been Carter’s classmate at the Naval Academy. When Carter visited Little Rock, he stayed at Stephens’s house. Stephens’s son-in-law, Craig Campbell, worked side by side with Clinton on the Carter campaign. And, of course, the biggest difference of all with the McGovern campaign was that Carter won, in Clinton’s state and in the nation.
LITTLE Rock was a new world for the new attorney general and his wife, as different from Fayetteville as Fayetteville had been from New Haven and Washington. Fayetteville was informal and collegial, more progressive than the rest of the state, a town of easy friendships. Little Rock was more formal, striving to be a little Dallas, with stratified social sets, a city of country clubs and debutante balls and corporate lunches. Rodham and Clinton found a small house in the historic Hillcrest neighborhood to the west of the state Capitol and cultivated another circle of friends in government and law. The transition was more dramatic for Rodham. She went from directing a legal aid clinic at a state university to practicing law at the Rose Law Firm, the oldest and most traditional legal house in Arkansas, with an impressive roster of deep-pocket corporate clients. Law school colleagues were reluctant to lose Rodham, whom they considered a future star (“Divorce him and stay here!” her colleague Mort Gitelman had said jokingly one day), but financial and political considerations ruled out a commuter marriage. As much as Clinton and Rodham enjoyed the relaxed style of living in Fayetteville, there were names to be made in Little Rock.
There was never any doubt that the attorney general’s office was nothing more than a brief stop on the road for Clinton. When raising money for the election, his supporters promoted his grander intentions. H. T. Moore, who had worked on Clinton’s congressional campaign as a law student in Fayetteville and then set up a law practice in the town of Paragould in northeast Arkansas, sent out fundraising letters for the attorney general’s race with the message that it would be smart to “get on board early.” It was accepted that Clinton, when he arrived in Little Rock, was the governor-in-waiting.
The attorney general’s job played to his strengths. He could position himself as a populist, give speeches, travel, expound on the state code, shape broad policy decisions, and he did not have to spend much time behind a desk making difficult decisions on appointments and programs that might antagonize people. He created the position of chief of staff and gave the job to a nonlawyer, Steve Smith. Lawyers who had worked for Clinton’s predecessor, Jim Guy Tucker, detected a change in the office when Clinton arrived. Although Tucker, who left for a seat in Congress, was a political animal, Clinton was more of one. He seized on one of the populist issues of the day, utility rates, and created a division of energy conservation and rate advocacy with double the previous litigation staff. He challenged the telephone companies when they raised the pay-phone rates to a quarter and often appeared at hearings to cross-examine utility officials.
Clinton and Rodham now found even more networks open to them. They made the extended guest list for dinners at the Carter White House, and Clinton was summoned to Washington occasionally for national briefings. As the state Democrat most closely associated with Carter, he was given an informal role reviewing all federal patronage appointments from Arkansas. When a vacancy arose, Carter named Rodham to the board of the Legal Services Corporation, and she quickly became its chairwoman. Clinton developed a friendship with Eddie Sutton, coach of the University of Arkansas basketball team. They would talk about the similarities of their two professions: in politics and basketball alike, you battle all the time and you get immediate results.
All in all, Clinton seemed delighted with himself in his first elected job. He had his own office with his own staff and his own private quarters. On the inside door of his private bathroom, he put up a life-sized poster of fleshily abundant Dolly Parton in a skimpy outfit. Terry Kirkpatrick, who worked in the criminal division of the attorney general’s office, spotted Clinton ambling down the hallway one night when she was staying late to write a brief. “He was just walking around, looking in all the offices, like he was surveying his fiefdom. He had a big grin on his face.” After encountering Kirkpatrick, Clinton strolled into the office of another assistant, Joe Purvis, who had been his friend since they attended nursery school together in Hope. “He put his feet on my desk, which means they were on top of a pile of papers,” Purvis later recalled. “He offered me a stick of gum. I think I said, ‘What in the hell do you want?’ It was like, say what you came to say and get the hell out. Bill said, ‘I said, are you having fun? If you’re not having fun, it becomes just work, and it’s time to move on to something else.’”
Clinton was having fun, yet thinking about moving on to something else at the same time. Rising to the position of attorney general of Arkansas would not be enough to place an asterisk next to his name in the billion pages of the book of life, the goal he had set for himself in a letter to Denise Hyland long ago. Thoughts of premature death came back to him again three days before his thirty-first birthday. On August 16, 1977, he was in Fort Smith to deliver a speech when he heard that Elvis Presley had died. Elvis was more than a slick-haired crooner in the Clinton family culture. He was a cherished icon. Clinton’s mother idolized Elvis and Bill, two southern charmers with sleepy eyes and soft voices and talents beyond their backwater roots. Clinton memorized the lyrics to many of Elvis’s songs as a teenager, and even during the sixties, when the King seemed out of style, there was some part of Clinton that held on to that corner of his past. Elvis’s death left Clinton transfixed. He visited the home of a longtime supporter, Marilyn Speed, after his speech, and did not want to leave and miss any of the television coverage. Terry Kirkpatrick, who traveled with him that day, remembered that the end of Elvis was all her boss would talk about: “All the way home on the plane he talked about it. He talked about the passing of an era. His youth. What a wasted life. It moved him deeply.”
EARLY that fall of 1977, Clinton’s chief of staff, Steve Smith, placed a call to a young political consultant in New York named Richard Morris who had been soliciting new clients around the country and had some novel ideas about how polls could be used to shape rhetorical arguments in campaigns. Morris flew down to Little Rock and met with Clinton at the attorney general’s office. At that meeting, according to Morris, Clinton said that he had a difficult decision to make about whether to run for governor or senator. He said he could “walk into the governor’s office” if he wanted to, but that he would rather be a senator and wanted to run for the seat being vacated by John L. McClellan. Part of it had to do with length of tenure, he told Morris: governors had to run every two years while senators were safe for six. He also felt there were more challenges in Washington. But the problem was that he was not sure he could win the Senate primary. Two Democratic congressmen, Jim Guy Tucker and Ray Thornton, were already in the race, and it seemed likely that Governor Pryor would join them.
Morris agreed to do a poll for Clinton on the two races. The results showed that Clinton could win the governorship with no problem, and he “could probably win” the Senate race, though it would be an iffy proposition, Morris said. The problem was not Pryor. The poll found that Pryor was likable but not electable and would fade in a tough primary “against a young charismatic candidate.” This was contrary to the conventional wisdom of the time, which held that Pryor was the strongest candidate. Clinton was impressed by Morris’s conclusions. He felt the same way, he said. But he was still nervous about the Senate race. He said that he would probably run for governor, depending on what Pryor decided.
A few weeks later, Pryor invited Clinton to ride with him from the state Capitol to Hot Springs, where the governor was to deliver a speech. Clinton had been seeking a private meeting where the two men could talk about their political futures, and Pryor decided that now was the time. They sat in the back seat of the state-owned Lincoln and chatted all the way down and back, and then went on to the Governor’s Mansion and talked some more. At the start of the discussion, Pryor could not tell whether Clinton wanted to run for senator or governor. He made the first move. “I told him that I was planning to run for the Senate,” Pryor recalled. He said he hoped Clinton would not join the already crowded field. Clinton “opened up” to Pryor as the conversation progressed. With Bumpers and Pryor both ahead of him, he said, he feared that he might find his career stymied.
“Bill,” Pryor told Clinton, seeking to reassure him, “you could run for governor and be elected and serve longer than Orval Faubus,” who was in the Governor’s Mansion for six two-year terms from 1955 to 1967. “You could break Faubus’s record” For the rest of the conversation, Clinton asked Pryor questions about what it was like to be governor. He did not say what was really on his mind: he would settle for governor, this time, but he had no interest in breaking Faubus’s record in Little Rock.
From the moment Clinton announced for governor, he began running two campaigns at once. In public, he was the candidate for governor, facing token opposition in the Democratic primary against four relative unknowns. He easily garnered support from labor and business, and was hailed as “the only truly distinguished figure” in the field by the Arkansas Gazette, though the editorial writers there occasionally upbraided him for being too cautious. His opponents assaulted him for using the attorney general’s office “as a political tool,” for “never working a day in his life,” and for having an assertive wife who would not use his last name. Internal campaign news summaries frequently noted that “the Name business,” as they called it, had surfaced in stories about Hillary Rodham. One candidate, Monroe Schwarzlose, an old turkey farmer, harrumphed about Rodham’s law degree. “We’ve had enough lawyers in the Governor’s Mansion,” he said. “One is enough. Two would be too much.” Another candidate, Frank Lady, blasted Rodham, saying there was an inherent conflict of interest between her membership in the Rose Law Firm and her position as the governor’s wife.
Clinton reacted to these attacks with varying degrees of righteous anger. He exploded once at Lady, the candidate of the religious right, saying that Lady’s “religious convictions tell him it is wrong to lie, but he does it anyway.” Another time he offered an emotional defense of Rodham. “If people knew how old-fashioned she was in every conceivable way,” he said. “She’s just a hard-working, no-nonsense, no frills, intelligent girl who had done well, who doesn’t see any sense to extramarital sex, who doesn’t care much for drink, who’s witty and sharp without being a stick in the mud. She’s just great.”
But in private, Clinton worried little about his primary, which his polls showed he had clinched. He busied himself with another political role as back room strategist for Pryor’s race in the Senate primary. He confided to a few friends and advisers that he wanted Pryor to defeat Jim Guy Tucker, whom he viewed as his main competition as the rising star of state Democratic politics. During Morris’s frequent trips to Little Rock in the spring of 1978, he later recalled, he and Clinton would spend a few minutes talking about the governor’s race, then spend hours plotting how Pryor could beat Tucker. Morris noticed something extraordinary about their discussions. They talked not like consultant and client, but like two consultants. He came to regard Clinton as “a highly sophisticated colleague” in the profession.
As Morris had predicted in his early polls for Clinton, Pryor proved to be vulnerable. On the night that Clinton swept the gubernatorial primary with nearly 60 percent of the vote, Pryor barely survived the Senate primary and was forced into a runoff with Tucker. Clinton, according to Morris, was becoming “increasingly frustrated with the Pryor campaign.” He complained that Pryor was “being too nice a guy and wasn’t aggressive enough in the campaign.” For the two-week runoff, Tucker began a media campaign based on the theme that Pryor might be a nice guy to go fishing with, but he was not an effective politician who could solve the state’s and nation’s pressing problems. Clinton, the back room political consultant, spent hours devising a response that would show Pryor’s strength. When the firemen in Arkansas had threatened to strike, Pryor had said that he would call out the National Guard to replace them. He had acted boldly and decisively in a situation where another governor in another state had not and some fires had burned out of control. They could make an ad showing David Pryor standing tall. Clinton wrote out the ad copy and gave it to Dick Morris, who revised it and took it to Pryor, who authorized it.
Pryor felt uneasy about this outside consultant Clinton had brought into the campaign. He had rejected Morris’s services earlier, and was only using him now because Clinton insisted on it. Pryor’s wife, Barbara, found Morris especially disagreeable and banned him from the Governor’s Mansion. She thought he was too negative, too much of an operator. Clinton had no such qualms, at least not during the election season. His theory of politics, he told Morris, was that you do what you have to do to get elected. Pryor won the runoff.
Clinton still had a general election to win. The Republicans had put up an opponent this time, unlike the attorney general’s race two years earlier. But it was not an even match. Lynn Lowe, a GOP official and farmer from Texarkana, was underfinanced and unknown. So confident were Clinton and his top campaign aides, Steve Smith and Rudy Moore, that they began preparing for his first year as governor. They were determined, Moore said, to “define and set the agenda for the legislature in 1979.”
WITH Bill Clinton it is often tempting, but usually misleading, to try to separate the good from the bad, to say that the part of him that is indecisive, too eager to please and prone to deception, is more revealing of the inner man than the part of him that is indefatigable, intelligent, empathetic, and self-deprecating. They co-exist. There is a similar balance to his life’s progression. In his worst times, one can see the will to recover and the promise of redemption. In his best times, one can see the seeds of disaster.
The final months of 1978 reflected the second of those two conditions. He was on the edge of glory. At the early age of thirty-two, he was the governor-apparent of Arkansas. He had a determined wife and a finely tuned political machine and an army of friends. He had come further, faster in the political world than any member of his generation. And yet it was in those promising days of 1978 that Clinton perplexed his aides by hanging out in racy nightclubs surrounded by admiring women. It was then that he and Rodham signed the first papers in a land deal along the White River in the Ozark hills. It was then that Rodham entered the risky livestock commodities trading market and made a huge profit in a way that would later be questioned. And it was then that Clinton was confronted with accusations that he had dodged the draft.
Of those events, only the draft issue was played out in public at the time. The others seemed of less consequence then. Not that the draft story loomed particularly large either. It was not so much a crisis as a two-day problem, raised and dealt with and quickly forgotten—but not forever gone. In the final week of the campaign, Billy G. Geren, a retired lieutenant colonel in the Air Force, held a news conference on the steps of the state Capitol in which he accused Clinton of being a draft dodger. Geren charged that Clinton had received a draft deferment in 1969 by agreeing to join the University of Arkansas ROTC, but had then reneged on his promise and returned to Oxford University. The lieutenant colonel, who was accompanied to the press conference by a top aide to the Republican gubernatorial candidate, laid out the case. Clinton easily rebuffed the charge by offering a fuzzy response. He claimed that he had never received a draft deferment because he had canceled the agreement with the ROTC and reentered the draft pool before a deferment could be granted. When reporters asked Colonel Eugene Holmes, the former head of the ROTC program, about the incident, Holmes said that he could not remember the Clinton case. With no documents to substantiate either side, the issue disappeared.
Geren, who had served on the University of Arkansas ROTC staff from 1972 to 1976, was closer to making a strong case than Clinton or the press realized. He had heard about the letter that Clinton had written to Colonel Holmes from Oxford in which Clinton thanked the officer for saving him from the draft. But Geren could not find a copy of the letter. Ed Howard, who had been the drill sergeant on the ROTC staff and had left the service to sell real estate in Malvern, recalled that Geren called him at home late one night shortly before the press conference. “He told me they were looking into Clinton dodging the draft,” Howard said. “He knew that I knew about the Clinton file and the letter. He was trying to get me to help them. He wanted me to tell the press that I knew about it.”
Howard refused. He was a Clinton supporter by then and did not think the draft should be an issue in the governor’s race. But the day after the press conference, when he read in the papers that Clinton denied ever receiving a draft deferment, Howard felt the same way that he had back in 1969 when he first heard about the letter to Colonel Holmes. “I was disappointed with Bill,” he recalled. “And angry—again.”
PROMISE, pain, an augury of future trouble—they were all there again on election night in 1978.
The promise was evident in Clinton’s overwhelming win. He swept the state with 63 percent of the vote and became the youngest governor in the United States in four decades.
The pain came five minutes before the first evening news report on the election. Jim Ranchino, Clinton’s friend and in-state pollster, who also served as an analyst for KATV in Little Rock, was exuberant that his numbers showed young Clinton scoring a resounding victory. An ebullient bear of a man, Ranchino had been slowed by what he thought was the flu that day but was eager to get on the air so that he could discuss the rise of Arkansas’ bright new star. He never made it to the microphone. As he was walking up the stairs toward his seat in the studio, he was felled by a massive, fatal heart attack.
The omen of future trouble came in a congratulatory note from President Carter, who wrote to Governor-elect Clinton: “You and I will succeed in meeting the goals for our country by working closely together to serve those whom we represent.”